Hugo

Writer Maarten Inghels and visual artist Annelies Rasker had a conversation about Hugo, her live-action painting performance by a masked person who challenges the art world and is inspired by electronic hip hop. For his portrait of Hugo, Inghels wrote a rap text.



HUGO

[INTRO]
Hugo is no man-person
Hugo is no lady love
Hugo is no robot thing
It is just itself
Hugo is simply Hugo
Helping art move forward
Having an idea for everything
And even if it’s sometimes slow
Hugo makes it happen!

[VERSE]
Hugo has a master in the nine muses
Hugo doctors as Hugo in the arts
Hugo is an escapist king, more mercurial than the latest drug
Hugo rips up childhood sins in curated insta stories
Hugo has investigated hunger artists for years
Hugo survives Eastern European residencies
Hugo arrives with no trigger warning, is postcolonial and decentralized
Hugo is an academic hypochondriac specialized in Broodthaers
Hugo is a joker boxed on Beuys
Hugo is an autodidactic wonder

[REFRAIN]
Hugo sits in the flow of the action, Hugo is perched on the skin of time
Hugo can be rented tax free for auction or opening, pedestal or bust
Hugo fights against faster and higher and is softly loud
Hugo boxes in bare feet against the art of the subconscious

[VERSE]
Hugo is broke, but sits at the table with the whole tin of beans
Hugo drinks cigarettes and eats whisky with the Bijl imitator
Hugo dines with writers’ writers in the midst of the Babel of Basel
Hugo has no truck with the Pana imitator or the sheet-steel flower knight
Hugo and the futile Disneyfication of the sector
Hugo discourses with the conceptual queer air acrobat
Hugo versus the document artist with his archive grieving
Hugo versus the ass-licker of Kassel
Hugo versus the cardboard artist and the ceramicist
Hugo versus the ecowarrior with green poetry and anti-capi anarchist

[REFRAIN]
Hugo has no gallerist with a thousand faces, but a sponsor
Hugo is Fluxus and situational and is sent by email
Hugo has no expo, does not do in situ and refuses every curator
Hugo is alone and has sent out his crew to no man’s land

[VERSE]
Hugo in triplicate bespoke suit paints a poppy self-portrait in negative double
Hugo in garden pants full of angry fragility is a prize beast of the authorities
Hugo in hunter’s jacket with fishing cap works on a triennial grant application
Hugo’s prices are wet finger work: hand under the faucet and make a guess
Hugo’s catalogue raisonné is available on request
Hugo is getting ready for the Ouagadougou Biennial
Hugo curates the Kazakhstan art route with the art of artists’ friends
Hugo’s row house with wonder wall fills a report in Knack Weekend
Hugo is street art for the country and land art for the city

[REFRAIN]
Hugo prefers to cloak their masquerade in masks filled with happiness
Hugo prefers to adorn his body with plumes and golden pitch
Hugo prefers to see the world through a Warholian silkscreen
Here is Hugo. Your woke bro, sassy sister and assistant has your back

[OUTRO]

Hugo is no man-person
Hugo is no lady love
Hugo is no robot thing
It is just itself
Hugo is simply Hugo
Helping art move forward
Having an idea for everything
And even if it’s sometimes slow
Hugo makes it happen!