By Petar Odak
Trying to decide on the best opening for this article, I was alternating between two quotes. My first option was:
The second:
Both of them are quotes by José Pérez Ocaña, and both are taken from the documentary Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait.
Ocaña was a performance artist, a painter and a papier-mâché sculptor, occasionally even an actor; in sum, one of the key figures of the 1970s Spanish counterculture.
Although Ocaña was working with different media and art techniques, the most significant among his artwork are his public performances. The most famous is Der Engel, der in der Qual singt (“the angel that sings in agony”).
This very rich and playful performance in Berlin in 1979 features Ocaña speaking with a cardboard cutout of Marylin Monroe.
At one point, he explains to Monroe that, while she, as a woman, was an object of consumption, Ocaña is a marginalised woman.
By Petar Odak