The Baldessari Assignments2016
Elina Brotherus has worked throughout her twenty-plus-year career in photography and moving images. Her works have alternated between autobiographical to art historical approaches, utilizing nearly any aspect of her personal life to those of the most iconic images from 19-20th-century paintings, especially works from the 1960-70s.
Her works reflect a
selection based upon the Fluxus principle that anyone, anywhere, any
given moment, can use their creative sensibilities to interpret and
reinvent an art piece, using whatever materials are available. Brotherus
emphasizes, "it is not about mimicking another artist’s original
performances, but studying and understanding the written protocols, the
so-called ‘event scores’”. In a way, she eliminates the question of
authorship and focuses her attention on the invitation to create her own
interpretation.
The American artist John Baldessari proposed a list of "art ideas” to
his indecisive students at CalArts in the 1970s. Brotherus started to
use these ideas as assignments in her own teaching: "I saw how much fun
the students had doing the Baldessari assignments and thought that I
want to do them too. In 2016 at my nomination for the Prix Elysée, I
started to use different instructions like Fluxus event scores and
Baldessari’s ideas as the basis of new work." The Baldessari Assignments is a still on-going series.