Aesthetes Take Heed
It’s time you philistines were subjected to rewarded with some cultural improvement. It’s for your own good, so I won’t have any complaining.
First up, here’s a little something for the diary:
The first collaboration between tattooist and fantasy artist Loren Fetterman and performance artist Stefanie Elrick, Written in Skin will see the stories of an international group of strangers [being] ‘blood-lined’ across the entirety of Stefanie’s body in one sitting. ‘Blood-lining’ is a semi-permanent form of tattooing without ink, the results of which are akin to scratches visible for weeks that gradually heal and disappear. Literalising the emotional marks we inflict and receive through experience, then transforming them into a customised piece of body art, this project explores vulnerability, intimacy and the regenerative process of love.
It explores. But of course. Oh, there’s more.
As the skin begins to restore itself the following weeks, photographer Jamie Alun Price will document the healing process via an online picture diary.
Written In Skin will be, um, performed at the Cornerhouse Annexe, Manchester, Sunday May 19th, between 11am and 5pm.
Readers with £15,000 to spare could also consider rewarding artistic greatness by purchasing a pleated white dress, briefly worn by a happening pop artiste named Lady Gaga, and vomited on by the performance artist Millie Brown. Ms Brown’s colossal vomiting works will no doubt be familiar to our regulars.
And those with a taste for even more daring and challenging work may prefer the theatrical stylings of Mr Ivo Dimchev, a “radical performer” acclaimed for his “gripping sensitivity” and whose performance piece I-ON “explores” the “provoking functionlessness” of various objects, before showing us “how to make contact with something that has no function.” Readers are advised that the aforementioned contact-making, which was performed as part of the 2011 Vienna International Dance Festival and is shown below, inevitably includes vigorous self-pleasure with what appears to be a wig:
Should your mind remain intact after absorbing such wonders, more of Mr Dimchev’s artistry can be found here.
Yes, I know. You’re aesthetically engorged.
Update: In the comments a featured artist responds.
Is that why ‘exploration’ makes you uneasy? Frightened of losing your co-ordinates?
Oh dearie me.
Stef,
This piece by our host is not a review, and as such he is not obliged to give it a first-person viewing. He is commenting upon its institutional representation and the institutional language being used to advocate for it, which is a valid topic of dialog despite your zeal to marginalize it in favor of your own preferred narrative.
It’s a shame that you can’t engage honestly with the remarks being made here. Instead you assume an insider position and attribute the author’s reaction to out-group philistinism, betraying your inability to participate in serious self-examination regarding your own work. Are there no truly shortcomings in it? Is it impossible that this work might be coming off as narcissistic masochism rather than a creative exploration? If you really had no expectations, why privilege other, more flattering readings over David’s? What does it say about this piece that its defenders are rudely advocating violence in its defense? What does it say about you that you don’t disavow such violence?
And that’s to say nothing about its derivativeness and triteness, which is not of concern to David, but is obvious to those of us in the topic-full time. Chris Burden, Maria Abramovic, and Vito Acconci were making similar statements, more emphatically, four decades ago, examining the same topics. For that matter, this is inferior to people committing their imagery and expression permanently to their flesh, in ink, and thus your piece has nothing in its relative favor except institutional context, as if semi-committal statements in the white cube trump fully committed statements in the vernacular.
This is the kind of retrogressive, academic, salon-style thinking that prevents art from moving forward.
What Franklin said.
We never expected awe nor did we seek it – we had no expectations whatsoever… I welcome the conflict of thought.
Sorry, I don’t believe this for one minute. Franklin’s covered it already but let’s recap: David laughed at the premise of your art and the way it was presented and you got all bent out of shape about it. People who ‘belittle’ your art are ‘blinkered’ and ‘frightened of losing their co-ordinates’, remember? Sounds like ‘conflict of thought’ is the last thing you want.
The review that Stef linked as affirming her work is quite funny too, if you like that kind of thing. The reviewer, an art student, spends a lot of time – many paragraphs – fretting about the artists’ intent (which of course remains unclear) and what it all means, how “uncomfortable” it makes him, etc. “Does this work in some way reference childbirth?” he asks. Alas, we never learn the answer to this great mystery. Such is the way of things – these things, anyway. The nudity apparently shocks him too, which seems rather implausible given its near ubiquity in bad performance art. Apparently, it’s “troubling” – “I was aware that I was looking at somebody female, attractive and naked. For a male you have to question, why you are looking.” This is followed by some cod rumination on voyeurism, which would presumably apply to any performance involving nudity, and a conclusion of sorts:
And this is the thing, the same old same old. The reviewer feels entitled to hail what he’s seeing as complex and sophisticated, having quickly stepped around less flattering possibilities. It’s “a work of ephemeral beauty,” says he, though the reasons for this remain at best nebulous and inconclusive, and somewhat removed from the gallery press release. There is, though, a willingness to beg the question and fill in the aesthetic gaps with suppositions of his own. Suppositions that may well have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is the artists actually intended. (Is it referencing childbirth? Or capitalism, or time-travel?) And if you don’t know what the artists are actually trying to do – if your review relies on so much tendentious guesswork – how can you judge how well they’ve done it, or how far short of their goal they’ve fallen? How can you be sure you aren’t crediting the artists with ideas they didn’t have and work they didn’t do?
And too, how can the artists be sure that they’re not crediting themselves with unearned artistic accomplishment? The presumption here is that they’re going in with no expectations about what this art, or what any art is supposed to do – that’s our failing, you see, for harboring such bourgeois notions – and once it garners any reaction whatsoever, then that is what the work is about. Hence “you’ve reminded me exactly why we did this” and “the dialogue that’s been opened up is a perfect counterpoint to everything we asked people to consider.” Debating this, as I put it once, is like punching a hill of meringue. It’s also, in epochs measured in the contemporary art world, an ancient strategy.
This “performance” reminded me tremendously of my 15-year-old non-verbal autistic son. You know what? It’s about time he started earing his living! (Or should I affect faux rage at the (unintended) and potentially demeaning imitation of his common behaviours?)