A fictional artist is showing some similarities in size and clothing with his famous predecessor Toulouse Lautrec. His name is program: To Lose. Apart from sounding vaguely french and somehow familiar in art history it is the dooming failure contained in the artist’s name that is the focus of the work. To Lose is showing the struggle of an artist to ‘come up’ with an idea for his first solo exhibition in an ‘invisible dialogue’ with the public, ultimately transforming his struggle and his failure into a work of art ending with the last rebellious words of Toulouse Lautrec pronounced on his death bed to his own father: “vieux con!” (old cunt!).
To lose is clearly a quality of human nature and often a more challenging alternative than to win. In many situations losing is the only possibility for improving. Loss requires more strength – or more weakness – than winning. And for that we cherish a troubled work of art so much. As you might suspect, a great appreciation of the “loosing quality” comes with self-identification by other losers. But how exactly could we end up happier by acknowledging to having lost? This self-perceptual contradiction often leads such “loser artists” to abandon or to pursue into desperation – most of them getting lost and forgotten forever.
As their practice is always first and foremost a critical one, Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau thus set up two conflicting ideas against one another in To Lose: the contemporary’s preference for the biographical over the difficulty of the work itself, and the contemporary artist’s struggle, in spite of all this, to continue to “make it new,” in the Modernist tradition. But what will To Lose show in this, his first important Berlin solo exhibition? Will he be able to sustain the myth of artistic genius that has carried his career this far and preserved his predecessor’s name in the annals of art history?
Text by the artists, Travis Jeppesen & A.I.
The below full version video was a commission by Arte Creative (2011), HD, 2min. 48sec. Special thanks to Alain Bieber.