Milo Moiré: PlopEgg (2014)
Photo by Peter Palm
I.
British art critic Jonathan Jones really doesn't like performance art and he wants the world - or at any rate his Guardian readership - to know it:
"Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it
is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are
wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or
lying." [1]
Obviously - and by his own admission - he's overstating things for polemic effect. But still it's clear that he's not a fan of contemporary performance art which, in his view, lacks power, fails to take any real risk, and reveals the extent to which today's practitioners are distanced from "real aesthetic values or real human life".
Practitioners, for example, such as Swiss artist Milo Moiré, whom followers of Torpedo the Ark will recall I have discussed in earlier posts which can be found here and here.
II.
Performed at Art Cologne 2014, Moiré's PlopEgg, involved the expelling of paint filled eggs from her vagina on to a canvas, thus creating an instant abstract work of art. At the end of the performance, the canvas was folded, smoothed, and then unfolded to create a symmetrical image resembling one used in a Rorschach test.
Dismissing Moiré as simply "the latest nude egg layer from Germany" [2], Jones denies that PlopEgg is an interesting feminist statement about female nudity, fertility and creativity; it is, rather, "absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate".
The thing is, even if Jones is right, and Moiré's conceptual work uniting painting and performance is all these things and succeeds only in perfectly capturing "the cultural inanity of our time", what's wrong with that?
And, actually, Jones is not right: PlopEgg resonates in many ways on many levels for many of us; we think, for example, not just of female genitalia as represented in the history of art and of relatively recent contributions to this tradition by Judy Chicago, Annie Sprinkle, Jamie McCartney, et al, but also of Bataille's astonishing novella L'histoire de l'œil (1928) and the famous scene in which Simone inserts a soft-boiled egg into her cunt (as she does later with a raw bull's testicle and, finally, a priest's eyeball).
We think also of Leda, the Aetolian princess, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; the union resulting in an egg plopping out of her vagina, from which the beautiful Helen was hatched. And we even recall with a smile the beautiful jade eggs that Gwyneth Paltrow encourages women to insert in order that they may gain a greater experience of ther own bodies and increase their feminine energy [click here].
Notes
[1] Jonathan Jones, 'The artist who lays eggs with her vagina - or why performance art is so silly',
The Guardian (22 April, 2014): click here to read the article in full online. All quotes that follow from Jones are taken from this piece.
[2] Jones doesn't specify who else he is thinking of when he refers to these egg layers from Germany, but one possible candidate might be Heide Hatry and her ambiguous performance piece entitled Expectations (2006-08), in which she too squeezes an egg out of her vagina.
In one variation of the work, Hatry, dressed as a businesswoman and carrying a laptop, throws the egg directly at the lens of the camera which is filming her, almost as if she wants the viewer to look foolish or feel embarrassed by what they're waching (i.e. to know what it's like to have egg on their face). To discover more about this work, click here.
