PSYCHOSAFARI 1990-1992
“By this point, a few years into behaving like a visual artist, I’d grown impatient with creating quote unquote Conceptual Art, where a single innovated gesture yields a work. It’s a very limiting approach, really, and my mind had become thoroughly bored with that behavior. So I decided to change things up by making something that instead included dozens of gestures. Some of these gestures In Psychosafari are real, some aren’t. As long as I was breaking away from Conceptual Art, why not throw fiction into the mix? I wasn’t concerned about it being absolutely true, I was concerned with making an entertainment. I wanted to put the viewer into contact with that behavior.”
The Psychosafari installation at Galerie Claire Burrus in Paris listed this accumulation of gestures in the Field Guide, a folded printed multiple akin to a guide to observing animal life in nature or a map obtained at a zoo. The Field Guide chronicles, in diaristic fashion, various behavioral experiments — dietary, sexual, gestural — ostensibly made during the course of creating the works in the exhibition, all of which are clearly real. The Field Guide was displayed in a fake snakeskin pouch attached to a wood girdle that wrapped around the posts in the gallery. (At zoos it is common practice to wrap girdles made of wood slats around the trunks of trees inside animal enclosures to protect the bark from being rubbed off. )
Selected entries from the Field Guide…
January 1 Set all the clocks in my house to different times and removed all the mirrors.
March 28 Photographed Behavioral Landscape #1 (Lemur House #1, Antwerp Zoo) [in gallery at top of page].
June Tried to persuade a succession of German art collectors to purchase animals and donate them to zoos.
June 27 Photographed Behavioral Landscape #4 (Bird House, Amsterdam Zoo) [in gallery above].
September 29 In Manhattan bookstore, publicly signed science fiction and horror paperbacks authored by another David Robbins.
October 2 Scotland Rowed on Loch Ness.
Early November Videotaped various people reminiscing about the first rock concert they’d attended.
December 4 Bruxelles Bought time at a recording studio but didn’t use it, then paid to have blank records pressed.
December 8 Took train to Antwerp to photograph Behavioral Landscape #9 (Reptile House, Antwerp Zoo) [In gallery above].
Reviews
Decter, Joshua. “Psychosafaris,” Artscribe, December, 1991
Zahm, Olivier. “The Wanderer,” Texte zur Kunst, November, 1991
