Denkmal zu Ehren von Bas Jan Ader / EXPEDITIONEN – Die Stadt als Aktionsraum.

In the performance artist is standing on a pole till he will fall asleep and consequently fall down on the mat surrounding the pole.

Memorials are reflections of the power of their time, and particular intervention investigates the source and feature of that power in the liberal era. In a way the aim of every public memorials was to subject the individual privacy to the common objectives, but with today’s background of the informative media, which successfully undertook that task, this implication towards memorials would seem too dramatic. On the contrary, what contemporary public spheres are lacking perhaps is a kind of resistance to that overwhelming influence of the new media.

The work is a challenge to the contemporary society constituting itself against the totalitarian paradigms of the past. It proposes the emphasis of the individual privacy over the public hegemony by substituting an object of collective acclamation with the somewhat private dedication.

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The pop-up monument in a public sphere commemorates the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. Although visually it appropriates the conventional forms of memorials, it presupposes the personal devotion as an essential expressive matter of the work: In the performance performer will remain standing on the pole resisting the inevitable state of exhaustion to the most possible extend. The aspects of personal respect and deep honour to the artist remains the bases for this action of resistance.