Docudrama Series Poster Project

Description:

Robert Linsley and Igor Santizo produced two posters for Western Front’s Docudrama curatorial series. These poster projects explored documents of performance and performative acts. They were distributed through the mail and posted on hoardings and shop windows in Vancouver in the summer through fall of 2002. 

The poster A Little Landscape by Robert Linsley featured Martin Jackson's hand-calligraphed title that credited the same named poem by Robert Walser. The poster featured a photograph of a young boy wearing absurdly large boxing gloves, standing in a grassy Vancouver park.

Linsey used the poetry broadsheet as a model, but chose a photograph instead of the usual hand drawn illustration. The poem and the photo are in an open, metonymic relation, meaning that they inflect each other equally—the photo is not in a subservient, illustrative role. The piece was intended to be a hybrid of poetry broadsheet, conceptual artwork, and captioned photograph.

Igor Santizo’s The Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void) after Alberto Giacometti (1934–35) is a photograph of Santizo in a supermarket and the gesture of him framing empty space between his hands. 

This image has layers of references, including the consumerist critique in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Tout Va Bien (1972), along with ideas of representation explored by Rilke, Rodin, Giacometti, and Nauman. It posed the philosophical question: can the void be captured in a wordless gesture, or does the act of representation transform it into an invisible object? A text responding to the work by Hadley+Maxwell further queried Santizo’s strategy to perform as an object rather than a person as a political and anti-consumerist act under capitalism—can the void be seen as resistance?