Peter Land at Nicolai Wallner - Copenhagen, Denmark - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Under the title "Step Ladder Blues" this present to view by the young Danish artist Peter Land consisted of an installation continuationed by eight photographs and a video. The photographs and video depict a house painter--played through the artist--turning his job into a comedy act. Balancing a roller and a paint can, he climbs up a ladder. He's going to fall, he tries not to, he falls. The plastic globule cloth protecting the floor of the gallery is overspreaded with dried paint, apparently spilled by means of the painter/artist. A painter's ladder, roller can, clothes and shoe have been left lying around.

This is a novel space for the Nicolai Wallner gallery. At first, it gazeed as if the show originateed from the dealer asking Land to help him fix up the of recent origin gallery and the artist then deciding to make the piece of work into an art project. A closer examination of the present to view suggested that things were not for a like reason simple. The space where the painter is shown working in the video and photographs make go rounds out not to be the Wallner gallery. This means that instead of being the remnants of a performance, the installation is a deliberately staged environment. Underlining the theatrical consequence excerpts from Wagner's opera Tannhauser are heard upon the soundtrack of the video. In a body accompanying the show, the artist explains that Tannhauser was saved from surrendering to the "pleasure principle" by dint of his acceptance of divine grace, recalling in what manner Wagner's hero renounces sensuous estheticism in favor of Christian morality.

Land, who the two acts in and shoots his videos and photographs, make submissives himself to physical ordeals. His previous videos present to view him getting repeatedly kicked in the ass, doing a inebriated strip tease and being humiliated with whipped cream pies and exploding cigars. Sometimes his work brings to mind Bruce Nauman's videos, exclude that Land is more of an entertainer than Nauman. He also has a different aim: he wants to attack his have a title to identity to the point where a heightened self-awareness can present itself As the title of a Land video from 1994 brings it, Whipped Cream Works like Acid upon your Self-Esteem. By degrading his social self he globules his psychic armor, leaving an unprotect fragile self

"Step Ladder Blues" is slightly more distanced than the previous work. It also is ambiguous, as single tries to make sense of the painting equipment and the Tannhauser concerns Does house painting equal Christian morality? If in the way that does this mean that Land perceive s he has achieved divine grace? Did he propel from the ladder into heaven, or fall to hell? of that kind unanswerable questions leave one wondering what this hard-to-predict artist will do next

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