I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I),2009, 20’24’’.
Ballroom Marfa, EE.UU. www.ballroommarfa.org
The subject has no relation to him (/her)self that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other, in the form… of the eternal return
- Jacques Derrida (1982)
Dan Finsel's frenetic, slyly slapstick and ultimately dark oeuvre—made manifest in performance based video works and sculptures—are interventions into the construction of a signifying subject and the formation of the self. Deciding upon his arrival in LA five years ago that his narrative track was uninteresting, he set about experiencing something else through someone else. Outwardly he remained the same, but positions, desires and associations were redeveloped into a character that was an amalgamation of various media constructed subjectivities, specifically those of popular TV and film. But just as stepping away has the uncanny fortune of bringing us back to something lost, Finsel found he could not complete rid himself of himself.
In I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah, the artist presents this character, Dan Finsel, in the midst, on the verge and working through what seems to be a psychological fit. Stripped bare of filmic artifice, in front of a chroma-key green screen, he rehearses the same lines over and over again. Finsel has culled the lines from the annuls of teenage melodrama, specifically those of 90210's Brenda Walsh and characters played by the late Farrah Fawcett. The elasticity of Finsel's emotions, severed from any backstory, combined with brute repetition lends the peculiar address unexpected moments of philosophical clarity. Appropriated hysterics such as "the past is the past, the future is the future," and "I'm a private person, I'm shy about people knowing things," open up into abstract epithets and political slogans questioning the illusions inherent in topics as far ranging as time and reality television.
Curatorial Text by Erin Kimmel
Dan Finsel (1982) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Graduated from MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA In recent years, starting in 2008, he carries on a research focused on himself, Dan Finsel, a psychologically unstable subject created by the distortion of an hyperbolic and perverse personality. Occasionally, through video and performance, the artist embodies this strange character, inspired by popular movies and television, and identifies himself with a schizophrenic character, a kind of child-adult continually tormented by his own personality.