Marc Camille Chaimowicz's groundbreaking installation
Celebration? Realife was originally created for 'Three
Life Situations' at Gallery House London in 1972. The work is a
strange hybrid of scatter environment, a theatrical stage and a
performance piece. Meant as a critique of modernist objectivism,
Celebration? Realife is also a consciously messy and
ambivalent reaction to the clean conceits of Conceptualist and
post-Minimalist tendencies.
Tom Holert argues that with Celebration? Realife,
Chaimowicz makes a strategic and important meditation on the
changing role of the artist, who in this defining work
simultaneously becomes art director, choreographer and participant.
Celebration? Realife probes the relationship between art,
design, popular culture and performance at a moment when these
disciplines, genres and milieus hardly ever met. Holert shows how
this influential work inventively anticipates and helps to define
an important and increasingly popular tendency in art.
