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The exhibition FATWHITESTRAIGHTBALDGUY at Performance Space in March/April 2005 brought together some of Tony Schwensen’s earliest and best known pieces alongside new work produced specially for the show. Schwensen’s artworks are notoriously pared-down and involve repetitious acts, such as banging his head against a brick wall, or kicking a ball in the air, that are often stretched out for ludicrously lengthy periods.
What is the significance of such acts? They go to the root of performance art in which the body becomes objectified through its unrealistic focus on a particular act. Repetition, for instance of a word over and over again, tends to empty out meaning, which, in turn, robs the word or things of its initial purpose. So, in Schwensen’s videos, unambiguous acts such as dancing or shifting about in a bathtub, become denatured, unfamiliar, strange, and, in so many cases, funny. The stark simplicity of the works resonate with perennial concerns of human nihilism and isolation. They are also inflected with an instinct of ironic resistance to worldly travails, whether that be in the name of a feeling of political powerlessness, or quizzical detachment from the dehumanising forces of mass culture. But where mass culture dehumanises us with all forms of manipulation, mendacity and trivia, these performative acts cast the artist into an alternative subhuman, marginally superior, because at least he is fortified by irony.
II
In his masterful Chess Novella [Schachnovelle], the great Austrian writer Stephan Zweig tells of a ‘Dr B.’ who is confined by the SS Gestapo to a hotel room empty of everything but a bed, desk, chair and washbasin. He is spared the concentration camps because he is numbered... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline