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| Mabruk Saf-Sal |
The monumental multimedia installation, Je soulève tout[1], was, by all accounts, a failure. Between power outages, drunken puppeteers, and a four-day transit strike, the piece came off as shoddy and incoherent. The public was baffled and the critics, (expecting something entirely different based on the press releases), were vengeful. Recovering from a professional debacle of this magnitude required a clever and aggressive philosophical riposte.
Mabruk Saf-Sal quickly renounced performance art, calling it “exhibitionism of the clinically depressed.”[2] After publishing two manifestos[3]advocating for the continued urgency of kitsch, Saf-Sal started painting for the first time since art school.
After an improvised process of remedial draftsmanship training (Saf-Sal immersed himself in the anatomical engravings of William Cheseldon and Hunter’s studies of midwifery), he embarked on a new body of Pop Art inflected work.
Both the public and the critical community were equally, though differently, assuaged.
[1] Exhibited at the Frieze Baku, November 2009
[2] “exhibitionnisme des déprimés cliniques”
[3] Pop is King, appearing in the January 2010 issue of Art in Quebec and Je ne suis pas désolé, 2010, (210 pages) which was distributed privately in limited edition.
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