Peter Land

PETER LAND

THE ARTIST AS ANTIHERO

The Danish artist Peter Land is well-known for his humorous and often self-ironic video art, productions which explore the absurdity of life and man’s frequently failed conduct in the world.

Pink Space, 1995

Description
In the video installation Pink Space Peter Land stars as a pathetic and slightly tipsy entertainer, wearing a glittering blue lamé jacket, white shirt and black bowtie, who suavely takes a seat on a barstool, drink in hand. Smiling at the camera, he barely manages to sit down before the stool collapses under him and he comes crashing to the floor.

Besides the stool is a small wooden table with a bottle of whiskey but otherwise the room is bare. A bright spotlight illuminates the centre stage, bathing the entertainer and the barstool in pink light. The sequence of the entertainer entering the sparsely furnished room, taking a seat and falling down is repeated in a number of almost identical falls together constituting a loop.

About the work
The video installation Pink Space utilises an accessible and readily understandable imagery. The work’s simplicity, repetitive structure and focus on the recognisable character of the entertainer enable us as viewers to identify with his failed attempts at mastering the situation and gaining control of his performance.
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About Land’s art in general
Peter Land moves freely between video, photo, performance and installation works and more traditional types of work in drawing, gouache and oil paint. In the various media he stages a tragicomic male figure, modelled on the artist’s own body or simply played by Peter Land. Consistently the works are executed with an evident reference to the artist himself, in that Land appears in different but always immediately recognisable characters in the bulk of his pieces. Common to the works is also the depicted male figure’s lack of command of the situation. Thus the inadequacy and the fundamental lack of control are recurrent features in Peter Land’s works.
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Literature
"Art at the Turn of the Millennium", Taschen Verlag, 1999
"Manual til dansk samtidskunst", (Lisbeth Bonde and Mette Sandbye), 2006
"Sip My Ocean" Video in Louisiana’s collection, (Michael Juul Holm and Anders Kold (eds.)) 2006
"Flash Art", March 2005
"Kønnet i kroppen i kunsten", (Rune Gade), Informations forlag, 2006
"Fairy Tales Forever: Hyldest til H.C. Andersen", 2005
"The Danish Pavilion: 51st Venice Biennial", (Jacob Fabricius (ed.)), Eva Koch, Joachim Koester, Peter Land, Ann Lislegaard, Gitte Villesen, 2005