Female Performance Artist Shocks the Art World By Staging Event That Doesn't Involve Her Vagina At All

Just kidding.

Of course it involves her vagina.

How could it not involve her vagina? Women are more than their genitals, and female performance artists prove this by only making art with their genitals.

You wouldn't understand, H8r.

Visitors to this week's Art Cologne fair were greeted with an unsightly sight: an attractive, naked women perched astride two ladders, squatting over a canvas. Swiss performance artist Milo Moiré was about to “birth” an abstract painting—by disgorging paint-filled eggs from her vagina.

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According to Moiré, “PlopEgg Painting” is intended to evoke a “loose train of thoughts” about “the creation [of] fear, the symbolic strength of the casual and the creative power of femininity.” By plopping eggs. Out of her vagina.

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Despite her clunky metaphors, Moiré, like most performance artists, must tell us the “meaning” of her work, lest the viewer misunderstand its seriousness.

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Put obliquely by Moiré, “Within the context of art (performance), commerce (art fair) and opinion creation (media) a deliberate-accidental creation act happens, which instantly provokes ambivalent interpretations.”

There's an enormous dodge in the art world. It's the word "challenge." As in, "This artwork is intended to challenge the viewer's idea of what art is."

You hear this bullshit a lot. This Snootch-Painter suggested the idea in saying her intent was to "provoke[] ambivalent interpretations."

When you claim to merely be "challenging" someone's idea of what art is, you are, coincidentally enough, shielding yourself from critique based upon existing standards.

Hey, you're challenging those standards. Hence, they cannot be applied to you.

You can't be said to have failed any number of traditional criteria for evaluation of an art; your "challenge" to those criteria places you outside such booszhwah standards, above them.

And who's to say what a good vaginal-egg-paint painting would look like, anyway?

That's right-- You don't know, so just shut up.

It's just the happiest of all happy accidents that the most talentless would-be artists choose to "challenge" the conventional criteria for evaluating actual artistic talent.

In addition, merely "challenging" something is an exceedingly low-ambition threshold to clear, isn't it?

Some artists and writers set high standards in terms of what they intend to accomplish. For example, a writer might set out to disprove a proposition.

Imagine if that same writer set for his ambition merely the easy threshold of challenging something. All he has to do is ask a single rhetorical question and he wins -- he has accomplished his goal according to his own standard. He said he was only going to "challenge" an idea, and he does so, with a single piece of punctuation.

Right . . . ?

Bang! Donzo. Challenging, accomplished!

This is all obvious, of course, and it's obvious to anyone who stands outside the art world and who isn't thus financially invested in the proposition that this crap is preposterously easy to do (and hence unworthy of monetary reward) and foundationally stupid (and hence unworthy of commentary, much less praise!).

But this is art, for the moment, and by "the moment," I mean the last 40 years.

Oh: If you wish to see the "art" this stunt produced, here it is, though of course the resulting painting isn't the point.

Lot of red in there. And of course she folded it over to create a symmetry (like they do at Smear Some Paint activities at carnivals).

So she created a red vagina-looking thing.

How On the Nose.

People wanted to see her naked. Well here's another happy accident -- because she wants you to see her naked, too.

Okay, here is a Not Safe For Work video in which she boards a train, naked, with the word "Bra" written on her where her bra would be, etc.

She does look good naked. And gee, what a coincidence. Almost all of her "art" involves her being naked. Kind of playing right into her "artistic wheelhouse."

So again, Not Safe For Work, here she is naked on a train, in video form.

So like when your boss asks you "Why are you yanking your shank to pornography?" you can give him a sophisticated, rakish wink and reply, "I'm yanking my shank to A Happening."

posted by Ace at 06:12 PM

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