In his series of film recordings of the performance Attempt 1–6 (2010), Yoeri Guépin shows several acrobatic sequences of himself with a chair. In Attempt 1, he tries to place the stool on the vertical surface of a wall and sit on it. At times, his attempts look like a serious performance exploring the boundaries of physical possibilities, but they quickly strike us as absurd, improvised, and entertaining one-minute sculptures. The other potentially performative works offer equally subtle shifts in a reality that seems to slip through our fingers, such as a glass display case containing golden, seemingly authentic fingernails or a wig with a hairpin tossed on the floor – a scalp presented as the artist’s self-portrait. At the background of the artist’s work is the question of boredom. But Guépin does not look at boredom as a passive state, instead seeing its potential as a possible source of activation. He uses boredom to forge pure creativity, liberated from ulterior motives, prejudiced opinions, or determining concepts. In the end, however, even the possibilities of banal activities and pure unengaged creativity help to define art and life as activities.
Mira Keratová