Manual/2 - The Patient Artist

For the artist Barbara Visser, the 1990s was a period of soul-searching that yielded at least four iconic works. Her 1992 comprises 18 portraits of Visser drawn by street artists. In 1994’s , she attacked art’s ghetto by going at a white cube space with pots of colored paint. Visser’s 1995 work is about her own guest role in a Lithuanian TV series. And in 1997’s , the artist as a person becomes even further concealed in a video recording of an actress speaking words – prompted by Visser through an earpiece – that comment on a separate video recording of a second actress playing the role of Visser. For each of these pieces, the artist recycled earlier works, reflecting an approach that is characteristic of her oeuvre. In , the four works form the backdrop to a performance in which an actor reads aloud extracts from reports on the artist written by therapists from the Netherlands Psychoanalytic Institute. The texts take on a fictional component by being associated with the images on-screen; the four works become the illustrations for the story. While the artist and her history come into ever-sharper focus, the duplication and the shifting framework cause her to become increasingly elusive.