Born in 1937 in San Sebastian (ES)
Lives and works in Paris (FR)
1977
Black and white photographs
30 x 40 cm chacune
Year of Purchase: 2004
Intime et personnel (Intimate and personal) is one of the first performances by Esther Ferrer, a Spanish Basque artist, and a historic member of the ZAJ group (considered to be the Spanish branch of Fluxus). As often with this artist, the system proposed here is extremely simple, generous and freely interpretable. The idea is to measure a body (hers or someone else’s) with a measuring tape, marking the places measured with a number, a dot or a note, which can then be read off at will aloud, played, marked on the floor or on a board, etc. At the end of the performance, the body has possibly turned into a tableau vivant (scientific, plastic and literary) all in letters and figures. While obviously a questioning of the universal notion of identity lies behind this superficial exploration and systematic marking out of an organic territory, we might also see it, against the political backdrop of Franco’s Spain, as a gentle denunciation of the body’s submission to the normative logic of statistics exacerbated by a certain totalitarianism. But the benevolence and curiosity that drive these gestures most of all show the artist’s fascination for space and numbers which we find in her later installations centring on a poetics of prime numbers. Mathematics and physics.
The interest of this particularly ‘open’ work also lies in its practical focusing of the crucial art issues of its time. Among a relaxed relation to the body, the musical paradigm (influence of John Cage), the economy and reduction of means, the importance of the system over actual realization, the possibility of accidents and the formal non-resolution of the work in progress. And even, with humour and freedom, the breaking down of boundaries between the private (revealing one’s intimate parts) and public spheres (the body politic and social), playing on sexual differences and overturning theatrical conventions through refusing the spectacular and through interaction with the audience. In a word, a yardstick for the minimal conceptual and performative practices of art in the 1960s. However, how such a performance is received is changing all the time, like a harmonic note, depending on where it is given. For, as economic and moral tyranny takes over from the dictatorial regime in its programme for standardizing bodies, in its radical simplicity, Intime et personnel gains fresh relevance. Its system for reactivation since 1967 also sheds a clear light on the paradox of gestural art which is essentially immediate and nevertheless immortal. What if, in its radical dematerialization and imprecise protocol, the ephemeral performance mode, over in a flash, was much more than a refusal of historic and cultural inscription, the very model of the universal, enduring work?
Guillaume Désanges