WAX LATEX MUD performance art by Dirk Jan Jager, the final piece of the VERBO manifestation 31/07/2010, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photo: Leandro Pena

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The painter as performer, as magician, as shaman, as athlete. In WAX LATEX MUD Jager explored the complex relationship between the viewer and the work of art by putting his performance-body at the service of painting, where painting becomes both revelation and sacrificial action. The body in question is the Anonymous Body (AB) that lies beneath the social and autobiographical detail that constitutes Dirk Jan Jager from the Low Countries. The AB is the Homo-Universalis, the unit of one body, the measure of man. The AB is always present, but unrecognized until forced with violence or despair to appear: Marsyas flayed by Apollo, maddened Orestes, and Nan Goldin's drug-addled drag queens of New York. It is the AB that is addressed by both George Bataille and Antonin Artaud, "Joy before death" and the "Body without organs." It is always at the edge of the void that we find the AB. Speechless, but always aware, always in focus, always prepared.

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