Name | Alex Staiger

Country | England

DOB | 1975.05.12

Email | info@alexstaiger007.com

Web | www.alexstaiger007.com

Curriculum Vitae | Click Here

Statement | Alex Staiger

My practice involves questioning value and what I as an artist can provide. The work deals with the psychology of and the questioning of reality by confronting the audience about value and experience with my videos, drawings and installations. Andrea Fraser’s says in her essay How to Provide an Artistic Service.

We are always already serving. Studio practices conceals this condition by separating production from the interest it meets and the demands it responds to at its point of material or symbolic consumption.  Because a service can be defined, in economic terms, as a value that is consumed at the same time it is produced, the service element of project based practice eliminates such separation.

My work aims to generate many answers to the question Who and how does one put a value on video works and performance?
Bourdieu talks of distinction and taste and demand of an artwork is subject to perpetual displacement following the course of particular struggles within the field. My work raises questions of social contracts between people and to push the boundaries of human conduct such as Erwin Wurm's photographs which also capture a perfect moment in lush color.

I am interested in bridging communities of entertainment and art through humor because humor gets into the subconscious of the viewer. Freud discusses the psychology of humorin Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, saying a joke is an unconscious moment allowed to bubble up without restraint acting in the sense of enjoyment and freedom.  He also believes wit spans the gulf between different ideas and the pleasure of a joke is a kind of economy. Transgressional works deal with psychological dislocation and abjection helps to explore the psychological as an event where audiences are confronted with their own repressed desires through a visceral experience. I look to Erwin Wurm, Daria Martin and Mathew Barney’s Cremasters seriesbecause of their viscerality, which allows a viewer to watch, delve and be absorbed into the image.

I look to everyday life and pop culture for exploring seemingly mundane everyday subjects in an innovative performance style with questioning characters. My love of excess, chaos, viscerality and involvement with the viewer leads me to incorporate the scenery from the videos into installations for the viewer for the viewer to be part of.