Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

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It's hard to be a performance artist. And Kasper's last Lewis exhibition so cleverly inverted the artist-is-present ethos instead staging the viewer as a humming presence awkwardly avoiding the pratfall spotlighting in the artist's absence. But now, as common, the objects seem awaiting their activation, the remains of the artist, like ashtrays or souvenirs, artists leave both.


See too: Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

(link)

It's not a stretch to think this installation as turning the tables on her WhiBi installation, the endurothon live-in where everyone gawked at her, the object viewed, inverted to set instead the viewer on heavily amplified stage, a sort of DIY version of Abramovic's spectaculars less concerned with (ostensible) spiritual risk of, like, all encompassing ego death in another's gaze and more just like the day to day drudgery of moving a lumpy sweating thing through space along with stacks of records and books and your like metaphorical underwear for all to see, there was, afterall, some Camus in her belongings did you see? I think the moral here is that it's hard to be looked at but easy to decide to be looked at. There's some saleable objects on the backwall.