BY ROBERT AYERS

ARTIST & WRITER, New York 2019

BrilliantandRebellious.com

Robert Ayers is a British-born, Brooklyn-based artist and writer. He began writing for publication in 1981. Since then he has written hundreds of articles, interviews, reviews, catalogue essays, and other pieces. He has been a Contributing Editor to ARTSCRIBE [London], a Senior Editor at ARTINFO.com [New York], New York Correspondent to Total Theatre [London], and U.S. Correspondent to EIKON [Vienna]. He has recently contributed introductory essays to monographs on Gloria Garfinkel and Alden Mason. He is currently writing a book on Julie Heffernan. Robert Ayers worked as a widely respected performance artist between 1975 and 2010. Nowadays his art activity takes the form of political street action.

Pili Garcia's ongoing project "In a noisy world, he spoke quietly" presents a timely opportunity to consider individuals whose lives and personalities overlap with the edges of our own. Though we may never have met them, these are people we know. 

Garcia's fascination is with the dualism of people whose natural inclinations render them private and introspective, but who force themselves into the public eye for reasons that even they might not altogether comprehend. Of course this “public eye” is ours. We are their eager audience, and thus responsible for the stress that their professional lives subject them to, and the damage their celebrity can bring about.

She has evolved a format for her work that is at once appropriate and compelling, combining stunning photographic essays of her subjects with sound recordings of them in conversation and reading passages from favourite books. All of these things are presented in parallel, and the overall result is like a fragment of the world that we live in, permitting only brief moments of individual contemplation in an ongoing flood of distraction.

This is the context in which all of us - Pili Garcia, her subjects, and those of us considering her work - spend our days. The power of her art is that it offers us not only an eloquent portrait of her subjects' lives, but also a deeper comprehension of life itself.