tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/performance-art-7771/articles
Performance art – The Conversation
2024-03-12T02:44:44Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223455
2024-03-12T02:44:44Z
2024-03-12T02:44:44Z
Art of the moment: experiencing Marina Abramović and Laurie Anderson at the Adelaide Festival
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</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Beveridge/Adelaide Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ruth Mackenzie is the new artistic director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, and for her first Adelaide gig she has brought in two heavyweights: performance artist Marina Abramović and avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson. Both were major events, very much of the moment. </p>
<p>The Marina Abramović Institute’s Takeover featured nine performance artists over four days.</p>
<p>To begin at the beginning, audience members are instructed to arrive at 11am each day. We are ushered into a compelling virtual presentation, where Abramović inducts us into being a participative community. </p>
<p>She tells us performance is the most difficult of the art forms, that you need to abandon time and surrender to the moment. Then she runs the audience through a series of Tibetan breathing exercises to make us attuned to reading the mysteries and personal language of performance artists.</p>
<h2>Durational performance</h2>
<p>Mike Parr’s Portrait of Marina Abramović is the most extreme. A blind painting event, his eyes remain closed for the entire 12 hours. His aim was to paint four black squares, one on each side of a constructed white cube gallery space, in homage to Russian constructivist painter <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kazimir-malevich-1561/five-ways-look-malevichs-black-square">Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square</a>.</p>
<p>Like Malevich, Parr says his blind painting is the creation of nothingness with a view to a rebirth. But he departs from Malevich: Parr is currently driven by the reality of the shocking events in Gaza, as set out in the painted text which starts on the walls of the show: “free Palestine” and “Gaza is a Warsaw ghetto”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="You can just see the word 'Gaza' from behind red paint." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581122/original/file-20240311-28-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Mike Parr’s work started with words looking at the war in Gaza.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Beveridge/Adelaide Festival</span></span>
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<p>These sentiments are amplified in his “vision” statement distributed at the performance. His impassioned text says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Jewish diaspora rise up to join hands, to relinquish the obscene policies of its political leadership […] to demand justice, freedom, prosperity for the Palestinian people and an end to the oppression and antisemitism of the apartheid.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over the next 12 hours, Parr paints four black squares – at times from perilously high up on a ladder – to be covered with red paint in homage to Abramović’s former Yugoslavian communist background, then covered again with black. The painted squares, complete with drips of red paint running down to the floor, remained after the performance for viewers to ponder their meaning, along with a video of the entire event.</p>
<h2>Place and Country</h2>
<p>Less sensational but equally demanding was the durational performance by Collective Absentia, a Bangkok-based group in a work entitled Our Glorious Past, Our Glorious Present, Our Glorious Future: Our Glorious Spring. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man sits with a covered head." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581126/original/file-20240311-24-zwa8vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">One performer meditated on non-violent forms of resistance to ongoing political events in Myanmar.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Beveridge/Adelaide Festival</span></span>
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<p>A member of their collective sat with his head covered and immobile in the middle of a passage-way, meditating on non-violent forms of resistance to ongoing political events in Myanmar. </p>
<p>All attendees at the event had to walk past and around this performance. Most stopped and connected with the sentiment of non-violent forms of resistance. One person even sat directly opposite the performer and meditated.</p>
<p>Christian Thomson’s postcolonial performance, Wait in Gold, involved him slowly and methodically pinning gold painted native daisies to every item of his exterior clothing so that he transforms from human into a larger flower form connected to Country. In this moving performance, he is responding to the denial of a voice as a result of the 2023 referendum outcome, and seeking refuge in the safety of Country.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man covered in gold flowers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581124/original/file-20240311-20-59z6cf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christian Thomson seeks refuge in the safety of Country.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Beveridge/Adelaide Festival</span></span>
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<p>In Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo’s absorbing durational work, Amnesia, she slowly covers a large black board with a set of chalk markings. At each mark made, she utters “I’m sorry”. </p>
<p>The mark making is interspersed with her taking off her black shirt, placing it with other discarded shirts, and sewing a new one to put on. At other times she abandons mark making and moves across the floor, writhing as if in deep remorse, again uttering “I’m sorry”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman draws counting marks on a wall." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581123/original/file-20240311-18-mi9d2h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo’s absorbing durational work, Amnesia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Beveridge/Adelaide Festival</span></span>
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<p>The promotional material accompanying her performance points to the work as an inner exploration of “untold narratives and forgotten realities of the past”. Her felt emotion in the performance is deeply persuasive, but I kept wondering about the amnesia from which Suryodarmo is recoiling: is it a deeply personal journey, or more?</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/marina-abramovic-retrospective-celebrates-the-grand-dame-of-performance-art-but-questions-the-genres-future-214415">Marina Abramović retrospective celebrates the grand dame of performance art – but questions the genre's future</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Encounters with AI</h2>
<p>In a different vein, Laurie Anderson’s exhibition I’ll be your mirror is an encounter with AI. Taking phrases from her song O Superman and her late husband Lou Reed’s song I’ll be your mirror, Anderson has generated intriguing text which hangs in five panels in the Adelaide Circulating Library, the city’s original lending library.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large text and two portrait photographs inside a library." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581121/original/file-20240311-20-vh3bcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">I’ll be your mirror uses AI building off songs from Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Roy VanDerVegt/Adelaide Festival</span></span>
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<p>The AI generated conversations between Anderson and Reed, who passed away in 2013, oscillate between the surreal and the eerie with phrases such as</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s a mirror in the room <br>
And when I look at night<br>
It reflects nothing back to me. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Bible is on display and open at <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2084-88&version=NIV">Psalms 84-88</a>, but hanging above the Bible is AI generated text based on biblical phrases, displayed as Genesis 1: 26-31. </p>
<p>A section from that text reads: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some nights now Noah dreams he sees his boat leave the dock<br>
It’s just another day on planet Earth <br>
Only this time it’s with an animal friend. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>As an adjunct to the exhibition of 21st century textual artefacts set amid 19th texts, Anderson held a virtual public conversation with the machine generating gurus she worked in Adelaide – the takeaway message being what machines generate depends on the input. </p>
<p>The exhibition is utterly intriguing, but novice viewers need an introduction to what they are about to encounter.</p>
<p><em>I’ll Be Your Mirror is on display until March 17.</em></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-duchamp-to-ai-the-transformation-of-authorship-in-art-210059">From Duchamp to AI: the transformation of authorship in art</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223455/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Speck, with Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo and Alison Inglis, has received funding from the ARC to investigate Australian art exhibitions. </span></em></p>
Ruth Mackenzie’s Adelaide Festival of Arts has two heavyweights, performance artist Marina Abramović and avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson.
Catherine Speck, Emerita Professor, Art History and Curatorship, University of Adelaide
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/221051
2024-01-17T17:49:54Z
2024-01-17T17:49:54Z
Marina Abramović has launched a skincare brand – and it doesn’t seem to be satire
<p>Marina Abramović has <a href="https://www.wallpaper.com/fashion-beauty/marina-abramovic-skincare-and-wellness-mindfulness">launched a range</a> of skincare and wellness products. The artist and her business partner, Nonna Brenner, are releasing three kinds of ingestible drops (priced at £99 each) and a face lotion (priced at £199) under the auspices of the “<a href="https://abramoviclongevity.com/">Marina Abramović longevity method</a>”. </p>
<p>Marina Abramović is frequently <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-make-marina-abramovic-godmother-performance-art-180960821/">described as</a> “the godmother of performance art”. Since the early 1970s, she has been using her own body as material, testing its physical endurance: from rhythmically stabbing a knife between her fingers until she grazed herself 20 times to walking the Great Wall of China.</p>
<p>The new products are being marketed as part of the artist’s “<a href="https://shop.royalacademy.org.uk/marina-abramovic-method-cards">Abramović method</a>”. Both an idea and product, the method is available to purchase as a set of cards with instructions “to reboot your life”. </p>
<p>Abramović’s foray into the wellness industry is not particularly surprising. As of 2024, she positions herself as an artist-cum-life coach, and there is little indication that she might be engaging in satire. Her latest work appears to embrace the kind of New Age vernacular that, outside art, has long been an object of ridicule. </p>
<p>“For decades Abramović has delved into multiple forms of wisdom, including Tibetan Buddhism, Brazilian Shamanism and the beliefs of Aboriginal Australian communities, to learn routes to higher consciousness, often reached by overcoming fears,” claims a <a href="https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/cms/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marina-Abramovic-Gates-and-Portals-Exhibition-Notes.pdf">recent Modern Art Oxford brochure</a>. If exhibition booklets are often criticised for their vague language, then the substance of Abramović’s recent art complements them perfectly.</p>
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<h2>Abramović and the history of feminist performance art</h2>
<p>It would be easy to describe this venture as just another chapter in the long history of artists “selling out” – but the relationship between beauty and feminist art has a long and complicated history. </p>
<p>Performance has been a productive medium for women artists because of its <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/e/ef/Jones_Amelia_Body_Art_Performing_the_Subject_1998_Introduction_Chapter1.pdf">emphasis on subjectivity</a>. The apparently objective analytical voice characteristic of much art criticism has, in fact, historically had a very specific identity: white and male. To draw attention to the false universality of this perspective, performance artists confronted their audience with their naked, and therefore visibly distinctive, bodies.</p>
<p>The point of early feminist performance art was not to reduce femininity (nor, for that matter, masculinity) to a set of physical characteristics, but to expose previous instances of speaking from a gendered position concealed as critical distance.</p>
<p>Defying the objectification of the feminine subject in art and popular imagery, feminist artists were conscious of the link between physicality and physical appearance. Still, the problem of looks quickly became a thorny issue in feminist circles. </p>
<p>In 1976, critic <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/a/a8/Lippard_Lucy_R_From_the_Center_Feminist_Essays_on_Womens_Art_1976.pdf">Lucy Lippard remarked</a> about the artist Hannah Wilke, who often photographed herself nude, that: “Confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level.” </p>
<p>The problem faced by “body art”, as the artistic practices that focused on embodiment came to be known, was the long history of representing feminine bodies for the enjoyment of the presumably male spectator. This struggle between fetishisation and individual agency was central to Wilke’s practice. </p>
<p>Wilke photographed herself throughout her career. In 1987, she was diagnosed with lymphoma. She continued to record her body in a photographic series titled Intra-Venus that explicitly showed the impact of illness on her appearance.</p>
<p>When artist Jo Spence sought alternative therapies for cancer, documenting herself in treatment, her desire to escape medicalisation was an <a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XVqudxMAACEAxxLK">act of political protest</a>. The point was to refuse the de-individualised, sick body – subject turned object. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1497632630929432579"}"></div></p>
<p>Abramović, on the other hand, claims on the <a href="https://theabramovicmethod.com/">website advertising her products</a> that: “Our need for consumption allowed us to be consumed, and always keeps us hungry for new gadgets to buy. The result of all this is that we have lost our spiritual centre.” </p>
<p>The focus on “spirituality” has replaced her interest in the tension between the self and other, characteristic of performances such as Rhythm 0, where the artist succumbed to the wishes of her audience. On a table, she set out 72 items, ranging from a feather to a gun, and asked the audience to use them “on her”. </p>
<p>Even the power of Abramović’s 2009 work <a href="https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3133">The Artist is Present</a>, a blockbuster exhibition-performance in which Abramović invited visitors to sit opposite her, lay in the fact that it was only deceptively simple. Sitting in a wooden chair for hours on end was an enormous physical feat for Abramović.</p>
<p>And yet, at the recent Royal Academy of Arts retrospective, the work’s documentation focused on faces: Abramović as experienced vis-à-vis her silent interlocutors, who, having queued for hours, were often <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marina-abramovic-makes-gi_n_1766060">visibly moved</a> by the encounter. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for the documentary about Abramović’s performance piece, The Artist is Present.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The strict parameters of Abramović’s works and their engagement with social norms matter no more. What used to be about bodily vulnerability is now about mental strength. Not defiant strength, but the individualistic ideology of strength that makes no distinction between the powerful and the powerless. </p>
<p>The foundations upon which Abramović has built her practice – of transgression, the feminist vanguard – have crumbled. Her art slots neatly into today’s mainstream focus on individual empowerment at the expense of dismantling patriarchy as a structural issue. Voyeurism is welcome.</p>
<p>The irony of selling a £199 face lotion as an antidote to, as Abramović vaguely puts it, “new gadgets” seems too obvious to be genuine – but the stunt is difficult to perceive as subversive. </p>
<p>The French artist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ1Ph-Pprj4">Orlan</a> is famous for undergoing a series of invasive procedures to resemble western archetypes of ideal beauty: Mona Lisa’s smooth forehead, Venus’s perfectly shaped chin. By taking objectification to the extreme, Orlan makes it futile. There is nothing we can do to her that she cannot do to herself. </p>
<p>If Abramović’s products were to have a critical edge, it would be as part of Orlan’s beauty routine: a lotion so good it makes you break out.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221051/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marta Zboralska receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust. </span></em></p>
Abramović’s foray into the wellness industry is not particularly surprising. As of 2024, she positions herself as an artist-life-coach.
Marta Zboralska, Bowra Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219110
2023-12-04T03:55:49Z
2023-12-04T03:55:49Z
At the End of the Land: an avalanche of images that invites us to sit alone in time and space together
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563198/original/file-20231204-21-ly2bjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C4%2C2978%2C1991&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aaron Claringbold/PICA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>At the End of the Land, a world premiere production by Western Australian interdisciplinary theatre makers Too Close to the Sun, is an experiential encounter with the liminal space between life and death and other unknowable things.</p>
<p>Performed, written and co-devised by Talya Rubin with co-devisor and director Nick James, At the End of the Land integrates Rubin’s live, amplified voice, delivered via direct address, with Samuel James’ luscious, seemingly three-dimensional video. </p>
<p>Working in concert with the soundscape (composed by Rachael Dease with sound design by Daniel Herten and Hayley Forward), the performance is a parade of images – aural, live and projected – that hold for a moment to imprint on our retinas, but then are gone as quickly as they appeared. </p>
<p>Rubin’s spoken text, sometimes heightened and poetic, other times direct and specific, has multiple narratives. The most recurring throughline references a story of the deaths of 18 young women in a Victorian-era boarding house. Speaking as one of these vanished women about “the day we all died” and what it’s like to be dead, Rubin guides the audience into this in-between place. There is a slightly disembodied quality to her presence, anchored by the serious sincerity of her deliberate delivery.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-hardest-and-most-beautiful-conversation-ive-ever-had-how-end-of-life-storytelling-on-tiktok-helps-us-process-death-206999">'The hardest and most beautiful conversation I've ever had': how end-of-life storytelling on TikTok helps us process death</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Dreamscapes</h2>
<p>The stage is variously zoned, with miniature rooms and landscapes enlarged via projection that plays with perspective, as the performer manipulates the tiny scenes. </p>
<p>One of the zones features a red velvet armchair, with a small side table and lamp, on a black and white checked floor, reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. This space places Rubin in her Peter Pan-collared outfit as a sort of Alice in the underworld.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A scary red monkey." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563201/original/file-20231204-17-nm67f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Red Monkey is a sort of demonic oracle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aaron Claringbold/PICA</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Sometimes accompanied by the recurring figure of the Red Monkey, the narrator’s sidekick who acts as a sort of demonic oracle, the overall effect is of a surreal, painterly dreamscape. </p>
<p>At one point Rubin narrates a verbatim interview with American filmmaker and painter David Lynch talking about his ideas and process, particularly with regards to his first feature Eraserhead. It works to position the performance in the highly visual “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/620859">dreamlike logic</a>” of a Lynchian landscape.</p>
<h2>Our own memories</h2>
<p>At The End of The Land creates a very specific, sustained introspective mood, twice deliberately broken by Rubin when the house lights are raised and the audience directly engaged. </p>
<p>There is a relief in this direct connection, momentarily unfiltered by technology. Rubin invites us to embrace the living and the dead, to contemplate and embrace the inevitability of our own death and the invisible threads that guide (and sometimes abandon) us all. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman talks into a microphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563200/original/file-20231204-22-lmlt5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rubin becomes an Alice in the underground.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aaron Claringbold/PICA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These moments of suspension create space and self-reflection leaving us alone with our own memories. </p>
<p>Operating in a non-linear surreality, Rubin’s text gives us hooks and signposts, but ultimately the density of images create a sensory overload that washes over you. It works to open the viewer up to the varied associations that accord with their own experience, ensuring At the End of the Land will land differently for each person. </p>
<p>For my companion, the references to the 18 dead women, provoked an association with <a href="https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/department-of-communities/16-days-wa">16 Days in WA</a>, a family and domestic violence campaign currently running in the state. Amid the myriad associative possibilities, Rubin’s endeavour is personal but also invitational as she finds ways to bring us together.</p>
<p>It is a seamless performance, which is pretty remarkable considering the work is really all seam: an avalanche of images knitted together with visible seams that invite the audience to sit alone in time and space together.</p>
<p><em>At the End of the Land played at PICA, Perth. Season closed.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/49-women-have-been-killed-in-australia-so-far-in-2023-as-a-result-of-violence-are-we-actually-making-any-progress-217552">49 women have been killed in Australia so far in 2023 as a result of violence. Are we actually making any progress?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219110/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leah Mercer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This production by Western Australian interdisciplinary theatre makers Too Close to the Sun is an experiential encounter with the liminal space between life and death.
Leah Mercer, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, Curtin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/208434
2023-10-13T12:31:53Z
2023-10-13T12:31:53Z
This engineering course has students use their brainwaves to create performing art
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>“Arts and Geometry”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>After a serious injury in 2016, I started drawing and painting during my recovery as a form of self-taught art therapy. I found the experience transformative. During my recovery, I rediscovered Pablo Picasso’s artwork and the geometry of his cubism, which inspired my early paintings.</p>
<p>As making art became part of my life, a desire grew to share this transformative experience with my engineering students. I wanted them to learn how to see science and engineering from a broader perspective – as an artist.</p>
<p>This led to the idea for, and development of, a course on arts and geometry in collaboration with professional artists of the Atlanta community. The play “<a href="https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/2865/picasso-at-the-lapin-agile">Picasso at the Lapin Agile</a>,” where comedian Steve Martin imagined a conversation in a Parisian cafe between Picasso and Albert Einstein, helped inspire the course. So did a book by history and philosophy of science professor Arthur Miller, “<a href="https://www.arthurimiller.com/books/einstein-picasso/">Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc</a>.” </p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>The course introduces engineering students to the geometry of manifolds – that is, cylinders, spheres or hyperboloids, and more complex surfaces, like a crumpled piece of paper or a rippled kale leaf. It then looks at how these concepts influenced modern arts and sciences: Picasso’s cubism and Einstein’s relativity. Cubism combines many angles to create a new way of seeing things, whereas Einstein’s theory changes how we think about time, which isn’t separate from the space around us – they are intertwined. </p>
<p>The course is integrated with weekly art labs taught over the years by Atlanta professional artists <a href="https://www.createdbyemily.com">Emily Vickers</a>, <a href="https://www.rachelgrantstudio.com/">Rachel Grant</a>, <a href="https://research.gatech.edu/anna-doll">Anna Doll</a> and <a href="https://jerushiagraham.wixsite.com/jerushiagraham">Jerushia Graham</a>, and with the support of music technologist <a href="https://mikewinters.io/">Mike Winters</a>. The artists teach students the fundamentals of several art mediums: <a href="https://issuu.com/ceebuzz/docs/like_picasso_and_einstein_book_fina">pencil and charcoal drawing</a>, printmaking, <a href="https://issuu.com/ceebuzz/docs/forms_and_expression_book_2019_fedele_grant">oil painting</a> and sculptures. </p>
<p>We also teach students how to create performing art using their brainwaves. Brainwaves are produced when we are engaged in any activity. They can be measured by electroencephalography – or EEG – headsets.</p>
<p>Students learn to create auditory or dynamic visual representations of our mind activity when we think, reason, create, dance or relax doing nothing. For example, brainwaves produced by a dancer can be transformed into musical sounds, an auditory representation of the dancer’s movements. Similarly, the brainwaves of an artist making a painting, or those of a mathematician deriving an equation, can be transformed into music that mirrors the act of creating art or math.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZB7Gk1lVZFM?wmode=transparent&start=419" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Mind melody performance: The brainwaves of artist Rachel Grant making a painting, engineer Francesco Fedele developing equations and choreographer Bella Dorado dancing are transformed into musical sounds designed by student Dennis Frank.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The same brainwaves can power on or off a set of pumps that produce water jets in a tank, a system designed by professor <a href="https://lai-etal-lab.github.io/author/chris-ck-lai/">Chris Lai</a> and students Muhammad Mustafa and Alexander Zimmer. These jets interact among themselves to produce a disordered turbulent flow in the water tank. The shape and motion of vortexes generated by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFLOn6fzMKY&ab_channel=73gabbiano">turbulence</a> are a dynamic visualization of the human mind’s activity.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A student dances on stage while another paints in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540377/original/file-20230801-17-2r0ssq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Choreographer Bella Dorado dances to sounds produced by the brainwaves of student Tanisha Chanda while she paints a waterscape.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Francesco Fedele</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>Civil engineering can be explained and taught using the physics and mathematics of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, from the 17th century: the concepts of derivatives and force being proportional to acceleration.</p>
<p>In our fast-changing world, there are exciting discoveries happening in science and technology, like in the understanding of the universe, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.</p>
<p>To prepare for the challenges posed by these recent discoveries, engineering students should be familiar with special mathematical tools developed by 20th-century geniuses such as Elie Cartan and Einstein. Such tools empower students to gain insights such as uncovering hidden geometric structures of complex physical systems or of large amounts of data. Normally, engineering classes don’t teach these topics.</p>
<p>The course also involves the participation of Colombian university students interested in arts for <a href="https://www.100kstrongamericas.org/roboarts-initiative/">the RobotArts Initiative</a>. Such an international exchange seeks to increase the number of Latino engineering students with skills in the arts, engineering and robotics. Besides taking my course, the students from Colombia also take a course on robotics. </p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>Students realize the <a href="https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2008.156497">mental health benefits</a> of practicing arts. They feel more self-confident and have more <a href="https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/329834">self-esteem</a> because they have created something.</p>
<p>Performing art live empowers students’ self-expression. By not relying on memorization, these performances stimulate spontaneous creativity, improvisation and free thinking.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Students dance on stage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540378/original/file-20230801-20-t0wcs4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Students Dennis Frank, Muhammad Mustafa and Alexander Zimmer performing brain art. In the background, software converts student performers’ brainwaves into music and water turbulence in a tank designed by professor Chris Lai.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Francesco Fedele</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>• “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/1112495919">Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity,</a>” by Sean M. Carroll, Cambridge University Press, 2019 – a textbook that covers the foundations of the general relativity and mathematical formalism.</p>
<p>• “<a href="https://www.arthurimiller.com/books/einstein-picasso/">Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc_</a> by Arthur J. Miller, Perseus Books Group, 2001 – a biography of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso.</p>
<p>• EEG headsets to acquire brainwaves and <a href="https://supercollider.github.io/">SuperCollider</a> software to synthesize them into music. </p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>The course will prepare students to think like an artist, using abstraction, imagination and fluid thinking. They will tackle with confidence the new engineering quests and challenges of the 21st century. The challenges encompass sustainable urban and ocean infrastructure design for extreme weather, global warming mitigation, clean water and energy, quantum computing, cybersecurity and <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-69978-9_4">ethical use of AI</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208434/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Francesco Fedele does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Art and science combine in this engineering course to let students turn their brainwaves into creative works.
Francesco Fedele, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214415
2023-09-27T11:32:06Z
2023-09-27T11:32:06Z
Marina Abramović retrospective celebrates the grand dame of performance art – but questions the genre’s future
<p>In 1974, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marina-Abramovic">Marina Abramović</a> performed a career-defining work at a small experimental gallery in Naples, Italy. The Serbian artist stood naked next to a table on which she had arranged 72 objects associated with pleasure and pain. They included a bunch of grapes, a jar of honey, a feather, a whip, chains, a scalpel and a gun. </p>
<p>Accompanying text instructed the audience: “There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I am the object.” The performance, entitled <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abramovic-rhythm-0-t14875">Rhythm 0</a>, lasted for six hours, during which Abramović was tickled, cut, written on and chained. Everything was documented by photographers, whose presence she had arranged. When someone held the (allegedly loaded) gun to the artist’s neck, the performance ended.</p>
<p>Half a century later, Abramović is the celebrated grand dame of live, performance, or body art. In this avant garde practice, the artist’s body takes the place of the object as the means of expression. She is also the first woman in the Royal Academy of Arts’ history to have <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/marina-abramovic">a solo retrospective</a> in its main galleries.</p>
<p>On entering Abramović’s retrospective, I was instructed not to photograph the performers. I hadn’t planned to take pictures, but this request struck me as strange. Photographic documentation is as integral to performance art as a wall is to a Renaissance fresco, or an acoustic echo is to a choral mass.</p>
<p>Everything I already knew about Abramović’s work was based on photographs. If photography was now forbidden – and the reenactment of works like Rhythm 0 was presumably ruled out by high levels of risk – what did this say about the changed, or changing, condition of performance art?</p>
<p>The exhibition begins not with live reenactment, but with extensive recordings of <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/marina-abramovic-marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-2010/">The Artist is Present</a>, a performance first staged at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Abramović invited audience members to sit opposite her at a table and to stare into her eyes for as long as they wanted while the procedure was filmed.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Ulay attends a performance of The Artist is Present.</span></figcaption>
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<p>From here, the exhibition moves roughly chronologically through Abramović’s career. Rhythm 0 appears next, represented by the unsettling arrangement of threatening and seductive objects and a looping slideshow of the original 1974 performance. </p>
<p>Adjacent to this are black-and-white photos of a performance in which Abramović prostrates herself inside the flaming five-pointed communist star. And a large format colour picture of her 1997 Venice Biennale performance of <a href="https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3126">Balkan Baroque</a>, where for days on end she scrubbed blood and sinew from a pile of grisly cow bones.</p>
<p>From 1976 to 1988, Abramović collaborated with her lover, the Dutch artist <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ulay-performance-artist-dead-1202679604/">Ulay</a>. The RA show presents slides and videos of the works they made together that explored relationship trust dynamics. The best of these crystalise the tensions and vulnerabilities of intimacy into strikingly memorable image sequences, such as <a href="https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3120">Rest Energy</a> (1980), in which Ulay holds an arrow pointing directly at Abramović’s heart.</p>
<h2>The limits of re-staging</h2>
<p>Accessing the next gallery involves negotiating the narrow space between a man and a woman, both naked. They are avatars for Ulay and Abramović in the 1977 performance <a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/marina-abramovic/imponderabilia">Imponderbilia</a>. The work has been re-staged to neutralise its impact, so that instead of being compelled to enter the personal space of the blank-faced performers, visitors can take an alternative route that avoids them. </p>
<p>Intending to photograph the silhouetted profiles the pair cast on the floor, I reached for my phone, only to be admonished by a security guard. They explained that not photographing performers also meant not photographing their shadows.</p>
<p>This absurd interaction reinforced the limits of re-staged performance art. The point reasserted itself with the re-staged work <a href="https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3132">Nude with Skeleton</a>. As I stepped closer to discover whether Abramović’s double was a live performer, a waxwork, or some kind of deepfake, another guard stepped purposefully into my line of vision, repeating the move when I sidestepped to look around them.</p>
<p>Throughout this substantial exhibition, Abramović’s desire to commune with her audience is stressed. But in practice, this intention is undermined by protocols of performer protection which distort the conditions of immediacy on which these works originally relied.</p>
<h2>Transitory objects</h2>
<p>When the audience is allowed to engage, their experience is mediated through a series of what Abramović calls “transitory objects”. These are made from materials associated with healing that you might expect to encounter in a wellness spa: crystals, green onyx, chamomile flowers. </p>
<p>Abramović claims these objects induce feelings of transcendence when they are stepped into, lain on or leaned upon. The objects are theatrically lit so that anyone interacting with them becomes part of the exhibition spectacle.</p>
<p>As I lay on a copper bed with my head awkwardly resting on a green onyx pillow, I prayed – not for transcendence, but that no one would sneakily take my picture and post it on social media. From this uncomfortable 21st-century position, I contemplated the possibility that the traumatic fallout of being threatened in 1974 by an audience member with a loaded gun had defined the subsequent course of Abramović’s work.</p>
<p>Despite this exhibition’s emphasis on care, transcendence and participation, Abramović’s work is defined by the apparent need to control her audience’s experiences while celebrating her own. It makes sense then that she has consistently distanced herself from the collective efforts of feminism. It also seems fitting that with her individualistic narrative, Abramović is the first women artist to have a solo exhibition at an institution that – for the past three and half centuries – has reserved this honour only for men. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Carolin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Abramović is the first woman in the Royal Academy of Arts’ history to have a solo retrospective in its main galleries.
Clare Carolin, Senior Lecturer, Art and Public Engagement, King's College London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/201939
2023-04-19T06:13:53Z
2023-04-19T06:13:53Z
Live art exists only while it is being performed, and then it disappears. How do we create an archive of the ephemeral?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521795/original/file-20230419-14-41cvqa.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C0%2C2719%2C1822&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leisa Shelton/Abbotsford Convent</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Live performance exists only in the moment it is being performed. Its ephemeral nature means it is transient and impermanent, and cannot be experienced again in precisely the same way. </p>
<p>How do artists hold on to the works that they make? What of the invisible labour that is rarely acknowledged or named? </p>
<p>Over the last ten years, performance artist Leisa Shelton has completed a series of participatory artworks which focus on the mutability of the archive: gathering audience testimonies and mapping artistic lineages. </p>
<p>Now her new show, Archiving the Ephemeral, brings five works together in a beautifully curated installation. </p>
<p>Archiving the Ephemeral is a celebration of the artist, the artistic process and the audience experience. </p>
<p>Shelton’s expansive career, built on collaboration, care and conversation, grounds the exhibition. The show reflects her focus on curating and re-framing interdisciplinary work to address the limited opportunities for recognition of contemporary independent Australian performance. </p>
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<p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/politics-pioneers-performance-50-years-of-australian-womens-art-and-feminist-ideas-175840">Politics, pioneers, performance: 50 years of Australian women's art and feminist ideas</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Meticulous design</h2>
<p>Marked by a spare, distinctive design, Archiving the Ephemeral is located in the Magdalen Laundry at the Abbotsford Convent. </p>
<p>Rich with a bright green wooden industrial interior and aged painted walls, the laundry is a perfect background for the specifically placed items, the carefully lit tables and the long lines of patterned artefacts. </p>
<p>Fragile ideas are framed and held within a crafted, artisan aesthetic. Objects are carefully made and remnants are meticulously gathered.</p>
<p>Along one side of the space, 132 brown paper packets are laid out in a continuous line on the floor. Each package contains a set of archival materials, burned to ash, which corresponds to an artistic project from Shelton’s career. </p>
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<img alt="People look at envelopes in a line on the ground." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521797/original/file-20230419-28-4cypca.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Paper packets hold archival materials, burned to ash.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sofie Dieu/Abbotsford Convent</span></span>
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<p>An accompanying video depicts Shelton’s meticulous process of burning, piece by piece, her entire performance archive to ash. </p>
<p>In a methodical and meditative process, the ash is sifted and packaged into the hand-crafted paper bags. The bags are then hand-punched and sewn with twine, typed, labelled and categorised: a kind of devotional honouring of the materials even as they are brought to dust. </p>
<h2>A living archive</h2>
<p>The exhibition includes an opportunity for each of us to become part of the living archive through conversations with two ground-breaking elders of Australia’s performance art scene, <a href="https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/news/in-conversation-with-stelarc-and-jill-orr/">Jill Orr and Stelarc</a>. </p>
<p>On the night I attend, I sit with Stelarc. We discuss Kantian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant">notions of time</a> as he tells me about his <a href="http://stelarc.org/?catID=20353">Re-Wired/Re-Mixed Event for Dismembered Body</a> (2015). It’s a delightful moment of personal connection with an artist I’ve admired for years. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Pairs sit at tables." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521798/original/file-20230419-23-qy1j2p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Personal archives built from conversations can be carried by each of us.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sofie Dieu/Abbotsford Convent</span></span>
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<p>Across one wall are four large hanging papers listing the name of every artist on every <a href="https://www.artshouse.com.au/about-us/">Arts House</a> program from 2006-2016, laboriously typed. </p>
<p>On the night I attend, these lists elicit lively conversations among the artists present as we study the names and dates (in my case, slightly desperately searching to see if my own name is there), and recall shows, people, events, stories and collaborations. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Typed names." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521799/original/file-20230419-14-3c1yy5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Hundreds of artists have performed at Arts House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leisa Shelton/Abbotsford Convent</span></span>
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<p>Much of Shelton’s work is gathered from conversations with audience members about art and artists. </p>
<p>In Mapping, a set of burnished stainless-steel canisters, beautifully marked with engraved identifications, sit on a bench underneath a suspended video screen on which artist names appear and disappear in an endless, floating loop. </p>
<p>The canisters contain details of profoundly memorable artists and performances collected from 1,000 interviews, dated and stamped. They are hand-welded, sumptuous objects which hold the interview cards securely locked under fireproof glass designed to withstand cyclones, fires and floods.</p>
<p>The many hand-written files of Scribe contain multiple documents which can be taken out and read. The sheer number of pages is overwhelming, and the breadth of audience commentary – joyful, moved, connected, inspired – is breathtaking. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C0%2C1354%2C904&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="People sit at a table" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C0%2C1354%2C904&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521794/original/file-20230419-28-2knkky.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">We can sit and read about the work that was.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sofie Dieu/Abbotsford Convent</span></span>
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<p>It’s a poignant reminder of the traces borne out beyond the artist’s own experience of performing a work: an often surreal and lonely moment once the audience has left the room.</p>
<h2>A practice of care</h2>
<p>Archiving the Ephemeral fosters a practice of care and acknowledgement which extends to the practical ways in which our trajectory through the room and engagement with the artworks is enabled. </p>
<p>The Convent is an apt site for such a careful collection. Analogue processes and objects are foregrounded. Typewriters, brown paper, string, awls and aprons are part of the painstaking construction process. Attendants and scribes act as custodians in the space, facilitating a gentle holding of the material.</p>
<p>We are given the opportunity to continue the archive as it evolves and devolves around us. As I make my way through the space, I notice my own embodied archival actions - taking notes, speaking to others - as I continue the trajectory of documenting the documents.
We are not just witnessing one artist’s body of work. Archiving the Ephemeral focuses on the need for greater visibility, recognition and honouring of Australia’s experimental and independent artists, and speaks to the many collaborations, associations, and intricate connections that mark a significant – if unacknowledged – cultural legacy. </p>
<p><em>Archiving the Ephemeral is at the Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, until April 22.</em></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-litany-of-losses-a-new-project-maps-our-abandoned-arts-events-of-2020-148716">A litany of losses: a new project maps our abandoned arts events of 2020</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Hunter has participated in Leisa Shelton's workshops in the past. </span></em></p>
Archiving the Ephemeral, brings five works by performance artist Leisa Shelton together in a beautifully curated installation.
Kate Hunter, Lecturer in Art and Performance, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/176326
2022-02-14T14:46:39Z
2022-02-14T14:46:39Z
RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, Maddy Morphosis, sparks conversations about cishet inclusion and queer discomfort
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445216/original/file-20220208-21-q5jqkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C2286%2C3722&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Maddy Morphosis was the first straight, cisgender man on RuPaul's Drag Race.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(VH1)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent years, <em>RuPaul’s Drag Race</em> and its spin-offs have welcomed several transgender, nonbinary and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/victoriascone/?hl=en">lesbian cisgender</a> performers to the franchise.</p>
<p>Now in its 14th season, the Emmy award winning reality TV program features <a href="https://www.instagram.com/maddymorphosis/?hl=en">Maddy Morphosis</a>, its first heterosexual cisgender contestant. Yup, that’s right: a straight cis-man could have made “herstory” as “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” </p>
<p>While <em>Drag Race</em> has been a force in discussing <a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3123665">non-normative gender presentation</a> and performance on mainstream TV, it has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/03/rupaul-drag-race-big-f-you-to-male-dominated-culture">brought with it controversy</a> and conversations about inclusion. </p>
<p>By casting Maddy Morphosis, the show has opened itself up to new fan commentary.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rupauls-drag-race-and-lip-syncing-a-once-controversial-practice-is-no-longer-taboo-166473">'RuPaul’s Drag Race' and lip-syncing: A once controversial practice is no longer taboo</a>
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<p>Some are writing <a href="https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/k7wbq9/maddy-morphosis-straight-queen-drag-race">in defense of the choice</a>, arguing that a diverse cast inclusive of heterosexual cis-men speaks back to toxic masculinity by <a href="https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/resources/Understanding-Drag-April-2017.pdf">inviting the idea that any performer</a> can take part in the art of drag regardless of gender or sexuality. </p>
<p>Others are more concerned about how her presence invades queer spaces since, as <a href="https://twitter.com/MaddyMorphosis/status/1467640003123687428">Maddy Morphosis herself notes</a>, “straight men are not a persecuted and excluded group within the drag community.”</p>
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<p>Both sides take on what political scientist Cathy J. Cohen describes as “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387220-003">a monolithic understanding of heterosexuality and queerness</a>,” causes the conversation around Maddy Morphosis to be all about the pros and cons of inclusivity. </p>
<p>But there are many “<a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/disrupting-queer-inclusion">complicities, collusions, and costs of inclusion</a>.” So, what does it mean to have white straight cis-men take up space in such a public drag scene, beyond the need for so-called inclusivity? </p>
<h2>Hollow understandings of diversity and inclusion</h2>
<p>As much as drag is a longstanding performance art, it is also a queer culture indebted to people of colour, and <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/contemporary-drag-practices-and-performers-9781350082946/">Black and Latinx drag ballroom communities</a> in particular. </p>
<p>During the growing white gay liberation movement, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2013.829861">low-income queer people of colour</a> were gathering to form safe spaces in New York City and elsewhere. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2011.0016">Ballroom culture</a> still offers space for participants to express their sexuality and gender, while also finding chosen family to help survive against racist, homophobic and transphobic violence.</p>
<p>These safe spaces, time and time again, have been capitalized upon by recent media to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/24/burning-down-the-house-debate-paris-is-burning">shamelessly profit off of</a> a contemporary consumer society and culture that champions hollow understandings of diversity and inclusion. <em>Drag Race</em> is no different. </p>
<p>It should come as no surprise then that Maddy Morphosis’s casting is a twist that overshadows more than six decades of documented queer performance art within carefully crafted safe spaces, all to establish the franchise’s first heterosexual cis contestant into the queer RUniverse.</p>
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<img alt="The cast of season 14, rupaul's drag race" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445222/original/file-20220208-21-1q6jk5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">People are concerned about how Maddy Morphosis’s presence invades queer spaces.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(VH1)</span></span>
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<h2>Discomfort by Maddy Morphosis’s inclusion</h2>
<p>Recent discussions within the 2SLGBTQIA+ movement centre both the discomforts faced by members of these communities and addressing or remedying these discomforts. It is a tried-and-true cycle that continues to result in certain improvements to the community’s everyday life. </p>
<p>From mental health services to the right to get married, a series of grievances — and responses to these grievances — remain at the foundation of <a href="https://www.beyondintractability.org/casestudy/palaoro-LGBTQ">the movement’s ethos</a>, which traditionally seeks to provide care and a better quality of life for all members of the wider queer community. </p>
<p><em>Drag Race</em>’s recent addition to the franchise requires that we consider members of the community who feel genuine discomfort by Maddy Morphosis’s controversial inclusion. How can acute care and support be extended to those who identify as bisexual, pansexual, asexual, intersex or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/style/drag-kings.html">drag kings</a>? </p>
<p>These are members of the wider community who have yet to see, and yearn for, meaningful discussion and representation to unfold around their identities on the show. </p>
<p>In a contemporary queer culture where burlesque superstar and <em>Drag Race</em> winner, <a href="https://instinctmagazine.com/rupaul-winner-violet-chachki-was-kicked-out-of-a-paris-sex-club-for-being-too-feminine/">Violet Chachki, is kicked out of a gay club because she does not exude a certain level of masculinity</a> — a reminder of how contemporary queer spaces and peoples can continue to <a href="https://twitter.com/violetchachki/status/914319126595801088?lang=en">uphold heterosexual norms and expectations</a> dictating sexuality and gender expression — it is time to address which issues the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and <em>Drag Race</em> should bring to the forefront on one of the queer community’s most influential platforms.</p>
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<h2>For the sake of shock-value</h2>
<p>The media’s obsession with shock value can emphasize the initial shock a possible scene or character might hold. Of equal importance is <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/6/22/18700875/lgbtq-good-ally">the ongoing debate</a> and hyperfocus on determining the values for being a meaningful ally to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. </p>
<p>This season’s casting of Maddy Morphosis continues to reveal how shock is both material and playful, but also holds the immaterial potential to cause genuine harm and discomfort to some members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community who eagerly await their chances to shine, inevitably trailing in the shadows of the franchise’s veneration of the first heterosexual cis contestant and ally. </p>
<p>That choice puts racialized queer histories, community discomfort and modes of allyship to the backseat all for the sake of shock-value inclusion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176326/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Theresa N. Kenney receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Linzey Corridon receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.</span></em></p>
A straight cis-man could have made “herstory” as “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” Drag Race’s inclusion problem botches racialized queer histories, community discomfort and ally participation.
Theresa N. Kenney, PhD Candidate in English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Linzey Corridon, Vanier Scholar and PhD researcher, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/163195
2021-07-07T15:04:07Z
2021-07-07T15:04:07Z
Nigeria’s #ENDSARS protests: a window into how creative art can be an act of therapy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409862/original/file-20210706-19-1i1m42l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters march at Alausa Secretariat in Ikeja, Lagos State, in October 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Olukayode Jaiyeola/NurPhoto via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Recent disturbing events in different regions of the world poignantly reveal how the creative arts can contribute to making sense of difficult situations and stressful times. This is particularly true of performance art. </p>
<p>Performance art provides ways of seeing, thinking, expressing and mindfulness. It highlights the idea that human beings, regardless of race, class or gender, have creative forces within them.</p>
<p>In African societies, including Nigeria, the use of the creative arts as political tools of assertion in crises is not new. This includes dance, music, art and drama.</p>
<p>For example, in colonial Nigeria, the famous <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/aba-womens-riots-november-december-1929/#:%7E:text=Thousands%20of%20Igbo%20women%20organized,the%20history%20of%20the%20colony.">Aba Women’s riot of 1929</a> is still a reference point. Tens of thousands of <a href="https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/through-the-lens-of-history-biafra-nigeria-the-west-and-the-world/the-colonial-and-pre-colonial-eras-in-nigeria/the-womens-market-rebellion-of-1929">militant</a>, resilient, scantily clad or nude women engaged with a highly charged protest dance. They forced the colonial government to change its system of governance in southeastern Nigeria.</p>
<p>Prominent Nigerian historian <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41971233">Adiele Afigbo</a> described the women’s protest as “one of the most telling poems of resistance against colonial hegemony”. Nigerian women became politically visible to an extent that has never been repeated.</p>
<p>More recently <a href="https://theconversation.com/young-nigerians-rise-up-to-demand-a-different-kind-of-freedom-148105">Nigeria’s #ENDSARS</a> in October 2020 represented a similar example of public protest as art.</p>
<p>Many Nigerians see their country as a failing state. This is due to the steady downhill slide of the economy and vanishing resources, dilapidated social amenities, massive unemployment, violence, insurgencies, <a href="https://theconversation.com/nigerias-poverty-profile-is-grim-its-time-to-move-beyond-handouts-163302">mounting poverty</a> and police brutality. It also includes the highhandedness of those in power. </p>
<p>Young Nigerian youths dared bullets and machine guns and took over public spaces to assert their right to a better life. For weeks, in a unified social body, they peacefully contained the “danced” protests. </p>
<p>One can view #ENDSARS as exquisitely organised politically motivated protests, fuelled and sustained by creative art making. Not many have investigated it as an event which has made a unique contribution to the understanding and study of non-verbal psychotherapy as an emerging field of study in Nigeria.</p>
<h2>Creative art therapies</h2>
<p>In 2015, at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan I successfully defended the first clinical trial experimental research in <a href="https://punchng.com/why-im-advocating-dance-as-treatment-for-mental-illness-nigerian-scholar-gladys-akunna/">dance and movement therapy</a> as an aspect of creative arts therapy in Nigeria. My research tested and validated the effectiveness of dance and movement therapy treatment in adult inpatients suffering from schizophrenia and depression. </p>
<p>The subjects in the research learnt to trust and use art as a tool to connect to themselves. They were able to get quantifiable levels of improvement in health. </p>
<p>Similarly, Nigerians in the #ENDSARS protests intuitively embraced improvised art making for the release of pain and anguish, and for mustering strength for survival. </p>
<p>The popular adopted slogan for the protests was <em>sorosoke</em>, a Yoruba word which translates as “speak up”. Apart from its political connotation, it was also a group therapy engagement.</p>
<p>The therapeutic space of this event lasted a few weeks. During this time millions of Nigerians in large groups performed for their mental health.</p>
<p>Nigeria’s heavily burdened and impoverished population has been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJoyjIWxNeU">publicly branded</a> as “lazy” and good-for-nothing citizens with no goals or aspirations. </p>
<p>But through their many united voices and bodies they became powerful and they found voice. Hence the importance of the slogan <em>sorosoke</em>.</p>
<p>Experts in the field of mental health agree that to have a voice is as much a part of daily living as it is of therapy. It signifies self-awareness and active agency and participation in staying healthy and productive.</p>
<h2>Artmaking and the search of mental health in #ENDSARS</h2>
<p>At the turn of the 20th century, and building on earlier research, the neurologist Sigmund Freud founded <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Introductory_Lectures_on_Psychoanalysis.html?id=Sfz0l6WSqFgC">psychoanalysis</a> – or the talking therapy – as a medical breakthrough in traditional psychotherapy. His approach has since become a vital aspect of the fields of psychiatry and mental health. </p>
<p>Freud also founded other significant theories including the theory of sublimation.</p>
<p>As a theory, sublimation is central to <a href="http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/15030">psychoanalytic theory</a> about the arts. </p>
<p><a href="https://literariness.org/2016/04/16/freudian-psychoanalysis/">Freud’s analysis</a> of literal and visual narratives of great artists was based on psychological nuances and influences of consciousness and beingness. To him, the subjective domains were symbolic communication of libidinal drive or fulfilment of these desires. </p>
<p>Beyond this, it was his critical evaluations of the experience of unconscious conflicts and their expression through the process of sublimation that laid the foundation on which the <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-12112-000">psychoanalytical study of art and the artist</a> evolved.</p>
<p>For Freud, and countless other examples, including those in Nigeria, the channelling and communication of stored painful memories can be released through a work of art – a socially acceptable form of creativity. </p>
<p>Equally significant is the symbolic form – or aesthetic appearance – of the work of art which meaningfully camouflages the hideous elements of consciousness, yielding some measure of beauty, enjoyment and appreciation. </p>
<p>For instance, as an art, dance is a specific, precise, intricately organised creative activity. It is pervaded by ideals of universality and inclusive sociality that evoke emotional and aesthetic appeal and response.</p>
<p>The #ENDSARS protests are a good example of this. They incorporated and presented potent, meaningful visual, verbal, non-verbal art displays and an overall visual quality. These yielded some measure of pleasure to both the performers and spectators. These powerfully interactive and meaningful performances were densely psychotherapeutic in form and content. </p>
<p>The protests rejected the irrational continual denial of the tragic realities in Nigeria’s socio-political landscape. Rather it was a creative way for the battered bodies and minds of Nigerians to confront their harsh, unfriendly environment. </p>
<p>And it paved the way for healing, vitality and a new vista of productive life.</p>
<p>This therapeutic goal was monstrously cut short by the Lekki Toll Gate <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/nigerias-lekki-toll-gate-massacre-will-not-go-away">massacre</a>. This inflated the frightful circles of mental illness and exposed hurting Nigerians in need of psychotherapy to brutal violence.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gladys Ijeoma Akunna does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The protests paved the way for healing, vitality and a new vista of productive life.
Gladys Ijeoma Akunna, Visiting Scholar, Department of Creative Arts Therapies, Drexel University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/157557
2021-04-12T20:19:41Z
2021-04-12T20:19:41Z
NFT performance art: Corporations could capitalize on protest
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394134/original/file-20210408-17-x8at4n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C40%2C5400%2C3136&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nike ad in New York in 2018, showing former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick after his 2016 kneeling protest. Could a corporation sell an act like Kaepernick's 'kneel' as an NFT? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Russian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/03/roadkill-radical-art-group-apolitical">artist Petr Davydtchenko</a> made what what he claims was the <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/could-this-video-of-a-man-eating-a-bat-be-the-first-performance-art-nft">first performance art NFT</a> in February. According to an article in <em>The Art Newspaper</em>, in a digital recording, Davydtchenko “eats a live bat in front of the European Parliament in Brussels.” </p>
<p>An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a digital record of the stake in ownership of a digital object (but not the copyright), often an artwork. This digital certificate says, “I paid for this special thing, now it’s mine!” </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-nfts-and-why-are-people-paying-millions-for-them-157035">What are NFTs and why are people paying millions for them?</a>
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<p><em>The Art Newspaper</em> reports Davydtchenko’s “performance” had received only one bid of 2.5 <a href="https://www.coinspeaker.com/guides/what-is-wrapped-ethereum-weth/">wrapped ethereum</a>, valued <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/could-this-video-of-a-man-eating-a-bat-be-the-first-performance-art-nft">at $3,848</a> when the story was published on Feb. 26. But <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nft-analysis-explainer-1.5933536">profits for some NFTs go into the millions</a>. </p>
<p>Davydtchenko says the <a href="https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/155740/activist-who-ate-live-bat-in-front-of-european-parliament-brussels-belgium-taken-into-police-custody-released/">event was a protest</a> against pharmaceutical companies. Davydtchenko’s <a href="https://www.bps22.be/en/exhibitions/petr-davydtchenko">performance art references vaccines and COVID-19</a>. </p>
<p>As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in <a href="https://www.openculture.com/?p=1087781">radical ways</a> by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society. </p>
<p>We should keep an ear open not only to <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/the-nft-craze-encapsulates-the-absurdity-of-the-art-world-and-its-obsession-with-authenticity">questions about authenticity and who profits</a> but also about what these kinds of transactions mean for us as spectators, virtual audience members and human beings. </p>
<h2>Performance check on war</h2>
<p>NFT art may seem new and bizarre, but can rightly be seen as part of a longer tradition of performance art and cultural criticism. </p>
<p>As a response to the trauma of the First World War, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dada">the Dada art movement</a> formed in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1916, performance artist Hugo Ball drafted a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2016.1223488">Dada manifesto</a>. </p>
<p>Ball’s work used nonsense words and costumes, <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ball-hugo/artworks">as he said, to challenge “the rationalized language of modernity,” emblematic of the “agony and death throes” of the age</a>.
Into the 1920s, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Dada_Performance.html?id=jLbWAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">performers continued to reflect on the violence</a> seen in Europe and the excesses of the roaring ‘20s. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EmMTKdUAokM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘The Case for Performance Art,’ PBS video featuring Hugo Ball.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In the 1960s and ‘70s, <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/movement/fluxus/">the Fluxus movement</a>, a revival of many Dadaist ideas, used performance in a similar way. One pioneering example of this was <a href="https://artsolido.com/2017/02/18/yoko-ono-the-cut-piece-that-changed-forever-the-relationship-between-artist-and-audience/">Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”</a> first performed in <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964/">Kyoto, Japan, in 1964</a>. </p>
<p>Ono sat on a stage and instructed audiences to use scissors to remove parts of her clothing. Ono told Reuters <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244759/figure/img03">39 years after the first performance that she did the performance “against ageism, against racism, against sexism and against violence</a>.” Some critics <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/pajj/article/30/3%20(90)/81/55361/Yoko-Ono-s-Cut-Piece-From-Text-to-Performance-and">suggested the performance was also a comment on the conflict in Vietnam</a>. </p>
<h2>Role of spectator, purchaser</h2>
<p>“Cut Piece,” and similar performances are living moments of shared human connection and meaning that are time-and-place specific. One can imagine that meanings understood by audience members of “Cut Piece” in Japan 1964 or in France 2003 could differ for many reasons. </p>
<p>Such site-specific resonances are challenged when a performance is tokenized as an NFT. Is Davydtchenko’s “performance” the eating of the bat? Or is it the NFT pointing to a recording of that event? Or is the performance would-be bidders or critics engaging in a public debate about devouring an animal whose species is associated with COVID-19? Davydtchenko’s work raises questions about what is being bought and sold, and the role of the purchaser or spectator. </p>
<p>Performance studies pioneer Peggy Phelan argued <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Unmarked-The-Politics-of-Performance/Phelan/p/book/9780415068222">that performance can disrupt and challenge the capitalist art market that creates value often disconnected</a> from relationships between artists and audiences. From a Marxist perspective, this disconnected “extra” meaning is “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygodsky/unknown/surplus_value.htm">surplus value</a>,” the value that exceeds the money a worker earns for their labour.</p>
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<img alt="Yoko Ono and audience member onstage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=632&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=632&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=632&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Yoko Ono performs ‘Cut Piece’ in Paris, 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(LoveMattersMost/Flickr)</span></span>
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<h2>Changing the 'aura’ of art</h2>
<p>Phelan’s analysis suggests how NFTs follow a tradition of art criticism that has questioned moral responsibility in the age of mass production and mass media consumption.</p>
<p>In 1936, German critic and philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/">Walter Benjamin</a>, of the famed <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/">Frankfurt School for Social Research</a>, applied Marxist ideas about how manufacturing workers become alienated from their labour <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm">and applied them to art</a>. </p>
<p>Performance scholar Philip Auslander has explained how in a capitalist society alienation means “<a href="https://www.almutadaber.com/books/book1_13905.pdf">workers become commodities when they must sell their alienated labour in the marketplace, just as other goods are sold</a>.”</p>
<p>Benjamin suggested new media technologies “demystified” art. The reproduction of <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED482090">art challenged what he called its “aura</a>,” or its unique originality. Reproducing visual art, for example, through printing, freed it from the precious spaces of the museum and made it accessible to the working classes. No more would a person need to travel to see the Mona Lisa: It was now available on a postcard or T-shirt.</p>
<p>The problem, argued Benjamin, is that “aura” is also a relationship to meaning. Once the “aura” is gone, artwork can be repurposed for purely economic, and even dangerously political ends. Indeed, the Nazis used symbols, artworks <a href="https://www.phaidon.com/store/design/iron-fists-9780714861098/">and mass branding to legitimize and circulate Fascist ideologies</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-nazis-twisted-the-swastika-into-a-symbol-of-hate-83020">How Nazis twisted the swastika into a symbol of hate</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Culture critic Jonathan Beller notes Benjamin recognized how new media could be used to preserve and advance ancient “cultic values” such as genius, mystery and authenticity, <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/fascism-blockchain-art-nfts">and understood fascism as advancing “the introduction of esthetics into political life” to promote “cult worship through mass entertainment.”</a> So far, we haven’t seen NFTs directly associated with fascism, but as Beller notes, through NFTs, political manipulation through art could be a possibility.</p>
<h2>Instability of dissent?</h2>
<p>Such questions of manipulation can be explored through considering Davydtchenko’s performance.</p>
<p>Is Davydtchenko’s bat eating an act of political dissent, as he claims, or <a href="https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/155438/russian-performance-artist-activist-petr-davydtchencko-will-eat-a-live-bat-outside-brussels-belgium-eu-parliament/">simply a cruel event</a>? What of those who pay for it or share the publicity: Have they been manipulated into amplifying something grotesque? </p>
<p>There is also the question of the stability of digital work itself. An NFT’s <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-explained-art-crypto-urls-links-ipfs">link to a digital file is based purely on trust and potentially error-prone technology</a>. But what if stolen NFTs could surface in strange places? The site <em>Hyperallergic</em> reports that some buyers say “<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/629328/reports-of-stolen-art-on-nft-marketplace-raise-issues-for-crypto-collectors">hackings have exposed holes in a technology often touted as a foolproof record of ownership</a>.” Could NFTs become the next forms of cybercrime or hate crimes, akin to defacing a public mural, or Zoom-bombing a performance?</p>
<h2>When corporations seek to capitalize</h2>
<p>Applying performance and cultural critiques to NFTs helps us consider how political resistance may be either amplified or co-opted when corporations seek to capitalize on political actions. </p>
<p>As I have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/post.5.1.29_1">written before</a>,
Nike quickly sought to capitalize on NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7035746/colin-kaepernick-timeline/">2016 kneeling</a> during the U.S. national anthem, an act of protest against police brutality and racial injustice. Could Nike look to sell the “kneel,” or other similar acts, as an NFT? </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yvkf88eSTrI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">CNBC video: How Nike turns controversy into dollars.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When we see <a href="https://mashable.com/article/nyan-cat-meme-non-fungible-token-sale-300-ethereum/">the prices some are paying for NFT art</a>, we must assume that more performances will circulate as NFTs, and consider what this may mean for the possibilities of performance and political dissent.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157557/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lowell Gasoi receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Elements of this research have been explored with this funding.</span></em></p>
When we see the high prices some are paying for NFT art, we must assume more performances, and potentially, acts of protest, could circulate as NFTs.
Lowell Gasoi, Instructor in communication studies, arts advocacy, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/156488
2021-03-24T03:34:11Z
2021-03-24T03:34:11Z
The show must go on, but it’s time to re-think how we fund the arts in NZ
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/389215/original/file-20210312-18-59zjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=66%2C0%2C7360%2C4451&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Stokkete</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The past 12 months presented unprecedented challenges for the performing arts as the pandemic curtailed many live performances.</p>
<p>Some organisations relied on pushing digital content to remain in the public eye, but this was <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/coronavirus-nzso-to-livestream-free-performance-to-all-of-new-zealand/64T2UN7X6FTNIJZI3PTA6SPQBU/">next-to-impossible to monetise</a>. </p>
<p>Now, as the COVID vaccines roll out and the sector heads towards a reset, it’s worth applying some fresh thinking to the arts landscape of the future. </p>
<p>Some have asked for more <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/123635098/lets-find-a-better-way-to-fund-a-resilient-arts-and-culture-sector">sustainable funding</a>, others for <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/124402546/art-for-arts-sake-money-for-gods-sake--how-can-aotearoa-fix-its-broken-artist-pay-model">more funding</a>. But the central question is: can we get better value-for-money from the spend through central and local government?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-year-on-from-new-zealands-big-lockdown-the-team-of-5-million-needs-a-new-story-156955">A year on from New Zealand's big lockdown the 'team of 5 million' needs a new story</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The answer is “yes” — if we don’t duplicate effort, if we target funding to those organisations that are of an appropriate scale, and if those organisations take a more creative approach to market development.</p>
<h2>We love the arts</h2>
<p>Pre-pandemic <a href="https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/assets/paperclip/publication_documents/documents/633/original/new_zealanders_and_the_arts_2017_full_report.pdf">research</a> in 2017 commissioned by Creative New Zealand (CNZ) found the majority of people agreed the arts improve our society and help define what it is to be a New Zealander.</p>
<p>The research also found about 52% of people believe the arts should receive public funding, with only 17% disagreeing.</p>
<p>The arts sector overall contributed <a href="https://mch.govt.nz/what-we-do/cultural-sector-overviews">NZ$2.38-billion</a> to GDP in 2018, about half as much <a href="https://sportnz.org.nz/resources/the-value-of-sport/">as sports</a> and recreation.</p>
<p>Of all art forms, the performing arts (music, dance and theatre) are the most popular and just over half of all New Zealanders attended an event in 2017. </p>
<h2>Value for money</h2>
<p>Performing arts organisations receive some funding from local government but the bulk comes from CNZ, which in 2018-19 <a href="https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/assets/paperclip/publication_documents/documents/740/original/annual_report__final_web_3.pdf">received</a> $16 million from the Ministry for Culture & Heritage (MCH) and $43 million from the Lottery Grants Board.</p>
<p>A small number of national performing arts organisations receive funding from MCH directly, out of its total budget of <a href="https://mch.govt.nz/sites/default/files/projects/Annual%20Report%202018-19.pdf">$577 million</a>. </p>
<p>A look at some of the publicly available performance reports of arts companies provides an interesting picture of how that money is used.</p>
<p>What becomes apparent if you adopt a systemic perspective of the sector are at least two key, interlinked areas that need attention:</p>
<ul>
<li>scope and scale of organisations</li>
<li>the need for market development.</li>
</ul>
<p>The first key issue is related to organisational scale and scope – those that are too large and those too small.</p>
<h2>National tours</h2>
<p>At the large end, NZ features organisations required to deliver performances on a national scale, in multiple centres around the country. </p>
<p>For the organisations themselves, this is expensive. It leads to large chunks of budget being spent on production costs — including hotels, daily allowances and airfares. Funding levels must make up for this.</p>
<p>For example, in 2019 the Wellington-based New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) spent almost <a href="https://www.nzso.co.nz/assets/Uploads/downloads/NZSO-AR-2020-AR-ART-PDF.pdf">40% of its total revenue of $20m</a> on mounting its 98 performances around the country. These costs were over and above paying all the personnel and general operating costs.</p>
<p>In contrast, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) spent almost half that proportion of its (<a href="https://www.apo.co.nz/media/3994/apo-annual-report-2019-final.pdf">$12.4-million) budget</a> mounting its 70 performances in Auckland. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GJnyDjz3-iQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">How to play with a pandemic.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Government funding must accommodate high touring costs. Almost three-quarters of the NZSO’s total revenue was derived from government funding. Less than half the APO’s total revenue came from government.</p>
<p>Similarly, the national opera company, NZ Opera, had to <a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC22724">source almost two-thirds of its $6.3-million total revenue</a> from government. Only 15% of its revenue came from box office.</p>
<p>National touring also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. In addition to the 70 APO performances in Auckland in 2019, the NZSO delivered 15 more to satisfy its mandate.</p>
<p>The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra (which received <a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC11437">only 36% of its $3-million total revenue from government</a>), performed 17 concerts in Christchurch. The NZSO performed another four. </p>
<p>On the whole, organisations that stick to their city deliver better value for money. So we should be aiming for organisations with the right size and scope that meet market needs, while still delivering excellence. </p>
<p>That doesn’t mean we won’t have national performing arts organisations. It just means they will be called “national” because they are based in the capital city, much like other countries around the world. </p>
<h2>Size should matter</h2>
<p>There are also issues with very small performing arts organisations.</p>
<p>In 2018 the performing arts employed about 30,000 people. But with almost 10,000 performing arts organisations in NZ that’s an <a href="https://www.skillsactive.org.nz/assets/0-ALL-DOCS/Research-and-projects/2020-Scan/7c3c9f021f/Performing-Arts_Workforce-Scan-2020-FINAL.pdf">average of just three employees per organisation</a>.</p>
<p>The median income for all New Zealanders in 2019 was <a href="https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/assets/paperclip/publication_documents/documents/715/original/20052019_a_profile_of_creative_professionals_report_final.pdf">$51,800</a>. <a href="https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/assets/paperclip/publication_documents/documents/715/original/20052019_a_profile_of_creative_professionals_report_final.pdf">For artists</a> it was $32,400 for those in acting and theatre production, $28,300 in music and sound, and only $17,500 in dance.</p>
<p>In Auckland there has been a proliferation of small contemporary dance companies — assembled around individual choreographers. Achieving efficiency is enormously difficult, with a large proportion of funding going to administrators and managers, not performers.</p>
<p>The scale of these organisations also hobbles their ability to engage in effective marketing and audience development, leading to modest box office take. </p>
<p>Government funding comprised <a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC23088">63% of total revenue</a> for one of these organisations, for another it was <a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC20585">86%</a> and for another, <a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC52642">100%</a>. </p>
<p>Our city-based theatre companies are much better sized to deliver the full package both artistically and managerially.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC11114">Court Theatre</a> in Christchurch received a modest 23% of total revenue from government and 37% from box office. And <a href="https://www.register.charities.govt.nz/Charity/CC23655">Auckland Theatre Company received 36%</a> from government funding and 41% from box office. </p>
<p>So which organisations qualify for recurring CNZ investment funding needs careful reconsideration. This means making some hard decisions about what’s really needed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Court Theatre in Christchurch." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390068/original/file-20210317-21-1xlich8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Court Theatre in Christchurch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/12339061@N06/3887460826/">Flickr/Heather Cuthill</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Collaboration brings benefits</h2>
<p>The second key issue is the need for more deliberate development of the market for performing arts — largely through collaboration.</p>
<p>Currently, arts organisations see each other as competitors. </p>
<p>We know what happens when organisations compete. They are reluctant to collaborate, become risk-averse and carefully protect intellectual property — such as subscriber databases.</p>
<p>But we aren’t talking about Pepsi and Coke. Any ticket sold to a live performance is a small victory for the entire sector. </p>
<p>Our research shows how collaboration between competitors can be used to shape markets, leading to new networks, practices, assumptions and levels of engagement. Ultimately, in the arts this would deliver increased audiences. </p>
<p>A market-shaping strategy works in multiple contexts. For example, what is today the entertainment behemoth Cirque du Soleil emerged in the 1980s. At the time, it was just one of numerous new circus troupes.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470593118809799" title="Markets changing, changing markets: Institutional work as market shaping">what Cirque did differently</a> was to build close connections into related disciplines, including Broadway and gymnastics. It worked closely with circus education programmes, and built truly imaginative productions that challenged the status quo and appealed to a wide range of people.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/has-a-gap-in-old-school-handwriting-and-spelling-tuition-contributed-to-nzs-declining-literacy-scores-155371">Has a gap in old-school handwriting and spelling tuition contributed to NZ's declining literacy scores?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Our research into <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320300813" title="Enhancing value creation in social purpose organizations: Business models that leverage networks">music festivals</a> and the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019850119305942" title="Collaborating to shape markets: Emergent collective market work">wine industry</a> show similar processes and results.</p>
<p>So the appropriate response is for the sector to better articulate the value proposition — the benefit to customers — of the performing arts. Then arts managers should decide how to deliver it together, which will generate some fresh thinking.</p>
<p>When you think about international artists such as André Rieu or, more locally, the Pop-Up Globe, you see great attention put into production values, setting, timing and dedication to audience appeal.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Lots of people in the audience watching a production on stage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391298/original/file-20210323-12-j0d14n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Audiences loved the Pop-Up Globe productions, here in pre-pandemic times with Twelfth Night in 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twelfth_Night_2016_2.jpg">Wikimedia/Benny Vandergast</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For NZ performing arts, a revitalised value proposition might leverage off people’s growing need for experiences that distract them from their busy, digital lives. </p>
<p>Arts funding should not be reduced, nor should it necessarily be increased. Instead, some fresh thinking needs to be applied to the status quo to increase New Zealander’s value for money.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/156488/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Jonathan Baker is a Director of Dance Aotearoa New Zealand (which receives no government funding).</span></em></p>
Some hard decisions need to be made if we are to get better value-for-money performing arts funding from central and local government.
Jonathan Baker, Senior lecturer in business strategy, Auckland University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/135354
2020-04-03T13:32:00Z
2020-04-03T13:32:00Z
These radical artworks force you to look in new ways
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324583/original/file-20200401-66109-hsk64e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5318%2C4000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">FKS</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://0100101110101101.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/FKS0125.jpg">Eva and Franco Mattes</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Time in isolation doesn’t have to mean time alone. Delving into art books, researching art online and even making art can reaffirm human connections and <a href="https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/publications/cultural-value-project-final-report/">increase empathy</a>. And there are online art exhibitions and art platforms for us to visit, discuss, reflect on and contribute to. We may be living in unprecedented times, but art can shine some light on the uncertain pathway ahead. </p>
<p>Art is always “unprecedented”. It offers new perspectives that are often ambiguous and sometimes uncomfortable. Art doesn’t necessarily solve things, but it makes us question and rethink our worldview. It opens up a space for thought and encourages us to respond with creativity and openness. Importantly, this reflective space is shared with others. We ask these questions alongside each other, and we are not alone in our experiences of loss, frustration and uncertainty. Art has the ability to connect us whether it operates at a distance or up close.</p>
<h2>Contagious images</h2>
<p>Sometimes artists take risks, endangering their health in order to create or sustain this reflective space.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z4pfNqFWvBM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>In 2011, in the months following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, art collective <a href="http://chimpom.jp/project/dfw.html">Chim↑Pom</a> initiated a project called Don’t Follow the Wind, an exhibition of works by 12 artists within the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. </p>
<p>The exhibition itself cannot be viewed. The Fukushima Exclusion Zone was evacuated after the disaster due to the high radiation levels. By installing Don’t Follow the Wind in this contaminated zone, the artists have made sure that documentation of this unseeable exhibition sustains critical attention to a complex, and continually-unfolding humanitarian crisis. As the Japanese Government are still facing accusations of covering up the extent of the damage, documentation of Don’t Follow the Wind can be seen in cities all around the world from Sydney to Sweden, reminding us of the impact of the disaster. </p>
<p>One featured project, <a href="http://0100101110101101.org/fukushima-texture-pack/">Fukushima Texture Pack</a> by Franco and Eva Mattes, documented the textures of the irradiated surfaces. These photographic images can be downloaded for free as seamless digital prints and used by other creatives, such as video game designers. Here, the radiated surfaces proliferate through the cultural industries, perhaps undetected. A contagious image of a quarantined surface.</p>
<h2>Bleeding for art</h2>
<p>Artists sometimes spark fear through provocative attempts to open up a space for thinking and rethinking. </p>
<p>In 1994, in response to a different crisis – Aids – the American artist Ron Athey created a performance in which he cut patterns into the skin of another performer, Divinity P. Fudge (Darryl Carlton). The cuts were performed as rituals representing reflections on Aids and homophobia. Athey blotted Carlton’s bleeding body with towels before hanging them on a clothes line. The audience was standing beneath this clothes line. </p>
<p>This performance – <a href="http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/w6m909kc.html">Four Scenes From a Harsh Life</a> – generated so much fear of contamination from HIV positive blood (although Carlton was HIV-negative) that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/07/arts/for-endowment-one-performer-means-trouble.html">restrictions</a> were placed on funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the short term, the artwork was censored, but discussions on homophobia and body image haven’t gone away. Four Scenes From a Harsh Life confronted these issues head on and has become a cultural event of enduring significance.</p>
<h2>Consensual and non-consensual closeness</h2>
<p>Although these artists perhaps get “too close” through their art, other artists perform social distancing in a way that reinforces human connection. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HvcQ39OBzzo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>In 2010, artist Marina Abramović undertook a performance using her body as her artistic media. In The Artist is Present, Abramović spent eight hours a day, for three months, looking into the eyes of 1,000 individuals who took turns to sit six feet away from her. Participants queued for hours to sit opposite Abramović and hold her gaze, and often individuals were moved to tears during the performance. Here social distance is offset by the intimacy of this eye contact, the attention of another and the need for connection.</p>
<p>A less consensual connection took place in the French writer and artist Sophie Calle’s <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calle-venetian-suite-t13640">Suite Venitienne</a>, published in 1979. Earlier that year Calle had met a man, Henri B, at a party. He was about to travel to Venice. Calle decided to follow him at a distance, wearing a blonde wig. She contacted his neighbour, and began to document his daily life through a nearby window and by tracking his movements throughout the city. Fascinated by the very fact that she could follow him, Calle documents her own emotional journey as a stalker, coolly evaluating her feelings of love and desire for connection. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pn7e8iR8AoI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Suite Venitienne contains her documentary photography right up to a final confrontation with Henri, in which he blocks the camera with his hand. In much of her work, Calle’s time spent alone and isolated is the starting point of a new journey. Responding to her own sense of introversion, she creates critical distance from her thoughts, exposing them to curious and often empathetic audiences.</p>
<p>Art, sometimes too close for comfort and other times at an unreachable distance, nevertheless reaffirms a human connection. We may be in a long-distance relationship with art, for a short while at least, but it’s all the more important to stay connected and to keep art in our lives for its warmth, humanity and unexpected insights. </p>
<h2>Please hold while we try to connect you</h2>
<ul>
<li><p><strong><a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/project/frida-kahlo">Faces of Frida</a></strong> – An intimate portrayal of Frida Kahlo through her life along with her art and cultural legacy.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><a href="https://nightwatchexperience.com/en/">Experience Rembrandt’s Nightwatch</a></strong> – Find out what makes the Nightwatch such a unique painting.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/bmw-tate-live-exhibition-2020">My Body, My Archive</a></strong> – Congolese choreographer and dancer Faustin Linyekula re-invents a scheduled performance at the Tate Modern that had been cancelled following closure of the gallery.</p></li>
<li><p><strong><a href="https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks?dm_i=56G9,6H96,125RTG,ODPQ,1">ICA talks</a></strong> – An archive of discussion events and talks held at the ICA between 1982-1993.</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135354/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jessica Holtaway does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
From Fukushima to a stalkers visual diary, art can be confrontational whether it’s far away or uncomfortably close
Jessica Holtaway, Lecturer in Visual Communication, Solent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/128571
2019-12-09T15:29:12Z
2019-12-09T15:29:12Z
The $120,000 banana: how to have your art and eat it
<p>For his latest work at the international Art Basel fair, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan bought a banana, duct-taped it to the wall of the gallery and called it Comedian. Over the weekend, American artist David Datuna upped the ante when <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50704136">he created a performance piece entitled Hungry Artist</a>, wherein he ate the banana. A video of the performance appears on his <a href="https://www.instagram.com/david_datuna/?hl=en">Instagram account</a>, where he comments that he loves Cattelan’s work, adding “it’s very delicious”. </p>
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<p>Within days of its installation, <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/06/someone-paid-120000-banana-duct-taped-wall-art-11304744/">two collectors had purchased it for US$120,000 each</a> and several museums are bidding for the third edition for US$150,000. Datuna eating the banana changed nothing, because the work of art is the idea, confirmed by the <a href="https://news.artnet.com/market/cattelan-banana-art-art-basel-1725678">certificate of authenticity</a>, which is what the buyers really purchased.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2#images">Cattelan</a> is no stranger to controversy. In 2016, his work <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/maurizio-cattelan-america">America</a>, an 18-carat fully functional gold toilet, was hailed as a “comment on art, money and Trumpian desire”. The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones recounted, in his review, how he had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/16/maurizio-cattelan-solid-gold-toilet-america-stolen-blenheim-palace">actually used the toilet</a> for its proper non-artistic function. In September 2019 it made the headlines again when it was <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/police-seeking-maurizio-cattelan-s-stolen-gold-toilet">stolen from Blenheim Palace</a>, where it had been on exhibition. It has not been recovered.</p>
<p>Artists intervening with another work of art in an act of performance is nothing new. In 1999, two Chinese artists, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/1999/oct/25/20yearsoftheturnerprize.turnerprize">JJ Xi and Yuan Chai, jumped on Tracey Emin’s My Bed</a> installation when it was on view at the Tate Gallery. And a number of artists “contributed” to Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain (1917) by urinating in it, including Kendell Greers, Brian Eno and Björn Kjelltoft. Unlike Cattelan’s America, Duchamp’s urinal was not plumbed, making these contributions rather messy.</p>
<p>So why is a banana a work of art worth US$120,000, and why is a performance artist eating it considered art?</p>
<h2>But is it art?</h2>
<p>The notion of what art is has <a href="https://frieze.com/article/how-has-art-changed">shifted over time</a>. In the 20th century, changes in our understanding of the world caused artists to think differently. Artistic technique was valued less than the ability to convey an idea. </p>
<p>Datuna’s work is an example of performance art, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/25739638.2019.1643056">an ephemeral art form</a> that became <a href="https://www.artsy.net/gene/1960s">popular in the 1960s</a>, as a way for artists to create art that couldn’t be bought or sold, and to engage a wider audience. Such a visceral form of art is hard to ignore, and reaction has often been key to performance art – shaking people up from the trance of everyday life to see things differently.</p>
<p>Where some saw a US$120,000 banana duct-taped to a wall, Datuna saw something different – he saw food for a “starving artist”, a trope referring to an artist who sacrifices material comfort for art. In many ways, the performance artist does just that, prioritising the work of art above profit.</p>
<p>Datuna’s work was ephemeral, existing in the moment. Equally, Cattelan’s installation was ephemeral, as eventually the original banana would have decomposed. The art work cannot be about the banana, a found object that can be purchased anywhere. The art work is the idea, and only Cattelan had that precise idea and executed it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305882/original/file-20191209-90618-17hgj1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artwork for The Velvet Underground and Nico album cover.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andy Warhol</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The move toward ephemerality came from artists’ desire for realism. In the 19th century, the Impressionists captured the experience of viewing a landscape with its changing light and atmospheric conditions. Eventually we came to accept these pastoral scenes even though the brushwork was less precise and “realistic” than we were used to. When they were first exhibited, those <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm">paintings were controversial</a>, not unlike the controversy around Cattelan’s and Datuna’s work today. </p>
<p>Soon, artists realised that a flat, two-dimensional surface couldn’t adequately capture real life, so, they shifted their focus to life itself. This shift had two facets: one, artists used real objects in their work – like Duchamp’s Fountain – and, second, they incorporated the lived experience. </p>
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<p>Perhaps the most well-known recent example was that of performance artist Marina Abramovic and her <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/marina-abramovic-marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-2010/">Artist is Present</a> performance at MoMA in 2010, where she sat in the gallery for hours each day.</p>
<h2>Crafty move</h2>
<p>There are those who will denounce Cattelan, stating that “anyone could do that” – even a five-year-old. But this is a nostalgic view as to what art is. Like the rest of the world, art has evolved – and different things matter to artists now. </p>
<p>The shift to real objects was a way for artists to express their ideas efficiently. Bananas are a global commodity, and represent a significant amount of trade, wealth and poverty. Polish artist Natalia LL’s <a href="https://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka/praca/ll-natalia-sztuka-konsumpcyjna?age18=true">Consumer Art</a> fetishised the banana at a time when it was a precious commodity in communist Poland, making it an object of both sexual and material desire. </p>
<p>By contrast, bananas are also the bane of the comic fool, who somehow always manages to slip on their peels. And what could be more tragicomical than the manner in which prices are often randomly fixed to both commodities—and art? And why should art be a commodity at all?</p>
<p>There are also those who will decry Datuna for destroying the work. But that, too, expresses a sentimental view of art. Performance artists wanted to avoid elitism, wherein only a genius could be declared an artist. Performance art democratised art, enabling everyone to express their creative potential. Cattelan’s America captures some of that – a gold toilet that few could own, but everyone can use. Perhaps it would be better if art were useful rather than a commodity.</p>
<p>Datuna’s performance neither destroyed the work – a replacement banana was found immediately – nor aimed to profit from it. And this is key. Recently, a Faroese watch company wanted to cut up Danish artist Tal R’s painting and use it to decorate their watch faces, but a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/02/danish-court-rules-artist-work-cannot-be-cut-up-to-make-watches-tal-r">Danish court ruled</a> that it was an alteration to the artwork and attempted to profit from it – it was was therefore declared illegal.</p>
<p>When one reacts to a work by a performance artist by saying that a five year old could do that, I imagine they might say: “Yes, that is precisely the point.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128571/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Bryzgel has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Royal Society of Edinburgh, British Academy, and Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.</span></em></p>
When artist Maurizio Cattelan’s work Comedian sold for $120,000, the art world went bananas. Little did we know it wasn’t the end of the story.
Amy Bryzgel, Professor of Film and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/113012
2019-03-19T10:45:32Z
2019-03-19T10:45:32Z
A half-century before the hashtag, artists were on the front lines of #MeToo
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263996/original/file-20190314-28496-5xqy4w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 2002 installation 'Rape Garage' displayed statistics about rape, along with first-person narratives about sexual trauma.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stefanie Bruser, Josh Edwards, Katie Grone and Lindsey Lee. Mixed media site installation at “At Home: A Kentucky Project with Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman.” 2001-2002. Courtesy the Flower Archive, housed at the Pennsylvania State University Archives.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The #MeToo movement has had a sweeping effect on politics, organized religion, educational institutions, Hollywood, sports and the military. </p>
<p>The cultural prominence of rape and sexual assault might be new. Efforts to bring attention to the issue, however, are not. </p>
<p>Beginning in the 1970s, a group of female artists in the U.S. started confronting rape, incest and sexual assault through performances, videos, quilts and other nontraditional media. </p>
<p>By tackling a taboo subject, they were at the forefront of raising public awareness of these issues. In my new book “<a href="http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08206-6.html">Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970</a>,” I detail how their relentless efforts to end the silence surrounding sexual violence against women reverberates in the #MeToo movement today.</p>
<h2>The ‘heroic’ rapes of the Renaissance</h2>
<p>When these feminist artists emerged, they sought to counter what art historians call “the heroic rape tradition of Western art.” </p>
<p>Beginning in the Renaissance, this tradition involved artists’ rendering assault, rape and murder against women with a patina of beauty and heroism that masked the reality of the violence. For example, Titian’s “Rape of Europa” depicts the ancient Greek myth in which Zeus turned himself into a bull to abduct Europa and bring her to Crete. There, he revealed his identity, raped her and fathered three children. </p>
<p>In Titian’s rendering, he depicted Europa as an eroticized woman who seems to writhe in pleasure on the bull’s back as they fly into the sky. The painting’s playful cupids, dynamic composition and rich colors belie the fact that Zeus is about to rape Europa.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263997/original/file-20190314-28505-1pf3432.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Titian. ‘Rape of Europa.’ 1559-62. Oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tizian_085.jpg">Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Mass, USA. Bridgeman Images. 70 x 80.7 in.
</a></span>
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<p>In Correggio’s “Jupiter and Io,” Jupiter, the Roman king of the gods, disguises himself as a cloud as he embraces the nymph, who has no idea that it’s actually Jupiter who’s seducing her. The lecherous act is depicted erotically, and Io seems to be enjoying it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264132/original/file-20190315-28492-1ymk2nm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Correggio. ‘Jupiter and Io.’ 1540s. Oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antonio_Allegri,_called_Correggio_-_Jupiter_and_Io_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. De Agostini Picture Library. G. Nimatallah. Bridgeman Images. 64.4 x 27.8 in.</a></span>
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<p>Over time, many scholars and critics, mostly male, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_Art.html?id=vp2Sj9MyDpkC">have praised these works</a> for their dramatic compositions, enticing colors and idealized figures. Little consideration was given to the violent sexual subject matter. </p>
<p>But by the 1980s, some art historians, mostly women, <a href="https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/the-subject-of-rape">expressed unease</a> about the sexually violent content of these revered works. They pointed out that representations of rape – even within the context of mythological, biblical and historical subject matter – seemed to glorify the act. </p>
<p>Why, they wondered, wasn’t anyone talking about the fact that this violent subject matter was so prevalent, accepted and praised? Why hadn’t anyone questioned it? Was it indicative of a larger problem beyond the world of art?</p>
<h2>Two artists change the narrative</h2>
<p>Raising consciousness about sexual trauma required creating a visual counternarrative. Rape wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t beautiful. And it certainly shouldn’t be acceptable. </p>
<p>Two artists, Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, were at the forefront of this movement. </p>
<p>They produced at least seven large-scale and complex public performances in Los Angeles that helped redefine rape as a crime of aggression and act of female subjugation.</p>
<p>One was a 1977 work titled “<a href="https://www.againstviolence.art/">Three Weeks in May</a>.” As part of the series of performances and installations, Lacy marked up two bright yellow municipal maps of Los Angeles located in City Mall Plaza. On the first map she stenciled the word “rape” in four-inch red letters over every location where a woman had been raped over a three-week period. She updated the map daily, using data from the Los Angeles Police Department.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Suzanne Lacy. ‘Maps.’ ‘Three Weeks in May.’ 1977. Ink on printed map. Los Angeles.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Suzanne Lacy</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the second map, she highlighted the locations of prevention centers, rape hotlines, hospital emergency rooms, and crisis and counseling centers. </p>
<p>Passersby checking out the maps – whether they were City Hall employees, tourists or shoppers – were instantly exposed to the overwhelming number of rapes that had occurred in the city, along with the resources available to assist victims.</p>
<p>Lacy and Labowitz were able to generate awareness, attract media attention and encourage survivors to seek help.</p>
<h2>An anti-rape drumbeat</h2>
<p>Over the years, Lacy, Labowitz and other artists continued to reiterate these themes in their work. </p>
<p>Sue Coe’s 1983 painting “Woman Walks into Bar – Is Raped by Four Men on the Pool Table – While 20 Watch” condemned the fact that four men brutally and publicly gang-raped a 21-year-old woman while patrons in a New Bedford, Massachusetts, tavern looked on and did nothing.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264008/original/file-20190314-28471-kdnsls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sue Coe. ‘Woman Walks into Bar – Is Raped by Four Men on the Pool Table – While 20 Watch.’ 1983. Mixed mediums collage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Sue Coe. The Museum of Modern Art, Acquisition from Werner and Elaine Dannheisser (880.1996). Licensed by SCALA, Art Resource, N.Y.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 2002 installation “Rape Garage,” by Stefanie Bruser, Josh Edwards, Katie Grone and Lindsey Lee, was part of the “<a href="https://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/about/onsite-archive/teaching-projects/at-home/">At Home</a>” project at Western Kentucky University, which was facilitated by feminist artist Judy Chicago and her husband, Donald Woodman. Participants constructed installations that explored the themes of womanhood and manhood in different rooms of a house in Kentucky. As its name suggests, “Rape Garage” was an installation in the house’s garage. It highlighted the issue of rape by displaying statistics and posting first-person narratives of sexual trauma. It suggested that pornography encouraged rape and even included the fact that a man could be raped by a woman.</p>
<p>Then, in 2012, Lacy and Labowitz performed an updated version of “Three Weeks in May” titled “<a href="http://cargocollective.com/suzannelacyprojects/Three-Weeks-in-January-2012">Three Weeks in January</a>.” </p>
<p>Once again, Lacy created a rape map, this time installing it outside of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Deaton Auditorium. </p>
<p>Although the map indicated that the number of rapes had decreased in the last 35 years, it showed that sexual violence remained a problem, especially in high schools and on college campuses. Viewers were encouraged to spread awareness by tweeting or blogging about the work.</p>
<p>Other artists continued to follow their lead. Most notably, Emma Sulkowicz, a visual arts major at Columbia University, became a national figure for a piece she titled “<a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/09/emma-sulkowicz-campus-sexual-assault-activism.html">Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight</a>,” which some compared to the 1970s anti-rape performances.</p>
<p>During her sophomore year, Sulkowicz said she had been raped. After a university adjudicating committee found her alleged assailant not guilty, she decided she couldn’t stay silent. </p>
<p>Over an eight-month period during her senior year, she carried a mattress similar to the one on which she had been raped to all of her classes and even her graduation. Other students joined her at Columbia University and other colleges to further protest against rape on college campuses.</p>
<h2>The rest of the country joins forces</h2>
<p>These clarion calls have been around for decades, but they were lonely voices that often went unheeded or unheard. Then, in 2016, things started to change. More and more women – and men – began to speak out to end the silence and demand justice.</p>
<p>In 2018, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/larry-nassar-trial-highlights-judge-rosemarie-aquilina-s-sentencing-ex-n840726">Judge Rosemary Aquilina sentenced</a> ex-USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar to up to 175 years in prison for his serial sexual abuse of female minors and young adults. </p>
<p>“It stops now,” Aquilina proclaimed. “Speak out like these survivors, become part of the army.”</p>
<p>The more than 150 female athletes’ voices heard on television and radio and read in newspapers had become part of that army. They had joined the hundreds of victims of the Catholic Church, Hollywood stars, bosses, journalists and politicians who have stepped forward since the dawn of the #MeToo movement. </p>
<p>But let’s not forget the feminist artists who were on the front lines – who bravely spoke out to end the silence when few addressed the taboo topics about domestic violence, rape and incest.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/113012/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vivien G. Fryd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Many Renaissance-era masterworks depicted rape and sexual assault as erotic. Beginning in the 1970s, artists worked to redefine rape as a crime of aggression and act of female subjugation.
Vivien G. Fryd, Professor of Art History, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/104660
2018-10-10T12:04:36Z
2018-10-10T12:04:36Z
Banksy: I was in the room when his painting shredded – and enhanced his brand
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239913/original/file-20181009-72121-de1092.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Art with a wow factor.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Banksy/Instagram</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Serious collectors of contemporary art had already started to leave the room at the Sotheby’s New Bond Street auction house in London last Friday night as a successful evening sale drew to a close. Most people seemed more interested in getting to their post-auction dinners than in the final two lots: paintings by <a href="https://hypebeast.com/people/kaws">KAWS</a> and Banksy, who are generally perceived to be interesting for new or young buyers but not serious collectors. KAWS, the American graffiti artist also known as Brian Donnelly, is seen as too comic; Banksy as too “street”. </p>
<p>That doesn’t mean they are not in high demand. KAWS’ large yellow comic face, Again and Again, sold for just over £1m, making him – in the words of auctioneer Oliver Barker – the Damien Hirst of the 21st century. And the last lot of the sale was Banksy’s 2006 Girl with Balloon, which was last year named in one survey as the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-40717821">UK’s favourite artwork</a>. </p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, bidding was intense and the hammer came down at £860,000, making a final sales price (including buyer’s fees) of £1,042,000 – quadrupling the previous estimate of the work. But the moment after the hammer came down a faint alarm went off in the room and, shortly after, in front of a roomful of gawping faces, the canvas slipped out of the frame, being shredded in the process by some concealed machine, before being hurriedly carried away by attendants. </p>
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<p>Under near chaotic circumstances, the sale ended. At the delayed press conference, all Sotheby’s experts would say was: “<a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/sothebys-gets-banksyed-at-contemporary-art-auction-in-london">We got Banksy-ed</a>”. And all they did was to reiterate that they had no prior knowledge of the prank, failing to shift attention away from it. </p>
<h2>Performance art</h2>
<p>In our media crazy society, everyone likes a prank – especially when it hits the top end of the art market which excludes all but the very rich. So to nobody’s surprise this story has gone viral, cheered on by Banksy’s “official” Instagram feed, where he not only claimed ownership of the prank, but also “documented” its genesis. </p>
<p>Since then, speculation around the value of the shredded piece and Banksy’s role in the art world has led to a lot of hype. But what needs to be considered here is not only value generation in the art market but ultimately the role and agency of the artist within the market’s resale structure, where artists usually benefit only marginally from the resale of any of their works. That the stunt happened during the <a href="https://frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london">Frieze Art Fairs</a>, one of the most important art fairs for contemporary art worldwide, has also given it added currency.</p>
<p>As a case study, the prank has been so successful that it will occupy the art world – as well as academics and students of the art market – for a long time to come. It might even become art history’s most famous stunt. Who are the involved parties, for example? Despite a <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/banksy-painting-questions-intl/index.html">great deal of speculative comment</a>, I don’t think Sotheby’s was in on the game. The story really doesn’t benefit them; it detracted from all the other good news the evening was supposed to spread. </p>
<p>At this point, Sotheby’s is still claiming – and it does sound plausible – not to have touched the work or its frame, following the instructions of Banksy’s studio that the frame is an integral part of the work. Again, not unusual. Neither does the inclusion of the piece in the auction come as a surprise. As a quick search on <a href="https://www.artnet.com/price-database/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8uCM-q373QIVg53VCh1GaAnDEAAYASAAEgLPevD_BwE">Artnet’s price database</a> shows, no less than <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/banksy/past-auction-results/4">26 works by Banksy</a> have been offered this year alone at auction – most of them with very good results above estimates. Banksy is hot. </p>
<p>So the fact that the work sold for more than £1m is not surprising, considering both the previous auction prices of the artists and the buoyant atmosphere of the sale that evening.</p>
<p>More interesting, of course, is what the work is worth now. Despite excitement by the press, claiming that it would now be worth far more (and what appears to be a copycat attempt by a collector to <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/banksy-artwork-plummets-40000-1-13387036">shred his own print copy of the painting</a>), the case has not been decided contractually yet. In a comment to the author, the auction house states it is unclear whether the sale will go through and that negotiations are still ongoing. There is a debate to be had that the buyer obviously bid on a work in pristine condition – and we won’t know if the work is worth double its sale price until it has been sold again in this state. </p>
<p>It’s a tempting thought – and a terrific story – but an artist’s stunt and a weekend buzz are not a guarantor for ongoing investment value. It will, however, surely alert any auction house to ensure proper due diligence and conservation examinations when taking on more of his works.</p>
<h2>Banksy’s brand</h2>
<p>But where does Banksy stand, as someone who so happily seems to claim to stand outside the market? Given he is so against the resale of his work, has he attempted to sabotage more of his works? As mentioned above, his paintings as well as prints often come up at auction and have been an integral part of his output for years. For street artists who have become famous for often radical actions, the question of how to interact with a collector market has always been a challenge. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240013/original/file-20181010-72117-1vtujma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Banksy Swinger in New Orleans.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Infrogmation of New Orleans</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But one thing is for sure: if this was instigated by Banksy as a marketing stunt it was a big success. Even if the future of this particular Girl with Balloon is as yet unclear, Banksy’s name will be in everybody’s mind and his brand value has definitely risen. </p>
<p>So let’s wait and see what he will produce and sell next. In the meantime, the people cashing in on this story are also the so-called art experts who keep media outlets busy with comments – most of them, let’s not forget, unproven and highly speculative. And as such this story is a perfect image of the contemporary art market today – about money, but at least as much about the buzz.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104660/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Dieckvoss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Was it a marketing stunt or a critique of the market itself?
Stephanie Dieckvoss, Senior Lecturer, Kingston University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/95471
2018-04-26T10:13:38Z
2018-04-26T10:13:38Z
Nick Cave sets out for a Distant Sky hand-in-hand with his audience
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216465/original/file-20180426-175061-1tsxm5v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Screenshot from Distant Sky (2018).</span> </figcaption></figure><p>It’s October 2017 and a crowd has filled the Royal Arena in Copenhagen for a performance by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Fans crowded at the edge of the stage applaud feverishly when Cave appears. The singer has the microphone in his right hand and gestures with the left. Standing almost directly above the audience, his hands hover over spectators’ heads, inviting them to reach out to him – his body almost touches them. And when he sings “Can you feel my heart beat?”, Cave grasps spectators’ hands and brings them to his chest. After a brief moment of puzzlement, the audience responds, offering him their hands. </p>
<p>This is not just another rock concert. This is the band’s first concert tour after the loss of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur, who <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/nick-cave-talks-death-of-son-arthur-2066069">died in July 2015</a>. The audience is well aware of the traumatic effect on Cave – he shared this in the 2016 film One More Time With Feeling. </p>
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<blockquote>
<p>You change from a known person to an unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognise the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On stage, Cave’s hands run the show – the hands that hold the microphone and give it to spectators to hold while he rhythmically claps. The hands that play the piano, that touch, grab, grasp, hold spectators’ hands. The hands that grab towels to wipe his sweat, the hands that hug a young spectator. The hands that the audience hold so tight, as if they are helping to keep him on his feet, to keep going.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216205/original/file-20180424-57614-1dd0ccz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Movie poster for Cave’s Distant Sky concert film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sylvia Solakidi</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But how about the others that Cave cannot physically touch? The Royal Arena has a capacity of 12,500 people. How can someone – like myself – seated among 20,000 spectators near the back row of the O2 Arena in London a few days before the Copenhagen concert, get touched by this? But I did. And I felt that touch again just recently, while sitting in a movie theatre watching a recording of the Copenhagen concert in the <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/news/new-nick-cave-bad-seeds-live-concert-film-distant-sky/">film Distant Sky</a>.</p>
<p>I could hear Cave’s voice. I could see his body and the handclasps. I could see others hearing and seeing him. And I held and was held by the performer’s and spectators’ hands. Magic?</p>
<h2>Communication and empathy</h2>
<p>Touch is remarkable in the way it connects. According to the French philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/">Maurice Merleau-Ponty</a> (1908-1961), when my two hands clasp each other, or one of my hands clasps yours, both hands are touching and are touched and they establish a connection between them, between us. But who is touching who – and who is holding who? Me or you, Cave or his spectators? This is mutual communication without words. I reach out to you and I take the risk that you may withdraw your hand, refuse touch, refuse connection.</p>
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<p>When Cave sings “With my voice I am calling you’, he invites spectators to touch his hand, when he demands "Look at me now!” he grasps their hands. While the body of the singer sings of his need for connection, spectators touch by seeing and hearing. According to Merleau-Ponty, touch is a model sense and different senses interrelate like “hands” – they “touch” each other and through their interweaving, they allow people to connect. </p>
<p>Influenced by Merleau-Ponty, in the 1990s, the Italian neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered <a href="http://www.gocognitive.net/interviews/giacomo-rizzolatti-mirror-neurons">mirror neurons</a>, which are activated both when we see and when we act. He conducted experiments showing that empathy is possible because when we see a gesture being performed, it is as if we are doing it ourselves. In this way, touch can “touch” other people. </p>
<h2>Intense emotion</h2>
<p>The effect of Cave’s handclasp with one person is amplified through seeing and hearing – and the intensity of their connection explodes in the huge concert venues making them “smoking, boiling, melting, burning” – to quote the words stencilled on his concert piano. We experienced the same intensity sitting in our seats in the movie theatre. When the camera switches from close-ups or medium shots of the first rows to long shots of the Royal Arena, the audience exploded just as if they were in the venue itself.</p>
<p>When Cave sings “I need you” and his body and voice crack, the audience sees the trauma of his son’s death. He transforms the music into “a weeping song” – but it isn’t for his son alone. We respond because we all have a precious person, that – in Cave’s words from his song Girl in Amber – we wish that “no part of her go unremembered”. Together we are a strong body of hearing, seeing and touching that makes an event of togetherness happen. In the end, when we “push the sky away” with our raised arms, we also push grief away, we are filled with delight and gratitude. </p>
<p>In his live performance documented in the film Distant Sky, Cave has revealed the power of the familiar – more often than not underrated – format of the rock concert, through the unexpected element of touch that “gets you right down to your soul”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95471/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sylvia Solakidi receives funding from TECHNE-AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. She is a second year PhD student at the University of Surrey</span></em></p>
The film of Cave’s first tour since the death of his son is powerful and evocative.
Sylvia Solakidi, PhD Researcher in Performance Philosophy, University of Surrey
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/86493
2017-10-31T14:57:47Z
2017-10-31T14:57:47Z
It’s not just grime – council estates produce all sorts of art
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192272/original/file-20171027-13378-gb7s7r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/dreary-london-housing-estate-pedestrian-footbridge-688177909?src=bDzvtEGHvToCGQSVhN86kw-2-32">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The music video for grime artist Skepta’s <a href="http://www.mobo.com/winners/2015">award-winning</a> single “Shut Down” is shot in the concrete courtyard of an inner city council estate. With an army of baseball cap wearing peers, dancing, smoking and tapping at mobile phones, the video celebrates the spirit of community and resistance that exists in urban working class communities. </p>
<p>Similar messages of survival and resistance – with estate imagery forming a backdrop – can be seen in many British hip hop and grime videos. They include Plan B’s Ill Manors, Skinny Man’s Council Estate of Mind and Tricky’s Council Estate. </p>
<p>The roots of this <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137454263">“hood” aesthetic</a> can be traced back to the hip hop culture that emerged from marginalised, black urban communities in late 20th-century America. When I ask my students what kinds of culture they associate with the words “council estate”, grime and hip hop are the most common answers. </p>
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<p>It is true that these forms of estate expression do dominate popular music. But residents of estates are engaged in a range of other cultural endeavours. And by paying attention to this range of creative possibilities we can challenge the <a href="http://leftfootforward.org/2014/06/its-time-to-defend-social-housing-against-media-stereotypes/">negative perception</a> that has contributed to the well-documented <a href="https://theconversation.com/theresa-mays-speech-and-the-challenge-to-expand-english-social-housing-85218">crisis of social housing</a>.</p>
<p>Yet estate artists who receive critical attention are often positioned as exceptional. For example, the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who created the cult-classic <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091859/">Rita, Sue and Bob Too!</a> has been called a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/andrea-dunbar-a-genius-from-the-slums-2105874.html">“genius from the slums”</a>. Coverage of her work often suggests that the home she grew up in was an unlikely place for such talent to develop. </p>
<p>Similarly, when the artist <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/17/khadija-saye-artist-was-on-cusp-of-recognition-when-she-died-in-grenfell">Khadija Saye</a> died in the horrific <a href="https://theconversation.com/grenfell-tower-disaster-how-did-the-fire-spread-so-quickly-79445">Grenfell Tower fire</a>, much was made of the fact that her estate residency was unknown to the gallery directors who showed an interest in her work. </p>
<p>Without wanting to downplay the achievements of Dunbar and Saye, and the obvious barriers that exist for working class people attempting to make a living from the arts, the idea that creativity is an exception on estates is not borne out by the richness of the artworks produced in and about these spaces. </p>
<p>Just like those living in other types of homes, working class estate residents make a positive contribution to cultural life. They express their humanity by making and taking part in art works that reflect the struggles and joys of their existence.</p>
<p>As the <a href="https://architectsforsocialhousing.wordpress.com/2017/09/10/mapping-londons-estate-regeneration-programme/">threat to social housing</a> posed by demolition and regeneration increases, residents turn to art to fight back. On the estate where he lives in Bethnal Green, London, <a href="http://www.jordanmckenzie.co.uk">artist Jordan McKenzie</a> performs as his alter-ego, “Monsieur Poo-Pourri”, an aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and treats his council estate like a country manor. </p>
<p>By playfully traversing his estate on a hobby-horse, McKenzie – who has exhibited work across the world – subverts ideas about estates. He draws attention to the green spaces of his home, illuminating the potential for play and exploration offered by his surroundings. </p>
<p>Andrea Luka Zimmerman, working with the <a href="http://www.fugitiveimages.org.uk/about/">Fugitive Images collective</a>, has documented the painful experience of displacement in the moving film Estate: A Reverie. She shows how the regeneration of her London estate was experienced by her neighbours, displaying the human side of the housing crisis. </p>
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<p>Director <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jun/16/dispossession-great-social-housing-swindle-review-paul-sng-documentary-britain">Paul Sng’s film</a> Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle, also focuses on the voices of residents, revealing how the systematic destruction of social housing for profit affects communities and individuals. </p>
<p>In the theatre, artists including <a href="https://www.cptheatre.co.uk/production/20-b/">Jane English (20B)</a> and <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2017/denmarked-review-battersea-arts-centre-london/">Conrad Murray (DenMarked)</a>, recall their experiences of growing up on estates. Murray’s mash-up of Shakespeare, song and beat-boxing reflects the richness of his upbringing, while English poetically demonstrates the lasting connection to others fostered by estate life. </p>
<h2>Artistic benefits</h2>
<p>There are also writers including Bola Agbaje (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/feb/09/theatre">Gone too Far!</a>), Caitlin Moran (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/may/29/caitlin-moran-raised-by-wolves-sitcom">Raised by Wolves</a>) and Michaela Coel (<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/08/chewing-gum-third-season">Chewing Gum</a>), who have created screen dramas that draw on their experiences of estates to examine and celebrate these spaces. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hPL37RpxOuk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Negative representations of estate residents (and of working class people generally) in “<a href="http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/3.html">poverty porn</a>” shows such as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02r76ws">Channel 4’s Benefits Street</a>, have an impact on how the public views government policy aimed at these groups. </p>
<p>In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster many people pointed out how constant representations of estate residents as drug dealers, benefit cheats and feckless single mothers had created a culture where those living on estates are no longer treated as fully human. </p>
<p>For those of us who understand access to safe, decent, secure housing as a basic human right, emphasising the humanity of estate residents is a priority. </p>
<p>The artworks made on estates reveal in no uncertain terms how the destruction of social housing threatens not only the lives of residents, but the cultural life and the <a href="https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/art-loss-social-housing/">human spirit of our cities</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86493/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katie Beswick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Self-expression from the streets.
Katie Beswick, Lecturer in Drama, University of Exeter
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/79747
2017-07-17T20:05:13Z
2017-07-17T20:05:13Z
Strapped, packed and taking the stage: Australia’s new drag kings
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176501/original/file-20170702-8514-1b657h4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some drag kings draw on facial hair to perform masculinity. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Sneakers</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Those with only a passing interest in gay culture will no doubt have heard of drag queens, aided by the meteoric rise of US reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which recently finished its ninth season. But perhaps fewer have heard of their corollary, drag kings. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=972&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=972&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=972&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1222&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1222&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177803/original/file-20170712-13828-1sf5vjd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1222&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Drag kings often get political.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fancy Piece</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A “drag queen” refers to a man, usually gay, dressed as a woman for the purposes of entertainment. Likewise a “drag king” can be loosely described as an individual (usually a woman, but also people who identify as other genders) who consciously performs masculinity.</p>
<p>Drag kings became a significant part of lesbian and queer women’s lives globally from the late 1980s. Events featuring drag king performances were an important part of queer culture: the performances often were seen as ways to explore gender and sexuality, and they commonly took place in gay- and lesbian-friendly venues. This meant that drag king events were often associated with “safe spaces” and formed the basis of thriving social scenes. </p>
<p>In recent years drag king performances globally have declined in popularity and were in danger of fading from our cultural view. The reasons behind this are many, including the fact that the debate around gender is evolving, and drag is seen by some as increasingly problematic. But recently, there’s been a resurgence of more inclusive forms of drag culture in Australia, and new kings are taking the stage. </p>
<h2>Games of thrones</h2>
<p>While both performance styles come under the umbrella term of “drag”, kings and queens have different origins and have evolved in different ways. The word “drag” most like comes from 19th century theatrical cross-dressing, and is now commonly associated with gay or camp comedy.</p>
<p>Traditionally, drag queens are seen as parodying the characteristics associated with women. We immediately think of drag queens with big hair and overdone make-up, and body language that conforms to stereotypical “female” behaviour (though not all drag queens do perform this type of exaggerated femininity). This in effect draws attention to what the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to as the “artifice of femininity”, or the excessive ornamentation and self-display of women. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=649&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=649&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177799/original/file-20170712-14421-1ttvgpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=649&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fancy Piece ‘packs’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leo deLush</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Performing masculinity, as drag kings do, is arguably more difficult. Masculinity is perceived as more natural or ingrained than femininity, so drag kings can’t simply dress up but have to rely on other performance techniques.</p>
<p>Some drag kings “strap and pack” (binding their breasts to give the appearance of a flat chest and wearing a dildo or other similarly shaped object to give the impression of male genitalia). Others draw on or glue hair to indicate facial growth, manly eyebrows or chest hair.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177801/original/file-20170712-14488-xo3o8r.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Performer Leo DeLush.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Debbie Draper</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some drag kings are known for their sexy, smooth dancing style, some for their realistic impressions of masculine walk, posture and gesture, and yet others for their comic renditions. Some drag kings provide for more politically-motivated critique in their performance, while others just want to get up on stage and have a good time. </p>
<p>Just as drag queens are associated with gay culture, drag kings are associated with lesbians, but not all performers are gay or lesbian. Likewise, king performers see themselves as distinct from other male impersonators, such as British music hall star, <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/vesta-tilley/">Vesta Tilley</a>, lesbians who dress or act in “butch” manner, and other reasons women might try to pass as men. Though, in practice these distinctions are more difficult to make.</p>
<p>Drag queens have achieved a ubiquitous presence at pride festivals and as a form of entertainment in theatre, music and movie industries for both gay and straight audiences - consider the ongoing appeal of <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/stage/melbourne-stage/priscilla-queen-of-the-desert-musical-to-return-to-australian-stages-a-decade-after-premiere-20170626-gwylcb.html">Priscilla, Queen of the Desert</a>. Drag kings haven’t yet made it into the mainstream, and remain somewhat of a subcultural phenomenon.</p>
<h2>Golden age</h2>
<p>Globally, drag king culture took root almost simultaneously from the 1990s onwards in lesbian nights, bars and clubs in major cities. Many attribute the origins of a distinctive drag king scene in Australia to performer D-Vinyl’s earlier ground-breaking shows from 1999 and the drag king competition, DKSY, held between 1999 and 2000 where experimental drag artists, <a href="http://scanlines.net/person/kingpins">The Kingpins</a>, performed. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/28850610" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>In 2002, drag king legend <a href="http://www.sexygalexy.com">Sexy Galexy</a> created a weekly event called Kingki Kingdom (renamed Queer Central in 2005) that quickly became an institution within Sydney’s lesbian social circuit. For over a decade, many of Australia’s drag king royalty mounted the stage at such events, including Melbourne-based <a href="https://www.facebook.com/roccodamore.dragking/">Rocco D'Amore</a>, burlesque performer Lillian Starr as drag king <a href="https://www.facebook.com/lillian.starr">John Dark</a>, queer performance duo <a href="https://www.facebook.com/fancypieceproductions">Fancy Piece</a>, and debonair gender illusionist <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Jayvante-Swing-119938238140466">Jayvante Swing</a>. Local drag king scenes developed in other capital cities within Australia owing to the passion and commitment of a large and rotating cast of amateur and professional performers, producers and promoters.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177800/original/file-20170712-3087-9uek2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hans Sparrow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ann-Marie Calilhanna</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the drag king has faded from the thriving scenes he supported in Australia in the <a href="https://clockinoff.com/2017/06/11/fading-out-sydneys-drag-kings/">first decade of the 2000s</a>. It’s difficult to pinpoint a single explanation or common source behind the scene’s demise, though it is clear that a number of factors are at work. </p>
<p><a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/death-of-the-gayborhood-queer-aging-in-the-time-of-gentrification">Gentrification</a>, and the economic instability of <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_do_lesbian_spaces_have_such_a_hard_time_staying_in_business.html">commercial ventures for women</a>, has seen a number of formerly iconic <a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/sunday/i-want-my-lesbian-bars-back.html">lesbian clubs and bars close worldwide</a> or be co-opted into <a href="http://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/the-death-of-australias-lesbian-party-culture?utm_source=vicefbanz">mainstream party scenes</a>. </p>
<p>There are also important questions about <a href="http://www.wweek.com/culture/2016/11/30/who-crushed-the-lesbian-bars-a-new-minefield-of-sexual-politics/">language and identity</a>. For example, the word “queer” is increasingly replacing the word “lesbian, as it is seen as <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_curve_lesbian_magazine_will_not_drop_the_l_word_from_its_tagline.html">more inclusive</a> to other forms of female desire. Drag also sits uneasily with the emerging presence of <a href="http://heapsgay.com/the-complex-conflict-between-drag-culture-and-trans-women/">trans and gender-diverse people</a>, which may conflict with the performance of gender for comedy. </p>
<p>It may also simply be that those who attended drag king performances a decade ago are now of an age where going out mid-week to late night events has lost its appeal. </p>
<h2>New kings</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177807/original/file-20170712-14428-dreyvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sexy Galexy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer Belinda Roland</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But there’s recently been a resurgence in drag king culture. New events have started in <a href="http://heapsgay.com/">Sydney</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ladydragmelbourne/">Melbourne</a>. Sydney Heaps Gay organiser Kat Dopper feels there was a demand from younger queer women for a specific platform to try out drag. In Melbourne, well-known drag performer <a href="http://www.facebook.com/sexygalexydragking/">Lexi Leigh</a> bills <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ladydragmelbourne/">Lady Drag</a> as "drag disco” that celebrates a diversifying drag community. </p>
<p>Combining drag queens and kings, Leigh has been a vocal advocate for evolving drag performance art. Even <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-05/darwin-bio-queen-prawn-cracker-spice-emerges/7901406?WT.ac=statenews_nt">Darwin</a> has seen an emerging bio-queen scene —where people who identify as female and “biological women” perform as drag queens — in its established drag culture.</p>
<p>Drag culture more generally seems to be becoming more experimental and inclusive. It’s not just <a href="https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/meet-5-drag-kings-challenging-gender-expectations">drag kings who must change with the times</a>. Drag queen culture is experimenting with <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/drag-queen-series-rupaul-drag-race-20-photos-style-clothes-fashion-fernando-cysneiros-experiment-a7584316.html">new forms</a> that don’t rely on <a href="https://theestablishment.co/why-faux-queens-deserve-a-place-in-drag-culture-ab0d6204734c">rigid gender identification and expression</a>. Even drag’s more mainstream counterparts are responding to this call: RuPaul’s Drag Race’s ninth season marked the first time an openly trans woman performed as a drag queen contestant.</p>
<p>The success of these new events in Australia perhaps heralds a more permanent king fixture on the party scene. In becoming more inclusive, Australia may soon see a return of the king.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79747/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerryn Drysdale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Drags kings have recently been declining in popularity, partly due to the evolving debate around gender and identity. But now a new and more inclusive drag culture is taking the stage.
Kerryn Drysdale, Research associate, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/73328
2017-02-21T09:33:49Z
2017-02-21T09:33:49Z
Andy Warhol still surprises, 30 years after his death
<p>During the last 13 years of his life, Andy Warhol made 610 time capsules. The artist stuffed these parcels with found objects and everyday ephemera, before consigning them to storage. </p>
<p>When the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh started to carefully <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29125003">exhume and catalogue their contents</a>, they discovered that the boxes contained everything from newspaper articles, junk mail, and toenail clippings, through to source photographs for projects, letters for commissions, and even the occasional unsold artwork. The last intact time capsule was <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29125003">opened in 2014</a> by an anonymous bidder who paid US$30,000 for the privilege. It seems safe to say that, 30 years on from his unexpected death at the age of 58 in 1987, Warhol’s work still has secrets to reveal.</p>
<p>This is despite the fact that Warhol has become one of the most well known artists in the world, with endless books and essays devoted to him. His early paintings of the ubiquitous Campbell’s soup cans and iconic silkscreen images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe are now instantly recognisable. Warhol currently enjoys an enviable combination of popular appeal, market success and critical recognition. His work is widely agreed to hold an important – and, if anything, growing – place in histories of post-1945 artistic production.</p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<h2>The Factory</h2>
<p>The latter status stems in particular from Warhol’s experimentation in avant-garde film, with works like Sleep (1963), Blow Job (1963) and Empire (1964). Sleep, famously, has a running time of 521 minutes, and consists of long take footage that shows Warhol’s friend and sometime lover John Giorno sleeping. To make the film, Warhol combined 22 shots, during each of which he homed in on different parts of Giorno’s supine form, from his face to his buttocks. The result is an obsessively voyeuristic film, the overtly boring quality of which paradoxically underlines the intense fascination that the object of desire can hold for an observer.</p>
<p>The cast lists for Warhol’s films, many of which were made at The Factory – the name Warhol gave his New York studio – read like a who’s who of the city’s alternative art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. They feature figures from the worlds of avant-garde film, performance and literature such as Jack Smith, Jill Johnston, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gerard Malanga and Taylor Mead. The Factory itself performed an important networking function, becoming a place for people to be seen as much as for work to be made.</p>
<p>It was also an artwork in its own right. Warhol covered the walls of its first incarnation, which became known as the Silver Factory, in <a href="http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/7826/behind-the-scenes-at-andy-warhols-silver-factory">aluminium foil and silver paint</a>, while the overarching concept of The Factory as a creative crucible enabled Warhol to manufacture the “superstars” that appeared in his productions, such as Edie Sedgwick and Ondine, by bringing individuals together and then featuring them in his productions. The Factory provided the stage on which Warhol developed a complex artistic persona that played with the celebrity status of the artist, and with the notion of the artist as impresario, models that practitioners from Tracy Emin to Jeff Koons continue to mine productively.</p>
<h2>Experimentation</h2>
<p>Warhol’s experimentation also expanded into performance. Between 1966 and 1967 he organised a series of multimedia events in collaboration with the Velvet Underground and Nico under the name <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/andy-warhol-exploding-plastic-inevitable">Exploding Plastic Inevitable</a> (EPI). The EPI immersed its audiences in frenetic environments of slide projections, sound, and strobe lighting. These sensory assaults were disorientating and destabilising, and have come to be understood as radical uses of technology and media.</p>
<p>In a very different instance of artistic collaboration, Warhol let the groundbreaking choreographer Merce Cunningham use his work Silver Clouds (1966) as the scenography for Cunningham’s 1968 dance <a href="http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/90/">RainForest</a>. Silver Clouds consists of pillow-shaped Mylar balloons filled with helium that gently float around any given space. In RainForest, the dancers have to negotiate their unpredictable trajectories. The Silver Clouds were themselves developed in conjunction with the engineer Billy Klüver, who headed up the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology during the 1960s.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VSgZ5sBDxco?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>It is partly this openness to experimentation and collaboration that continues to ensure critical interest in Warhol, but his engagement with sexuality and gender is equally significant. The essays in the 1996 book <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/pop-out">Pop Out: Queer Warhol</a> exemplify the ways in which Warhol’s work itself, together with his performance of his artistic identity, have had significant ramifications for understandings of the body, queer art histories and sexual politics.</p>
<p>Warhol’s reputation has not been unassailable. A dip in the art market in the 1990s led to <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/14941229">prices for his works falling</a>, while <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/06/20/andy-warhol-foundation-questions/?pagination=false">accusations of misattribution</a> have been levelled at the Andy Warhol Foundation. Yet three decades on from his death, it often seems as if there are as many versions of Warhol as there are audiences. </p>
<p>While it might be the success of his works at auction that make headlines, it is the ideas, creative provocations, and the artist’s own studied resistance to interpretation throughout his interviews and writings which ensure that audiences remain intrigued.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73328/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spencer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Warhol has become one of the most well known artists in the world, but his work still has secrets to reveal.
Catherine Spencer, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68615
2016-12-19T14:13:14Z
2016-12-19T14:13:14Z
Imperfect soundtracks from 2016 for people who wish for a different world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149946/original/image-20161213-1625-1g1mbz8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail from Jenny Hval's album Blood Bitch.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><strong>Review 2016:</strong> This has been a year most of humanity would like to forget with war, disasters, racism, sexism and, especially in arts and culture, the deaths of revered icons. But it is also in the arts and culture where people look for and find hope.</em></p>
<p><em>The Conversation Africa has asked a number of our contributors to give us five books, records, buildings, works of art and so on in their field that made a difference to them in 2016. Here is popular music lecturer, record label boss and musician John Harries’ year in review.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>A year all in music from me, since it’s where I live most of the time.</p>
<p>Much of my 2016 has been given over to releases on my tiny London record label <a href="https://thelumenlake.bandcamp.com/">The Lumen Lake</a>. It doesn’t appear here because its importance to me is self-evident and I guess I wouldn’t want my enthusiasm for the work of my friends to seem like self-interest or promotion. </p>
<p>Elsewhere in my musical world, the following have been important in the last 12 months – important for saying something about the world as it changes around us, and for offering solace …</p>
<h2>1. Jenny Hval – Blood Bitch (album, Sacred Bones Records)</h2>
<p>In 2015, Hval’s album <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/04/jenny-hval-apocalypse-girl-review-provocative-compelling-art-pop">Apocalypse, Girl</a> dropped into my life without much warning, and instantly became essential to me. </p>
<p>This year, <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/music/blood-bitch/jenny-hval">Blood Bitch</a> added vivid reds to that album’s greys and pinks, deftly wove pungent images of vampirism and menstruation amongst the warp threads of Hval’s world-weary but resolutely defiant personal narrative in song to date. </p>
<p>As Hval struggles with the idea of romance in an increasingly sad and frightening world (Conceptual Romance), her repeated exhortation, “I’m working on it”, strikes a peculiar chord. I don’t quite know why it’s so affecting, except that for all of us who would wish for a different world, to keep trying is what we’ve got … </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZVaWc00aZ30?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Female Vampire, a track from Jenny Hval’s latest album Blood Bitch.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Gaika – Security (mixtape, Mixpak Records)</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149951/original/image-20161213-1615-10x7en3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The cover of Gaika’s mixtape Security.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The last six years of Conservative government in the UK have produced a visible <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/01/london-rough-sleepers-double-in-five-years">increase in the number</a> of rough sleepers on the streets of London. There are more difficult housing conditions, fewer welfare safeguards and a lower standard of living for many thousands. This city, which is my home, is getting tougher and colder.</p>
<p>The best music coming out of London in recent years has taken a long, hard look at the cruelty and ugliness of the city, and held it close, mingled with the excitement and the beauty –- anger and sadness and love all together, inextricable. </p>
<p>It’s all there in the first three lines of dancehall-inspired electronic musician <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/11/how-gaika-is-transforming-black-music">Gaika</a>’s magnificent <a href="http://www.mixpakrecords.com/blog/2016/04/download-gaika-security-mixtape/">Security</a> mixtape: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I stand here but it’s not the frontline / I can see Mayfair and smell Chinatown and cats want brown and white / Kit-kat walks up and down Shaftesbury and takes pennies from tourists to show them a good time / but they will never see a good time like us …</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>3. Fatima Al Qadiri – Brute (album, Hyperdub Records)</h2>
<p>A record about protest. Josh Kline’s brilliant cover (derived from his installation work <a href="http://portlandartmuseum.org/exhibitions/josh-kline/">Freedom</a>, 2015) for <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/music/brute/fatima-al-qadiri">Brute</a> sets the tone. </p>
<p>Eclectic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/grime">grime</a> producer Qadiri’s music is often bleak and strangely directionless considering its pointed political framing.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149957/original/image-20161213-1605-12xknur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover of Fatima Al Qadiri’s Brute, designed by Josh Kline.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beats come on with intent, but then cycle away to nothingness. Bass and synth sounds are tough in themselves, but somehow they don’t quite fit together, the whole remains resolutely the sum of its disjointed parts. But if this record feels messy and imperfect, that’s because its subject is conflict … </p>
<p>I wrote the above in the afternoon on Tuesday, November 8, then ground to a halt. Now I’m continuing on the morning of Wednesday the 9th, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/2016-us-presidential-election-23653">US presidential election</a> having fallen inbetween. A sense of disconnect, of unresolvable conflict is everywhere today. </p>
<p>When they build <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37243269">the wall</a> on the Mexican border, perhaps it will be policed by those sad-eyed <a href="http://www.teletubbies.com/">Teletubbies</a> in riot gear gracing Qadiri’s <a href="http://pitchfork.com/news/63051-fatima-al-qadiri-readies-brute-shares-battery/">album cover</a>.</p>
<h2>4. Rie Nakajima – performance at Silver Road, Lewisham, UK</h2>
<p>There’s hope in a refocusing of our perspective from the global to the local, to the immediacy of real human interaction, to spaces where we understand one another intuitively. </p>
<p>Fittingly, then, some of the most extraordinary musical experiences of my year have been in the form of live performances, and particularly those performances that seemed to speak to a sense of intimacy, of domesticity. </p>
<p>In the summer of 2015 I saw <a href="http://www.rienakajima.com/">Rie Nakajima</a> perform for the first time, at Supernormal Festival in Oxfordshire. She is a Japanese artist working with sounding objects in installation and performance. At <a href="http://louderthanwar.com/supernormal-2015-lineup-details-so-far-for-uks-foremost-forward-thinking-festival/">Supernormal</a> she played with singer <a href="http://www.rienakajima.com/_work/_collaborationsetc/OYAMAO.html">Keiko Yamamoto</a> in the centre of a big, old barn – her mechanical soundmakers rattling, chirping and chiming, and Yamamoto’s unamplified voice; small sounds in a large space, the singing of birds and insects in the wide open spaces of summer.</p>
<p>In November 2016, I had the opportunity to see Nakajima again, this time close to home in the extraordinary space at <a href="http://www.silver-road.uk/">Silver Road</a>, Lewisham in London. This venue is a disused and drained steel water tank, a great resonating, reverberating cylinder. </p>
<p>Here, Nakajima collaborated with Belgian musician and sound artist <a href="http://soccos.eu/artists/detail/pierre-berthet">Pierre Berthet</a>. The two set about sounding the space itself, objects clattering against the walls, voices of humans and mechanisms exploiting the natural resonances of this big drum. </p>
<p>The sense was of being completely enveloped and consumed by the music, being inside of it and listening to the firing of its neurons and nerve endings, the coursing of its blood and the flutter of its pulse. An unforgettable and heartening experience.</p>
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<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/155230401" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A sound installation by Pierre Berthet and Rie Nakajima.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. Turtle Yama – Performances at Supernormal Festival, Oxfordshire, UK</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/performances/turtle-yama/">Turtle Yama</a> is a duo of performance artist and guitarist Yuku Kureyama, and keyboard player and electronic musician Nahoko Kamei, based in Osaka, Japan. </p>
<p>This past Northern Hemisphere summer they visited the UK for the first time, and at Supernormal Festival, amid a good deal of music that was darker, louder but also more familiar, played two sets that were so fresh, thoughtful, fun and exciting as to rather rewire my head.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149959/original/image-20161213-1594-1jjrqt7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Japanese performers Turtle Yama.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They achieved that most difficult feat of playing real pop music while questioning its frameworks, creating a deconstructed, genuinely improvisatory version of something familiar and comforting. And in their approach they combined inclusivity and humility with an uncompromising exploratory zeal and a clear and total intellectual authority.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68615/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Harries does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In a world seemingly spinning out of control, music has important roles to play – either to reflect or interpret the state of affairs, or simply to provide solace.
John Harries, Lecturer in Popular Music, Goldsmiths, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64678
2016-09-06T20:49:08Z
2016-09-06T20:49:08Z
Ghana’s ‘Chale Wote’ festival lifts spirits, frees souls
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136563/original/image-20160905-15429-zq4q9t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Realpen Pencil is a young instant live drawing artist who lives and works in Accra, Ghana.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nduka Mntambo</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>To understand the potency of the multisensory intoxication that is the <a href="http://accradotaltradio.com/chale-wote-street-art-festival/">Chale Wote</a> Street Art Festival held in Accra, Ghana annually, I begin in the east of the continent and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uMwppw5AgU">invoke</a> Kenyan writer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/binyavanga-wainaina">Binyavanga Wainaina</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want to live the life of a free imagination. I want to work with people around this continent to make new and exciting things, to make sci-fi things, stories, pictures. I want this generation of young parents to have their kids see Africans writing their own stories, painting their own stories. That simple act, I think, that is the most political act one can have. I want to see a continent where every kind of person’s imagination does not have to look for being allowed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chale Wote translates in the Ga language spoken in the Ga-<a href="http://www.lonelyplanet.com/ghana/accra/sights/neighbourhoods-villages/jamestown">Jamestown</a> district of Accra to: “Man, let’s go!” It is a wonderful actualisation of a free imagination in action invoked by Wainaina. </p>
<p>It is an irreverent myriad of cutting edge performance art, film screenings, talks, music events, photography, fashion and installations. The Chale Wote project invites the artists and viewers to reconfigure the coordinates of how we understand our place in our world in ways that are both intriguing and liberating. </p>
<p>This year’s instalment of Chale Wote was framed under the idea of the creation of a “<a href="http://africandigitalart.com/2016/08/spirit-robot-chale-wote-street-art-festival/">Spirit Robot</a>”. The Spirit Robot offered participants an opportunity for an exorcism of the canonised ways of thinking from elsewhere. It is a thinking which continues to stunt African art practices that still seek permissions from white cubed spaces and the impotent halls of academia.</p>
<p>For a glorious week in Ga-Jamestown, the contours and cadences of every day’s joys, questions, fantasies, desires and sorrows are dramatised and, dare I say, theorised in ways that are daringly innovative and spectacularly visual.</p>
<h2>Meeting the black magician</h2>
<p>I encountered the Afro-American artist <a href="http://autumnjoiknight.com/">Autumn Knight</a> at the Untamed Empire, one of the beautiful venues where the Labs @ Chalo Wote programme was held. She describes herself as a black magician. This Afro-trickster’s bag of tricks includes an affecting performance video piece called Lagrimas Negras (Black Tears).</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136431/original/image-20160902-20232-92qvmk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The artist Autumn Knight, who participated in Ghana’s Chale Wote Street Art Festival.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nduka Mntambo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the video, the artist offers her black tears at the seawall in Galveston, Texas. She wanted to see if an expression of grief by a black woman/body would elicit any form of empathy from the public. </p>
<p>For an hour Autumn wept but not a soul stopped to ask what was wrong, save for some children whose parents swiftly pulled them way. Autumn described it to me as a survivalist strategy from which she conjures up different realities/temporalities and imagines herself outside the world that tells us that we cannot make things. </p>
<p>At the heart of this film performance is the sad question “do black tears matter?”. Autumn is invested in constructing a narrative about our tears; in a world that is comfortable to hold a binary of black body as simultaneously inhuman and superhuman.</p>
<h2>Ritual of creation</h2>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/realpenpencil">Realpen Pencil</a>, who lives and works in Accra, is a young instant live drawing artist with a photographic memory. This description does no justice to the extraordinary ritual of creation I experienced while witnessing him working in the streets of Ga-Jamestown. This was a public act of creation in which, for hours, the artist was surrounded by cheering and at times impatient audiences.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DrWfIK2vfaw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Realpen Pencil in action.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beyond the kinetic beauty of his performance, Realpen Pencil seemed to remind us the embodied nature of birthing works of the imagination.</p>
<p>In this our Instagram times of instant gratification where the ubiquity of image making structures and mediates our experience of things and times, it is important that makers such as Realpen Pencil exist. His process reminds us that the act of looking and capturing does not always have to be mechanical and veneered through digital filters.</p>
<h2>Blurring lines between fashion and art</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://www.thisisthenest.com/">Nest Collective</a> from Nairobi in Kenya is a cutting edge multidisciplinary art collective collapsing and blurring the uninteresting lines between fashion, film, music and visual arts. This collective describes itself as an army of thinkers. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/116848487" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘To catch a dream’ - a fashion film by the Nest Collective.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their project of beauty, memory and imagination takes flight in the poignant film “To Catch A Dream”. It is a visual and sonic thrill that tells the tale of Ajuma, a grieving widow plagued by recurring nightmares. In bold narrative, sartorial and aesthetic moves, the talented director <a href="http://www.jimchuchu.com/">Jim Chuchu</a> creates a modish melancholic world, cadenced by multiple Eastern African languages spoken by the characters. </p>
<p>Very much like the broader concerns of the Nest Collective, this film accomplishes to experiment with ideas about multiple futures/pasts, that are conceived on aesthetic and conceptual daringly original terms. Seconds into the film the label “fashion film” peels away as you encounter the beautifully rendered interiority of Ajuma. She wrestles with the memory of a beloved, moored by the searing music from the original <a href="https://soundcloud.com/thisisthenest">soundtrack</a>.</p>
<h2>Creating new knowledge</h2>
<p>In a conversation with the co-director of <a href="http://accradotalt.tumblr.com/">Accra dot ALT</a> and producer of Chale Wote, <a href="http://accradotaltradio.com/tag/mantse-aryeequaye/">Mantse Aryeequaye</a>, Aryeequaye told me about the economic transformative infrastructures that Chale Wote offers the neglected community of Ga-Jamestown.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136566/original/image-20160905-15444-vqx6ga.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Chale Wote street festival has treated local people to cutting edge performance art, film screenings, talks, music events, photography, fashion and installations.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Speaking about the evolution of the Chalo Wote over the past five years Aryeequaye asserts it important for young black people to create new knowledge. Aryeequaye reminded me of the fact that the whole of Ghana was once the Wall Street of the transatlantic slave trade. As such, the culture of exploitation is embedded within the psyche of the people.</p>
<p>Chalo Wote has sparked a lot of economic activities, but is also an important site for experimentation for artist/thinkers: an alternate space for radical imaginations and practice.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64678/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nduka Mntambo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Ghana’s Chale Wote festival’s main aim is to provide an alternative platform for the arts. It uses street arts to break creative boundaries and cultivate a wider audience for the arts in West Africa.
Nduka Mntambo, Lecturer of Film and Television, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/63348
2016-08-01T14:08:55Z
2016-08-01T14:08:55Z
Why today’s art world owes a great debt to a certain networking genius
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132637/original/image-20160801-17187-1ansznf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Richard Demarco (left) with Joseph Beuys in the early 1970s.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Demarco European Art Foundation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The beginning of August means it is time for the <a href="http://www.eif.co.uk">Edinburgh International Festival</a>, during which the Scottish capital hosts one of Europe’s premier annual arts extravaganzas over three weeks. With impeccable timing, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has just launched <a href="https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/on-now-coming-soon/richard-demarco-and-joseph-beuys/">an exhibition</a> in tribute to one of the festival’s most enduring patrons – and a lynchpin in linking art movements in Europe and the UK for the past few decades. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.richarddemarco.org">Richard Demarco</a>, born in Edinburgh in 1930, has been involved in every Edinburgh festival, organising exhibitions and theatre events, since the early 1960s. He is many things – an artist himself, a curator, arts promoter and organiser – but perhaps his greatest strength is in facilitating relationships. </p>
<p>Over the years, he has cultivated artists, arts practitioners, curators and educators, among others. His <a href="http://www.demarco-archive.ac.uk/richard_demarco_biography.pdf">biography</a> reads like a catalogue of the contemporary art world, and the results of his networking have been immeasurable. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132641/original/image-20160801-17190-13mh4vo.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Neagu’s Tactile Object (Hand) (1970).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To give one example, it was Demarco who brought the celebrated Romanian sculptor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/jun/28/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries">Paul Neagu</a> to the UK for the first time. Fleeing the repressive atmosphere of communist Romania, Neagu eventually naturalised in the UK and went on to teach some of the country’s most significant contemporary artists – <a href="http://www.antonygormley.com">Antony Gormley</a>, <a href="http://anishkapoor.com">Anish Kapoor</a> and <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rachel-whiteread-2319">Rachel Whiteread</a>. </p>
<p>Demarco has long seen it as his role to ensure Scotland maintained its connections with Europe, having originally been inspired by the divisions that scarred the continent following World War II. As a schoolteacher in Edinburgh after the war, he was struck by how many of his students were the result of Scottish women marrying Polish servicemen, for example. He <a href="http://studiointernational.com/index.php/richard-demarco-edinburgh-international-festival-joseph-beuys">sought to</a> highlight his kind of shared cultural heritage and saw the arts as a way of uniting the continent. </p>
<h2>Beuys is back in town</h2>
<p>The new Edinburgh exhibition showcases the fruits from another of Demarco’s special relationships, with the German artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys is one of the most influential contemporary artists in the world. His lasting legacy in performance art has been to shift the emphasis from the objects the artist produces to the life and activity of the artist and the act of creation. The revered performance artist <a href="http://marinafilm.com">Marina Abramović</a> cited seeing him in Edinburgh in 1970 as a key influence, for instance. </p>
<p>Beuys was there as one of 35 German artists who participated in Demarco’s <a href="http://www.eca.ac.uk/palermo/history_strategy_get_arts.htm">Strategy: Get Arts</a> exhibition (the title is a palinrome) for that year’s estival. Both men believed in seeing art in the everyday, and struck up a close relationship that drew Beuys back to Scotland several more times to perform until his untimely death in 1986. </p>
<p>Beuys was famous for his belief that anyone can be an artist, that we each have an inner creative spirit that for many remains untapped. On his way to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he taught, Beuys would pick up the homeless, the street sweepers and the so-called “non artists” and bring them to class. For him, their participatation in the creative process was as important as anyone else’s. When Demarco invited Beuys to Edinburgh, Beuys’ choice of performance venue was not the city’s official art spaces or theatres but the Forresthill Poorhouse, a place for the deprived and ill. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132638/original/image-20160801-17185-aptvf7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joseph Beuys.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/centralasian/5746208976">cea +</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beuys created what he called <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/social-sculpture">“social sculpture”</a>: the art of the everyday, of living consciously and deliberately, considering every aspect of life as a work of art. It involves the participation of the viewer, for example in <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-12-hour-lecture-edinburgh-arts-73-the-richard-demarco-gallery-ar00826">Beuys’s lectures</a>. It is not an object but an experience. </p>
<p>Beuys was also fascinated by Celtic culture and saw the Scottish Highlands as a spiritual and sacred place, from which he drew much inspiration. For his original 1970 visit, he created <a href="http://www.whitfordfineart.com/item/single/6866/joseph_beuys_the_scottish_symphony_celtic_kinloch_rannoch">Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony</a>, a five-day performance (performed for four-hours each day) in collaboration with the Danish avant garde musician Henning Christiansen that was inspired by the Highlands’ Rannoch moor. During the performance Beuys delivered a lecture to the audience while drawing a series of letters and symbols on the chalkboard, a constant feature of many of his performances, while Christiansen <a href="https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/beuys_joseph/Beuys_Christiansen_Scottische-Symphonie_02_1970.mp3">played his composition</a> on the piano.</p>
<h2>Boundary pushing</h2>
<p>Beuys was a man of extremes: he created marathon performances in Edinburgh, such as his <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-12-hour-lecture-edinburgh-arts-73-the-richard-demarco-gallery-ar00826">12-Hour Lecture (1973)</a>, in which he speaks about things like art, creativity, socialism, democracy and freedom. In <a href="http://www.kidsofdada.com/blogs/magazine/35963521-joseph-beuys-i-like-america-and-america-likes-me">I Like America and America Likes Me (May 1974)</a>, he lived for three days in the René Block Gallery in New York City with a wild coyote. It was his attempt to access the animal primitive world of instinct, as an antidote to the anaesthetised world of capitalism. </p>
<p>Demarco has had a similar bent for the extreme. In 1980 he circumnavigated the British Isles on the sailing ship The Marques, not as a vacation but as a floating university. This was the final hurrah of Edinburgh Arts, Demarco’s international summer school modelled on <a href="http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/history/">Black Mountain College</a> in North Carolina, US, a centre for experimental art and activity in the first half of the 20th century. Edinburgh Arts was set up as a platform for artists from around the world to meet, collaborate, and develop innovative new art projects.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132634/original/image-20160801-17169-1u21yu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Demarco more recently.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amy Bryzgel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This bringing together of artists is Demarco through and through. In the same way as he brought Joseph Beuys to Scotland, Demarco’s talent for building relationships has produced international connections and works of art that would not have existed otherwise. That is his enviable legacy. </p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/on-now-coming-soon/richard-demarco-and-joseph-beuys/">Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys: a Unique Partnership</a> is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh until October 16. Admission free.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63348/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Bryzgel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Richard Demarco, aka Mr Edinburgh Festival, has been fostering vital UK links with artists around the world for decades.
Amy Bryzgel, Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62364
2016-07-14T10:37:58Z
2016-07-14T10:37:58Z
Going naked in public is a joyful release for mind and body
<p>I doubt I shall ever see blue in the same way again, since blue paint on my skin was the only thing covering my nakedness. I was among the 3,200 people – strangers to one another when it all began – who took part in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/09/thousands-strip-naked-in-hull-for-spencer-tunick-photographs">largest naked photo shoot in Britain</a>, wearing nothing but four shades of blue body paint. </p>
<p>This work of performance art, named The Sea of Hull, was conceived by New York-based photographer <a href="http://www.spencertunick.com">Spencer Tunick</a> and commissioned by the <a href="https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/seaofhull/">Ferens Art Gallery</a> in Hull in north-east England as part of the city’s place as <a href="http://www.hull2017.co.uk">UK Capital of Culture</a> in 2017, with Tunick’s exhibition as one of its highlights. </p>
<p>Tunick’s work has been widely discussed in academic literature as much as in the tabloids. But in the book <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Judging-the-Image-Art-Value-Law/Young/p/book/9780415301848">Judging the Image</a> by sociologist Alison Young, she describes Tunick’s early years and struggles against the law in the US, and also includes comments from those who have participated in his many installations. The <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/the-sea-of-hull-was-the-feel-good-story-that-this-country-needed-a7129476.html">spectrum of feelings</a> aroused in those participating in Tunick’s work – as described in the book – echo the sentiments I have just heard expressed from my fellow participants in Hull.</p>
<p>My nude buddy summarised the event as joy, community, and release. And these are the three words with which I want to develop an approach to Tunick’s work and try to explain the reasons that led me to be a part of his human sea. </p>
<h2>Joy, community and release: human essentials</h2>
<p>I first came across Tunick’s work in 2002, when I saw his exhibition at the <a href="http://www.macm.org/en/">Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal</a>, Canada. It has taken 14 years for me to be able to make it to one of his installations, but my desire to do so never faded – something for which Young provides an explanation in her book: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tunick’s great achievement as an artist is that his work is premised upon offering individuals the uncanny experience of being simultaneously the object of the image and the performance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The dynamics of the acceptance or rejection of human bodies, either naked or clothed, rely on many factors and are culturally determined. The human body, as the physical essence of humanity, is at the core of the controversy. (I am not even going to approach the issue of sex. Not least because there is no sexual element in Tunick’s installations at all, but also because the complexities of human sexuality have already been masterly summarised by <a href="https://www.umb.edu/academics/cla/faculty/patrick_clarkin">Patrick Clarkin</a> in his fascinating series <a href="https://kevishere.com/2016/04/21/wrapping-up-the-blank-ogamous-series/">Humans are (Blank)-ogamous</a>.)</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1342&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1342&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130369/original/image-20160713-12353-6qs7tl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1342&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ines Varela-Silva at the end of the event.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Kennedy</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Being part of Tunick’s installations provides an overwhelming sense of joy. It is exhilarating to realise that we can break socially prescribed barriers. Ultimately, the struggle is with ourselves: will we be brave enough to bare it all? Once nude, the feeling of joy is indescribable. From a purely physiological point of view, our “hormones of happiness” – endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin – will be unleashed, with knock-on effects on the body, including <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568997206000279">boosting the immune system</a>. </p>
<p>Humans are social mammals, and cooperation and altruism are core evolutionary traits. In his book <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269712">Race, monogamy, and other lies they told you</a>, anthropologist <a href="http://anthropology.nd.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-by-alpha/agustin-fuentes/">Agustin Fuentes</a> explained that cooperation is what humans do best, and what makes us such a successful species.</p>
<p>Tunick’s installations provide a feeling of community that is not easy to find in our daily lives, but one to which we are evolutionarily hardwired to seek. The sense of release emerges when the feelings of joy and community lead us to realise that we have become better human beings – more inclusive, and with a greater capacity for acceptance.</p>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p>If you assumed Tunick would take a break for a little while after navigating the Sea of Hull, you’d be wrong: he is already channelling all his creative energy into, of all places, the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sign-up-to-pose-nude-at-the-republican-national-convention_us_5734bb67e4b08f96c1826b18">Republican National Conference</a>, in Cleveland, Ohio. Tunick is now looking for 100 women who will pose naked while holding mirrors to reflect:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of “mother nature” … The mirrors communicate that we are a reflection of ourselves, each other, and of the world that surrounds us. The woman becomes the future and the future becomes the woman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I am seriously considering dropping everything I have currently going on and hopping on a plane, right now, to be one of those rays of sunshine in Cleveland. This will be an installation focused on equal rights, specifically on women’s rights – values I treasure and fight for everyday. Do I need any other reason? I don’t think so.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62364/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Inês Varela-Silva receives funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation</span></em></p>
Going naked in public has its own benefits.
Inês Varela-Silva, Senior Lecturer in Human Biology, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60852
2016-06-14T03:05:07Z
2016-06-14T03:05:07Z
Dark Mofo and the affective power of a creative storm
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126441/original/image-20160614-18068-haityg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Visitors take in Cameron Robbins' Field Lines at the Museum of Old and New Art.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona/Remi Chauvin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the week leading up to Hobart’s Dark Mofo winter festival, I picture myself exploring events in a layered pupae of thermals, scarf, coat and gloves, still shivering, but awed by a spectacle of fire, light and unimaginable, dark, sensory wonder. </p>
<p>As a result, my start to the festival – a trip to Willow Court (a former mental institution) at New Norfolk to see Mike Parr’s Asylum and Entry by Mirror Only with a friend – is punctuated by a series of disappointments. It’s not cold enough; I barely need gloves. The MONA ferry is cancelled, due to debris from the torrential rain a week before, and the replacement bus smells slightly musty – like dank carpet. This would be somewhat in the spirit of Dark Mofo if the bus fabric was black and not a hideous swirl of primary colours, complete with bright blue window curtains. We laugh. We don’t feel “dark”. </p>
<p>When we arrive on site, we stand near some fire pits and receive instructions. We are confused, but follow the crowd. Strange pale faces peer from some of the windows in the building above. Linger. And are gone. </p>
<p>Eventually, we break away and start exploring the site. We stand at an entrance to one of the buildings, the threshold marked by a the intense scent of possum urine and faeces. The abandoned interior is decrepit and damp. A few small mirrors sit on narrow ledges and in odd corners. We see videos of Parr’s intense body mutilation and endurance performances through windows and projected onto walls. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mike Parr, Aslyum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona/Rémi Chauvin</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>In another building, there is a sea of pale green broken glass. We move on – a possum runs, terrified, through an empty hallway framed by the heavy doors to the old patient cells. There’s a sense of unease, but it’s somehow all too familiar, almost expected. Indeed, the experience reminds me of Parr’s work installed at Cockatoo Island for the 2008 Sydney Biennale. At the time, it was a standout, resonating with me for days after the encounter. This time, the similarity almost bores me.</p>
<p>More buildings, more rooms. The smell of human and animal waste seems ever present. As we walk, I become increasingly captivated by different arrangements, from piles of archived objects to a more formal display of one of Parr’s prints.
They conjure feelings of desperation and a struggle for control. There are various colourful plastic hand held mirrors, which conjure a nostalgia to childhood, loss of innocence and the traumas of youth. There are vintage bathroom mirrors, broken car mirrors, travel and vanity mirrors and an abundance of shards. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mike Parr, Aslyum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona/Rémi Chauvin</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>These mirrors register visitors in the present, but they are also conduits to another time, standing in for the people that once occupied this space: the damaged and discarded. –The space feels increasingly haunted through these objects that amplify the surrounds, capturing glimpses of feet and bodies. It is the sound of vomit accompanying one of Parr’s video works that breaks through my final resistance. I am overcome with the involuntary sensations of disgust, horror, sadness, grief and profound compassion for the voiceless and forgotten patients at Willow Court. </p>
<p>We complete our encounter with Parr’s 72 hour endurance performance Entry by Mirror Only. A single room is well lit and inside we see Parr seated at a table, drawing. His hand moves gracefully, repetitively across the page. The rest of his body is still, even his eyes seem to remain motionless. In the cell there is a mattress with a neatly folded blanket. A crowd stand around watching him. </p>
<p>Dressed in striped pyjamas, drawing fixedly, he becomes the patient. Further within the building, a large room is lit to reveal a series of disturbing self-portraits composed of heavy black lines. The image of Parr, as patient, is complete and the performance, becomes a moving homage to the artist’s late brother who suffered from mental health issues for much of his life. I am moved, I feel the complexity of this site within me. We leave, my early disappointments forgotten, looking forward to the next Dark Mofo encounter.</p>
<h2>Storms and Shakespeare</h2>
<p>The following evening, another friend in tow, we visit Tempest at The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The show, curated by Juliana Engberg, references violent storms and the Shakespearean play of the same name. This time, I am open and no longer mapping disappointments. </p>
<p>As we move into the exhibition, I start to note how expertly the journey has been crafted. The collections of artwork, objects and natural history specimens create a rich narrative linked to the perils and wonder of discovery and the story of The Tempest. We are about to set sail and the start to the journey is marked by Tacida Dean’s video How to Put a Boat in a Bottle. </p>
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<span class="caption">Ship Model, 1800s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In the next room, a central table displays an abundance of intricate model boats. Many are composed of the familiar wood, thread and fabric. However, others are more magical and strange, composed of shell and bone. In the rear projection space, Fiona Tan’s Nellie depicts a young girl dressed in 17th century garb. The print of the wallpaper and her dress are the same – white and blue, reminiscent of Delft Blue china, but composed of tropical imagery including exotic birds, monkeys and palms. </p>
<p>She sits alone in a large house and the matching patterns make her body, at times, disappear into the walls. While Tan’s work originally referenced the story of Corneila van Rijn (Rembrandt’s illegitimate daughter) and Tan’s own experience of displacement from Indonesia to Amsterdam, in the context of the show, the connections are extended and link to the character Miranda in The Tempest: a young girl, controlled and trapped on an island between two worlds.</p>
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<span class="caption">Fiona Tan, A Lapse of Memory.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist and Frith St Gallery, London</span></span>
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<p>From the still ships in harbour, we move into the storm. David Stephenson’s Star Drawings conjure connections to navigation and destiny while on the opposite wall, a massive drawing of lightning, by Tacida Dean – When First I Raised the Tempest, No.17599 – extends the full length of the gallery. A series of paintings of ships, a love letter and a room-size painting of Prospero’s Island extend the narrative. </p>
<p>The exhibition creates a space that speaks about much more than the story of The Tempest. It explores issues of power and colonialism and the relationship between humans and the natural world.</p>
<p>Indeed, this exhibition, like Mike Parr’s installation and performance, must be experienced. Through the richness of the curatorial layering, it invites each viewer to draw on their own unique background and experiences to inform the overall reading. This is a show that requires time, and should ideally be experienced twice. </p>
<h2>The flow of the wind</h2>
<p>By Saturday, I feel a little overwhelmed, but we are determined to see the opening of Cameron Robbins and Ryoji Ikeda’s work at MONA. On entry to Cameron Robbins’ Field Lines (main image), we are confronted by an impressive sculptural machine, tall and skeletal with odd horizontal funnels. It reminds me of Jean Tinguely’s kinetic drawing sculptures, but the context is yet to emerge.</p>
<p>In the next room, I see a series of long exposure photographs capturing the movement of light in bright red-orange bleeding lines, and I begin to make the connection between these images and the strange machine. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cameron Robbins, Field Lines.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona/Rémi Chauvin</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>My initial instinct to link Robbins’ machines to the work of Tinguley was indeed appropriate. His sculptures are not simply strange aesthetic objects, but carefully crafted and honed to capture the immaterial flows and subtle invisible forces around us. Indeed, the light drawings create shapes that speak of the flow of the wind. </p>
<p>In the rooms that follow, this dialogue is extended through the presentation of many more machines and the intricate drawings, patterns and movement created by wind, tide, energy and magnetic force. While the images and machines are spectacular, it is the subtlety of each individual line and impeccable balance presented in the construction of the sculptures that ultimately draws me in.</p>
<p>The work is not simply about visualising wind or the in-out flow of tides. No. This work is about revealing some of the scientific magic that exists all around us, the complexity of interconnection between systems, chaos and order. It provides a glimpse at an understanding that extends beyond words, and must simply be felt as an immaterial, almost spiritual force. </p>
<p>While the bulk of the exhibition consists of various sculpture-machines and drawings, the experience is complemented by the addition of video and a large installation. It creates a range of sensory engagements that further the connections and speak of the value of curiosity, observation and exploration. </p>
<h2>Entering the control centre of the universe</h2>
<p>The work of Robbins is superbly complemented by a visit to Ryoji Ikeda’s Supersymmetry. At the entrance, we are told that there will be darkness and strobe effects. This announcement creates expectations that are then immediately exceeded. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ryoji Ikeda’s Supersymmetry.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona/Rémi Chauvin</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Ryoji’s work is spectacular. Conceived while on residency at the Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva, a research centre renowned for experimental particle physics, Supersymmetry immediately creates links to the movement of particles. </p>
<p>The space is black, lit initially by the light emitted from three low, square structures containing a glowing white screen. Ball bearings move in patterns across the intensely lit surface. They form pooling and flocking patterns as they travel. A low whirring sound accompanies their movement. Incredibly, the smooth, glowing surface appears immobile. After a few minutes, what seems like a scanning layer appears and moves across the surface of the structure. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ryoji Ikeda, Supersymmetry.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mona/Rémi Chauvin</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>The first appears to record the location of the ball bearings, the second seems to map time, while the third records arrangements. The use of strobe effects enhances the sense of scanning. At one point, all movement ceases and the bearings form different shapes near the centre of the screen. While the full function and details remain unclear, there is a definite sense of rigid and precise data collection. The matched timing of each structure is impeccable. </p>
<p>The second component of the installation only enhances the experience. A long row of projections and screens appears to be gathering real-time data from the three “experiment” structures. We see the ball bearings move, then images of clusters of particles, like an expanding universe – I get associations of cosmic forces, light speed, time travel and intricate connections between matter and the invisible forces that control it’s movement and trajectory.</p>
<p>I feel like I have entered into the control centre of the universe. </p>
<p>As though there is no god, just a series of computers, mapping and controlling the fate of every particle, creating patterns and systems that appear open, but follow distinct rules.</p>
<p>I stand for a while and try to take it all in. After watching the spectacle cycle through, I decide, this space is perhaps not the control centre, but an obsessive, never ending experiment to find this elusive space and finally understand the meaning of life and nature of the universe. </p>
<p>As I stand there, I realise that I cannot do this work justice. In the curatorial notes, the work is described as “a total visual and aural immersion into nature’s innermost reality”. A big call, that one. But, you know, I have to agree. This is not to be missed. </p>
<p>After just a few days of engaging with some of the headlining artworks at this year’s Dark MOFO, I understand that this festival is not about darkness or horror.</p>
<p>Rather, it is about engaging in new experiences that capitalise on the power of art to expand horizons and take us into new worlds of understanding and possibility.</p>
<p>While some work, like Mike Parr’s haunting Asylum, will require the viewer confront the darker terrains of human experience and the troubling institutional policies of the past (and present), the curatorial teams have delivered an astounding and deeply affecting program that moves seamlessly between science, spirituality and magic and captures the beauty and danger of a raging storm. </p>
<p>The only thing I can say for sure, is that Dark Mofo is best experienced in person and, preferably, without the baggage of expectation.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em>Tempest is at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery until November 20.</em></p>
<p><em>Cameron Robbins’ Field Lines is at MONA until August 29.</em></p>
<p><em>Supersymmetry is part of MONA’s permanent, evolving collection and will be on display for at least 12 months. https://darkmofo.net.au/lineup/supersymmetry-ryoji-ikeda/</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60852/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Svenja J. Kratz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Hobart’s winter festival explores darkness, storms and the very nature of the universe, with artwork performed in an asylum; echoing the elements and conceived while on a residency at Geneva’s Centre for Nuclear Research.
Svenja J. Kratz, Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice, University of Tasmania
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/52337
2015-12-14T16:48:47Z
2015-12-14T16:48:47Z
‘You have reached LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner. Can you touch my soul?’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105840/original/image-20151214-9540-15ix4xk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">LaBeouf Rönkkö and Turner, Day 2 of #TOUCHMYSOUL.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">FACT © Brian Slater</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf sits around a table with two members of his performance art collective. They are all plugged in, typing frantically while speaking on the phone and engaging in conversation with an endless stream of callers. All calls start with the line above. </p>
<p>LaBeouf insisted that he wanted to be “moved” by the exercise – and to prove his seriousness, vowed to tattoo himself with the words that touched him the most after four days of uninterrupted conversations.</p>
<p>This all took place at the <a href="http://www.fact.co.uk/home.aspx">Foundation of Art and Creative Technology</a> (FACT) in Liverpool from December 11 to 14. I found myself as an observer and participant in another moment of heightened celebrity culture, witnessing a performance about our insatiable need for contact, capture and immersion in the world of the big and famous. The difference here, though, is that this need was being met by the celebrity himself, directly, and in real-time.</p>
<p>LaBeouf’s way to address his need for real “connection” with people has been to become a performance artist. After his decision to walk the red carpet for the premiere of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac with his face covered by a paper bag (“I am not famous anymore”), the actor has explored live expression in an art gallery (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/01/alleged-rape-of-shia-labeouf-is-inexcusable-but-so-is-bad-art">#IAMSORRY</a>) and in a cinema hall (<a href="http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/28444/1/shia-labeouf-speaks-out-about-allmymovies">#ALLMYMOVIES</a>) while being streamed online. Some of these works have attracted accusations of plagiarism of well-established live art performances such as Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present”. To this, LaBeouf’s collective <a href="http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/22732/1/shia-labeouf-the-interview">responds</a> bluntly: they are not celebrating the presence of the artist but, rather, its absence.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105837/original/image-20151214-9526-kgia1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At the premiere of Nymphomaniac.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tobias Schwarz/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Regardless of our views on their originality, the collective are achieving something other artists in this field have not: a large and global online following. As a Disney prodigy and Hollywood blockbuster star, LaBeouf’s forays into the world of performance art are reaching out to an audience far beyond the avant garde arts world – and making the conversation around live art interventions considerably bigger than ever before. The value of this? Well, art needs to reach more people and it can do just that through such global figures. The challenge, however, is exactly how you critique a system of which you are a part.</p>
<p>At the clinical-looking exhibition space staging LaBeouf’s call centre, there was a small window that looked out into FACT’s reception area. The window was filled by a moving wall of handheld devices and the odd written message to the celebrity. These messages were not part of the event’s rationale, so were politely taken away at regular intervals by the security guards. </p>
<p>Inside, in advance of the event’s official opening and before the broader public were allowed in, the feeling was of quietness. LaBeouf & co. laughed out loud from time to time in response to callers’ witticisms no one else could hear. Their conversations were typed and emerged, slowly, on the publicly available Google document shared “live” via the project’s <a href="http://touchmysoul.net/">website</a>. Despite the growing number of fans outside, the most dominant sound in the room was the smack of the trio’s fingers on their keyboards. </p>
<p>On opening day, the crowds descended on FACT. #TOUCHMYSOUL is only one of a handful of exhibits, workshops and performances under the umbrella <a href="http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/follow.aspx">FOLLOW</a> that the gallery will showcase until February 2016. LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner, however, only took calls for four days, so the sense of momentum was noticeable. From youngsters coming to sketch the celebrity, to friends orchestrating calls so that they can have their idol say their names out loud and search for them among the room audience, the range of people present at the gallery and following the event’s live feed were noticeably different from FACT’s usual visitors and, on the whole, considerably more invested.</p>
<p>On the last day of the performance, LaBeouf made his choice. His arm was tattooed with the line: “You. Now. Wow.” The line emerged out of a conversation with a caller who said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m touching your soul from Egypt. This. The connection. This is feeling. I feel. I feel it. I don’t need to be there with you now. I feel it. I’m smiling. You. Now. Wow. I feel it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"676174868900114433"}"></div></p>
<p>It is a conversation that represents much of what has been captured on the <a href="http://touchmysoul.net/">streamed document</a>. Access, feeling, happiness, crying, they are all emotions that callers have expressed, with surprising immediacy – the average call lasted a minute or less. These feelings have always intensified in response to LaBeouf, as opposed to his collaborators. They have also emerged within parallel online conversations, most notably in the chat facility surrounding the live-calls transcript. Throughout, the conversation and emotional reaction expanding online has been, first and foremost, about the celebrity and his presence.</p>
<p>Despite attempting to take stock and interrogate our obsession with fame being “just a click away” and the impact of the internet on “the way we think about those around us”, the main calling card for the exhibit was the presence of an A-Lister and the possibility, for many, to phone him or take a selfie and share it online. LaBeouf insists that his work is the result of a collective, and that it is equally valuable for Rönkkö and Turner to take on calls and engage with the public as it is to do it himself. But this is not why people were calling, queuing or, indeed, tweeting and following the #TOUCHMYSOUL live feed. </p>
<p>At the heart of this performance was a fascinating paradox about the nature of authenticity, fame and personal connection that no visitor (impatiently checking the number of “likes” against their latest star-dusted selfie) can escape. To critique celebrity globally, you have to become a global celebrity first. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Access the performance’s full recording and transcript <a href="http://touchmysoul.net/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52337/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beatriz Garcia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Shia LaBeouf’s latest artistic performance interrogates celebrity, online community and the endless search for ‘true connection’.
Beatriz Garcia, Head of Research | Cultural Policy, Institute of Cultural Capital, University of Liverpool
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/50010
2015-11-20T02:52:56Z
2015-11-20T02:52:56Z
I’m not lion, Temporary Title by Xavier Le Roy will leave you panting
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102561/original/image-20151119-18434-1h1fypp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is it enough to recruit dancers and present them as interactive, moving art objects? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Xavier Le Roy</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I’d never thought of performance art as a health hazard. But based on the band-aids stuck to the performers’ knees in French choreographer and artist Xavier Le Roy’s <a href="http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/projects/XavierLeRoy/project-31-xavier-le-roy">Temporary Title</a>, opening today at <a href="http://carriageworks.com.au/events/xavier-le-roy/">Carriageworks</a> in Sydney, I’m reconsidering. </p>
<p>In this show, 12 performers blur the boundary between dance and exhibition as they roam – naked – through Sydney’s Carriageworks. They imitate a pride of lions as they move on their hands and knees, while patrons sit or stand around them. </p>
<p>I saw the performance at one of the Open Rehearsals, where feedback from the audience was welcomed. As I entered one of the Carriageworks track spaces, arched windows let in natural light. Carpet was laid to ease the passage of the performers who paced, padded and stalked around the room on hands and knees.</p>
<p>The question Temporary Title raised (beyond whether those sore knees would ever heal) was whether it was really effective to translate dance and choreographic working methods into an exhibition?</p>
<h2>Going wild</h2>
<p>The performers ranged the floor; they collapsed into sleeping piles; they stopped and paused, to actively listen. They were choreographed to curl their fingers under, to slap down their “paws”, to sway their hind hips as wild beasts do. </p>
<p>They strode, and then froze, mid step – a common enough phenomenon in nature, but at Carriageworks it formed part of the choreographic patterning and improvisation.</p>
<p>The work was structured (as dance practice), it was temporal (though without clock precision) and it happened live. The pauses in the performers’ movements created a stillness that felt unlike anything we – as humans – are these days accustomed to. They were on high alert for changes among the audience, or new arrivals in the space, which affected the next series of movements. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102563/original/image-20151119-18441-hnzur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Temporary Title, 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kaldor Public Arts Projects/Carriageworks.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his choreography Le Roy has employed elements of repetition, unison, patterning and interruption. The interruption occurred when one of the performers broke rank and padded over to a member of the public, all of whom tended to nervously adhere to the four walls. </p>
<p>At the artist lecture, last Sunday afternoon at Carriageworks, Le Roy explained that the performers were encouraged to speak to the audience about anything they wished. There was freedom in these interactions, yet the questions (mostly about ageing, time, change and geography) seemed closely related to the re-wilding and the animalistic hyper-consciousness of the performance. </p>
<p>One of the remarkable and subtle elements of the choreographed “exhibition” – as Le Roy preferred that it be called – was the slight panting some of the dancers enacted when they were still. Dogs and lions, alike, pant to cool their body temperature, to restore themselves before the next phase of movement. Dancers, when they do it, train to hide such overt signs of exertion. </p>
<p>Le Roy presented live choreographed dance as an exhibition. Why defend the work as exhibition, rather than performance? Perhaps, to raise the status of dance and to disseminate it to a broader public. </p>
<h2>The aesthetic of recruitment</h2>
<p>Is it enough to recruit dancers and present them as interactive, moving art objects? Or is it just another annoying trend of merging disciplines, so that none stands alone? </p>
<p>Why endlessly integrate audience participation into contemporary art? </p>
<p>During the performance, my friend and I were approached by independent artist <a href="http://www.dirtyfeet.com.au/iveywawn">Ivey Wawn</a>, who asked us in a slightly stuttered and innocent way, how we knew if we were moving north, south, east or west. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102568/original/image-20151119-18441-12owb6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Temporary Title, 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kaldor Public Art Projects/Carriageworks.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is what academic Tom Apperley calls the “aesthetic of recruitment,” which is where strangers gather together to play, such as in computer games. It is a calling upon the public to widen the discourse, to both assure and disrupt, to participate and disorganise. </p>
<p>Ivey recruited my friend and me to speak philosophically about the curve of the planet and human relationships with it. What was the effect? Well, it was a variation from the experience of watching nude human bodies pace. </p>
<p>In an era in which recruitment has become an aesthetic, where social media can create impromptu gatherings and crowds, it makes sense that choreographed dance interacts with exhibition spaces in innovative ways. </p>
<p>Temporary Title is an apt name for an art experience that provided quick-fix sensory reactivity and melded connections between animal behaviour, transitioning social spaces and philosophical posturing, in a condensed format. In the end, though, I couldn’t help but feel there was something overly familiar – or maybe askew – with this work. </p>
<p>Maybe it was just fatigue from seeing all the band-aids caused by carpet burn. I really hope it wasn’t because I kept thinking of The Lion King.</p>
<p><br>
<em>Temporary Title takes place at Carriageworks on November 20, 21 and 22. Entry is free but bookings are essential. <a href="http://carriageworks.com.au/events/xavier-le-roy/">Details here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50010/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Prudence Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Is this a dance work, an exhibition, or a melding of the two? Xavier Le Roy’s latest work, in Sydney, raises many questions, such as: Is it enough to present dancers as interactive, moving art objects?
Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.