(Warhol’s Wig)
HD video, monitor, speaker, MDF, steel, motor, 1:20 min.
A MDF disc with a diameter of two metres is turning incessantly. Cables connect a speaker together with a screen across the breadth of the circle. On the screen a man can be seen in a pink jumpsuit. Stefan Hurtig stages himself and addresses several areas of self-stylisation: With Andy Warhol the figure of the (pop) artist is alluded to, but also the self-representations on various other platforms. The artist portrait, traditional, but now digitised and transmitted into today’s object world, is viewed with irony in a song by Kraftwerk entitled The Model. Hurtig however sings it in a modified version: “He’s a model and he’s looking good.” The beauty market demands its price for attractiveness by self-optimisation and adaptation to the norms – or the deviation from it. With the fundamental change in the position of the artist in the 19th Century, away from the role of the courtier to that of a self-marketing subject of a free art market, turned its presence into one of enormous importance. A factor of recognition is satirised through the invocation of Warhol’s Wig. The famous wig is missing, and as such the protagonist resembles bald medieval Christ figures who had removable wigs made from real hair: The artist is the fool, Christ the sufferer, the Star.
Text by Heidi Stecker, from the exhibition catalogue 2.5.0. Object is Meditation and Poetry…, Editors: Alba D’Urbano, Olga Vostretsova (HGB, 2017)
Acquired by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony (KdFS) 2011, © Dresden State Art Collections (SKD) / Art Fund (Kunstfonds)
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