David Bowie is... Hyperreal
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1913-5874/37382Abstract
David Bowie is…, the recently ended exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, stands in stark contrast to a similar exhibit mounted by Marina Abramovic at the MOMA entitled The Artist is Present. Unlike Marina Abramovic’s insistent, troubling presence, David Bowie’s body is absent. The exhibit offers the performative figure of “Bowie” as simulacrum, a “real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1994, 1). The simulacral “Bowie” is presented as a de-centered, dis-oriented subject, transecting gender and performance boundaries as he effortlessly moves through physical and artistic geographies. This paper argues that the exhibit merely performs the subversive, “demonic” (Deleuze 1990, 258) character of the simulacrum, and by doing so closes it off from its radical potential to challenge the neo-liberalized space of the museum.
References
Auslander, P. “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (2006): 1–10. Print.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Shelia Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.
Cooper, Matthew. “Spatial Discourses and Social Boundaries: Re-Imagining the Toronto Waterfront.” Theorizing the City: the New Urban Anthropology. Ed. Setha M Low. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 377–399. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V Boundas, Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print.
Jones, Amelia. “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence.” The Drama Review 55.1 (2011): 16–45. Web.
Jones, Amelia. Body Art, Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.
Jones, Richard G, Jr, and Christina R Foust. “Staging and Enforcing Consumerism in the City: the Performance of Othering on the 16th Street Mall.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.1 (2008): 1–28. Web.
Levin, Laura, and Kim Solga. “Building Utopia: Performance and the Fantasy of Urban Renewal in Contemporary Toronto.” TDR: The Drama Review 53.3 (2009): 37–53. Print.
Makeham, Paul “Performing the City.” Theatre Research International 30.2 (2005): 150–160. Web.
Ockman, Joan. “New Politics of the Spectacle: Bilbao and the Global Imagination.” Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place. Ed. D Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren. First. New York, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004. 227–239. Print.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: the Politics of Performance. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Reinelt, Janelle. “Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age.” Performance Research 16.2 (2011): 16–27. Web.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 2002. Print.
Wickstrom, Maurya. Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Print.
