Fan
FAN A PIECE ON HYPOTHETICAL ARTISTIC REFLECTION
IN ADOLESCENT CULTURE
Fan is a work in photography and video format that takes the phenomenon of the same name into the contextual framework of an art gallery.
The subversion of the usual protocol of artistic reflection underpins the conception of a piece that uses the absurd, the improbable, as raw material.
Fan adopts meta-artistic strategies, but far from trying to generate an endogamic project, it makes use of these in order to discuss the perceptual implications of an artwork from the work itself. It invites those willing to think to engage in a reflective discourse, presenting itself as a work that is Pop in conception, and also in the reflexive readings it suggests.
The story that is performed in Fan becomes the imaginary reaction to a story, thus generating a kind of conceptual loop centred on the idea of provoking the spectator to reflect critically on artistic reflection.
Expectations about how a work will be perceived — what effect will it have on the spectator? — are ‘resolved’ in Fan with irony, the response shown is completely charged, with empathy, idolatry toward what is created and the creator as the common denominator in the discourse.
As a narrative element, in an ad hoc hypothesis of reflective experience towards an artwork the piece presents a group of 15 adolescents who go crazy with admiration. In Fan the people who habitually assume a subordinate role to the idol, the ‘star artist’, here take the lead, inverting once again the usual logic and course of events.
I find the fan phenomenon suggestive as a visual metaphor, a symbolic image in some form, of what an artwork ultimately becomes after being conceived and materialized. The artist creates and projects himself and, to a greater or lesser extent, raises questions about how the piece will be interpreted. Once the artistic phenomenon is able to stand on its own two feet with no need of the person who gave birth to it and can go where it wants, it is out of our control.
Marc Serra
Produced in Galeria H2O, Barcelona, July 2009.
Thanks: Joaquim Ruiz Millet. Gallery H2O.