An Xiao

The artist is kinda present.

Social media art.

I feel like it’s mostly a performance based art (with documenting) as most of the idea of it stems from the social interaction between the online community and the artist. So it is much more about the communication of these communities and how the communication channels have changed. I guess it is just artists using new technologies to make art, as happens always.

This work involves the real life interaction taking a backseat to the online interaction. And as a stark contrast to Abromovic’s ‘The Artist Is Present’ in the other part of the museum. It’s just a really funny artwork. I think that Abromovic is so sincere, intense and authentic that it is great that someone is just poking fun of that from the anonymity of her twitter handle.

It is interesting the way that social media, and this work, has so many layers to the interaction. The artist is present, yet totally downloaded/uploaded into her many screens. The viewer/participant sits opposite the artist and interacts via social media until they are somewhat satisfied. The viewer is involved physically, and is involved digitally, using their own digital profile/reality. While the artist is involved physically and digitally. It makes me think which is a stronger presence? People are so intwined in their digital reality that they are totally zoned out of actual reality. Its just a prefect embodiment of the digital age, especially in response to Abromovics work. Abromovic, I think is trying to do the same thing as Xiao, but Xiao’s work is just so much better and poignant (to me). I guess I have no experience of either of these works so can only use my imagination of the experience. But sometimes humour is the best way to cut through to people and that is something that Abromovic lacks in this piece.

I think it totally relates to my interest in technology as the new interface. The Abromovic work would be so filled with energy, just by looking at someone in the eye for however long brings this emotion and energy in the body.. Does science even explain this? Not sure, but i would think it would have something to do with the sensory receptors - connection is something that is being completely lost in this present day. And the importance of connection is being forgotten. I think that online communication is so empty and soulless. It is funny that the work by Abromvic is kind of a time capsule of the way people used to relate, and Xiao’s work is the way people connect now - and the difference in experience between them.

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Cindy Sherman

Selfies series

These selfies are something else. At i feel like this is the exact trajectory that my art ideas have been heading but Sherman got there first. Which I think is a good thing. Just commenting on selfie culture and using the FB technology style - made to beautify yourself - in order to make real monstrous feminine caricatures of herself. I think these are brilliant. Using Instagram as its medium(?) is perfect. It's just really simple and perfect and slightly horrifying. and the number of them is great too. Five hundred of them or more, so you get a real sense of overstimulation, oversaturation and filling up your social media feed with selfie vain clutter (again). It is dissecting this question between what is a selfie and self-portrait - and what an important person to ask that question. Is it art? I love that the images are dispersed within her regular feed. everything that is facing out is regular instagram crap, everything that is facing herself is a fucked up selfie. Like she’s only just a little obsessed with ugly self-portraits but she actually lives a real life as you can see. Her selfie obsession only started a few hundred updates ago. first one starts 124 weeks ago with ‘selfie! No filter hahaha’


This is really using the beautifying tool of that face app thingy into a weapon to make ugly, making fun of the selfie, using her history of the artist to become these internet troll characters? She is becoming the people that live for this in each of these photos - instead of the 'everywoman' in film that her untitled series produces, she is the everywoman in everyday online life. 

Is she constructing a monstrous femininity? She is becoming monstrous -And I need to understand more of Barabra Creed the monstrous-feminine to get this question… but making something that is supposed to be beautiful into something ugly - is that the monstrous feminine? Turning the expectation of beauty and self-representation being aesthetically pleasing into one of shock or horror - the opposite of aesthetically pleasing.

Anna Uddenberg

“I mean let’s come clean, engaging with the surfaces of things is not to be mistaken with being superficial. There is a great essay written on this by Ulrika Dalh called Surface Tensions: Femininities, Feminisms, Femme Figurations. She uses the idea of a surface tension to describe the constitutive tension between an “inside” that’s supposed to be authentic and an outside that’s read as superficial. She uses that to talk about femininity. Accusing something of being superficial, reveals some sort of disappointment or need for the “authentic” or “the genuine” (the performative genuine) or the “real deal.” There is something very disturbing and idealistic about that, which reminds me of when people talk about women wearing “too much” make up, that they prefer the “natural look.” And just as the “natural woman” is a construction, there are certain aesthetics for coming across as “socially and politically engaged.” It’s a bit sad and potentially also conformist, when one asks art to fulfill one’s own ideas about one’s self as somebody who cares about politically urgent matters.”

Sophie Takách

Evert Manifold. Takách uses dental mold to take an imprint of her vagina. By doing this she subverts or inverts the feminine space. She makes the negative into a positive shape, into a threatening monstrous shape. Inverting the passive into active the vessel into phallace. Making an answer to penis envy inverting the lack into an actual object, even a weapon. But the shape is still curved and organic, still feminine. The material is Bronze casting which still somehow has a feminine tactility to it and harks back to ideas of bronze busts of important men in the library. I think this is a reallly important and subtle piece of modern feminist art that really harks back to the monstrous feminine and ways of subverting power dynamics in the gaze.