Fiona Abicare

Rose Nolan

Christian Capurro

Andrew Hurle

Eliza Hutchison

Tom Nicholson

 

Performance Anxiety

An exhibition curated by Damiano Bertoli

Invitation

Press release / Catalogue text

Performance Anxiety by Justin Clemens

So, you've got performance anxiety. Everyone knows you can do it; you know you can do it. You're talented. You went to art school. You've had successes. But, somehow, it hasn't quite worked. You're not quite where you thought you'd be. You get nervous, go all weird, don't talk to the right people, don't talk in the right way, don't quite make the work that people are going crazy for right now, and then, whenever you think about it, you go a bit funny, get even weirder. You can't perform. But what's stopping you? Don't you think you're good enough? Maybe you're not, but you can't seem to give it up, either. So why not just relax? It'll be OK. In fact, it'll be better than if you worry too much. People will appreciate your efforts; they may even think you're hot, love you even. You may even enter art history, may even be considered an important artist. People will write elegant and witty catalogue essays about your work. But, still, knowing this, you worry too much. Sweating, trembling, stuttering, paralysed, all sorts of embarrassing physical reactions, way in excess of any possible conscious control. And so it all fucks up. Or, at least, that's how you feel. How could you do it, keep doing it, again and again? Do you like the humiliation? The frustration? The physical horror of it? What is it that you want? But that's it, isn't it? It's your desire; bigger, nastier, more inadmissible even than your (not-so) secret ambitions to dominate the world, be the best, most famous, best loved, richest artist in existence. Anyone can have those ambitions; actually, probably everyone does have those ambitions. Even people who aren't artists. The problem is, you are an artist, maybe even a real artist, and so you don't, can't, have a clue what you want, other than that it's so obscene and extraordinary there aren't any words, images, objects up to the job. And so, when you try to start making, the catastrophe of nothingness erupts, vitiating the work from within. But without that nothingness, without the anxiety that accompanies it, without the irreparable and unbearable sense of impending failure hovering over the whole affair, it wouldn't feel worth it, and it wouldn't be. Catastrophic as performance anxiety can be, things would be worse without it.

© Justin Clemens, Paris, 2004

 

© All works copyright the artist