page_title: PINK de Thierry
section_title: L'Art du Bonheur: Man Woman Child series, 1980–1990
hierarchical_section_title: PINK de Thierry / Performance art / L'Art du Bonheur: Man Woman Child series, 1980–1990
caption_attribution_description: English: Frans Hals Museum 1988. The Renaissance Hall, bedroom of MWC for their overnight stay during the STANDING STONE journey
context_page_description: PINK de Thierry is a Dutch visual artist known for her meta-performance art projects, which included 100 days of living in a painting, 30 days of traveling in the US as a performance-art project in 1988, daily entering Arcadia for 60 days in Germany with Et in Arcadia Ego Sum in 1990–91 and leading the Royal Netherlands Army in constructing Checkpoint to Dutch Arcadia in 1994. Since 1995, she has created a series of works entitled Letters from Arcadia.
context_section_description: From 1980 to 1995 PINK created a number of intervention-based meta-performance-art projects in which an iconic human unit, Man Woman Child (MWC), was used as a metaphor for humanity's cultural transference. For each project, PINK explored a theme with a mixture of public-space art intervention and performance, installation, photo and video art.
  Large, official royal-portrait photographs remain from the exhibit.
  In 1981's East West Home Is Best MWC lived for 30 days in a specially built, fully furnished suburban apartment inside a Holland Festival art exhibition in Amsterdam, where 30,000 visitors filed through as MWC lived their lives.
  VideoSketchBook (1983) found MWC living one day apiece in 12 row houses on a 1930s street in a provincial capital. PINK adapted this performance piece into a video installation of 12 photo and 13 film portraits at Frans Hals Museum Haarlem, Vleeshal Middelburg, MMK-Arnhem, SALA I Roma, Fotofeis Edinburgh, and Galerija Klovic Zagreb. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam acquired in her KOG collection the complete video-installation with the 12 original photoprints from 1983 which was celebrated December 17th 2018 with a KOG lecture by prof. dr. Erik de Jong on Videosketchbook 1983: The Ritual of Hominess.
  At Home (1984) considered MWC the ideal family in Haarlem, Bergen and Middelburg (Frans Hals Museum Haarlem, KCB Bergen. Vleeshal Middelburg.), which hosted them for 100 days in their city centers in an ideal garden against a backdrop of a full-scale painting of an ideal house (sleeping in a camper bus behind the 100-m² exhibit).
  Tea Time (1986) was a VPRO television project in which MWC explored the ritual of a filmed tea party, a conversation piece with a prominent family ending in an official group portrait.
  HouseRites in Crystal Museum (1987) revealed humankind's affectionate and possessive relationship with personal objects at home, set in the context of museum-art conservation. Dutch National Arts Council.
  In Ter Zake. Business as Usual. USA 1988, a government-sponsored orientation trip to the United States turned into a 30-day performance artwork. MOCA, Los Angeles and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
  In Standing Stone (1989), with an ice-age boulder their only luggage MWC walked to the intersection of the Saalien lateral moraine and the actual North Sea coast. The travelers (and their ​2 ¹⁄₂-ton luggage) stayed overnight at the Haarlem Frans Halsmuseum. When they arrived at their destination the following day MWC stood, motionless, on top of the boulder. The boulder is on exhibit in front of PINK's former studio at Overtoom nr. 16 in Amsterdam.
  In Electronic Painting at the 1990 "Tomorrow is Yesterday" exhibition at Museum Het Prinsenhof in Delft, a white-gloved chief curator replaced a painting of the Holy Family (c. 1500, unknown master) by a beautifully framed photo of MWC at their 1989 overnight stay in the Frans Hals Museum. A video of the Holy Family painting was shown on a monitor in an open safe; after visiting hours, the safe was locked.
caption: Standing Stone (1989); overnight stay in the Renaissance Hall of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem
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