Title: Night Hot Stories

Alina Serban

The Ethics of Image

The difference between an original and a copy is very often perceived as a topological difference: an original is confined to a real space (whether conceptual, ideological or aesthetic), has a particular function and is widely accepted in a community, while a copy is frequently regarded as a project which is under construction, non-historic and virtual.

The changes one can notice within the contemporary artistic field define, on the one hand rethinking of the historical and artistical consciousness illustrated by an exhibition, and, on the other one, projects, from the perspective of artistic sociology, powerful significance which is generated by the context that produced the respective work of art. The impact of the new media on the way we understand, represent and systematically construct the world around us, modifies the artistic practices and annihilates the difference between perception and representation, between original and its copy.

Under the incidence of the actions taken by the contemporary global society, the so called awareness of our own time, the personal, subjective way of looking for certainties, disclosing conflicts, becomes a acute and the rapport between one and many is constructed on a conflictual basis (namely that of demystifying universals). In such a schizophrenic context the artist is trying to recover his/her identity by reflecting in his artistic works (whether we refer to the now classical languages or the new media) the sensations, anxieties and overbids cost by the urban life or the other. Being aware of the space he inhabits, the visual artist is inevitably a voice of the contemporary pseudo-critic, of the exaggerations, the re-mapping of territories and the blurring the borders between the center and the periphery.

The obscure artistic acts, the fragments of immediate reality, the falling into virtuality, the interventions into space represent, from this perspective, an exceeding of aestheticism, cutting up, under the contemporary wave of globalization, a visible sign of claustrophobia and disorder of the mindscape. The artist reevaluates or, on the contrary, underestimates his personal passage from a colonial towards a post-colonial phase. His/her critical approach draws attention to the conceptual social rhetorics and the theatricality of enunciation. Night Hot Stories, a performance which took place in Studio 35 from Bucharest and which represents the work of ten women artists constituted as a group Aproximativ 28, makes use of the local artistic context so as to disclose the image of the Balkan artist as a pale copy of his/her occidental peer. At a deep level, the show represents a true account of the strategies of seduction, which destroy the purity and unity myth. The subject of investigation questions both the status of the woman artist and the way we mentally place ourselves given the fate of a woman as an object permanently subjected to the function of look- ness-at. Being used to the position of an inert onlooker who rounds about the gallery and then goes out, the public had, this time, the chance to see a live-sharing show which excluded the mechanism of giving and taking information between the work of art and the consumer.

The performance, which lasted an hour, displayed ten women artist in the shop-window. They were ten personal narratives, ten attempts to determine an identity change and blur the border between an original and its copy. The shocking images consisted of copies of company ladies. The perverse vision, in the postmodern spirit, was supplemented with the nonconformist CVs of the artists which were displayed in front of the windows so as to underline the obvious difference between the original and the copy. The sound (a medley of songs centered of the motif of the woman and covering various genres such as party and hip-hop songs) filled in the morbidity of the performance, ironically stressing the relation between a small and a big culture.

(text published in CONTRAPUCT nr1-3, may 2003)