IngridMwangiRobertHutter

IngridMWangiRobertHutter’s work The Cage tests the boundaries and the commoditisation  of the body,  particularly the artist’s body. It interrogates the links between the body and the self, spectatorship and participation and suggests that looking is more than an act of witnessing – it is appropriation.  This work makes me think of Derrida’s notion of the gift as something  – a gesture, and act, an object – that is “given”, but which resists appropriation. Performance and event-based art seems, at a fairly superficial level, to resisit the codes of appropriation and speculation that govern the viewing of an artwork in a gallery space.  The intervention is not commoditised, the assumption goes,  in the same way that an object-based work may be. It doesn’t enter the commercial realm in the same way.

What the Cage suggests, however, is that it does. Perhaps this is tied to the presence of the artist’s own body in performance. When the artist performs he or she or they often become the object of a gaze that is almost as, or equally, appropriative as the gaze that desires to take home an artwork from a gallery. The gaze of the audience can be hungry for celebrity or entertainment; it might require some sort of memento or keepsake to remind the viewer of what he or she saw. In The Cage, the artist’s body is sacrifced or transubstantiated. It is part of a pseudo-communion in which the artist  stands to gain nothing and the audience, crossing visible and intangible boundaries,  feasts. A little self-flagellating, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless – IngridRobert was, after all, half bald and covered in Koki pen grafitti by the end.

This is IngridRoberts ID Photo project, in which artists’ protraits were generated at an street ID photo booth.

See the programme for dates and times for IngridRobert’s works.