Michael Mandiberg. Live Study. 2019-24. Performance. Paintings. Video.

Michael Mandiberg’s Live Study is a durational performance comprised of a series of oil paintings of Mandiberg’s studio assistants through the years surrounded by imagery and the requisite tools of their assigned projects as well as 912 hours of live-streamed video of the artist’s painting sessions. Each portrait’s size is proportionate to the amount of hours they worked. The prices correspond to how much they were paid. In both Live Study and earlier works such as Quantified Self Portrait, Mandiberg enacts an absurdist data collection practice gesturing towards the rise of wellness apps and prescient of crypto tokenization. Mandiberg’s performances are engineered to find cracks in the pursuit of this one-to-one ratio between lived experience and trainable data; ultimately relying on qualitative marginalia and the pictorial fluctuations of a digital artist learning to paint through bouts of illness and recovery, to find catharsis beyond quantification.