Monday’s Muse: Niki de Saint Phalle

Celebrating the ritual and action of art, rather than the finished product, French artist Niki de Saint Phalle talks about her performance-based work Portrait of My Lover (1961).

I made a portrait of my lover, a man’s shirt glued on to a piece of white board, with a dart board for its head. I was actually very angry with a boyfriend I had and I enjoyed throwing darts at his image.  

… When I saw it hanging in the show I was fascinated to see the spectators throwing darts at the construction; and the idea of audience participation attracted me. So I started thinking up a new way of getting the audience to play with the work, and to be involved with the work.  

I had the idea of putting some bottles of paint behind a plaster form, these would be fired on with a gun and the paint released; the idea of destruction being one of construction.

… At the first shootout I was very tense. Would the colours come out? Yes. Red, blue, spaghetti, rice, green, eggs! It was thrilling. We took turns shooting. For the following six months I experimented a lot, mixing old cast away rubbish and objects with colours. I forgot about the spaghetti and rice and started concentrating on making the shooting paintings more spectacular.

The experience was like war. A nice war. No one ever got hurt. But after a shoot-out we always felt emptied, exhausted, like after a bull-fight. There was the whole ceremony of the gun. The whiteness of the blank picture … the smoke, the noise, and the colour.

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{image above by Dennis Hopper, 1963}