Danilo Prnjat

Perfect Lover


Life in contemporary society has made eroticism a basic undertone on the mental level; a situation that has in part resulted in shop windows becoming maximally eroticized; such windows are places filled with plastic bodies, where individuality is emphasized to the utmost extent. This ambivalent function of windows in the erotic sense—permanent attraction (fascination) and its material dissociation from observer—provides consumer culture to precisely channel and aim that condition in “most desirable” possible direction, which is fulfilling “erotic” desire with financial participation.


In the performance Perfect Lover, I toured aesthetically impressionable windows in Italy and approached them with an “excessive” sensual action—licking. Licking windows makes the position from which the author performs very transparent—emphasizing the frustration of the distance between the body of the (Serbian) performer and the world of high aesthetics characteristic of developed capitalist societies.




On the other hand, traces of body fluids (saliva) that were on this occasion left on luxury windows are the kind of fluids (sweat, blood, and the like) that became relatively distinctive for artists from the Balkan region (Marina Abramović, Emir Kusturica…). Within the viewers’ global perception, this represents an additional parody of Serbian artists’ disenfranchised position.


The possibility of simply virtually identifying with the object of desire and the erotic dimension of work, make this disenfranchisement visible in a wider (political) and narrower (local) sense. It’s about the impossibility of true identification with the object-culture of personal, social, and political fascination.




Perfect Lover, 2006

Video performance, sound, 1:31 min.




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