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 Portrait of an Artist comprises 18 portraits of Visser drawn by street artists. In 1994’s Ars Futura, she attacked art’s ghetto by going at a white cube space with pots of colored paint. Visser’s 1995 work Gimines is about her own guest role in a Lithuanian TV series. And in 1997’s Lecture on Lecture with Actress, 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 Manual/2 – The Patient Artist, 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.