Overview

Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa is an accumulation of Melbourne artist Damiano Bertoli’s research into two interpretations of Pablo Picasso’s play Le Désir Attrapé par la Queue (Desire Captured by the Tail): a 1944 reading in Picasso’s studio which featured members of the Parisian intellectual scene; and a 1967 production organised by French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel in Saint Tropez. Drawing on a range of archival documents, anecdotes and visual motifs, Bertoli presents a spatial collage or performance document that recontextualises the play in the present to create a ‘continuous moment’ through and across time.  

Bertoli’s project explores the complexity of appropriation and the idea of revisiting historical works or events. Picasso’s text was itself informed by Plato’s symposium and directly refers to several themes from classical Greek literature. Written against the backdrop of wartime Paris, Surrealism and psychoanalysis, performed as a psychedelic Happening of late-1960s counterculture, and now considered in terms of contemporary art practices, the play operates as a temporal pivot point.  

Picasso’s text and Lebel’s restaging have a strong sense of anarchism and both were considered subversive commentaries on the dominant social structures of the time. Featuring a host of absurd and abstract characters, including ‘Thin Anxiety’, ‘Curtains’, ‘Silence’ and ‘The Onion’, Le Désir Attrapé par la Queue was a survey of radical and transgressive excess. Reexamined in an era synonymous with abundance and excess, Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa reflects on the shifting concerns, anxieties and desires of a moment.