I'll be your Angel
/10
- I'll be your Angel
- 2001
- video, color, sound
- 22min, 54sec
"I’ll Be Your Angel" consists of my accompanying Mr. Szeemann during the opening days around Venice (including cocktails, dinners, press conferences). I performed as his escort—his Angel. This piece, integrated in everyday life, poses potential ambiguous narratives concerning the scandalous artist (and the curator). It provokes an invitation/invasion, and questions the power structure in the art world. Speculations of morality, and art world strategy spin out; while the press constructs a media support for this, it is not necessary. The structure of the piece is the process of mystery, both personal and public, encased in the glossy gossip of art world whispers. Why such a radical strategy? The Venice Biennale is a global phenomenon: A tourist attraction, a financial party of the art world, an intellectual soup; yet, it happens that many art works in Venice are either missed or misconstrued. So, I asked Harald Szeemann for his collaboration. His openness and trust of the potential nature of me "being his escort and his angel,” owes a critical debt to him. He was a respected and powerful personality with a "loaded name;" he became the material for my work and a "guarantee" for a platform for fragile questions. The opportunity to make an active/interactive artwork out of Mr. Szeemann proves infinitely rich and complex. It allowed me to blend the immaterial and intellectual in a process-oriented work, a work that is not only “officially” sanctioned, but also “unofficially” snakes in and out of the language of the art system. T.O.