Art Must Be...
Art Must Be Clean, Artist Must Be Clean - collage, mixed technique on canvas. Size: 80 x 60 x 4 cm, wooden box framed, 2016, Anton Terziev. Photo: © the artist. Courtesy of the artist
after "Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful" video by Marina Abramovic(*1946), 1975
The piece paraphrases the original title, replacing "beautiful" with "clean." The gesture is intentionally humorous. What interested me was how a phrase that once carried the force of an artistic proposition can, decades later, acquire entirely different meanings.
The bib is central to the work. It introduces a note of absurdity, but also points toward something more specific: the seemingly limitless appetite of the contemporary art mainstream, which has an extraordinary capacity to consume, neutralize and repackage almost everything it encounters—including ideas and practices that originally emerged in opposition to commodification.
The work is not a parody of Abramović's practice. Rather, it uses one of her most recognizable works as a point of departure for reflecting on the current relationship between authenticity, artistic mythology and the cultural marketplace. If there is criticism here, it is aimed less at individual artists than at the mechanisms that transform artistic gestures into endlessly consumable products.
Never shown in public
after Every Male Selfie Is a Cry for Help by Richie Culver (b.1979)
Me&Marina-cellphone camera selfie, circa 30.08.2022 Photo: © the artist