Anne Fontanille - Judgement
Wissel 202 20 mei 2005
Engagement, my statement : Judgement
When I agreed to be part of the exhibition in the Aanschouw around this \"engagement\" theme, my first feeling was fear, I had to be involved and strong. In fact I had to exhibit myself, and to do it well enough for people to view.
I realised that I cared too much about peoples judgements and it paralized my creativity. Too many artists do their artistic works just to fit in with basic public opinion, or in the oposite way to provocate but just to be \"against\" something, without deep message.
Further more, people are making groups together because they like the same type of music, the same political opinion or they have the same taste in general and they judge other groups or persons with preview, putting labels on them. I asked myself why, why do we need to judge all the time? And I think it's because it reassures us, to feel artificially unique or superior.
This is why I came up with the idea of showing a judge like in the juridic process, in the window. When you look at the installation you see your face in the judge's face mirror : you see yourself as a judge. All the stickers designed like labels with judgement adjectives like \"proud\", \"common\", \"fake\", etc... are also in the composition.
I made a video, a dance stop motion video showing myself wearing white clothes .The fluorescent judgement stickers were stuck one by one in my clothes and I reacted by movements at this agression. This video is placed under the judge.
For my opening, I decided to do a dance performance, to carry out the message by the \"living art\" way. I wanted people to understand that, by being to judgemental, we finally lose ourselves and our authentic identity because we behave by influence.
During the performance, I played with all these stickers silkscreened on my clothes by moving like as if I was in a \"stickers' shell\", like all these looks and judgements stick to my skin! The musicians improvised with me, answering to the public atmosphere. I did an interactive communication with the public by sticking my labels to a few people and after looking at their reactions, I played with their expressions and movements, replying and copying it like in a dance conversation.
Anne Fontanille.
Curator: Frank Taal