If you’ve spent time in New York during the past year or so, you might have noticed plywood signs popping up around the city to announce a breakup with contemporary art. Painted with large red hearts, the signs feature handwritten Valentine’s-Day-gone-awry expressions, like “Contemporary art, we need to talk. This isn’t working anymore”. When images of these boards started to appear in my social media feeds, I was perplexed. Was this the work of an affectionately exasperated New Yorker? An irritated gallery manager? Maybe even a viral marketing campaign?
As it turns out, the plywood signage is the work of the Brazilian-born artist André Feliciano. But more than light-heartedly breaking up with the current art scene, Feliciano wants to declare the contemporary époque over, even dead. His recent performance pieces – which include birthday parties and funerals, all featuring a personification of the contemporary – are intended to suggest the period’s ephemerality in order to make room for his new collective movement, called the Floraissance.