" I Want to Look Like You "

   
a danish babe                                               a danish businessman                              a danish painter                                        a danish student


In the guise of professional tourist, Colonel prosecutes his iconography of Denmark by having individuals typifying different walks of life and life-styles briefly surrender some of their clothes.  In return, they get to see themselves. He accosts strangers in a Copenhagen park: "I want you to take a picture of me looking like you." Colonel dons the loaned items and poses before a draped Danish flag that serves as a studio back drop [?]. The Danes - a babe, a businessman, a painter, a young person sporting the traditional 'student's cap' - assume the role of photographer, as requested. But who is being exposed here? Whose image is it that the camera catches? Danes, having lent out their clothes, are to photograph another resembling themselves.perfumeperfumper

When August Sander photographed his fellow Germans, he positioned himself behind the camera. Colonel, by contrast, is in front of it, allowing others to see as well as to be seen. In other words, Colonel offers individual Danes the chance to 'see themselves as him'. He asks them whether he looks like them and they cue him into the appropriate postures. Dress and demeanour are used to signal identity, but are equally good at disguising it. We show by hiding. A woman asks Colonel whether he's a transvestite. "No, I'm a cultural transvestite."

Do I look like you now? I want to look like you. French has the expression avoir l'air: to look like may be construed as having the air. So how does Colonel come to look like a Dane? By owning Danish air. It's simple - he contacts a supplier of domains and purchases www.danskluft.dk [www.danishair.dk].
In previous projects Colonel used camouflage to look like a Dane and he buys domains, but now it's the smell of Danishness he's after. Colonel is in the process of preparing a perfume. Yet another experiment and laboratory triumph. L'odeur aromatique du Danemark.

But where do we get to see all of this? On national television, for Colonel has produced a trio of series featuring suites of such typical encounters. He readily countenances the migration of his pictures across the mass media for transportability and fluidity define, in part, the genre. Fresh sedimentations and encrustations accrue to them, incremental layers form, like rings in an ancient tree. The pictures appearing here are taken from footage for the series Professional Tourist, screened on primetime television. Their delivery in the form of unannounced ten-minute features studding the regular schedule meant that they had none of the packaging connoting 'artistic project'. Instead, the footage figured as a gatecrashing element, as were TV a space inviting occupation.

But Colonel has invaded other media, including the broadsheet weekly, Weekendavisen. In one 2001 issue, a photographic spread taken from Colonel's productions graced the Arts Review section's light-hearted back page, which accommodates accidental humour and satire. Colonel's park disguises annexed that space. Yet another growth ring is added. Wide-reaching ripples spread.
It may very well be the shot of Colonel sporting the 'student's cap' that will end up figuring in the unlikeliest contexts. For Colonel has deposited the picture with Bam Photo Agency, a supplier of photographic material to a host of different media. The day may well come, then, which sees a photographed Colonel, the Frenchman, beaming from the pages of an article about Danish student culture, or youth and nationalism, or something else entirely.


by Line Rosenvinge  .Inside text for book  "avoir l'air " . A nifca publication 2002

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other dictionary words
 
-apparence
-camoufflage
-cheating
-culturel travesti
-culturel travestissement
-fiction reallity
-mise à nue
-passage
-peintre de la justice
-prime time
-sport art kendo
-wallraff methods