Jean-Baptiste Farkas is an artist who operates under the identities IKHÉA©SERVICES, Glitch (Much more of less). He was President of the Association of the Paris Biennale.
For Jean-Baptiste Farkas, the practice of art must question the notions of the artist, the work, or the place where it is shown in order to problematize them. His work consists in offering instructions that can be put into practice, where normally an artist is expected to produce a finished and exhibited work. Through his services, he invites anyone who wishes to do so to carry out specific tasks whose principle of efficiency is reversed: to put a fragment of habitat out of use, to slow down the pace of a work or to lie. They are neither “performances” nor “happenings” and do not fall under what is commonly known as “participatory art” or “relational art”, and they are articulated around the notions of use and performance, striving to make the moment of creating the statement the heart of the work. The services of Jean-Baptiste Farkas wish to conquer the field of daily reality and raise questions about behavioral norms as well as about artistic norms themselves. Outside of the art world alone, they emerge as anomalies that cause random events and should generate disputes, even real altercations.
Quotes
- “Commitment of art.”
- “Progress without growth.”
- “Originality is a miracle and it’s up to us to make it happen!”
- “The art object clutters us, it has become superfluous.”
- “Art beyond the original.”
Experiments, operations, conferences, workshops
- Activation of IKHÉA©SERVICES N°24 (variant) Perdre son temps and N°30 (variant 2) Exposer/Casser, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, 2012.
- The Less, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, 2011.