Art In Public

"the first public demonstration, which I presented under the title "feu a volonté" took place in the galerie J in paris on june 30, 1961. for 14 days, the visitors could make use of an armoured shooting stand. there was a record number of visitors. the visitors-actors were invited to work off their repressed instincts, which they usually relieved in fairground shooting booths, on an aesthetic level. the innovation went around the world within two months and surrounded niki with a kind of halo that appeared somewhat strange, as if it was being worn by a modern amazon or a hunting diana of montparnasse. hundreds of newspaper articles and a number of tv programmes contributed to the success. the itallans turned her into a vampire, the swiss into a convinced feminist who had replaced the exhausted men in the field of art. the americans, puritans, moralists and pacifists, reacted with anger at a television programme in which she was heard to say.. "obviously war is better, but I can't do any more." (Restany, loc. cit.)

Society and media, thirsting for any novelty and any scandal, presented the young painter's action to the public that was only gradually discovering the young art of the nouveaux réalistes. The artist in front of the paintings, the picture walls, the altars at which she or others shot; for some pictures, the identity of the person who shot at them has been retained, indeed "who shot them" as with a hunting party where the ranking of the participants is determined by the number of animals shot. The photos from this time - many of them appearing almost simultaneously in newspapers and magazines - repeatedly show Niki de Saint Phalle rifle in firing position, or in the game of "before and after", first in front of the object to be shot and then in front of the object shot and covered in coloured blood. The ritual sacrifice of the pictures is directed by her, the keeper of the ritual.. 'I dress myself completely in white, like a vestal virgin, and massacre my own paintings." (Quoted from the Niki de Saint Phalle Catalogue, Retrospective, Duisburg, Hanover et al., 1980/81, p. 20)

The artist in front of the objects, the artist shooting : a change of roles is recorded and documented, for a woman is standing ri front of a picture to be shot, takes aim and fires. On the pictures of other shootings - at this time many news photographs were taken of executions around the world - women are amongst the victims, but never amongst the perpetrators. it remains up to Niki de Saint Phalle to introduce a woman as actor in these scenes of shootings in the pictorial world of the media. Going far beyond this, as Restany notes, the artist Saint Phalle deliberately and arrogantly enters male terrain, breaches the exclusivity of male war-making and execution rituals. She infringes the taboos of the age on many levels, in publicising violence, even making the observer an accomplice in her violent acts; by making the observer a voyeur of her symbolic executions, she involves them in the act of destruction and in the creation of the new picture through the destruction of the old. in the classical theatre, the role of the artist was that of the garçonne, the classical "breeches part" for a woman: a female being transgressing the limits, overcoming the limits of her own role and entering unauthorised male terrain. But the artist does what she does in the midst of daily life in Europe, in the centres of cities and, increasingly, open to the general public.

The first shooting actions at pictures were soon followed by larger, performance- like undertakings. It is not only the monumental picture assemblages (1961 in Paris) that were shot at and from which even today parts have survived as individual paintings, that are "processed" in the presence of third parties, indeed specifically that of the press and photographers. A further step towards a new public breach of a taboo was the use of large pictorial forms from a religious context. With her altars, the artist attacked the image of the institution of the Church and its credo. Confronted with the accusation of blasphemy, she set out her own statement of belief:

"Holy communion. I step towards the altar with words of love and hate in my heart. Why do You let people hunger and suffer? - I hate You. - I love You. - I trust You. - there are mysteries I do not understand. Why do You allow hunger and war? Is the devil stronger than You? Please forgive me. I am sorry and ask for forgiveness. I throw myself at Your feet. I am eleven years old. A passionate love affair with God has begun that will last throughout my life. The altars and cathedrals that I created in 1961 and 1962 are the expression of this passion." (Niki de Saint Phalle, in.. Catalogue, Munich, p. 66.)

The shots at the altars and cathedrals recreate the image of the victim, it is only the blood of paint over the white or golden backgrounds that brings the objects found into their own pictorial context. In Milan, during the "Festival of New Realism", the artist was still shooting at a large white altar full of statues of saints dominated by a crucifix in the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele near the cathedral as late as 1970. The photograph of the action shows her, shooting in front of the altar, surrounded by a wide semicircle of spectators, who were, however, not only spectators but also witnesses of the deed, witnesses who could testify to what the artist did. It is precisely also in the attacks against the insignia and symbols of the Church and institutionalised faith that she works off experiences that are not only symbolically autobiographical, such as the memories of her childhood in a convent. It is precisely through making her actions public that the artist renders impossible the devaluation of her artistic criticism as being merely personal and autobiographical. By presenting her art to a public, allowing it to be experienced and witnessed by many, communicated and fixed by the media, she also increases the effect of the contents of this art. What the public takes note of does not remain hidden within small artistic circles, it belongs to everyone and is present in many minds.

Thus in her art Niki de Saint Phalle has, through the shooting pictures, the destroyed altars and cathedrals, given large and loud testimony to the desperate struggle between love of and distancing from real and intellectual fathers and mothers. It is only through the deliberate exploitation of the public nature of her actions and the worldwide reaction of the press that the artist's message was also really seen and heard. And only few doubted the sincerity of the artist who in these activities went far beyond the playful artistic in-group actions of the neo-dadaism of her colleagues. She stood unprotected in public, presenting herself to a global audience with her attacks against a system that had lost all credibility and its protagonists in politics, the Church and art. Accompanying art through the heart of life, into the lives of everyone, appears to be the actual motor behind Niki de Saint Phalle's actions.

In her early works, long before the Nanas, Niki de Saint Phalle chose a decisive path for her public artistic activity, transcending the private aspect of her work to make a testimonial to her time. The harmonious view of the world in her first paintings remained the view of a personal ideal world, offset by threats and affliction appearing in fairy-tale forms - dragons and snakes, fantastic creatures and structures. As she approached the discourse of young contemporary art in the second half of the 1950s, the materiality of found elements in her painting assemblages become more important for the artist. Finds of all sorts were included in object pictures of the late 1950s, and integrated by Saint Phalle into her dream world. Her next step was to leave this dream world. Around 1960, we are initially surprised by the huge variety of materials found and used. Like an étude based on a main theme, numerous variations of combinations of different materials appear, materials including pieces of metal, parts of tickets, pieces of slate, grasses. Yet these all embedded in landscapes where the fantastic and the poetic derives from the character of the finds used. A situational comedy and humour developed in the interaction between the elements.

With this second step in Niki de Saint Phalle's artistic concept, a third of synthesis follows. the combination of the two in the shooting paintings of the early 1960s. The portrait, in particular the portrait of the autocrat, becomes increasingly important as a symbolic presentation of the world of that time. And it is here that the young artist also begins to break away from the normally protective function of the artistic context. Having created the actors and persons whom she identified as responsible for war and destruction in the real world, she does not simply leave the figures in their artistic context. Instead she ushers them back into reality by subjecting them to the usual punishments of real life (the shooting performances), infringing art's right to extraterritorial ineffectiveness. Her art penetrates real life, and she experiences the marginalization and distancing form the huge public she had initially attracted through the media - an outcome that the persistent rebel has always experienced. Saint Phalle's extreme political concept of the unity of life and art rnade her intolerable to an art world that only defines itself aesthetically.