Mircea Cantor, Vertical attempt, 2009. Mini Dv transfered on DVD, 1’’ looped.
The first piece in the Mircea Cantor show at the Chapelle de l’Oratoire, part of the Nantes Museum of Arts, could almost singlehandedly sum up the artist’s praxis. It is a sentence in the form of an anti-slogan, uttered by one of his children, expressing the artist’s wish not to play at being a saviour of humankind, and not to overstep a role which he fondly intended to be a modest one. I Decided Not to Save the World is an example of ventriloquy. The artist got his child to utter it rather than doing so himself, favouring a distanced relation to the world. By highlighting the figure of a child going through many different situations with the same playful and somewhat mischievous smile, Mircea Cantor neutralizes the much-expected solemnity of right-thinking discourse.
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