How One Artist Gained International attention for an Instagram stream of artworks that were an entire fiction in themselves.
Please read this article below, a hot story at the moment getting lots of press, which can be viewed in two ways – One as an art world phenomena that is of some interest, or Two, as a how-to manual on presenting a series of artwork on Instagram and then talking about it.
The artist in this case is presenting a story on Instagram, then exhibiting it in a museum. It is a performance in a sense, designed to create visual images of the artists choosing, that are then exhibited.
I’ll let the article and links explain, but this is not so unlike previous notions I have discussed of using your mailing list or newsletter as a type of daily art to communicate with an audience.
In this case it was from instagram to a major museum show which is generating conversations about this.
Feel free to share your own experience or thoughts on this!
ART WORLD
Tate Modern Taps Instagram Sensation Amalia Ulman for Its Next Major Show
Photo: Courtesy Temporary Art Review.
Should Instagram be in museums like the Tate Modern?Photo: Better Bankside.
Her snaps of kittens, striped pajamas, and post-shower selfies turned out to be a performance art piece titled Excellences and Perfections. “Everything was scripted,” Ulman told the Telegraph. “I spent a month researching the whole thing. There was a beginning, a climax and an end. I dyed my hair. I changed my wardrobe. I was acting, it wasn’t me.”
Some 18 months later, her Instagram feed—with which she “wanted to prove that femininity is a construction, and not something biological or inherent to any woman”—is going to be exhibited at a major institution.
“Although Ulman used Instagram to make the work, its destination was always the gallery/museum context,” Simon Baker, Tate Modern’s senior curator of photography, told artnet News in an email.
Amalia Ulman.
Photo via: @amaliaulman Instagram.
“The exhibition is about performance and the many ways in which artists have used photography to record and exhibit their performative works. Ulman’s work is an example of recent practice in the same tradition,” Baker added.
Also in the exhibition are key performative works such as Yves Klein‘sAnthropometrie de l’epoque blue (1960) a live painting event in which the artist used bodies of naked women and seminal 60s performances by Yayoi Kusama, Eleanor Antin, and Niki de Saint Phalle, which were documented by the important performance photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender.
Yves Klein, Anthropométrie de l’Époque bleue (March 9, 1960).Photo: Yves Klein Archive.
Sincerely,
Brainard