Performance principle

Performance principle
2007
Eight figures in combination with projected 3D animation
Hard plastic protection elements from various sport equipment, vetonit base, wood construction

Competitive sport in general and international competitive sport in particular carries a message through its very structure. It manifests in rating nations, teams and individuals, and states at its basic core the Western cultural thinking of being -a competitive society. Not only have modern athletes compete against each other but they also have measure their achievements against records set by already deceased colleges. Their achievements are eternally fixed within our mainframe of time and space.
Western culture acts to firmly entrenched pattern and believes that manifests them self unconsciously and are rarely challenged. There seems to be an (cultural) overriding commitment towards the performance principle. Apply the rules, let the rules define the process; let the process go on without limits.
In this particular work I was dealing with the afterlife of athletes, individuals that lived their live striving for acceleration, broke borders with will power or drugs and are unlike to stop, even by death.
The installation Performance principle displays a combination of sculptures and computer animated video projection. The sculptural part consists of nine individual crafted players. Sexless, bulky and scary, their bodies are mere exoskeletons, abandoned shells by their previous owners.The amour plates that circumscribe their bodies are compiled of hard shell protection parts collected from sport equipment.

Pharma CV

Pharma CV
2006
Glass blown oversized test tubes, selection of ball specimens sorted by colors

I often feel a natural distrust towards competitive sport, and particularly against competitive sport at the international level. This is not an argumentation against individual, or collective achievement, player and teams trying their best to win, but the problem is if the method of achievement is competition at whatever cost. Western thinking and conception of life is highly dramatic. Everything hangs on the competition. Heaven or hell, win or fail.
Passion is the thing that the artist shares with the athlete, it keeps us going and at the same time to enjoy our profession. Art and sport on their best are and should be primary motivated.
In my works this issues come often in disguise of happy colored and playful objects from the world of play and sports but they also point to a dark underlying current.
Curriculum stems from the Latin word for racecourse, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow and mature in becoming adults. Pharmacology
(From Greek, pharmakon,”drug”, and–logia.) is the study of drug action. The Pharma CV comes here in the color of a rainbow but the glass test tubes hint also to a hidden and more sinister aspect. One could not phrase a better example as a quotation from the article (The Convicts of the Road) by the French journalist Albert Londres.
Following the Tour de France in 1924 he recalled the following interview with the previous year's winner, Henri Pélissier, his brother Francis and a third rider, Maurice Ville -that all had pulled out after a row with the organizers. Henri explained the problem - whether or not he had the right to take off a jersey - and went on to talk of drugs.

"You have no idea what the Tour de France is," Henri said. "It's a Calvary. Worse than that, because the road to the Cross has only 14 stations and ours has 15.
We suffer from the start to the end. You want to know how we keep going?
Here..." He pulled a phial from his bag. "That's cocaine, for our eyes. This is chloroform, for our gums."
"This," Ville said, emptying his shoulder bag "is liniment to put warmth back into our knees."
"And pills. Do you want to see pills? Have a look, here are the pills." Each pulled out three boxes.
"At night, in our rooms, we can't sleep. We twitch and dance and jig about as though we were doing St Vitus's dance..." Henri spoke of being as white as shrouds once the dirt of the day had been washed off their bodies, then of being drained by diarrhea, before continuing:
"There's less flesh on our bodies than on a skeleton, Francis said,
“The truth is, that we keep going on dynamite!"