Subversion feels like a kiss on the lips in the candid, captivating work of Ivan Argote. Text: Hili Perlson
Move over Robert Doisneau: once typified by the French photographer’s landmark 1950 shot “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville”, the public kiss in this day and age can be an act of intimate subversion, a joke, and a serious piece of art all at the same time. That’s what young Colombian artist Ivan Argote achieves with his series “All My Girlfriends”.
Argote’s constructed snapshots of himself mimicking the Photoshopped facial expressions of models on public advertisements take the faked spontaneity of “Le Baiser…” to a different level. He makes the public personal, and tackles the visual pollution and – some might say – unrealistic aspirations offered by advertisements, using only a digital camera and his own face. It’s the same picture-perfect falseness that the advertising world borrowed from Doisneau’s iconic image that the young Paris-based artist mocks.
But Argote is not only making the streets of Paris unsafe – watch out for his interventions in museums as well as on the Metro. Working with photography, film and new media, he combines charmingly boyish humility and subversive humour to challenge conventional pillars of behaviour in public, and act out intimate urges around them. His interventions disturb the codes of conduct within the spaces that he penetrates – and the unsuspecting audience and urban settings are both key for completing his work.
His 2008 video work “Retouch” shows a radical intervention at the Centre Pompidou, where he sets the camera on the floor, pulls out a spray-can from his backpack, sprays over a Mondrian, and runs. Another filmed performance, “Birthday” (2009), shows Argote asking people in the Paris Metro, in his humble little voice, to please sing happy birthday to him, because he’s new in the big city, it’s his birthday and he has yet to make any friends.
While critical interventions in public spaces have a long tradition in the art world, there is something beautifully naive and touchingly expressive in Argote’s work, due in no small part to the trifling undertones of his acts. The video “Feeling” (2009) is a buoyant clip of Argote dancing to The Cure’s “Close To You” in front of a black cross by Malevich. The reverent whispering and guarding of one’s distance from a masterpiece – the modus operandi we seem automatically to default to in museums – is boldly undermined.
The Parisian Metro is a favourite site for Argote’s attempts at shaking people out of the zombie-like apathy they inhabit in their random daily interactions. He gives passengers directions such as “action” and “cut” while pointing a lo-fi camera at nothing in particular, or walks between the carriages trying to give people coins as a form of reverse panhandling (needless to say, no one takes the money on offer). Indeed, artworks about communication breakdowns, societal angst, alienation and indifference have rarely been this entertaining. A video showing Argote licking a pole in the Metro recalls a certain advertisement for antibacterial gel that was so disturbing to commuters in the New York subway that it had to be removed (the original showed a homeless person holding on to a pole or sitting down in the subway, pointing out that you never know who was there before you).
Acting out secret urges and intimate fantasies, Argote’s attack in “All My Girlfriends” is coated with the frisky veneer of mischief and prompts a smile before any other intellectual reaction to the work emerges. That’s not to say that his message doesn’t come through loud and clear: his work sets out to expose concealed struggles and suppressed anxieties at the heart of human interactions, and it does so with all the intimacy and pleasure of a stolen smooch.
Ivan Argote shows at Prix Sam Art Projects December 7 2012 until January 21 2013, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. www.perrotin.com
www.ivanargote.com
From Sleek 35 “Kiss & Tell”