'First Thought, Then Sustenance' is something of a structuralist narrative made in collaboration with the artists Jacques Vidal and Kembra Pfaler. It centers around three characters - a homeless man in a wheelchair, an SS officer, and a performance artist. The three characters are gathered around a flaming oil barrel and are engaged in the activity of tossing various books into the fire. Each has their own motivations for their participation in the book-burning: the artist burns the phone book, her own address book and finally the Bible, each with great ritual. The Nazi burns the works of Jewish intellectuals, a copy of the communist manifesto, and the bum, burning books solely for the sake of warmth, mostly sticks to popular best-sellers, with the occasional book of Nietszche or Picasso just to get his digs in at the other two. The dialogue is composed entirely out of quotations from Bartlett's ranging from Hamlet to Hitler. Each performer selected their own lines from the book in a kind of surreallist scriptwriting game. However, continuity was paramount here, and I hope this is visible in the way each line constitutes something between a response to the preceding line and a meandering pontification on the part of the speaker. Justin Lieberman is represented by the Zach Feuer Gallery in New York.
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London Contemporary Art Gallery
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