I Don’t Think She’s Handling the Menopause Very Well
Once again it’s time to poke a stick in the mental bog of performance art. And so readers are invited to sample the aesthetic wares of Rocío Boliver, an “underground cultural icon” whose career spans musical performance, video, raves and “porno-erotic texts.” Ms Boliver describes herself as “a 56 year old woman living in the 21st century,” a “devotee of transgression” who “aims to demystify the horror of old age in an ironical way,” while “questioning the capitalist system that’s imposed on women in this stage of life.” Her Artistic Statement (NSFW) tells us, “Doing performance art is the only way I can get my own back on life… I feel blessed when I leave those who watch what I do flabbergasted. Happy to wipe their stupid Hollywood smiles off their faces.” She describes her performances as “electroshocks… applied to listless, alienated minds… speechless idiots.” No sell-out flattering of the audience, then.
Highlights from Ms Boliver’s recent triumph Between Menopause and Old Age can be seen in the video below. Its transgressive anti-capitalist electroshocking will,
I’m sure, shake your world. Readers are advised there is nudity throughout, along with barbed wire, self-harm, a bicycle pump and large amounts of Sellotape.
That sound you hear is the trembling of capitalism and the imminent collapse of bourgeois conformity.
Update:
Anna sums things up quite nicely in the comments:
Nudity? Tick.
Anti-capitalism? Tick.
Self-harm? Tick.
No, she’s not conformist at all.
There is of course a long and tedious tradition of self-harm in performance art, seen most recently here. It’s hardly less common than nudity or faeces. Or anti-capitalist pablum. For instance, Marina Abramović, now an elder stateswoman of performance art, has over the years cut herself with razor blades, allowed audiences to burn her, and brushed her hair aggressively until her head started to bleed. What I’ve seen of these things is very boring and the aesthetics escape me. It’s hard to see much beauty through all that pretension and psychodrama. Though to be fair, some have embraced self-mutilation in a slightly less time-wasting and roundabout manner. In 1971 an artist named Chris Burden had a friend load a rifle and then shoot him in the arm. Mr Burden felt this would lead to him being “taken seriously as an artist.” Though it seems this colossal seriousness had to be reaffirmed three years later, when Burden felt it artistically necessary to have both of his hands nailed to the roof of a VW Beetle.
Hitting the tip jar will only encourage me. 
Unless you consider social and political agitation over things like sustainability, peak oil, fracking, consumerism, religion and gender issues culturally enriching? Pass?
Well, I’m not convinced that ‘fine’ art – as opposed to, say, documentary film – is a great way to convey a political message of much complexity. Slogans, yes, maybe emotive images. But not so much an argument, let alone a fair one. At least I can’t offhand think of an example. And then there’s the issue of where the beauty fits.
It seems a shame that people like the above woman are considered “artists,” and people who make beautiful things are considered to be just standard workers. To my mind there has been more artistic nourishment from this than from all the pretentious performance art shows I’ve ever heard of.
Years ago I went to an exhibit that showed a bunch of pieces from da Vinci, including his notes and sketches. I was really interested to note that his sketches and drawings were very similar to engineering notes and sketches that I or my colleagues would make. My conclusion was that he was a craftsman, as much or even more than an “artist” in the modern sense. Certainly he had great artistic sensibility, but he was also focused on making products which would please his customers, which were expertly crafted. His sketches and notes for building the horse sculpture (a full-size version of which was outside the exhibit) were fascinating, the way he attempted to perfectly capture the motion and musculature of the horse.
Today, a person with that attitude and approach would not be considered a “serious artist.” He might even be mocked and hated, the way many do with Kinkade or to a lesser extent Norman Rockwell (“yes, his painting was good technically, but [insert various political complaints here]”). That’s a shame for everyone, and it diminishes art. I agree that it’s hard to see what the purpose of Art in the modern sense is at this point.
Art, I’ve always thought, is the prefect marriage of medium and message. Art is about communication through craft.
If it has nothing to say — if it is just there to be pretty, or to entertain, but it has nothing to say, nothing to communicate — then it’s not art. It’s craft. And there’s nothing wrong with craft, but it’s not art.
On the other hand, if there’s no craft there — if it’s just message — then it’s not art either. It’s just propaganda.
Annoyingly today real art is getting harder to find: it’s kind of split, so you get lots of craft, like slick sitcoms that are entertaining but have nothing to communicate, and lots of awful, awful propaganda, like the stuff discussed here, but rare is the play, the novel or the film that actually manages to combine both craft and communication, medium and message, and actually become art.
David and Jimmy . . . .
What comes to mind is an essay I read a number of years back, written by a long time computer programmer who had recently returned to school, as a professor. Once upon a time, he and a very close friend were taking classes, they were studying computer programming, and this was a very long time ago, and they were a very tiny offshoot of some uni department, and the entire lot of they and their classmates was all of about 150 people. And then they graduated. The writer went off and got an assortment of jobs over at least a couple of decades, the friend stayed around school(s) and taught, and then finally came wandering back to join his friend.
This time around, computer programming had become The Big Thing Which All Must Become And Collect Masses Of Money And etc, mumble, wave hands, observe all around being very impressed, Etc. There really weren’t classes to take any more. Instead the Big New Process was to stand at one end of an aircraft hangar and hold forth on some topic. The small horde of Computer Programming Students (cue thunder) were arrayed before the lecturer, and prolly there was some small army of teacher’s assistants of some sort that would run discussion sessions, or something like that.
And then the newly returned professor started picking up on a pattern . . . . In that aircraft hanger of a hall, that cluster of bodies was sound asleep, that couple over there were three hairs short of having sex, those three over there were having lunch while reading something else, and so forth, regardless of all being signed up for the course. And in that semester, and in general, as the class progressed, he started seeing a cluster of the same names coming up, the same students proactively doing the same sort of work, tearing apart the concepts, breaking things, fixing things, seeing how one actively Does this thing called computer programming.
And of that cluster of the same names doing that same work, the entire lot of they and their classmates was all of about 150 people.
I am a bit at a distance from the British, ah, schools, but I’m rather getting the impression that British or not, the diploma mills selling overpriced wallpaper labeled ARTIST—-or mba, or uber ultra executive international mba, or anything else printed up by the diploma mills these days—are indeed not training artists, or anyone who actually do the fun of I wanna see what this picture or sculpture or whatnot winds up looking like, because I think it would be fun, or because I just feel I must do this.
And, the Actual artists are out there. They’re just not bothering with any formal training more complicated than either personally or institutionally reading the how-to manual and then going off to experiment and play.
I recommend another essay, http://themacavity.com/filmschool.html . . . The Collective MacAvity School Of Making Movies
The opening lines are;
So You Want To Go To “Film School” . . .
Quite simply, Why Bother?
David,
Well, I’m not convinced that ‘fine’ art – as opposed to, say, documentary film – is a great way to convey a political message of much complexity. Slogans, yes, maybe emotive images. But not so much an argument, let alone a fair one.
I completely agree with this. I’m going to try and get someone in government to agree as well.
Hal,
…the diploma mills these days—are indeed not training artists, or anyone who actually do the fun of I wanna see what this picture or sculpture or whatnot winds up looking like, because I think it would be fun, or because I just feel I must do this…And, the Actual artists are out there. They’re just not bothering with any formal training more complicated than either personally or institutionally reading the how-to manual and then going off to experiment and play.
Yes, there’s a lot of truth to this. Re Anon’s post, trying to inject ‘meaning’ into every drawing, every painting, every sculpt, is stultifying. To be exceptionally good at something like drawing requires hours upon hours, days upon days, of grind work. My tutors weren’t interested in seeing this. It was too technical. They would say “but what does it all MEAN?”, obviously irritated with my lack of engagement with meaning. In order to critically reflect on your work you actually have to produce a lot of it. It can’t all be deeply meaningful. A problem arises when a student has little of their own work to engage with visually. They get stuck with trying to suss out what it all means and where to go with it, and become open to influence from ideas and sources that they may not really care about, but which help them engorge their practice with sufficient meaning to please their tutors.
trying to inject ‘meaning’ into every drawing, every painting, every sculpt, is stultifying.
It seems to me that if a piece of art is evidently beautiful, it doesn’t require any external or theoretical attempt at validation. Exposition may be added of course, as a footnote perhaps, but it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, necessary in order to find the beauty. The attempt to justify with theory and cleverness isn’t the meat of it. The verbal add-on isn’t its reason for being looked at by the public and presumably enjoyed. And if the aesthetic is quite enough to captivate and intrigue, isn’t that an ideal? And the further from that ideal a piece of art falls, the more likely one is to find an acreage of elaborate and unconvincing verbiage.
Conceivably, this is annoying for quite a few art “theoreticians,” some of whom, like Benjamin Buchloh, like to bang on at length about how “The antinomy between artists and intellectuals on the one hand and capitalist production on the other has been annihilated or has disappeared by attrition.” And other tendentious guff. As shown in the Art Bollocks piece, for some critics and “theoreticians” art is little more than a vehicle for the airing of their own political suppositions. And even if one assumes that ‘fine’ art should have some socio-political content, some ‘message’ – some ideological excuse for being – there’s another problem.
It’s easy to find art or pseudo-art that has political ‘messages’ but those messages tend to be predictable and very much of a kind. The local taxpayer-funded city-wide art festival is much the same as previous ones – heavy on leftwing politics and textual exposition, light on aesthetic substance. If you want to look at objects and images that are captivating and pleasing to the eye, you should probably stay home and do something else. But if you’re inclined to socialism and want to reinforce your own assumptions with a “critique” of “international market forces,” a “critique” of privatisation and “neoliberal policies,” a piece that “highlights economic and social inequalities,” and a film about an attempt to unionise office cleaners… well, knock yourself out.
The festival – which isn’t actually festive, so far as I can see – is curated by lefties, features work by artists who are largely leftwing, or pretend to be, and attracts a small audience of people whose politics generally correspond with those of the artists and curators. Despite the obligatory blather about art “being challenging,” it’s hard to see how any of the people involved are being challenged in this respect. And this is hardly unusual. As we’ve seen, many times, what you very often end up with is an in-group, a tiny caste of middle-class lefties leeching taxpayers’ money while telling each other how egalitarian they are.
Despite the obligatory blather about art “being challenging,” it’s hard to see how any of the people involved are being challenged in this respect.
Spot on, David. Have a drink on me. *hits tip jar*
I think here is an appropriate point to link to Roger Scruton’s documentary about beauty, for those who never managed to see when it did the rounds on tv…
http://rclvideolibrary.com/2012/12/08/why-beauty-matters/
present & correct,
Thanks for that. Michael Craig-Martin, who appears in Scruton’s film, is mentioned here. Note the condescension and the implicit, rather immense, self-flattery.
This display of skill
I clcked on David’s original link – watch it if you haven’t seen it – and was pretty impressed so I tweeted the link. I was retweeted by a lady I’d never heard of before, so I looked at her profile and found exactly the same thing done by someone else.
Perhaps balancing feathers on lattices of reeds and doing yoga at the same time is what people need to do these days to relax.
And even if one assumes that ‘fine’ art should have some socio-political content, some ‘message’ – some ideological excuse for being – there’s another problem.
If you can make something beautiful (which isn’t easy, I’ve tried) you don’t need to say why you bothered. It doesn’t need ‘some ideological excuse for being’. Lovely phrase, btw.
If you can make something beautiful (which isn’t easy, I’ve tried) you don’t need to say why you bothered.
Well, yes. From the public’s point of view, beauty pretty much speaks for itself. But as you say, making beauty is hard, very few of us can do it, while theory is relatively easy and, more to the point, unhindered by standards. And if you manage to make something beautiful, evidently so, this may well please the public but it rather diminishes the role of the academic “theoretician,” whose career generally depends on obscurity, chest-puffing and reams of tendentious and uninteresting text. (See, for instance, the hefty tome mentioned in the Art Bollocks piece. It’s an enormous pile of untested assertions, inflated jargon and political conceit.) It’s much easier to churn out thousands of words, big words, on why a pile of sand and fag-ends or some arbitrary display of squalor is a masterpiece of art, an “intellectual miracle.” One can theorise wildly and be terribly transgressive. You can claim to see things that others can’t, because you’re so much cleverer than them, and never be proven wrong. You can even shoehorn in lots of hackneyed student politics.
If more artists made art the public might like and even be willing to pay for directly, what would all the theorists and self-appointed intermediaries do? What would happen to all those middle-class lefties who aren’t very talented and couldn’t get a decent job anywhere else?
Will no one think of the middle-class lefties?! 😀
Have a drink on me. *hits tip jar*
Thanks, Jacob.
Perhaps balancing feathers on lattices of reeds and doing yoga at the same time is what people need to do these days to relax.
Short summary, Nah. Apparently it’s merely what those hipsters were all doing at that particular moment.
My first responding thought had actually been: “And about 10 years on, the formal training in [insert collective name for balancing feathers on lattices of reeds and doing yoga at the same time] will have been established, with the occurrence of schismatic conflicting schools starting up about 5 years after that . . .”
. . . except that the effort required for actual schools of practice to form would require an ability to have actual focus and structure and attention to actual context, and we’re talking about wannabe theorists here.
Instead, I rather expect the simpler and more likely explanation is that this all just falls into the same pit as someone writing a parody sociological study of a very obscure and limited cluster of people she grew up around, where the same variety of posers here being discussed then started calling themselves preppys after reading that limited bit of satire called The Preppy Handbook. . .
—at least in the US . . . I’ve read that in Britain that terms like sloane ranger/chav. Etc. very much, have also been applied to describe the vacantly pretentious and generally useless members of several layers of economic levels . . . .
. . . and then that claim to artificial gravity didn’t get the posers any social, cultural, or monetary benefit(1), so they started being the yuppys, and continued with all the vacuosity and the total abhorrence of any and all taste, style, and coherent thought and practice . . .
. . . and then the ability to scam easy credit collapsed along with the government of Iceland, et al, and now they’re called hipsters, and thanks to the prevalence of electronic communication and equipment developed by adults out there in reality, thanks to those tools and techniques developed out here outside the rabbit hole, now the posers are reduced to sending tweets and posting YouTube clips on web pages about balancing feathers on lattices of reeds and doing yoga at the same time . . . . . . .
(1) Yeah, it’s a footnote. Yes, the peddlers of brand name costuming and related kitsch have made and continue to make masses of money off of the suckers, but the peddlers themselves make no claims of taste or style or importance.
I understand that Witkacy’s novel ‘Insatiability’ is translated into English.
It seems as good a commentary on the contemporary art world as any (I’m relying on Czeslaw Milosz’s precis of the novel).
If more artists made art the public might like and even be willing to pay for directly, what would all the theorists and self-appointed intermediaries do?
They might find out how well they can play football: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle-Class_Rip-Off
Jim Hacker is in his constituency watching his local football team . . . Two of the club’s officials tell him of its financial difficulties: . . . one of the officials is chairman of the council’s Arts and Leisure Committee. He mentions that money is being spent on a nearby art gallery that is in a state of disrepair, and that they keep getting offers for the site. Hacker suggests they sell the art gallery and save the football club . . .
Hacker can see no difference between art and football — except that a lot more people are interested in the latter. The Minister opines to Sir Humphrey that art is only subsidised for people like him: the educated middle classes, who enjoy theatre, opera and ballet. Sir Humphrey counters that . . .and the councillors come up with an alternative plan to raise the money by closing down a local school . . .
On another hand, all this does get easier when considering that pesky little question of actually defining “theory”. But as you say, making beauty is hard, very few of us can do it, while theory is relatively easy and, more to the point, unhindered by standards. . . . the role of the academic “theoretician,” whose career generally depends on obscurity, chest-puffing and reams of tendentious and uninteresting text. . . One can theorise wildly and be terribly transgressive. You can claim to see things that others can’t, because you’re so much cleverer than them, and never be proven wrong. You can even shoehorn in lots of hackneyed student politics.
In fact quite particularly, as part of that defining of theory, one can solemnly announce that “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.” and Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” and that “Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” . . . . Welllll, with Just One Relative problem. These quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein.
Yes, theory is very, very, very important, in that it allows for the exploration of all sorts of possibilities . . . and with that wide open ability to explore is the realization, acknowledgment, and open practice of the one and only situation where the theoretical is as credible as the practical: Mathematics.
Outside of Mathematics however, there is indeed only that which is actually practiced, such as accounting, portrait painting, plumbing, acting, singing, news photography, setting splints for broken bones, vs the “theory” that results in being merely some variety of being a hipster and neither good at or good for anything else . . . .
Following on from Hal’s point, isn’t there an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ in which Hacker has to deal with some thespy types who complain about expenditure on defence, rather than the arts, and call for cuts in the former in favour of subsidies for the latter?
IIRC he then makes a quip about substituting the armed forces for a particularly vibrant production of ‘Henry V’, which doesn’t go down at all well.
She wishes she were a pornstar, but she’s too old.