Judit Kele

"Judit Kele graduated in 1976 in Textile Design at the Budapest Academy of Applied Arts. At the 1979 Textile Without Textile exhibition at the Young Artists' Club she presented a photo performance of the same title in which she substituted herself, her own naked body, for the medium of the artwork: the thread that runs through the heddles and rolls of the loom.

Next year she expressly placed herself in the role of the artwork at a durational performance in the Museum of Fine Arts. With a woman’s daintiness she composed herself into a perfect spectacle and spent the following three days sitting/living at the empty place of a painting on loan, behind a cordon, in the company of the guard and the rest of the artworks. Equating a masterpiece and masterful female beauty, this performance, along with the book I am a Work of Art, inquires into the durability of the two kinds of value. 

Next, Kele was an invited participant at the Paris Biennial, where she prepared to be auctioned as an artwork. She figured that through selling herself as a work of art, she would learn what she was worth, and armed with this knowledge, she would be able to take control of her life. The bidders invited for the auction were selected from among respondents to a matrimonial ad she had published in the French daily, Libération. As the ad stated, she hoped to gain, through the marriage, more freedom of movement than what her home country allowed her at the time.

The item put up for auction was a given period of ownership of the artwork for each Swiss Franc the bidder was willing to pay. This is how Judit Kele became the property of Christian Tamet for a period equivalent to 3250 Francs. The new owner then wanted to keep his artwork by his side, and so, in order to turn it into a freewheeling "international work of art" owner married his artwork in Budapest. The groom was a prominent member of the Paris dance world, also gay, so an alibi marriage to a somewhat exotic Eastern European woman artist was a good deal for him too (not to mention the tax reduction he got for being a wife’s supporter).

With devices at once intended and unintended, yet encoded in the nature of her act, Kele denaturalized the cornerstone of hetero-normative social order, the institution of marriage built upon romantic love. Meanwhile, she realises an extraordinarily daring type of body art: she does not only expose her body, but her entire existence to an unforeseeable process. Indeed, it turned out early on in the course of the artwork and owner’s common life that the triviality of human relationships cannot be disregarded without consequences. Thus the marriage wrecked before the contracted life-time, and so, filing a divorce, the artist-artwork had to refund the price for the remaining period.

Since 1985, Judit Kele has made sound performances and films. Invited to the show Agents and Provocateurs, she presents her complex piece I am a Work of Art for the first time, now complete with a new video work. From the perspective of 30 years, the film reflects on the questions raised in the original performances. It addresses the social/cultural mechanisms of value assignment that conversely affect a work of art on the one hand, and masterful female beauty on the other. It also holds up the possibility of liberating relationships that may also lead out of the hetero-normative matrix." (Source)