Digital Revolution @ The Barbican Centre

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from the new exhibition at the Barbican Centre, that aims to explore the rise of digital creativity across the arts.  Up until this point (and apologies for not posting) I had been busy immersing myself in my dissertation and the impeding job hunt.  Finally both parts have now been taken care of, and I am back to doing what I love, exploring art exhibitions and writing about them.

It was a sunny Tuesday morning, and a friend and I arrived at the exhibition before it even opened- this is good advice- aim to get there around half ten to pre buy your tickets and avoid any queuing.  I’ll keep this post brief because I believe that one of the reasons I loved it the exhibition so much, was that I had no expectations, and no idea what it was going to entail.  When we get ourselves too hyped up about something, an exhibition, a particular artist, or an event in general, we do tend to attach with it too many expectations.

 

But it’s easy not to get disappointed with this exhibition when there is such a high level of interaction.  You can play with the 3D laser field light that fills an entire room, play a keyboard and listen to the sounds of the world and even revive your youth by playing games such as the Sims and other vintage video games.  You can also project yourself onto a large digital screen and dance with the new image, create a digital version of yourself, whisper to butterflies which in turn type out the message you speak, and finally, my favourite part, turn your own image into that of a great phoenix.

For me, the exhibition was all about interacting with a digital space and uniting digital’s past with its future.  This is exactly why the exhibition was, in my eyes, not only incredibly entertaining, but also eye-opening.  It offers insight into the importance of digital culture not only in art, but also in our lives, and by reconciling the past with the future, it offers a sort of shared phenomenon that the public can all relate to.  Artists, film-makers, designers, musicians and game developers, all pushing their fields using digital media, unite for the first time inDigital Revolution.  The exhibition runs until the 14th of September, and is a must see this Summer in London.

I Went to Art Basel And I Went Naked

If you’ve read any of my articles before, you’ll be aware that I am pretty tolerant when it comes to performance art.  Despite the increasing scepticism that surrounds it, I tend to see the beauty and passion in it as inherent qualities of art in practice.  I recently wrote an article about the young performance artist Milo Moiré, who hit the headlines last month when she stood naked in a square in Cologne, pushing ‘egg’s out of her vagina.  Naturally, she got ripped by the press and the art world, but I still found myself defending her. Why? She had made a somewhat convincing statement about art and its relation to life despite a pretty volatile appearance.  She focused on concept disguised behind controversial aesthetics, and I totally rate that.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about Moiré’s most recent attempt at performance art. It was devoid of everything great performance art should have, concept, originality and shock factor. At the annual Art Basel in Switzerland, art enthusiasts found themselves among one particular art enthusiast, who stood out because she was not wearing any clothes. Instead, she replaced her clothes with words that represented the very clothes missing from her body. Instead of wearing a t shirt, she chose to write ‘t shirt’ on her stomach.  She surprisingly enough passed rather inconspicuously among the public and even managed to get away with the act until arriving at the entrance to Art Basel, where she was asked to put on clothes or leave.

It was the inconspicuous nature of it that warrants the act ineffective and frankly embarrassing. Performance art should of course be in a separate category of itself, away from the plastic arts, but that doesn’t mean it should be allowed to ride of some sort of non existent hall pass that allows it to discount both aesthetics and concept.  What exactly was the artist trying to convey? We didn’t even get to find out because the piece was so uninteresting and devoid of excitement and brashness.

Performance Art has a pretty bad rep these days.  I guess we can’t really be surprised, especially if we compare it to its beginnings in the seventies, where originality and creativity ran wild.  It was all about power, strong visuals and long term goals.  If we want Performance Art to make a bolder message and to actually mean something, it needs to have a clear concept and above all it needs to mirror society and culture.  What else is art if it is not a reflection of our time?

p.s  my best friend really hates performance art

 

 

Legs Like Guns: Ai Weiwei and the Revolutionary Selfie

Since Wednesday afternoon, I along with some 64,000 others, have been entertained by a constant upload of pretty entertaining selfies via Ai Weiwei’s instagram feed.  Given Weiwei’s track record with social networking sites, it is of no surprise to see the artist yet again succumbing to this ‘selfie’ craze.  But it becomes clear that the artist has entirely different purposes with this project.  The one thing all these images share is their subjects, who all raise their leg into a pose that resembles a loaded gun. What began as the artist uploading a selfie of himself with his legs raised in such a position, gave rise to a number of his followers playing homage to the same pose via his instagram feed. Weiwei then proceeded to upload these images to his own instagram account, highlighting the power of social networking sites to unite audiences in the name of art.

While it seems bewildering and somewhat disappointing to denote such importance to social media, a debate of this is not really the point of all this. What Weiwei aims to show with these ‘legs like gun selfies’ constitutes a more outright attack on the political situation in China.  He is quite blatantly and quite openly satirising the oppressive nature of the cultural control to which China bases its politics.  This was also implied by the Chinese blog, Beijing Cream (http://beijingcream.com/), who first highlighted the connection between the leg pose in Weiwei’s selfie and the one in the infamous Chinese ballet, The Red Detachment of Women. The ballet was one of the eight model operas that monopolised the 1960s Chinese national landscape during the cultural revolution; a state-sanctioned depiction of one woman’s rise through the Communist party.

Regardless of the speculations to the origins of this pose, Weiwei’s satirical images coming just after the 25th anniversary of these protests in Tiananmen Square is no such coincidence. The artist, pertaining to the metaphor of the raised gun, explicitly pokes his own finger at the regime.   The very same regime which uses guns to gain control.  It is with no surprise that the message accompanying most of these photos is ‘#endguncrime’.  Sanctioning such gun crime is deplored by many and so his protest (disguised as selfie) reaches out and speaks for, the population of China, but clearly goes far beyond that.

Of course I had to have a go myself, sending the snap straight to Sir Weiwei himself (@aiww)

Whilst the underlying message of the campaign is incredibly serious, we can’t deny the allusion to humour.  Several of Weiwei’s followers make reference to a new dance move suggested by the posed leg in photo, ‘is this the new twerking?’, one of Weiwei’s 65,000 asks. Like with anything, be it in art or in politics, it is clear that humour still has the capacity to move people and to further a cause.  Art and humour help us face the one true certainty of life together, and through these ‘selfies’ and their somewhat ironic undertones, the public will be better informed about the crusade in China.

‘To tell a good joke in art we need to face reality head on’. Joke and humour means that we are better prepared and more aware of what is going on in life.  It means we are more likely capable of dealing with an issue, because humour quite often allows us to enter the furthest reaches of the imagination and to explore the fantasy and the absurd. Who says art can’t be funny and that art can’t proclaim change? Weiwei has a clear political message with this otherwise humorous project.  While it shouldn’t, we can’t deny that a selfie has grabbed our attention of an issue we may have otherwise been unaware, or even worse, ignored.

Take a look at some other selfies uploaded onto Weiwei’s instagram account:

Provocative Performance Artist Reenacts Gustave Courbets ‘The Origin of the World’ By Displaying Her Own Vagina

Just as I was beginning to despair with the recent ‘attention seeking’ acts of performance art, one young artist comes along and changes all that.  YES, Deborah de Robertis constitutes a piece of performance art work that directly plays with and challenges Gustave Courbet’s ‘The Origins of the World’.  Indeed if we are aware of the incredibly racy nature of Courbet’s 1866 painting we can only imagine the provocative nature of the act that this performance artist undergoes.  If you weren’t aware, and as the title makes clear the painting references to the beginning of human life, the place where it all starts.  It is a portrait of the female genitalia.  Whilst the painting was seen as a great scandal at the time, today we recognise it an artistic treasure uniting themes such as realism, romance, eroticism and voyerism.  It’s an incredibly powerful piece, it disturbs just as it incites.

Last week de Robertis, draped in a short gold sequin dress, entered ironically, rather inconspicuously into Room 20 of the Musée d’Orsay.  She placed herself boldly and un-ashamedly directly in front of the Courbet masterpiece, but at the same time, she gave nothing away.  A few seconds later she opens her legs revealing her womanhood.  It is as raw as it is intense, and at the same time rather too easy to watch given the brashness of her display.  But what is it about this piece of performance art that allows it to stand so far from other more recent contemporary pieces?

Before you go any further, check out the video of the performance here: *high sexual content ALERT* http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1yaxll_une-artiste-expose-son-sexe-sous-l-origine-du-monde_news

There was something incredibly raw and emotional about her performance, surpassing the so called ‘aesthetics of beauty’ that the History of Art proclaims to, pushing her performance one step ahead.  It is a declaration of a message about women by women to women, to men and to society.  Did you know that in the 1990’s, less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum were women, but 85% of the nudes were female?

As always the most frustrating and often most entertaining part of reading articles like these is the sprawl of comments made by the great public.  One ‘top commenter’ AKA a Carol Dixson naively says ‘I’m guessing about half the population in the world has one. Hers is special? This “artist” needs to get over herself.’  It is comments (attitudes) like this that seems to disregard  the powerful message behind the act of performance art.  If you don’t like it that is fine, but with conceptual art, with performance art, it’s more the message or concept behind it that becomes the most powerful.  I don’t think those gallery-goers or indeed the security staff at the Orsay will forget about this incident for a long time.  And why should they?

Who knew that a vagina that in art is so treasured, becomes so disturbing and hated in real life? Talk about hypocrisy!

Despite the much despised custom that the French adhere to move things at a very glacial pace, it still didn’t take long before De Robertis was removed by security staff.  She has been handed over to the police who have the power to charge her with sexual exhibitionism.

But De Robertis justifies her performance.  ‘If you ignore the context, you could construe this performance as an act of exhibitionism, but what I did was not an impulsive act,” she explained to Luxemburger Wort. “There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.’

I couldn’t agree more with the brave young woman and neither it seems did the surprised gallery-goers who were quick to applaud her performance.  Why call her brave? She believed in promoting her own message so much that she sacrificed her own position and persona to do so.  Displays of sexual exhibitionism in such a public place like the Musée D’Orsay are going to get you arrested. Yes she broke the law, yes the performance was extremely sexually explicit and yes it came with absolutely NO warning, but this was the very beauty of it! And there is something incredibly powerful and beautiful about her performance. It’s funny how quickly the public go a-wall when a woman’s genitalia is involved.

Last time I checked almost 50% of the population have a vagina, and the other 50% are no stranger to them, so why the outcry? Does it take a nude performance artist disrupting a casual day of museum revelry to make the world notice? Apparently so…