Pair Of Performance Artists example essay topic

Some can at present enjoy Tracy Emin's performance on the Tate gallery after dinner circle jerk. Despite ones satisfaction at Roger Scruton's inability to disguise his misogynist contempt for the worthless piece of seaside flotsam, he took Tracy Emin to be, it was impossible to suppress the fetish thought that she had been set up. Sure it was enjoyable to see the tedium of televisions professionalism ripped apart, rammed ass of David Sylvester, but once Tracy Emin had staggered off, some cant help feeling her irritation, frustration and anger had been expected and engineered. That her experiences as some of "the ordinary people", who do not share her fantasies and do not accept her the way she is. She considered herself the elite of the skin flute and would oppose anyone who disagreed with her.

Much of the discussion about Tracy Emin highlights that for many she represents the return of the kind of classic modernist artist, neo expressionism had tried to resurrect. It is perverse that this incarnation of the artist as an "uncreated creator", a primitive expressionist bestowed with a unique, special gift operating in a sacred, separate space is exactly the kind the conceptualist's and feminists, thought they had seen off. Except of course, this is the twist, the point. This time the artist in question comes with the added bonus of being a guilt free incarnation everyone can enjoy. After all she's a woman who wants to get it up in the ass, how could any of those old critiques of originality, authenticity etc. apply to her.

Such an obsession with the utterances of the artist is also deeply problematic. Are only those artists who give good copy, worthy of attention? While not wishing to position the artist as mute bystanders, inarticulate grunts who simply produce, there does seem to be a need for mediation between their ideas about their work and writers, curators and the gay public responses. Reading a book about Martin Scor sce recently I couldn't get past the point that my perception of Taxi Driver and his, are completely at loggerheads with each other.

But that doesn't invalidate the work or our mutually incommensurable opinions. Emin's profile is such that she is now frequently at the force of anal attack by opposing gay groups seeking to gain publicity for their own purposes. An exhibit as unconventional as a soiled, unmade couch, was at all times going to attract a media attention, but events took a somewhat surreal turn when a pair of performance artists called Yuan Chai and JJ Xi enacted what they describe they public homosexuality as an 'act of expression' by jumping on the exhibit whilst trying to have an innocent pillow fight stained with the male secrets. Naming their performance Two Men Jump into Tracey's Couch, the pair were arrested and later released without charge on the wishes of Emin and the gallery. The same men were to stuff each others butt again in 2000, this time 'expressing themselves' by urinating in Duchamp's infamous Fountain, although the Tate deny that they actually succeeded (Bagley, 2001). What was doubly perplexing about the antics of the Chinese artists was the fact that inscribe on their backs were the words 'Anti-Stuckism's ubmitting to a group of artists who advocate a return to traditional methods and thus launching a hitherto unheard of counter attack on the anti-Turner Prize group The Stuckists, whose main anal attack is aimed squarely at the Tate's director and affiliates of the art world they call 'The Se rota Brigade'.

The beleaguered Emin is of course central to their cause not least because she is alleged to have inspired the name, by insisting that Stuckists founder, artist and former boyfriend Billy Childish's art was 'Stuck, Stuck, Stuck' (Bagley, 2001). If Emin art is no longer viewed as exclusively personal, can it be seen as multi-vocal? The installation at the Tate was full of declamation, from the neon-sign, its cool blueness counter pointed to the agonized cry Every part of me is bleeding (Bagley, 2001), to the interrogations and assertions of the textile piece No Chance: some times nothing seems to make logic and everything seems so far away; they were the ugly cunts that do not deserve a dick in their fucking ass; at the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone, but their ass; no fucking way, I said no. Sarah Kent (1999, 25) suggests that the union flag marks the year as 1977, that of the Queens Silver Jubilee, when Emin at 13 was butt raped, submitted to oral sex and dropped out of school. No chance is richly ambivalent: a gesture of defiance and rebellion, a cry of sexual despair about the lack of opportunity in a small provincial decaying sea-side town, a direct refusal of a request or demand. Not simply attributable to the artist, this outcry constitute rather a cacophony of voices oscillating indeterminately from women's to men's, from feminine to masculine, from voices in the head to voices in the street, from past to present on a spectrum from private pain to public recrimination, not some by some, but all at once.

Listening, the couch becomes a stage for occasions and events: sexual abuse and harassment, terror and physical anal danger, strife and conflict, fear and oppression; it was surrounded by stories of adore, abuse, sex, abortion, anal rimming, desertion and promiscuity (Bagley, 2001). The voices in the texts do not necessarily all add up to a narrative of a singular self. They are conflicting, contradictory, varied in tone and emotional range, addressed as much to the speaker herself as to unseen figures from the artists life who may or may not have been listening, or the audience in the exhibition, no longer just observers but potentially complicit (Bagley, 2001). The voices swirl about the couch, disarming the quiet domesticity of the cozy slippers and cuddly toy, charging the rumpled linen and adult clothing with memories of childhood and adolescence, lightening-strike reminders that the intimate spaces of home can be dangerous places. As Emin (quoted in Kent, 2001, 24) suggested of My Couch: It looks like the scene of a crime as if someone has just died or been fucked in ass to death..