FF - Live at the Fridericianum

Kermit the Frog, Even
A performance by Alex Da Corte

Saturday, Sep 7, 2024, 5 pm – 11 pm

As part of Kassel Museum Night 2024, the Fridericianum is presenting the performance Kermit the Frog, Even (2018/2024) by Venezuelan-American artist Alex Da Corte. The performance is a restaging of a scene from Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, a parade organized by the department store to mark the holiday. At the center of the performance is the replica of an almost 20-meter-long balloon figure representing director and television producer Jim Henson’s Kermit the Frog, of The Muppet Show and Sesame Street fame. Like a snapshot, the figure floats in the exhibition space, held aloft by parade participants in frog costumes who wave cheerfully to viewers of the spectacle. The frog’s smooth inflated body contrasts with its drooping head. This condition is a reference to the 1991 parade, during which the original balloon figure collided with a tree and was impaled, dramatically changing the tone of an innocent celebration: As a kind of burst illusion, the fragility of the inflated sculpture is a meditation on Kermit and all characters like him—sunny leaders, burdened by responsibility and a level of introspection not afforded to others. The performance also alludes to the unsustainable foundational myth of Thanksgiving itself, in which the violent colonization of the United States is recast as a happy shared enterprise with the native population. Through the damaged figure, the artist hints at a dark reality hidden behind the façade of a seemingly ideal world.

Alex Da Corte (*1980, Camden, NJ) is a painter, sculptor, installation, performance, and video artist. In his works, he embarks on an intense exploration of pop and consumer culture as well as the social structures and human emotions underpinning them, consistently alluding to different art historical references. His works draw on figures, narratives, and objects that are familiar to entire generations from their everyday lives and core memories. The performance at the Fridericianum is typical of Da Corte’s wry attitude towards cultural rituals and invites deeper reflection on them.

Da Corte studied film at the School of Visual Arts in New York and printmaking at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia before completing his MFA at Yale University in 2010. His recent presentations include Fresh Hell at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2023), the survey exhibition Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (2022), participation in the Whitney Biennial in New York (2022), the Roof Garden Commission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2021), and contributions to the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2019). He has also been honored with solo exhibitions at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (2018), the New Museum in New York (2017), the Secession in Vienna (2016), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2016), and MASS MoCA – Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (2016), among others.

Kermit the Frog, Even was originally produced in cooperation with Kültur Büro Barcelona / Buenos Aires.

Alex Da Corte’s performance is part of the Kassel Museum Night 2024. More information about the program can be found on the event page.

No registration required. Drop in and out at any time.