One Day...by Peter Brandt
One Day…
About my billboard project “One Day…”, part of the project “Art in Public Space", BWA Gallery, Bydgoszcz, Poland, 2006.
This work comes out of my experience with violence. During a residency, at The Danish Institute in Rome, in 2002 was I attacked and beaten up by a stranger. I was unconscious during the whole attack, so I have no remembrance of the incident. I got severe contusions in my head and was much later diagnosed as having attained brain injury. So in 2005-06 did I attend a rehabilitation program at The Center of Rehabilitation of Brain Injury, in Copenhagen.
The picture is one of my unpublished photos from my series ”Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe & Peter Brandt” from 2001. It was the last series of photographs I made, before being attacked. This photo series deals with gender, being in-between male and female, masculine and feminine. I was made up to look like Andy Warhol and was ”performing” like Marilyn Monroe, based on the famous shots Bert Stern did, shortly before Marilyn Monroe died on August 5th 1962.
The text deals with the complex problems I have been experienced, e.g. people neglecting that you can be a victim of violence without having provoked it and the assumption that you can go on with life, like nothing has ever happened to you.
There is also a reflecting on time, like there is prophecy when the text in picture talks about what will happen in the future. All together the piece with the title ”One day…”, questions how masculinity is perceived in society. How males are supposed to act and be. In the western world, we often treasure a kind of masculinity that are destructive towards mankind and that often lead to a violent behavior.
One thing that is not considered very masculine in our culture, is being a man subjected to violence. It creates laughter that you weren’t the fellow who smashed the other one. But, I believe that one can construct a masculinity that are much more rich in humanity without losing one’s sense of manhood.
Peter Brandt, Copenhagen 2006.
