Performance art confronts spectators or makes spectators confront themselves. Marina Abramovic, through her Rhythm 0 (1974), forces people to look at their capacity for descending into evil as the crowd became progressively more abusive to her over a six-hour period. In 2007, Guillermo Vargas Jiménez, also known as Habacuc, took an emaciated street dog and put him on a leash attached to an art gallery wall, claiming that no one cared about this dog at all until he turned the dog into art. Whether we like it or get it, performance art often forces us to decide or react, while some static art we could walk by without paying much attention. Performance art yells at us to notice it.
While performance art falls under the more general heading of ephemeral art, it doesn’t always mean that it happens in a flash. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for example, spent four years building Running Fence (1972-1976) in California, only to dismantle it 14 days after it was completed. But some performance artworks take a long time and also have long-term effects. Artist Orlan began The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan in 1990. She committed to having a series of plastic surgeries (such as liposuction, as well as temple and breast implants) based on parts of famous paintings and sculptures of women (e.g., Diana, Venus, and Mona Lisa), as a way to demonstrate ideals of beauty.
Orlan confronts us with the question about whether our beauty practices are for ourselves or for the public. We, the audience, were only privy to the aftermath of these surgeries. With eyes highlighted with eyeliner, Orlan invites us to be part of the surgical procedures through the eyes of the camera. We think of someone getting plastic surgery as a private act that will yield public-facing results only after they reveal their new look. Both patient and public usually prefer to skip over the swollen flesh, scars, blood, and even the thought of the surgical details. But Orlan transforms the private into the spectacle, which provides critical commentary on the act of surgery itself.
Guy Debord’s name is most associated with the spectacle from his famous book, The Society of the Spectacle. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” according to Debord, “it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Orlan creates a spectacle by mediating her transformation (or reincarnation), capturing the process on video. In this way, she isn’t swept up into a spectacle; she controls what gets revealed to the public. Looking at the spectacle from this perspective, most of us participate in it every day through current technologies.
Years ago, prior to the inundation of smartphones, we might have only been able to display ourselves physically to the immediate public of our daily life. So, our presence, identity, and appearance were not mediated by images. Then, television and mass media were able to mediate news, celebrities, politics, and more throughout their selected images. But now, we are able to mediate ourselves directly, creating new strands of social relations that can extend around the world. This no longer is about dressing ourselves up a little to be presentable to someone we find attractive. The whole world can be mediated through the spectacle of images—millions of them—through handheld devices, not to mention layers of filters added onto those images. For those interested in beauty (and the spectacle), this raises questions about the relationship between the individual, the public, and the beauty industry.
The beauty industry is massive (expected to be $646.2 billion worldwide by 2024). Our relationship to the spectacle and our participation in a very large industry makes us wonder for whom we are doing all these acts of beautification. A simple answer may not be so easy as it may depend on the specific context, and it’s very likely that we act one way for one reason and another way for another reason at different moments in our lives. Are we all involved in performance art without being recognized as artists? Or do we have other motivations for consuming and using beauty products? Why do we care about beauty in the first place?
These are all philosophical questions that don’t admit to simplistic answers. Jean-Paul Sartre, famous existentialist philosopher, offers an explanation for this: “Although it is impossible to find in every man a universal essence that could be said to comprise human nature, there is nonetheless a universal human condition.” We create our own essences, according to an idea that permeates existentialism. But our human condition influences the ways we create ourselves as individuals. We still have similar needs and wants. Existentialist philosophy is often associated with an emphasis on the individual. But it is not that the individual is automatically supreme. We struggle to create ourselves as individuals.
A sea of advertisements, industries, governments, and others urge us to conform. As Debord indirectly highlights: “Each new product is ceremoniously acclaimed as a unique creation offering a dramatic shortcut to the promised land of total consummation.” We are engulfed with images, products, advice, and on and on. Insofar as we appear in front of others, there will always be a sense of performance with beauty and fashion. In her book, How to Be Authentic, philosopher Skye Cleary writes: “Self-knowledge can help people to understand their situations, to consider what they want to do in life, to reflect on what they want out of life, and to explore possibilities for happiness.” Cleary and the previous existentialist philosophers agree that what matters most is what each person desires. The problem arises because we often don’t step back and reflect on what we are doing. Sure, we give effort to think about big decisions—marriage, children, careers, schools, etc.—but on many daily things, we go through the motions.
We need to cut ourselves some slack. We have an instinct for beauty for both ourselves and for others, but we need to find a balance to be authentically ourselves. We cannot question all our actions every moment of the day. But we also cannot expect to be fulfilled if we don’t consider our actions and question them from time to time. Rather than lamenting over this, we can reorient ourselves to the purposes of beauty, fashion, and other aspects. As people see us, they might always contain an element of performance, though rarely to the extent of Orlan. However, if we consciously shape our path and readjust as we desire, then we create the image of ourselves that brings us forward and creates who we want to become.
