Deborah de Robertis: ceci n’est pas une chatte

At the Musée d’Orsay a few days ago, the performance artist Deborah de Robertis further blurred the lines between performance, art, criticism, gender politics and self-marketing by re-enacting Origin of the World in front of the original painting. Which, if you’re not aware of Courbet’s controversial masterpiece, essentially means displaying her ladyparts to all and sundry.

De Robertis explained her actions thus:

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.

...which is essentially a riff on the feminist argument that in too much art, the male gaze at once sexualises the female body and makes it passive. Fair enough. But the stunt (cunning or otherwise) also refers back to the questions raised by René Magritte 85 years ago when he forced us to contemplate the distinction between a real object and a painting thereof. If it’s OK to show a painting of female genitalia, de Robertis seems to ask, why is it so disturbing — not least for the museum authorities — to show the real thing? When we get to media coverage of the event we get beyond reality top the competing claims of different kinds of representation. After all, unless we happened to be present when she sat down in the museum, we don’t see de Robertis’s genitalia, only photographic representations of it — just as we only see Courbet’s rendering in oils of his anonymous subject’s pudenda.

Said media tend to play things safe. In the Artnet article, the Courbet painting is shown in all its glory; Ms de Robertis’s tender areas are blotted out (is this the black hole to which she refers?); but there’s a link to a video in which all is bared and you can also see the upset that resulted. A brouhaha about a hoo-ha, one could say. When Le Figaro covered the same story they were even more puritanical, not even showing the original painting; but in the photo they used an attendant’s leg protects the artist’s modesty, thus making the act of censorship feel slightly less crass. (Indeed, that image rather reminds me of the classic photo of the Twickenham streaker Michael O’Brien, in which a London bobby’s helmet shields us from his, um, helmet.) When the Daily Mail ran a different story relating to Courbet’s painting last year they were equally wary of showing it in all its glory but felt able to offer up a rough sketch: which suggests that its readers can cope with neither female genitalia nor paintings of female genitalia but half-assed doodles of female genitalia are OK.

But let’s go back to de Robertis’s original point, which is essentially about how artists use and abuse female nudity. She’s reasserting her claim to ownership of her body, so the depiction of a naked woman is OK if it’s the woman herself doing it. Context is all. But she may well have been making a feminist statement when she sat down but if you wait till the end of the video clip and go to some of the suggested viewing, you’ll find that some of those who appreciated the ideological intent behind her gesture also wanted to see attractive Italian ladies in their underwear and a story about Scarlett Johansson getting naked. In today’s infinitely connected world, context begins to die after a single click.

Which puts me in a spot: how can I illustrate this story without seeming to be a prim, censorious puritan on one hand or a leering pornographer on the other. I suppose I’ll just avoid the issue, with a pretty picture of a cat, albeit one involving an artist who raised similar questions about the points at which empowerment and titillation intersect. Will this do?

Femen and Bucklesby: a tale of two stunts

A man who doesn’t exist, although a lot of people rather wish he had; and another man who does exist, a fact that has prompted even greater disappointment.

The man who does exist is Victor Svyatski, who appears to be the svengali behind the topless provocateurs of Femen. A new documentary presents him as an unlikely feminist, admitting he hand-picks activists on the basis of their looks, describing them as “bitches” and admitting to the possibility that he started the organisation to “get girls”. Indeed, he appears to be a repository of the sort of patriarchal attitudes that – we thought – Femen was intended to challenge:

These girls are weak... They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.

Nobody with any degree of political nous truly believed that Femen was an authentically grass-roots movement but the revelations about Svyatski seem to take astroturfing into a new dimension and risks discrediting the whole movement. Unless of course the film is part of some as-yet unspecified campaign of counter-intuitive publicity, in which Svyatski is in fact a helpless pawn of the bare-boobed campaigners. And in case I sound too puritan about the whole story, it’s no coincidence that I’ve put the Femen picture first in this post, acknowledging the fact that, when it comes to luring online traffic, nipples will always trump...

...a park bench, even one bearing a gloriously grumpy salute to the memory of Roger Bucklesby.

Although it soon became clear that Mr Bucklesby was a figment of a writer’s imagination. And yet that somehow makes the park bench thing even more endearing; whereas the fakery behind Femen disturbs us. I keep coming back to those words by TS Eliot: “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” And I think Eliot would have chuckled at Bucklesby but I’m not sure what he would have made of all those nipples.

Francesca Eastwood’s handbag: all bound for Mu Mu land

Francesca Eastwood, spawn of Clint, has prompted a minor brouhaha thanks to her involvement in an art stunt that involved a $100,000 Hermès bag being chainsawed and set on fire. It’s essentially a reality-show re-run of the KLF’s notorious Burn A Million Quid event, albeit on a smaller budget, and some of the aghast responses are pretty similar – Ms Eastwood should, we are informed, have put the money towards some more worthy cause. But is it really so much more heinous to destroy a bag worth $100,000 than to spend $100,000 on a bag in the first place? Or to sell it for that much? (Unless of course that’s what Eastwood and her conspirator/boyfriend were actually intending to say, in which case I’ve suddenly decided that it’s lame, studenty gesture politics of the most obvious kind.)

One more thought: how much direct involvement did the Hermès marketing department have in all this?

Pierrot le fou

Oh dear, it’s all gone a bit death-y, hasn’t it? Yesterday we got the sad news that both Charlie Gillett (we can forgive the Dire Straits business, because he gave us Ian Dury, Lene Lovich and The Sound of the City, one of the first books that persuaded me that writing about pop music might not be an utter waste of time) and Alex Chilton (am I the only person prepared to admit to preferring the Box Tops to Big Star?) had checked out, and this morning I found that Fess Parker, the man in the coonskin cap, had gone the same way.

Amidst the carnage, I almost missed the fact that Pierrot Bidon had also died. He was the man behind the extraordinary circus collective Archaos; by combining athleticism, nihilism and a smart eye for a bit of publicity, it added a bit of danger to the Edinburgh Fringe in the days before that venerable institution effectively turned into an open audition for people who aspire to be on Mock The Week. With its rough edges sanded down a bit, the Archaos meme was tweaked into the success of Cirque du Soleil, Stomp, the Blue Man Group and those strange people who dangled from ribbons at the Millennium Dome.

I was lucky enough to see Archaos in 1989, which was (I think) their first time in Edinburgh. Buzzes were still created by word of mouth in those days, and all of a sudden the only buzz going was about these stinky French crusties who’d been doing motorcycle stunts during the afternoon rush hour on Princes Street. Unusually for the Fringe, the show itself lived up to the hype, all fire-breathing punks, juggling chainsaws and topless trapeze artists. It was the sort of show where the audience leaves quietly, not because they are underwhelmed, but because there is nothing left to say, not at least until you bump into someone who hasn’t seen it yet.

They showed it on TV that Christmas. It was good, but there was something missing; the smell. For two decades, I’ve been telling people it was “the smell of cordite” but as I came to write this, I realised I wasn’t entirely sure what cordite was, beyond something a bit explosive, not to mention smelly. It turns out that cordite has been obsolete for decades; now I don’t know what smell it was that the TV show lacked, but it was important. And now Pierrot isn’t around to tell me.



PS: Mark Borkowski eulogises Bidon at greater and more informed length, starting here.

I'm burnin' it

Man tries to live a brand-free lifestyle, torching his branded possessions en route, and writes a book about it.

Advertising/marketing/branding site accuses him of hypocrisy.

Fair point? Or a sign that he's getting under someone's skin?

Communication problems

I know how difficult it is to get media coverage these days, especially for worthy but unsexy causes such as hearing impairment. So when the RNID staged the photo opportunity above, I was at first prepared to be tolerant. I mean, at least it wasn't one of those bodged-together, statistically nonsensical 'surveys' to publicise a new brand of lager or car or no-fee legal assistance. (You know, the type that asks a sample of ordinary Brits: "If you'd just crashed your car after drinking 10 pints of lager, which sexy celebrity would you like to represent you in court?" The answer is always Angelina Jolie.)

But back to the picture. The fact that the subjects are in the vicinity of red phone boxes might suggest some tangential reference to hearing loss, but is probably more likely to trigger thoughts of English Heritage. I mean, when was the last time you used one of these things, unless you're a Japanese tourist? And look at the people themselves. We have a man who doesn't look very much like Albert Einstein, another man who doesn't look in the slightest bit like Del Boy, and people whose resemblance to Madonna, Winston Churchill and Elvis Presley is, to put it gently, fleeting. If there's any implied message or meaning here, it's probably more related to blindness, since only someone with severely restricted sight would associate these people with the figures they are puported to represent. Baudrillard appropriated the word simulacrum to describe a representation that continues to have currency, even when its link to the thing it represented is severed. So, to stick with the public telephone idea, Dr Who's Tardis is now better known than the police box it hijacked. I've got a horrible feeling that these gurning parasites will continue to appear even after we've forgotten what Elvis sounded like.

There's a tired old line trotted out by desperate PR hacks when something's gone utterly tits-up: "There is no such thing as bad publicity." It's utter bollocks, I'm afraid; look at John Prescott, or DFS commercials. It's not polite to say it, but desperate, naff, lame, cheap, bland, banal, amateurish stunts like the one above make me want to follow Basil Fawlty's lead. The next time I meet a deaf person, I'll move my lips as if I'm speaking, and when she adjusts her hearing aid, I'll just scream "POSTMODERNISM" into it.

And, while we're in the goods yard of prevailing mediocrity: Miss Prism, in her Capacious Handbag blog, elegantly sums up the whole, fraught issue of 'dumbing down':

"It's simply not feasible to explain complex issues to the public one soundbite at a time - the general level of background knowledge is far too low. I'm no defeatist, but I think the problem should not be 'How do we explain this in 100 words or less?' but 'How do we make people want to read 10,000 words?'"

Couldn't have said it better myself (which is why I nicked it).