Asta Gröting

With: Buddy Big Mountain
Text: Deborah Levy
Director and producer: Asta Gröting

I AM BIG is part of the artist’s The Inner Voice project, which itself fits into a highly coherent body of work. Asta Gröting became known in the art world for her very formal sculptures representing human organs and their links to the emotions. This logically led her to the question of the soul. To represent this Gröting chose to use a ventriloquist’s dummy that she made for herself. When moved, this dummy becomes the “inner voice”, a notion which she now used as the title for a series of videos and then performances. The finesse of this German artist’s work lies in its subtle negotiation of the very human encounter between a so-called “minor” art and the fine arts. Gröting has had her dummy handled by many ventriloquists, including the very disconcerting Native American Buddy Big Mountain, whom she met at a ventriloquists’ convention in Las Vegas. Half-nun, halfwitch, eyes wide open, the dummy is very human, and very different from the cuddly toys, childish dolls and other grotesque partners generally used by ventriloquists. The texts, originally written by the artist, and then commissioned from writers (including Tim Etchells from Forced Entertainment), deal with the great issues of the human psyche: death, love, the relation to others, vanity, etc. By turns superego, representation of the other and expression of the unconscious, the dummy is like a mirror. This almost schizophrenic relation between the ventriloquist and the dummy eventually loses spectators in the twists and turns of identity and representation: Who is talking? Who is lending their voice to whom? Who is manipulating who? In I AM BIG, a phase whose themes include self-image, these questions are raised with particular intensity.

Asta Gröting was born in 1961 and lives in Berlin. She has taken part in numerous collective exhibitions, including the 1993 Venice Biennale, Passageways at the Roseum in Malmö in 1993 and the 1994 Bieñal de São Paulo. She started work in her Inner Voice project in 1993.