Peter Friedl: Blow Job

Peter Friedl (1960, based in Berlin) explores the conditions and genres of representation, using strategies of bracketing, exposing, editing, and other contextual transfers. His artistic practice emphasizes the friction between aesthetic and political awareness in the framework of their respective narratives. Throughout his artistic practice runs a deep concern about the language of the “subaltern” – that is, what remains outside or excluded from accepted symbolic systems. With the exhibition Blow Job in Extra City Antwerp, curated by Anselm Franke, Peter Friedl returns to his long-standing interest in theatre and its aesthetics, which was the subject of a large number of essays he wrote in the early 1980s.

The title Blow Job refers to an Internet project which started in 2001. At the time, Blow Job was set up as an anonymous blog: a brief scenario (“Berlin, 2001”) full of biographical, historical, and fictional references including seven acting characters. Running dialogues, stage directions, or prose insertions could be contributed to the website anonymously.

This trash material, now anachronistic, is the starting point for the present exhibition. Extra City commissioned Peter Friedl to turn it into a definite dramatic text which will be published by Sternberg Press in conjunction with the exhibition. Following Friedl’s previous text-based projects, such as the children’s monologues of Kromme Elleboog and Four or Five Roses or the interviews in Working at Copan, Blow Job raises questions of authorship, institutional practice, and visibility. The text will become the source for realizations and collaborations in various institutional contexts, beginning in São Paulo and Berlin in the fall of 2008.

The background of this commission functions as an organizing principle for a constellation of works in the exhibition, which brings together drawings, photos, and slides from 1964 to the present, some of which have rarely or never been shown before. Also included is the video installation King Kong (2001), shot in Sophiatown on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The film mimics the subtle deconstruction of a video clip, featuring songwriter Daniel Johnston against the backdrop of apartheid history. Rather than being another “retrospective”– a genre Friedl used in recent exhibitions – Blow Job reveals the theatrical as an exhibition and curatorial paradigm.

For more information please visit Extra City Kunsthal.