The Perfect Object - 1998
Performance commission - ICA Institute of Contemporary Art

Review by curator Gabriel Perez Barreiro, published in Arara

"One of the achievements of performance over traditional art media is that it has managed to question precisely those issues which involve the relationship of the artist to art institutions (and by extension, to art 'meaning'). By moving away from the value systems which surround any constructed art object, the performance artist is free to stand on the edges of the art world and look in (or out).

For the durational performance 'The Perfect Object', Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre chose a highly symbolic location: the bar of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), one of the art world´s favourite haunts in which the movers and shakers of the London art scene rub shoulders with young hopefuls and cultural tourists.

For over two hours at peak time, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre occupied an ordinary space within the bar and peeled potatoes into perfect spheres. These spheres were then rolled along the bar floor, creating a kind of football game among the feet of the drinkers. Some people reacted with enthusiasm, kicking the balls, and even taking autographed versions home, while others looked with distaste at such a mundane and domestic scene.

So, why? The artist's intention was to draw attention to the situation of the young artist, particularly with regard to those many artists who survive through temporary work within the service industries of the art world: cafes, bookshops, receptions, ticket sales....Here there is a great irony - 'unsuccessful' artists are employed by the great art institutions, and are paid. However, those 'successful' artists officially invited into these institutions work for free: the price of success.

By performing within the service area instead of the galleries used by the other performance artists on this Live Art day, Ana Laura's aim was to draw attention to 'the tyranny of imposed standards of failure and success, amalgamating intellectual, artistic and domestic labour in search of the perfect object'.

This perfect object (a spherical potato) is an eloquent metaphor of the delicate position of the emerging artist. The object is perfect in many ways, in its geometry, its hand-made quality, its collective consumption. Yet it is also mundane, a new culinary foible for the ICA restaurant perhaps, or at least until for whatever reason its status is changed, at which point it will cross that invisible line between the work of an artist in the ICA and... the work of an artist in the ICA."