Stares Stairs

In 1995 I was invited to create a site-specific installation for Intersection for the Arts XXX Year Anniversary celebration. Artists were given a floor plan for the 466 Valencia Street building along with permission to think of anywhere as a possibility. Excited by the challenge and this remarkable opportunity I spent several days on site considering, meandering, and measuring. As an artist interested in telling a story in space as well as time, for years I had pondered the significance of stairs; their rising and their declension. The stairs going from the street up to the gallery/exhibition space became the perfect passageway for the creation of a sequential visual narrative. On the face of each of the 30 stairs I mounted a set of eyes, each set portraying a significant expression: the stare, the gaze, the glance. Intending to invert the relationship of viewer/viewed, instead of looking at the artwork, the artwork is looking back with questions: Who is looking at whom? Or what is looking at who?

This installation sparked my research into the annals of art history looking for other great "stair" moments including the Marcel Duchamp's infamous "Nude Descending a Staircase." So I decided I better get with it and decend the stairs nude.

As I studied Duchamp's work I learned about Rrose Sélavy, his alter ego, his female persona. This discovery was a revelation, a profound ah-ha moment, a life changing event which led to the development of my own theoretical artist, alter ego, masculine persona.

At that moment I decided to embark on a 25 year project. Each year (1996-2021) I will don a Groucho Marx "nose and glasses" and pose as Marc De Ansar. By using the comedic face of the jokester/clown, I will poke fun at the formality of the staid traditional portrait. DeAnsar, as a post-modern entity, considers the difficulty in creating a singular image to define and depict an identity. Over time, the disguise, the mask, will remain the same while underneath the masquerade, I/he will change. 

Each year I will create four 22" x 30" paintings. Upon completion there will be 100 chronological portrait images. By maintaing certain fixed parameters (the size of the paper, the nature of the pose) the subtle differences and the effects of aging will be apparent. Beyond the creation of the paintings, I will develop Marc's character through fabricated stories and found art-i-facts (readymades) that he will name and proclaim as ART. His astute skills as a cunning strategist and sensitive renderer of line and form will be played out in his expertise as a champion of tic-tac-toe (ala Duchamp's chess game) and as trickster par excellence. His antics and his artistry will be video taped and edited into a series of short vignettes that will ultimately become a recorded document (100+ minutes) of his enactments.