Kasia Fudakowski

Tap And Die

A Lecture On The Work Of Andy Kaufman And Lee Lozano

Event

10/11/2016 –

– 30/11

Fudakowski reveals her fascination with these two artists and their influence on her own work- which often balances precariously between the comic and the tragic, by looking at their provocative approach to thinning the membranes between art and life.

Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was a game-changing painter, pun-master and conceptual artist working in New York in the 60’s to early 70’s before she decided to stop and radically broke ties with the art world in her last and perhaps most consequential work: ‘Dropout piece’. Andy Kaufman (1949-1984), from Great Neck, was a self-proclaimed song-and-dance man, who challenged audiences to varying degrees of confusion, discomfort, and laughter through his radically innovative and at times confrontational performative style.

While neither Kaufman nor Lozano considered themselves comedians, they both had a pretty funny relationship with women. Kaufman as the self-proclaimed ‘champion’ of intergender wrestling and misogynist-extraordinaire alter-ego Tony Cliffton, and Lozano’s ‘Boycott women piece’ which she allegedly kept working on till the end of her life. Both sought an extreme relationship with the female gender, perhaps purely because, ‘that’s where the action is’, as Lozano wrote in one of her notebooks.

Their personal as well as professional narratives have held a lasting fascination partly because they were both seemingly cut short. Employing all the liberties bestowed on the amateur, Fudakowski investigates these two towering figures, as well as the art world’s preoccupation with their authenticity, and attempts to bring you closer to where the action was.

Info

About Kasia Fudakowski: Kasia Fudakowski (b. 1985) studied at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and has exhibited internationally at venues such as; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Arnolfini, Bristol; GAK, Bremen; FUTURA, Prague; Hamburger Bahnhof Kunstverein, Hamburg; Sprengel Museum, Hanover; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.