Art Metropole

#16155

Antiperformances

Writer

Noémi Lancelot

Price

$27.00

Date

2023

Publisher

Postfirebooks

Format

Artists' Books

Size

20 × 28 cm

Length

60 pp

Genre

Arts Writing, Social Practice, Contemporary Art

Antiperformances presents some Noémi Lancelot’s statements binded together in a notepad with releasable sheets.

In her short film En finir avec l’Art (2021) – literally Get Art over with – Noémi Lancelot lays the foudations of her anti-practice. « How can we produce an object that speaks about get over with production? » That’s the question the artist asks to someone on the phone, before talking about giving up art, following her studies of artists who gave up during their career.

Directly inspired by Lee Lozano’s Language Pieces, Antiperformances brings together protocol-like texts that follow one another like proverbs about what the artist does not do in the art world: an invitation to think action through negation. The book – which is not really one – shows commitment as an artistic practice, interrogates the medium and the institution with no moralism: it’s as much fiction as documentary. If a single question had to sum up this publication, it would be: how to be an artist today?

Each text is written as a sworn statement, giving precision on Noémi’s thoughts, to affirm the radicality of her posture against the system. What she does not do – she attests on her honor – forms her practice and identity. Statements are printed on the back of a page, so the notepad appears empty of any content when opened in the right reading direction. Lectors have to lift the pages to read it. Through its shape as well as through its words, Antiperformances tends to be a critical object that criticize its own performative utterance.