Hannah Wilke’s influence can be seen in contemporary art performance by artists such as Milo Moiré and Deborah de Robertis. Both of these artists have used nudity to confront bourgeois prejudices in public. Moiré’s PlopEgg No. 1 was a performance in which she
‘plopped’ paint-filled eggs onto a canvas in public, in the nude, and from her vagina (Jones
2014). The same year, de Robertis sat in front of Gustave Courbet’s painting, Origin of the
World, with her legs opened wide to display her vagina (Vartanian 2014).
Jonathan Jones’s reaction to Moiré typifies the male hegemony in the art boys’ club that,
Koolhaas’s analysis suggests, refuses to take women’s body art seriously. This would seem a not unreasonable assessment. In harking back to a …show more content…
Indeed the continued need for this assertion of the feminine through bodily confrontations, along with its penchant for controversy, shows an underlying hypocrisy to modern societies that profess policies of equality that are seldom reflected in practice. For example, public displays of nudity such as these by Moiré and de Robertis have led to their arrest and exclusion; meanwhile, pop stars such as Beyoncé assert their sexuality on stage without any (psycho-social) resistance, and are heavily publicised to their teenage fanbases.
Could this be because a group of powerful white men are able to make money from entertainers that they cannot from contemporary artists? If so, then the art world art is evidently able to challenge boundaries in ways that would compromise the interests of more popular forms of culture.
We could easily run away with the idea that popular culture is a benign or toothless art.
Such a view would miss the elites that are hidden behind accountants and lawyers. And we could equally be seduced into thinking that art has bite. Artists that directly intervene …show more content…
The artist behind the work, Anthony Gormley, said of it: ‘In the context of
Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues to specific individuals, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society.’ (Higgins 2009)
This apparently democratic spirit enabled artist Tiffany Oben to perform a piece in which she challenged heteronormative assumptions about gender by gradually stripping herself of clothes traditionally worn by women and then changing into those worn by men.
Her performance, or perhaps ‘her’ performance, could be taken as a lucid illustration of
Judith Butler’s theory of ‘performativity’ (Butler 1990) in which gender is understood as a cultural rather than biological construction in process. Oben’s performance therefore appeared to indeed ‘reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society’ as Gormley stated.
However, self-exposure, whether online or in public as with One & Other, is, as we