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7 DEATHS: MARINA ABAMOVIC ON MARIA CALLAS

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7 DEATHS: MARINA ABAMOVIC ON MARIA CALLAS

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Synopsis

1. Violetta dies of tuberculosis.
I am a flickering flame on a lonely candle. the elements exposed: wind and rain, love and hate - sickness and health.
The flame can warm me or burn me. She can mean light the way and be my guide. But when she goes out, she is extinguished. Then it's gone forever.

Violetta's aria from La traviata, Act 3: "Addio, del passato"

2. Tosca throws herself down.
It's not dangerous to jump. It's not dangerous to fall. The air flow, the blood through the veins. Suspended and yet falling. You have time to feel, time to love. Forever. No, it's not dangerous to fall. Only when you land does it become dangerous.

Tosca's aria from , Act 2: " Vissi d'arte "

3. Desdemona is strangled by Otello.
There is an intuition, a premonition, a feeling, a suspicion, a fear, and a warning. Desdemona knew. She removes her wedding dress and prays. When Otello came, she was prepared.

Aria of Desdemona from Otello, Act 4: "Ave Maria"

4. Cio-Cio-San takes her own life.
In science, the butterfly effect stands for an effect in which small causes lead to unpredictable consequences. In superstition the butterfly is your lover visiting you. In mythology, the butterfly is a human soul; whether alive, dying or already dead.

Aria of Cio-Cio-San from Madama Butterfly, Act 2: "Un bel dì, vedremo"

5. Carmen is stabbed by Don José.
Your fearlessness fascinates me. Your love of freedom mirrors mine.
Her burgeoning sexuality empowers her. She knows what she wants and takes it. Love guides her heart. Her beauty and her body belong only to her.

Aria (Habanera) of Carmen from , Act 1: "L'amour est un oiseau rebel"

6. Lucia dies insane.
When the universe conspires against you, tramples on your heart, crushes your soul and enters your brain, you will go crazy. And when you go crazy, you're no longer responsible for yourself or those around you. Love turns to hate, hate becomes love, and death becomes the ultimate liberation.

Lucia's aria from Lucia di Lammermoor, Act 3: "Il dolce suono"

7. Norma goes into the fire.
You go towards the pyre. The first steps are warm, then it gets hotter. Your skin tingles, your eyes water, your hair is singed. You move on. Your skin will turn red before it forms bubbles. But you keep going. The smell of burning flesh. Your skin turns black, blindness, hair on fire, scorched lungs. But you go further - each step requires an incredible amount of effort.
Just before the fire engulfs you, you realise you are not alone. Then the final step into the flames - united.

Aria of Norma from , Act 1: "Casta Diva"

8. Maria Callas dies of a broken heart.
Marina Abramović goes into Maria Callas' bedroom at 36 avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris, where the singer died on September 16, 1977 at the age of 53.
But is Maria Callas really dead or does she still exist, oscillating between life and death? Marina Abramović slides into Callas' past life and exposes herself unconditionally.
She sees photos on the bed, she looks at herself in the mirror, opens the window and breathes Parisian air before Maria's voice sounds once more.

The texts by Petter Skavlan were created for the opera project 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Marina Abramović recorded the lyrics. You can hear them in front of the seven arias.

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What is the Story of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas? Plot, Synopsis & More | ENO

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Synopsis 1. Violetta dies of tuberculosis. I am a flickering flame on a lonely candle. the elements exposed: wind and rain, love and hate - sickness and health. The flame can warm me or burn me. She can mean light the way and be my guide. But when she goes out, she is extinguished.

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-The oldest courtesan, probably a sex worker in Rome. Two greek stage names throughout career, 'proper name' Volumina. Born a slave, raised with a theatrical background, trained to be a mime. -Mime in ancient Rome is closer to vaudeville, popular entertainment for people of all genders. Women were allowed to perform within these mimes. Mime is associated with sex work.
https://www.academia.edu/1587290/Lycoris_the_Mime_in_A._Fraschetti_Roman_Women_University_of_Chicago_Press_Chicago_2001

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Lycoris the Mime, in A. Fraschetti, Roman Women, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2001

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Lycoris the Mime, in A. Fraschetti, Roman Women, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2001

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Biographic documentary about Maria Callas.
Select interviews giving insight into her character, interesting pieces on how the public perceived her as 'temperamental' and known to having tantrums...

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In his splendid book Subculture: the meaning of style, British sociologist and expert on the birth of youth movements in 1970s Britain Dick Hebdige devotes a fine page to collage, stolen from William Burroughs, the master of literary cut-ups. Similarly, political and poetic rebel Linda Mulvey changed her name to Linder to reference the German name of John Heartfield, her collage master who was born Helmut Hertzfeld.

A changed identity and graceful extreme techniques were born out of the circumstances of a politically ferocious period, packed with revolt and subjects that she treated with seemingly out-of-context forms and materials: flower-women, housewives with domestic-appliance heads and vapid magazine heroes.

After years of Photoshop, it would be pointless now to simply analyse Linder's photomontages in terms of pure technique. Instead, an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris illustrates her delicate and contingent work of collection and excavation, the great delicacy that Linder, one of the most influential figures on the British punk scene, managed to evoke and extract from waste materials, pornography and advertising, in the late 1970s subculture that magnificently glorified the idea of "homemade" with humble materials. Her personal and social artistic revolt lies in this pre- and post-Thatcherite poverty.

Do not be fooled by the glossiness of Linder's later works at the end of the exhibition. Created from more contemporary materials, they realign her work alongside commodity artists good and excellent, from Jeff Koons to Damien Hirst.

It is, rather, to the Max Ernst of Une semaine de bonté or the collage grounds of Joseph Cornell's boxes that we must turn if we are to thoroughly enjoy and understand the beauty of series such as We are the kind of people who know the value of time (1976-77), a masterpiece of the transgender aesthetic.

Manchester, Linder's birthplace, was in a terrible state at the time and it seemed impossible that any sense of beauty could be created or developed there. Yet it was a hive of music phenomena and, from her proletarian workshop, the artist extracted little gems that took on concrete form in the home dinette.

Hers was an obsession with an inverted image of the bourgeois world - on the one hand, women's magazines (fashion, decoration and photo-stories), on the other, the male press (automobiles, DIY and pornography). Linder incestuously paired them together. Her flower-woman almost became a signature-piece, and the porn heroes and playmates were submitted to cosmetic surgery and truly disgusting rituals. Images became meat to shape her obsessions, and the artist turned herself into a performer. On 5 November 1982, at a concert of her group Ludus at the famous The Hacienda club, she appeared on stage in a dress made of leftover food and meat found in the bins of a Chinese restaurant; Bloody Linder cocktails were served to the audience and her managers offered them the same leftovers, wrapped in pages torn from porn magazines. The concert ended with Linder improvising a striptease and revealing the words "Women wake up!" on her body.

Had her work been confined to these high points of scandal-strategy, fairly common to her generation, Linder's work and research would probably have run itself out in trendy cultural consumption and become irrelevant at least two decades ago. On the contrary, however, it is the elegance and restraint of her work that surprisingly, and very effectively, fill the museum rooms today. The Paris installation slightly softens the biting minimalism and ferocious social criticism of her beginnings, but suburban life and art as a means of deliverance stand out, nonetheless.

Linder knows how to function as a political artist and is well aware that her basic ingredients are surrealism and the juxtaposition of different and distant levels of interpretation. Her conceptual transference is clear in works such as Cakewalk degagé (2010) in which the impossibility of fulfilling her childhood dream of learning to dance gives rise to an exhilarating gallery of dance steps and cream pies - Picabia-style. What Linder produces is not the simple situationist détournement that frequently underpins much of the subculture aesthetic. It is, rather, her precious quality as an inveterate miniaturist and her ability to extract a convulsive beauty from images. Linder applies quite a shamanic essence to her work, an approach revealed in all its completeness in the sophistication of the collage. In this "Femme/Objet" exhibition, Linder has produced a manifesto or, rather, a global work that manages to create a tension between emotionally distant categories, genres, universes and epochs. She does this via the mask of an absent-minded, perverse and schizophrenic housewife, as if we were observing a character from a John Waters film. What we actually see on the walls is the essence, served cold, of 30 years of work. Beautiful copy-and-paste pages of a white-trash period reinterpreted through a magnificent and distorting Raphaelesque lens. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 21 April 2013
Linder: Femme/Objet Musee d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
11 Avenue du Président Wilson, Paris

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An exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris illustrates the delicate and contingent work of collection and excavation that one of the most influential figures of the British punk scene evoked and extracted from waste materials, pornography and advertising in the late 1970s.

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REPRESENTATIONS OF PAIN IN ART AND VISUAL CULTURE- PDF

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REPRESENTATIONS OF PAIN IN ART AND VISUAL CULTURE- PDF

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTON: MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY, 1945

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTON: MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY, 1945

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'to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world...our body is not primarily in space: it is of it'

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Heterosexuality is nobody's personal problem.

"Heterosexuality always embarrasses me," Maggie Nelson admits in The Argonauts, a book once so rabidly popular among women and queers that my first copy was swiped from my bag at a dyke bar in 2016. Nelson's confession has always struck me as diagnostic of our current moment, in which indictments of heterosexuality have become something of a meme. Yet when I asked her about it during a Skype call held by a sexuality-studies workshop for graduate students, she backtracked. Denying that she is embarrassed by heterosexuality in general, Nelson claimed that she is only humiliated by her own heterosexuality, by moments in her life when she has entertained-or suffered from-a romantic attraction to cis men.

At the time this caveat struck me as both unnecessarily defensive and disingenuous. Of all people, Nelson knows her queer theory, and thus knows that her own heterosexual experience only comes into focus via the cultural delineation of heterosexuality from other (less embarrassing?) forms of intimacy and attachment. It doesn't make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution-if you are embarrassed by one, you are necessarily embarrassed by the other. Heterosexuality is nobody's personal problem.

What I now see is that Nelson's caveat is typical of heteropessimism, a mode of feeling with a long history, and which is particularly palpable in the present. Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are "performative" does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.

Social media is a playground of performative disidentification, and heteropessimism thrives there. One recent surge of online heteropessimism was triggered by the Straight Pride event in Boston (an event that, like so much of the right-leaning internet, is simultaneously less substantial and far more sinister than most people seem to believe). At the same time as the City of Boston granted organizers a permit for the event to take place, they denied them the right to fly a newly unveiled Straight Pride flag, which-as social-media users jumped over themselves to point out-tellingly resembled a black-and-white-striped prison uniform.

"Heterosexuality is a prison!" a chorus declared, vocalizing one of heteropessimism's central maxims. Many of those who seized the opportunity to mock Straight Pride and its appropriately drab flag were, unsurprisingly, queer, yet a sizable number of straight people could also be found in the fray. A quick Twitter search of the phrase "heterosexuality is a prison" reveals that it is attached just as often to complaints made from within heterosexual experience as to queers thanking their lucky stars they were born gay.

Confronted by Straight Pride, many are keen to emphasize that they are not that kind of heterosexual, that they are, in fact, ashamed of being straight, and that, not to be dramatic, they see heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will. (The prevalence of the prison metaphor could be taken as a reassuring indication of abolitionism going mainstream or a worrying reminder of how easily incarceration is still trivialized in the popular imagination.) Their disavowals are akin to white people making jokes about "stuff white people like," a connection that makes sense given the sinister intimacy between Straight Pride and white-supremacist organizing. Yet while trying to redeem oneself from whiteness or heterosexuality through performative distancing mechanisms might seem progressive, the reality is usually little more than an abdication of responsibility. If heteropessimism's purpose is personal absolution, it cannot also be justice.

Performatively detaching oneself from heterosexuality is particularly appealing for women, and the reason why is encapsulated by one of heteropessimism's memetic antecedents: the overly attached girlfriend. This early meme is less a portrayal of actual behavior than a goofy male nightmare, the suffocatingly overcommitted partner against whom freewheeling men like to define themselves. Interestingly, the meme originally emerged from a video parodying Justin Bieber's 2012 hit "Boyfriend," which begins with the now famous romantic threat "If I was your boyfriend, I'd never let you go." As is fairly common in straight culture, a negative trait like obsessive jealousy-which in reality is one of the most commonly cited triggers of male-on-female domestic violence-is repackaged and sold as a female trait. If the OAG was a manifestation of men's heteropessimism, women reacted by declaring themselves absolutely and flamboyantly unattached-to men and to heterosexuality in general. A proliferation of memes parading this lack of attachment emerged in the OAG's wake, quickly becoming a foundational mode of women's heteropessimist expression.

In this sense, heteropessimism is, to borrow Lee Edelman's phrase, an "anesthetic feeling": "a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment." Heteropessimism's anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits-overattachment and "the overintensity of feeling"-for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed. That much heteropessimist sentiment is delivered in joke form coheres with Henri Bergson's idea that comedy delivers "a momentary anesthesia of the heart." Unlike traditional comedy, however, heteropessimism is anticathartic. Its structure is anticipatory, designed to preemptively anesthetize the heart against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain. During the media storm surrounding Brett Kavanaugh's hearing, for example, the comedian Solomon Georgio tweeted (to the tune of over 23,000 retweets and 142,000 likes): "Today is a reminder that if homosexuality was a choice, there would be 2, maybe 3, straight women left after today." This sentence, which circles back to the same word on which it began, betrays the confusion between universality and specificity embedded in heteropessimism. Kavanagh is a "reminder" of a preexisting fact-that no woman would choose to be straight-yet this fact is somehow also produced by "today," by the particular awfulness of the present.

Like most online subcultures, heteropessimism occupies a contradictory relationship to the market. Quite often framed as an anti-capitalist position, heteropessimism could be read as a refusal of the "good life" of marital consumption and property ownership that capitalism once mandated. Yet this good life, which was always withheld from marginalized populations, is now untenable for almost everyone. If the couple was the primary consumer unit of the past, today this has collapsed, or more accurately been replaced by a new dyad, the individual consumer and her phone. It is hardly news that the goal of the big hookup apps is to keep people single. Tinder has made this surprisingly explicit in its first ever brand campaign, which features an exuberant, seemingly carefree blonde woman accompanied by the words "Single does what single wants." Stay single, stay wanting, and let the data of your desire accumulate like so many layers of gold.

Heteropessimism has helped stimulate this individualizing turn, not just by draining the hetero couple form of its appeal but because dissatisfaction with heterosexuality, despite being sold as universal, always seems to operate on the level of the individual. Collectively changing the conditions of straight culture is not the purview of heteropessimism. In this sense, heteropessimism actually reinforces the privatizing function of heterosexuality, even as it is mass distributed through culture as a viral meme. Under a heteropessimistic rubric, women might not view themselves as competing with one another within the cutthroat dating "market," but in metabolizing the problem of heterosexuality as a personal issue the possibility of solidarity remains foreclosed.

This is an acute problem. Social movements such as #MeToo or the South African protest against intimate-partner violence #MenAreTrash demonstrate the frightening urgency with which heterosexual culture needs to be revolutionized. Heteropessimism might seem like a starting point of that revolution, but in reality its anesthetizing force has had the ironic effect of stalling some of the momentum of these movements. If "heterosexuality" becomes shorthand for misogyny, the proper object of critique falls from view. To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better. This is, of course, similar to the charge often leveled against Afro-pessimism, a school of thought that takes antiblackness to be the transhistorical structuring force of the world. Both Afro- and heteropessimism are reactions to perceived immutability, but beyond this their resonance is mostly morphological. The pessimism in heteropessimism is more literal, more basic (in both senses of the word) than it is in Afropessimism. Partly for this reason, heteropessimism is far more obviously prohibitive of social change.

Unlike Afropessimists, heteropessimists bear responsibility for exactly what they identify as irredeemable, and this responsibility cannot evaporate via disavowal, however much they might like it to. A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality's malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women-especially white women-have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power. Like most lesbians, I have found myself on the receiving end of approximately 100,000 drunk straight women bemoaning their orientation and insisting that it would be "so much easier" to be gay. Sure, it probably would be! That "men are trash" is not something I am personally invested in disputing. Yet in announcing her wish to be gay, the speaker carelessly glosses over the fact that she has chosen to stay attached to heterosexuality-to remain among the (slightly more than 2 or 3) women who are, despite everything, still straight.

Women are not the only heteropessimists. From the indignant fury of the incel to the married man complaining about his "old ball and chain," men clearly subscribe to heteropessimism even if, like all feelings, they are not exactly encouraged to express it. To be clear, men's heteropessimist claims tend to be neither ethically nor logically equivalent to those made by women. Instead, they are a kind of funhouse distortion of feminist complaint. Nowhere is this perversion better illustrated than on Facebook, where the efforts of men's-rights activists have led administrators to classify "men are trash" as hate speech and suspend the accounts of those who use the phrase. (Users may post "women are trash" with impunity.)

Heteropessimism has become a framework through which men process both demands for gender equality and the quotidian experience of romantic harm as evidence of a global female conspiracy. One of the most prominent male heteropessimist memes asserts that the #MeToo climate has made dating too dangerous-for men. The most zealous male heteropessimists-so committed that they are mocked by other male-supremacist groups for actually choosing to act on their heteropessimism-unite under the delightful banner of Men Going Their Own Way. MGTOW maintain that women are sly, parasitic, and essentially evil, that heterosexuality is wholly beneficial to women and severely dangerous for men, and that the only solution is for men to abstain from marriage, reproduction, and (according to some) dating, sex, and even masturbation.

The result is a strange parody of feminism. In place of heterosexual relations, MGTOW are encouraged to form homosocial self-care communities that will both shield and heal them from romantic trauma, ensuring a kind of prolonged anesthesia of the heart. The movement's heavy reliance on the Internet makes it difficult to know how substantial it is in reality. Its members are prolific meme makers, and online forums are their consciousness-raising site of choice. Yet even if MGTOW became a prominent force in reality, in choosing to self-segregate, this group actually render themselves the least dangerous of male heteropessimists. Far more disturbing are those who've come to believe that contemporary culture cheats them out of their "right" to possess women-and choose to act on this belief.
In a talk at the 2019 Duke Feminist Theory Workshop, Lauren Berlant identified heteropessimism as a product of contemporary tectonic shifts in social power: "As we are living now, when privilege unravels it goes out kicking and screaming, and people lose confidence in how to be together, uncertain about how to read each other, and incompetent about even their own desire . . . as the incels, braincels, and many new sex-negative feminists exemplify." Thus far, this is the only explicit acknowledgment I've found of the link between these feminist and anti-feminist traditions of heterosexual negativity.

Such a theoretical lacuna is unsurprising. Heterosexuality has long been a neglected object of study, elbowed out of sexuality studies right after the field emerged by the sexier and cooler project of queer theory. Queer theorists look smugly at heterosexuality over their shoulders as the thing that they have-thank God-left behind. In doing so, they remain outdatedly attached to a moment in which heterosexuality was widely understood to be an idealized form of life. In Jane Ward's otherwise razor-sharp Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, the sociologist chooses to define straight people not by the sex acts they pursue but by the fact that "they enjoy heterosexual culture. Simply put, being sexually 'normal' suits them. It feels good; it feels like home." This flattening account of straight identity, which fails to accommodate even the possibility of heteropessimism, is a far cry from our current reality.

Compared to the heady possibilities of the queer world to come, heterosexuality appears unbearably drab and predictable (the "same old story" as Skepta puts it in a recent heteropessimist anthem). Indeed, in the moment just before feminist theorization of heterosexuality all but totally fizzled out, a pre- Gender Trouble Judith Butler wrote that "precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself."

Spinning on its wheels, endlessly repeating, going nowhere-heteropessimists and queer theorists alike are convinced that this is heterosexuality's permanent fate. I think they're wrong, that there's evidence heterosexual culture is changing. But even if it weren't, we would have to believe it could, because tens of thousands of women are currently dying of it every year, murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, or exes. (That almost all mass shooters have histories of domestic violence makes it obvious that heterosexuality also poses a fatal threat to anyone, of any gender, who happens to be in a movie theater, at school, in the office, at a mall.) Yes, universal queerness and the abolition of gender may be the horizon toward which we are eventually moving-but what happens in the meantime?

Particularly for women, radically transforming heterosexuality might begin with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing-the house is clearly on fire, but is there anything worth saving? Such accounts are totally foreclosed by heteropessimism, and must therefore be drawn from conversations and narratives that-even if only momentarily-transcend a heteropessimist register.

One such conversation can be found in the writer Harron Walker's podcast why do i like men. In episode one, guest Larissa Pham echoes the ridiculers of Straight Pride: "Heterosexuality is a prison . . . heterosexuality is awful." Pham posits heterosexuality as a form of wayward, masochistic desire; she tells Walker that she likes men "'cause you don't know what's good for you . . . and you're drawn to that which destroys you." Later, Pham reverts to the familiar implication that no woman would choose heterosexuality: "I don't think you can choose attraction."

Yet over the course of the conversation Pham does cite reasons why she finds men desirable, such as "big arms," "penis," and "the way men smell . . . most men." In subsequent episodes, other guests offer their own ideas about men's appeal. Theda Hammel suggests that women are drawn to men because intimate proximity to a man is affirming: "The reason that a woman likes men-or a trans woman maybe in particular likes men-is not necessarily because men are that likeable . . . but just that they bring out qualities that you like in yourself, by virtue of being different from you." For all their obviousness, these observations are quite rarely voiced. Hearing them spoken so plainly exposes how heteropessimism has worked to silence articulations of women's desire.

why do i like men is a half joke-you can hear the smirk in Walker's voice as she delivers the question at the beginning of each episode-but it is also a sincere inquiry. In asking and reasking the podcast's eponymous question, Walker pushes through heteropessimist anesthesia and reawakens her own vulnerability. In this light, heterosexuality is not a terminal diagnosis but becomes a possible site of experiment and change.

For a long time, heterosexuality's normalization allowed it to endlessly repeat, immune from any substantial change. Today, heteropessimism might actually obscure the extent to which heterosexuality is changing-even as it is also causing it. Without an immutable object of critique, the logic of heteropessimism falls apart. Perversely, this has created a renewed investment in the consistency of heterosexuality, a reinscription of heterosexuality's tired features, even as this investment takes the disguised form of negative feeling. In this light, heteropessimism reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken. Faced with the possibility of disappointment, anesthesia can feel like a balm.

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"Heterosexuality always embarrasses me," Maggie Nelson admits in The Argonauts, a book once so rabidly popular among women and queers that my first copy was swiped from my bag at a dyke bar in 2016. Nelson's confession has always struck me as diagnostic of our current moment, in which indictments of heterosexuality have become something of a meme.

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How may we address the sexual underbelly of culture when it is being censored spheres where community exchange takes place?...

Landscape… What is the landscape of this world? How can I recontextualise it so that audiences recognise it?

'the drawn phalluses obviously symbolize how male domination is echoed in vertical modern architecture'
Where can we see the phallus representation in today's visual culture?
'politicized critique and an exploration of desire'
On the Fight Censorship group she created: In a statement, Steckel identified “sexual subject matter” by these artists as “many things: political statements, humor, erotica, sociological and psychological statements—as well as purely sensual or esthetic ‘art’ concerns

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Reconsidering Anita Steckel in the Age of Heteropessimism - Mousse Magazine and Publishing

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To tell the story of Anita Steckel's art, most writers start in one of two places. The first strategy focuses on a censorious attack in 1972 against Steckel's

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"Instagram Has a Problem": Betty Tompkins Sounds Off on Art and Censorship

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It's been 30 years since the cancellation of a planned Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective over fears that a (federally funded) showcase of interracial relationships and nudity would prove too controversial. And while censorship in art might seem like a thing of the past-after all, the Guggenheim mounted a major two-part Mapplethorpe retrospective earlier this year-the threat is still very much real. Just ask Betty Tompkins, the pioneering feminist artist who's currently ruffling just as many-if not more-feathers as she was when the French government seized two of her works at customs in the '70s.

Between 2005, when the Japanese government pulled a similar move, and 2015, things were relatively calm for Tompkins. Then, she joined Instagram. According to Tompkins, the app has deleted more than a dozen posts featuring her artwork-a pattern that culminated in April when she posted a photo from a catalogue featuring her photorealistic, explicit work Fuck Painting #1, at which point Instagram deactivated her account.

Six months later, the app invited Tompkins, plus a number of art world figures including the photographer and painter Marilyn Minter, to a closed-door roundtable discussion about its content moderation. Unable to attend Monday's discussion, Tompkins instead wrote a statement to be read at the gathering. While researching the subject, she experienced a "total shock" of a discovery: She'd actually never actually violated any of the app's guidelines, which specifically state that "nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK."

"Over a billion people use Instagram every month and operating at this size means that mistakes are made," Stephanie Otway, a Facebook company spokesperson, told W on Thursday. "It is never our intention to silence members of our community." The company also said that it has restored six of the posts that were at one point removed from Tompkins's account, upon realizing that they were in fact photorealistic paintings rather than photographs. This, the company added, was among several topics it raised to those who partook in Monday's roundtable discussion.

On Friday, Tompkins posted a portion of her statement to her account. (She'd planned to post it on Thursday, but her account was once again temporarily deleted-though, as she noted, "the people at Facebook and Instagram who got it back up they were humane, generous, and efficient.") Here, she shares more with W, from her feelings on NDAs to her love-hate relationship with the app.

Your statement is surprisingly short. How did you set about deciding what to write? When they invited me to the roundtable and I couldn't be there, I said I'd like to write a statement that would be read aloud, and they said sure. I spent like two weeks trying to figure out in my head how I would state this, basically stewing, before I realized that despite all the notices mentioning them, I'd never actually read the community guidelines. Most of them said what I expected them to, but there was this one little section that was a total shock to me-and I'm sure the thousands, millions of other artists who are on Instagram have never read it either. I mean, the sentence has no qualifier: It says "Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too." But apparently not if some ignoramus somewhere on the planet decides they don't like it, or if the algorithm is just off today or whatever. When I read it, I was laughing and I was furious at the same time. Instagram has a problem. They don't follow their own guidelines. I wanted someone from the gallery to read it at the roundtable in my place, but they wouldn't allow that. I keep thinking about it, especially because I wasn't there. I don't know if it would be more or less obvious to me if I had been, but meetings between people who run social media and people who are active on their social media, should not have NDAs.

I know that Facebook said it was standard procedure, but it still shocked me to hear about the NDAs. Me too. But since I wasn't there, I didn't have to sign one! [ Laughs.]

Betty Tompkins, *Censored Painting #1*, 2019. Acrylic on canvas.

Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

Combined with the absence of the media, it made me wonder, Is there something you guys are trying to hide? Right. Two days after the meeting, they haven't announced any change-yet. Of course, they may never, but it seems to me that if they wanted this meeting to have a real impact, they would have made it public. [Artist] Michol Hebron said they should have livestreamed the whole thing, and I totally agree with her. They lost a wonderful opportunity. I know everybody had to sign, and so far people are not talking that I can see. But these are artists. My job as an artist is to break rules. And I really can't think that you could put 20 artists in a room, feed them a hot lunch and they'll stay shut up.

Have you spoken with anyone who attended the roundtable? Marilyn [Minter] said "Wish you were there" on Facebook, and I said "Me too." She's a rulebreaker, but no, I haven't gotten in touch with her to see what she would say. We'll have to see what happens. I suppose we have to be reasonable and say we'll see what they do, but I think from the beginning they just wanted to know what we thought. And as the days are passing, I'm beginning to think that they didn't have any intention to go further than Now we know what they think, and they don't like us, they're a pain. They know that we need Instagram, so basically all the power is with them. But they need us, too.

I do think it's important that they invited younger, up-and-coming artists, because they're the ones that this most affects. Absolutely. I can't tell you how many young artists-well, almost everybody's younger than me-I heard from who were worried they were going to lose their account when mine was deactivated. So many of them wrote to Instagram to complain about it, which was great, because I was-to put it mildly-hysterical. I was posting on Twitter and Facebook like every hour and a half, telling people to go on Instagram and complain. Because if you don't have an account on Instagram and if you're not posting your work for whatever for you is at a normal rate, it's hard to let people know what you're working on. For me it's like a meditation-I do it first thing I do in the morning, before I get up, and then I'm done with it for the day. I try not to spend too much time on social media during the day because I have a lot of work to do. But I paint wet over dry, so there's 10, 15 minutes. Sometimes I work on something else, but a lot of times I'll say okay, I'll go see what everybody's doing.

Were you hysterical just on principle, or because you missed using the app, too? It actually was both. I was really insulted, and really surprised. I was looking at my account, and what I had posted six months previous wasn't any different. It was like, Why is this stuff still up? And it had been months since they had taken anything down before they disabled my account, so I was like okay, they finally realized who I was and that this is what I do.

What's funny about the post that made them shut down my account-which was gone when they reactivated it-is that it was of a catalogue from Stadtgalerie Saarbrüken, this big feminist show I was in. I had opened it to my pages, so there was text about me on the lefthand side and a reproduction of Fuck Painting #1, which they had borrowed for the Centre Pompidou, on the right. It's a historically important painting, but I'm not even showing the painting. I was really clear that it was a printed page I was showing; you could see the fold. I mean, by that time, I was used to them taking my posts down, because they've taken down an awful lot. But that time, they took my account down.

It seems pretty arbitrary, too. In May, you posted that Instagram had taken one of your posts down, but that people could scroll back to see it when you first posted it, the previous October. Completely. I took a screenshot of the one I posted, edited it down to the piece, and put it up again, so it really was the same post. Thank god I hadn't taken down the original, because I tend to do that so if somebody is taking scrolling through they don't see the same images five times.

I'm surprised that you were so surprised when they deactivated your account, though. Haven't you often dealt with censorship over the course of your career? Yeah, and you know what? Each time it's like the first time-sort of like how you can remember a painful experience, but you can never relive the pain. Before Instagram, there were 15, 20 years between governments censoring me, so I was surprised each time there too. There are certain things I do when being censored to keep my sanity, and for Paris and for Japan, I did censored drawings of the pieces that were actually censored. So after I got my account back, I started to keep a list of what Instagram was taking down, so I'm now doing censored paintings. I'm on my fourth one, and I already have a list of at least 10 more images that I can go to work on. And enough's enough! I already have enough for the whole series; stop. [ Laughs.] And I am going to go through with them, because it keeps me pretty centered to do something positive out of an experience that was 100 percent negative.

Betty Tompkins, *Censored Grid #7*, 2008. Pencil and ink on paper.

Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P·P·O·W, New York

If Instagram invited you to another roundtable, but you had to sign an NDA, would you accept? If I had to sign an NDA, I don't know that I would. Maybe I would as a pro forma thing and just do what I want to do. You know, when I first saw someone mention the NDA, it reminded me of the old days. When I taught at LaGuardia Community College, which is a part of CUNY, in the '80s, I actually needed to sign a loyalty pledge-an "I never did or will do anything against the United States," from the McCarthy days. You wouldn't get the job if you didn't sign it, and I was desperate for money. I really was instantly I was instantly reminded of the McCarthy era. And J. Edgar-let's not forget about him.

You offer two ideas for solutions in your statement. Do you have any other suggestions for Instagram going forward? I wish they did it more like Facebook, which owns the app. Facebook has taken down a couple of my things, but when they do it, they send you a notice citing their community guidelines, and you have to check one or two things: whether or not you accept the decision, and whether or not you would like it reviewed by a human being. I have several times now and it's always come back up, either between two hours and 24 hours, and I am sent a notice of apology-a We made a mistake and we're sorry. But when Instagram reactivated my account, all the sudden I could just log back in. There wasn't a word. Not one-excuse me-fucking word. They could give me the right to appeal the decision to a human being, and they could also offer an apology. After ruining my day, I would appreciate that.

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It's been 30 years since the cancellation of a planned Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective over fears that a (federally funded) showcase of interracial relationships and nudity would prove too controversial. And while censorship in art might seem like a thing of the past-after all, the Guggenheim mounted a major two-part Mapplethorpe retrospective earlier this year-the threat is still very much real.

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Betty Tompkins was not invited to join, for instance, because she appropriated pornographic photography for her large-scale Fuck Paintings (1969–74), and several members were opposed to utilizing porn in one’s work. From today’s perspective, the notion of censorship might also seem dated in light of the discourse over cancel culture. “Cancellation,” in terms of online moral outrage, often only solidifies problematic public figures’ standing in the world.
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