Fabrice Joseph Arfi  

Artist’s statement

 

My work stands at a crossroad between performance, installation and painting. Its goal is to challenge the perceived role of the artist in the west as a maker of objects rather than images and situations. At the same time, it embodies an interrogation centred on popular culture and the relationship between people and their environment. I came from a double background, both culturally and artistically and I view it as important to take different tradition into account and to question boundaries between genres and cultures.

 

I first trained in performing arts in Paris, and later studied fine arts in Britain and have always shown interest in art forms that allowed me to express my different areas of speciality and where all media could interact together without clashing or creating any sense of anarchy and work on a same level in harmony. Shortly before graduating in fine arts, I joined the Fat House performance art group with which I took part in the Fix Festival with Roland Miller, at the Custard Factory, in Birmingham, as well as countless happenings and cabarets thanks to which I developed a clown called Boris. This allowed me to crash-test ideas and performances in front of an audience and encouraged me to re-centre my practise around the creation of objects, installations and environments.

 

The I Want a Life… project is more a reaction to the world as a social and philosophical entity and bears connotations if not direct references to other artists and movements, such as Fluxus or Beuys, Jimmy Durham and Bobby Baker.

This piece of work was born out of frustration and lack of means to produce art at a time when I badly needed a life, IE: a way to produce art, though I was at a financial dead end. Maybe lack of means and material allows a concentration process which can be very productive. Anyhow, no matter how little you have left, you still have yourself, your own body, your mind and the input of others as a highly versatile, enjoyable and direct way to make art. As an artist, you are, as an entity, the first and most obvious medium to utilise.

 

The project is time/process based and deals with organising and building an environment for a performance as it is actually taking place. It is made to propose a different and more poetic approach to urban environment and to encourage the public to interact with it and with each other at the same time. The surrealists likened the role of the artist to that of a medium; here, the artist is the medium in every sense of the term. In other words, the artist doesn’t only stand in between what Plato would call the sensitive and the sensible world but also in between the public and the piece as the brush does in between the painter and the canvas. The artist, then, becomes effectively the medium of the performance/installation in the way that he or she becomes at the same time tool and material, indispensable to the creation of the piece.