Detail from Dan Colen: Birdshit Paintings, 2007. Oil and enamel on canvas. Image courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin/Los Angeles
On Saturday, the exhibition Absent Without Leave opens at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London until March 17. It examines the ways in which contemporary artists, including Terence Koh, Kirsten Pieroth and Loris Gréaud, use elements of performance as material in the production, or reception, of their work. Here, 27-year-old American artist Dan Colen discusses his own work in this context.
I have spent today installing my work in the gallery. I've made this large series of 62 canvases that I kind of threw paint at in different ways so they end up looking like they are made of bird shit. They vary in size, touch and colour. Some of them look like Pollocks, some look very realistic, others are painterly, some are dumb, some are elegant, some are beautiful.
The last solo show that I did I put up sculptures of big boulders covered in spray paint, bubble gum and what looked like pigeon shit. Doing it straight on to a canvas this time around made it explode for me. I think it works perfectly with the theme of this show. The curator was really interested in the residue of performance as opposed to actual performance, as witnessed in the work of the artist Vito Acconci in the early 70s.
What excites me is the idea of hypothetical pigeons being the performers, rather than me, so all the shit is the residue of their activity - I don't know if the curator saw it as that. The antics that the artist Dash Snow and I do is shit and giggles, but while everything about my life is worked into my art, this work isn't about mine and Dash's relationship.
Despite the theme of the show, however, I don't think performativity is any bigger or more important than it was five years ago. I think Acconci is a great artist but I don't have a special connection to his work or see my work linking up to much of it.
Performance art can be such a big, general thing: anything can be performative. The currents of the show are way more subtle than one would think from reading the press release. Once the thing exists, I'm happy for it to have a life on its own and hope people are interested in it. I'm not looking for a specific reaction from the audience. Everybody is different.
