In Tokyo, there are shops where hundreds of trading-card photographs of j-pop “idols” are displayed hung in plastic sleeves. These shops are filled with teen girls searching for images of their favorite group or singular star. The cards are coveted; collected in special scrap books.
There are huge amusement arcades with computer games and with "Puri-Kura,” computer photo booths, that for 300 yen (@ $3.00), offer sheets of photographs that can be digitally decorated with fancy frames and borders. As you stand in front of a video monitor which shows your face, loud teeny-bob music blares and lights flash while a high pitched female voice calls out. Your portrait can be embellished with a variety of effects: glitter text, cascading hearts, playful kittens, and rainbow colorful backgrounds. Then, in about a minute, the machine prints out a sheet. The small photos are used for personal introductions, posted as surprise impromptu visages on power poles, and eagerly traded.
Marc De Ansar was enthralled by the Puri-Kura and spent many happy hours adding to his repertoire of postures and pronouncements. He liked the idea of the “idol” and thought that he should display himself as such.
Elements 1 a CalArts alumni exhibition at the Presidio in San Francisco, in an alcove I mounted Nine Years, Nine Lives a pop-up featuring artifacts from Making Marc 1996-2021 an in-process longitudinal portrait study. I presented four painting variations from photo booth pics, a portrait collage composed of beach plastic, my first watercolor portrait, a grouping of Marc postcards, a vitrine with Marc’s boxing jacket and gloves with screen saves from his video Punch Out where, in a gesture to fight the hyperventilated prose of artspeak, he punches out all obtuse villainous phrases: https://youtu.be/Ia07b8TG6TI
To invite visitor participation, a red bench was set with nose and glasses so people could try on the guise. Although the exhibit was small, it was a great way to introduce my project that I had, by then, been working on for 9 years.
The text of Mark Book Marked was extrapolated from ZYZZYVA magazine. Key words from the original text were selected; all others were whited out. The remaining "found" story became the musings of theoretical artist and postmodern alter-ego, Marc De Ansar.
This work was created in a slow and intuitive way. Every day for months, I would focus on a page and wait until the words "spoke" to me. Then, I would carefully and laboriously paint the paper white; leaving the selected words present.
There is a randomness and a resonance with the phrases that became the narrative line. Although there is a sense of a sequence and order, there is no singular meaning. It is to the reader to form an independent interpretation out of the linguistic promiscuousness of the text.
Marc De Ansar is the posied result of my search for an expanded identity. Through his character, I am creating a persona through whom I can write and speak a different voice.
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.
