Anti-Performance (U.F.O) 1980

Anti-Performance (U.F.O.) is the photographic documentation of a ‘cultural situation’, as Koller termed his conceptual installation and performance works. It consists of a black and white photograph mounted on a single sheet of card, with the work’s title, its year of production and the artist’s name handwritten along the bottom. The photograph shows Koller standing in front of a large white screen on an empty stage, facing rows of empty seats in the foreground. The large blank screen is reminiscent of a blank canvas. Many conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s investigated the artistic possibilities of exploring ‘nothingness’ or ‘blankness’ in their work. Such works were often linked to exploring the tension between visual and verbal communication, as in Joseph Kosuth’s Blank 1967 (reproduced D. Marzona, Conceptual Art, Cologne 2006, p.7). Although Koller often used painted symbols such as question marks, or plus and minus signs, rather than investigating systems of meaning, his ‘anti-happenings’ aim to question the cultural context the artist was working in.