Selfportrait N. II

Lil Picard was a key player in the postwar New York art scene, in Fluxus, happenings, and Pop art. She was a witty and eccentric and also critical protagonist, and she reported on what was going on in art for well-known art magazines and newspapers. Picard belonged to an older generation, being in her late sixties. She was born in 1899 and emigrated to New York from her home in Germany in 1937 because of anti-Semitic persecution. In Germany she worked as a cabaret performer and as a journalist in Berlin’s Dada avant-garde circles. Picard was a radically political artist, and a member of the NO!art movement founded in 1959, and her work contains many autobiographical references. In 1968 her intermedial performance “Morality Play – Self Portrait” took place in Cologne, and is from this that “Selfportrait N II” derives. As well as this life-size figure, who is presented as an alter ego of the artist, Picard used taped texts of her talking about important moments from her childhood and youth, and also projected photos with references to her life, and fragments of a film by Andy Warhol that documented her performance Construction-Deconstruction-Construction, in which she protested against the Vietnam War. The doll attached to a hardboard with its attire with burn holes and sprayed paint is both fearful and pitiable, makes us think of an aggressive zombie or the victim of a massacre. In the text for this work Picard wrote: “My ‘Selfportrait’ is […] an attempt to ‘mirror’ myself in a time-space concept, it is also a psychological search to understand myself in relation to my time and to the future times…. Remembering the past.”