Showing posts with label the louvre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the louvre. Show all posts

1 Oct 2017

Genitalpanik 1: My Pussy My Copyright

Deborah de Robertis 


Some readers may remember that I expressed my admiration for the performance artist and vulva activist Deborah de Robertis after she initially came to public attention in 2014, by exposing her cunt at the Musée d'Orsay in front of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, L'Origine du monde: click here to read, or re-read, the post. 

It was, I thought, a courageous and amusing attempt to expose the hypocrisy of a phallocentric art world happy to stare into the abyss of a gaping vagina on a canvas or a screen, i.e., when framed by culture and offered as an image to be consumed, but uncomfortable with seeing such in the real world made of actual living flesh.   

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that Ms de Robertis is still continuing with her one-woman attempt to change the world by spreading her legs and declaring ownership of her own body: my pussy, my copyright; this time round obliging visitors to the Louvre to contrast the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa with the explicit display of her sex.

What Leonardo would have made of this, I don't know: for whilst he loved to paint beautiful women and possessed a detailed anatomical knowledge of their bodies, including their reproductive organs, his erotic fascination was clearly for young men and he drew many highly intimate studies of the male anus.

Nor do I know what the mostly bemused tourists who witnessed the event made of it; press reports that they were stunned and outraged seem exaggerated to me. What I do know is that the authorities weren't amused and the artist was held in custody for two days before appearing before a beak who ordered her to face trial on October 18 on charges of sexual exhibitionism and assault (she allegedly bit a security guard during her arrest).

Her defence, of course, will be that her goal was not to exhibit her genitals in a sexually aggressive manner, but to make people think about the role of women within art and, in this case, to remind them of the work of the Austrian artist Valie Export; the stunt at the Louvre being essentially an act of homage to the latter and her 1968 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, which I'll discuss in part two of this post ...


Notes

To watch Ma Chatte Mon Copyright (2017), by Deborah de Robertis, uploaded to YouTube on 29 Sept 2017, click here

To read part two of this post on Valie Export and her Action Pants, click here