81. FIRE PLAN / POWER STATION MUSEUM, Shanghai, China

I had been invited to take part on SNACKS show in a big chinese museum, with some nice friends as Lolo, Sosaku and Boris Hoppek, amount others. I thought these should be a great opportunity to test some new experiments. JA JA JA !!!! [ villain laugh ]

So I was wondering if it´s possible to paint a big mural and avoid spectacularization claws? It´s possible to get closer to life itself? On the street, it seems to be “easier”. Even if we live on a spectacle society that reach every shape around us, street (on its poetical meaning) get to keep its own freedom and scape from social spectacularization. Lovers, inmigrants, travelers, mad people, teenagers, artists, dreamers, outsiders,… interact in the street and make it an “autonomus zone” where everything can happend… So when I paint narrative images on the street, these images interact with life fading away from an art perspective. Even if these images could be captured in photos and submitted as art images on books and magazines, I feel that its interaction with pedestrians will be in life terms and not in spectacle terms. I mean… life is life.

Iit´s possibe to produce life in the museum? How manage to make something inside without the limitation of art (spectacle)? My challenge was not to enter life in the museum (that will probably been immediatly neutralized because of the stage), but maybe the opposite: How to extract life from the museum itself? Museums are pervert machines that turn life on art, as theatres, as medias…. But museum itself, as a machine, is not art. It´s just a tool, a stage, an intermediary, just the mechanism to build spectacle. Lets try to make advantage from limitations, trying to erase frontiers between life and spectacle.

So I found this little Fire PLan that was posted on every little corner in the museum. I don´t understand exactly what it says, but surely something really interesting that would be necesary to know in case of fire. Lets reproduce it bigger to make the museum a safer place. Just in case!

“Fire plan” try to work on those points. Searching references from the museum itself to paint a big mural, playing the limits between what is and what isn´t. What is an exibition and what isn´t an exibition? Where are the limits between the stage and the representation? Where are the limits between life and art. Put on the stage a detail from the own stage, as show on a film the cameras with which the film have been recorded. “Signalize the stage up on the stage” is a test to “sterilize” the museum itself and extract life from him. A test that, as supposed, have been a failure, a big funny nice failure.