Red obsession

The research for this artwork centres on the devices Performance Artists use in coming to terms with their lived environment. 

Our differences and similarities to others in our immediate environment define our sense of self. Our identities are partly produced by the gaze of the “Other”. Our formulation of morality is the recognition of others and how they transgress our own perspectives; survival is dependent on how we deal with these transgressions.

My research has shown that the performance artists Steven Cohen and Matthew Barney challenge the element of taboo by a ritual display of their genitals. They superimpose and destabilise audiences with their own neurosis, fears and issues setting themselves up as a commodity-body image, artifacts for consumption or simulacrums of use value. Barney and Cohen use their nudity as a ‘commercial instrument.’ They have slotted the penis into the management disciplines of contemporary social codes and present it as a type of narcissistic branding device. It simultaneously becomes a camouflage, a type of urban armour and a negotiated exchange. Barney’s Cremaster film series is named after a muscle that regulates heat in the scrotum. His brand identity and corporate logo known as a “field emblem”, is based on the male reproductive system. In turn Cohen admits that he is “hiding in his own body”* when audiences withdraw from his exposed genitals in shock. 

There seems to be a contradiction between the concept of promoting or branding a product and concealing or camouflaging it, but branding and camouflage are both about fantasy, artifice and exaggerated dis/play - a simulacrum. They represent something other than the real and may be compared to the persona of the two Performance Artists in question. 

The use of repetitive vinyl ‘cut outs’ in this work has compulsive and fetishistic implications and also speaks of the synthetic. (The type of vinyl used for this work also reacts to heat and curls up, it alters it’s shape as the cremaster muscle in the testicles might do). The patterning of Red Obsession is just as playful and attractive as the adorned artists in question but on closer scrutiny may also be perceived as offensive and could be categorized as the sublime of delightful horror.

Information retrieved from the artist