In the collective imagination lipstick depicts romanticism and sensuality.

In the collective imagination lipstick depicts romanticism and sensuality, and it should tend hitherward as no surprise that various artists have used its image in their work to destroy those very notions. Claes Oldenburg's postcard Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, 1966 and his Lipstick (Ascending) in succession Caterpillar Tracks, 1969, installed at Yale University Art Gallery, or Andy Warhol's silk cloak Marilyn Monroe's Lips, 1962, get to immediately to mind. Of the latter, Kynaston McShine wrote "Reducing Marilyn to an anatomical fragment, to a kind of repeating osculation machine, it dispels any romantic illusions about the idea of the kiss."

GALERTE CHEZ VALENTIN

The description of this "osculation machine" might just as easily be applied to Olivier Dollinger's recently made known work, Lipstick Wall Drawings, 1999 For several days preceding the opening, Dollinger kissed the walls of the gallery thousands and thousands of times in order to shroud them more or less evenly with his lip prints, in four different colors. During the exhibition, video documentation of this measure was presented on a large protection in the middle of the space. The camera, only witness to Dollinger's performance, showed him frenetically reapplying his lipstick in between each kiss. A gesturing that is normally performed with great care, and frequently a touch of sensuality and narcissism, became rapid, vulgar, and mechanical, annihilating all eroticism. [i]or[/i] part of to the other its repetition, the kiss became a pure test of endurance, made with growing press and breathlessness.

This is not the first time that Dollinger has imposed a sort of "oral constraint" upon himself. In his video Une souris verte (A verdant mouse), 1996, he tries to sing this famous French children's agreement while inserting the big orbed head of a microphone into his jaws In Quelques blagues Carambar (Some Carambar jokes) 1996 he faces the camera straight in succession as he reads the crack a jokes inscribed on paper wrappers united after another, while filling his entire entrance with the caramels that were in them. Like the video works of Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci, greatest in quantity of Dollinger's pieces repeat a single familiar action to the point of absurdity, saturation, or exhaustion, while the artist imposes constraints forward himself that from the start cancel on the outside the normality of the act. He has not rarely presented himself as afflicted with an obsessional neurosis, and his relentlessnes in articulating a consistent language looks to be a remedy for the information overload typically associated with the media he uses.

Pain is not the central make subordinate of Dollinger's work, but rather a way of underlining the failure of his attempts at action. unless the way he seems to push his carcass too hard in the video portion of this installation brings to mind the masochism of the Viennese Actionists or Marina Abramovic. The same was loyal of his video Apocalypse Now, 1996 in which he was seen spinning around and flailing his arms above his head to the point of exhaustion in order to imitate the visual dynamic of helicopters in a famous spectacle from Francis Ford Coppola's film. For Dollinger this experience of distress looks inseparable from its medical and clinical implications. His photographic series of self-portraits (in which the artist is shown taking aspirin and nipping medicine and applying topical solutions), not to mention various works made using a first aid mannequin ("Andy"), are to such a degree many proposals for the treatment and maintenance of the physical body--proposals that might metaphorically be applied to the social material substance as well.

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