Bird Song: An Ode to Marcel Duchamp
SLIPPERY TERRAIN
The Nordic House, Reykjavik, Iceland
May 2011
Marcel Duchamp, whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist art movements, challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions Therefore, he insisted that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
The performance work, ‘Bird Song: An Ode to Marcel Duchamp’ is a conceptual strategy to remove the artist from a high-art practice and distance herself from commodity culture to concentrate on creating an intervention in the landscape.
It is arguable that the art market always finds ways to incorporate the activities of those dematerializing the art object within existing institutions and structures but Juliana hopes that by creating an outdoor exhibition in solidarity with the natural environment, greatly extends an allied interest in ecology and green politics.
To add to this discourse, this performance work is a subversive act to attract the colony of birds and wild life that live in the wetlands to the staging of an outdoor art exhibition of Icelandic Art of a cross-disciplinary nature….
Laminated images taken from the internet and constructed as sign posts were staked around the wetlands area surrounding the Nordic House. They symbolically represent a small selection of well-established Icelandic Artists who have left their historic stamp in the Icelandic art world and at large, whether it be through Painting, Music, Theatre, Sculpture, Photography or Film and Television, etc.
Juliana’s performance incorporates the installation of this outdoor intervention as an art exhibition for the wildlife of the wetlands. She invites the viewer to the ‘vernissage’ alongside with the wetlands wildlife who wereserved trails of bird seed distributed along the path so as to observe each artist posted along the trail.
The Nordic House, Reykjavik, Iceland
May 2011
Marcel Duchamp, whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist art movements, challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions Therefore, he insisted that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
The performance work, ‘Bird Song: An Ode to Marcel Duchamp’ is a conceptual strategy to remove the artist from a high-art practice and distance herself from commodity culture to concentrate on creating an intervention in the landscape.
It is arguable that the art market always finds ways to incorporate the activities of those dematerializing the art object within existing institutions and structures but Juliana hopes that by creating an outdoor exhibition in solidarity with the natural environment, greatly extends an allied interest in ecology and green politics.
To add to this discourse, this performance work is a subversive act to attract the colony of birds and wild life that live in the wetlands to the staging of an outdoor art exhibition of Icelandic Art of a cross-disciplinary nature….
Laminated images taken from the internet and constructed as sign posts were staked around the wetlands area surrounding the Nordic House. They symbolically represent a small selection of well-established Icelandic Artists who have left their historic stamp in the Icelandic art world and at large, whether it be through Painting, Music, Theatre, Sculpture, Photography or Film and Television, etc.
Juliana’s performance incorporates the installation of this outdoor intervention as an art exhibition for the wildlife of the wetlands. She invites the viewer to the ‘vernissage’ alongside with the wetlands wildlife who wereserved trails of bird seed distributed along the path so as to observe each artist posted along the trail.