L’Heure Autosexuelle

A domestic interior.

A naked man writhes frenziedly in front of the camera, caressing his own body with rubber gloves. A woman, seated behind him, stares impassively, seemingly uninterested in the spectacle before her. It seems that these two will never combine as one. The tape is truly intriguing, and sophisticated in its grasp of the dynamics of performance.

Of an open structure, each part of Michael Curran’s work forms the fragment of a whole, this whole being the segment of something else yet to be sought. The ambiguous tone (beyond the ambivalence relating to any kind of discourse on sexuality) makes it impossible to know where to position oneself between the irony and the violence, the distance and the proximity. This notion of dual space between the close and the far off, between presence and detachment, performance and it’s pretence, seem particularly obvious in Disclaimer and l’heure autosexuelle, where the role of perception plays upon the notions of division and imbalance.

Michael Curran sees art an extension of a way of thinking and living which focuses and condenses all the semiological figures connected with the subject or which, in other words, reinstates the status of the artist and that of the spectator, with neither illusion nor naivety, as the nerve centres of a critical space. Through delicate situations, always verging on failure, his actions are inevitably linked to desire anf its sufferings, to everything that is off a compulsive nature, where repetition is a form of the urge towards life or death, forcing the dissatisfied spectator to extricate or distance himself from the situation and then find his own means of reaction.