Robin Deacon

Works for Live Art Danmark
2011 “The Argument against the Body” at Samtalekøkken
2014 “White Balance: A History of Video” and “Spectacle: A Portrait of Stuart Sherman” at Hitparaden 2

The Argument against the Body
Robin Deacon performed “The Argument against the Body” at Samtalekøkken in Warehouse 9 in February 2011. It was a complex meditation on the ancient mind-body dualism, one of the oldest and utterly unsolvable philosophical conundrums: What am I, my mind or my body? Robin applied the question to the relationship between performer and audience. An entertaining and very smart lecture performance, the video of which can only be seen at Youtube, because there is tons of nudity in it.

White Balance: A History of Video
At Hitparaden 2 Robin presented a personal history of video technology in a lecture performance. The title “White Balance” refers to the process by which a camera is adjusted to account for differences in light, changing the relative strengths of colors to reach a truer sense of what is being seen. From the evolution of the video camera to meditations on discarded and forgotten videotape formats, the performance uses a series of outmoded vintage video cameras to explore how our ways of seeing and ways of remembering may be transformed by the medium used to capture the event. This performance is part of a continuing series of works that create fictional narratives and explore their potential relationship with real life and autobiographical experience.

Spectacle: A Portrait of Stuart Sherman
Robin studied and re-enacted the work performance artist Stuart Sherman for several years. At Hitparaden 2, he screened a movie he made about the artist and his own process of approaching him at Copenhagen’s most colorful cinema, “Palads”. Richard Foreman plays an important part in the film.

About the Artist
Robin Deacon, born in 1973 in the UK, is an artist, writer, film-maker and educator currently based in the USA. Since the early 1990’s, his work has been presented at conferences and festivals internationally in Europe, USA and Asia. His interdisciplinary practice spans a variety of themes, including explorations of performer presence and absence, the role of the artist as biographer, and journalistic approaches to arts practice. Recently he has shifted into the area of documentary film with a series of interrogations of the ethics of performance re-enactment. His work has been presented in venues and galleries such as Tate Britain, London (2014), The Whitney Museum, New York (2013), The Bluecoat, Liverpool (2010), Hebel Am Ufer, Berlin (2008), Tanzquartier Wein, Vienna (2007), and The Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona (2006). He is a Professor in Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

Read more about Robin’s work on his website.