Naked - Opening and Exhibition

Naked - Opening and Exhibition

by

Vitavie

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This is a story about an art performance. It is a translation of my own 'Nackt - Eröffnung und Ausstellung', written in German.

However, it is more than a translation. It is also a major revision (and expansion.)

The most striking change may be that the roles in the flashback section (INTERLUDE) are reversed, i.e., it is not Gitte that does my (Vita's) hair, but I do the hair of Gitte, renamed as Julia. Does it work better? I think so...

As for most of my stories, I begin with a standard warning - I don't want you to waste your time. This piece will certainly not be erotic for everyone. Sensuous it is, in my book. It definitely is - once again - slow. But all the same the theme is about being naked in public and being seen, even watched. Another theme is full-body shaving, from head to toe. The nudity starts 3000 words in. Closely followed by the shaving. A lesbian tinge, some masturbation...

Also, this story is very close to my heart. So, I always remain open to measured criticism, very open, in short or long, or to correspond about my work.

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A flashback

Oh! I see an apparition. A statue. The eyes are alive and looking at me, looking through me. So smooth. So cool. So clean. So naked. So bald.

I feel humble under the eyes of this otherworldly creature, a stern angel. Is she there to cleanse me of my sins? A female, still, with cunt, tits and ass, all the curves.

Then - shock! - I realise I am looking at myself, reflected in the full-length mirror. My naked body glows ever so slightly, head too. In the twilight that has come over us, my body appears fluorescent. Is this me? Is this a better me? I feel that I am growing. I stand upright, calm and serene.

The near future

I hear the door being locked behind me. I am in this insane room, with mirrors above and mirrors below, and left and right and behind me, and my multiple selves. Apparitions!

The window in front of me is not a mirror, but a window. All the same I mainly reflects myself once again - they have dimmed the lights, it's so dark on the other side. I see vague figures - just the ones in front of me right now - on an equal footing with my mirror image.

I move to the centre of the room. There I slowly take a series of poses, model poses, dancer poses, using all my limbs, hands and feet and head, and turn in a complete circle as I walk. I can't help but feel embarrassed. I am not an actress. They see all of me. I stand upright, nervous and self-conscious. Keep yourself together, woman! You've got a month to go. Rather: allow yourself to unravel! Let go!

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THE PERFORMANCE

Who am I? What is my game here?

High, I have risen. Low, I want to go.

Let me explain...

I am an artist and in my late 40s. My medium was sculpture. Was... I excelled, became well known and prosperous. A few months ago, however, I decided I was tired of sculpture and would quit making it. In part, I had said all I could say. In part, I felt the medium was bankrupt. We've seen it all before, from classical sculpture to sculpture made of rubbish and the exhibition of the unmade bed after a night of sex, alcohol and smoke. Fine, perhaps, but sculpture was no longer for me.

This does not mean I renounce what I created in days gone by. It is just that I am not motivated to make more. I remain an artist, I still need to create, but I can't be bothered to create more work from the vein I have been mining for decades.

So, I myself will be my medium. I will limit myself to the essentials and no longer hide behind a thing. Before you accuse me, I am not saying that this is new in itself. I am not the first to do this, by any means. And, yes, besides... Perhaps performance art is bankrupt too. However, it is new to me, and it is I that wants to express. About the human condition. Yes, you could say... narcissism, mid-life crisis.... Maybe you are right. I hope to find out. I am not afraid of failure. Nor possess a sensitive vanity.

I am about to stage my first event as a performance artist. I could have done it anywhere I wanted, on the back of my reputation. Yet I wanted a modest venue, as opposed to a prominent, established gallery or museum. Ironically, securing a modest venue was harder. Obviously, their reputation and economy are more fragile and they may therefore need to play it safe, in terms of their core audience. I had to exhaust my extensive network of contacts to get the opportunity to do the performance, but I succeeded. (Of course, I did! I could have founded one, pop-up style.) A small gallery in Bonn stuck out their neck and agreed to work with me. They, like me, will taking a big risk, but they decided the publicity of staging me would make it worth their while. It helped that I would bankroll the base costs myself.

The exhibition space

The exhibition space is a single large, square room of about 12 x 12 square metres. A former industrial building. The ceiling is about 8 metres high. Almost a cube, therefore, this room. We divided it into two equal halves, the first half for me, so measuring 12 x 6 x 8 m, the second for the audience, a good size lounge with high ceiling. The three walls on my side are all made of mirrors, as are the floor and ceiling.

Separating the two sides is a glass wall. It can be made into a big one-way mirror using a second panel that can be lowered down to the floor or suspended, well above head height. A one-way mirror means: mirror on my side and see-through for the audience. If it is up, the audience and I can see each other, though my environment will be well lit and theirs will just have floor and table lighting. Therefore, the audience can see me at all times, whereas with the panel down I can only see my reflection, not the audience. The control is not on my side, obviously. It's in the hands of the audience. Every tenth visitor receives a code that enables him or her to raise or lower the mirror-pane depending on its current position.

What will I do?

I will live in this space for a month. A long time, as I won't leave my seventy-some square metres and there are no windows to the outside world. I will have no television or radio. There will be no books or newspapers, nothing to read. However, there will be all kinds of writing and drawing materials and paper. Everything I will write or draw in the course of a day will be collected and the next day be made available to the public in a display case or folder on the other side. Since I can't live without music, I will have record player, with an allowance of three hours per day. The idea - mine! - is to be isolated with myself and my thoughts, albeit with an audience.

The audience can visit me 24 hours a day. For security, there is a guard at the entrance, outside the exhibition space, and all visitors will leave their belongings (Smartphone! Knives and guns!) there and pass through a metal detector. Both facilities, the guard and the metal detector, are at my expense.

The condition is: no photographs! Firstly, because I need to be in control of how I am portrayed in the world. Secondly, I want people out of their own comfort zone, which these days implies hiding behind the Smartphone and seeing life through that thing. I want them to see with their eyes and mind. I will be working hard. They should as well.

Haven't I said? I will be naked. 24 hours a day, for a month.

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OPENING DAY

At home preparing

Today is the day of the opening. I am in my flat preparing. I say preparing - there is little left to do. I have to choose what to wear to the opening and what vinyl records to take with me. Here I am - the famous artist, with more money than I would ever need - and I'm nervous and scared. I knew I would be when I planned this event, and that nervosity, discomfort will indeed be the crux of it, part of the crux. I want to hit my naked core, be thrown back on myself and show the result to the public. The audience is necessary to put me on my toes. Still, knowing how my system operates doesn't completely calm my nerves. I think of many of my actor friends. They suffer this again and again, no matter their experience.

The choice of the records is relatively easy - I select some fifty records, classical, jazz and pop. Beethoven Op. 111, Le Sacre du Printemps, Daniele De Niese's Così fan Tute, Christine Schäfer's Lulu, Bartok Viola Concerto, Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue, Coltrane, ICP, Joni, Revolver, All Things Must Pass, Memory Almost Full, Brel, Björk, Viv Albertine etc.

What to wear is more difficult. Should I choose one of my power suits? Or rather my more feminine clothes? Seductive things? Or the baggy things I wear when I'm lounging around at home? Or the casual attire when I visit a friend? Or the rags I wear when I sculpt? I'm narrowing it down to the power suit - to throw some of my authority into the mix - or the work clothes - a reference to my status as the future ex-sculptor. I will opt for a strange combination. Work clothes, my dusty rags, over my refined silk shirt, a pair of glittery tights and my best underwear, dark blue with red details. Heels. The combination makes sense to me. I get dressed slowly, as if in a choreography, and I am ready.

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My first opening

My first opening, way back... I remember it well. It was staged four years after I had left art school. I had graduated quite well, but had slipped underground soon after. I felt I needed time to (re-)invent myself (yes, even then!), pardon the cliché, and determine what I needed to create and why. By then, some of my peers, many of them less talented, had already made some kind of mark and people were talking about them. It was the belief of this one gallery owner that gave me my start. He had admired my graduation work and had said he was ready for me when I was ready myself. I won't say that that first exhibition contained my best work ever, but on the whole, it was good, and some pieces are still counted among my best, over two decades later.

The question I now ponder - was I more nervous then than I am now? The answer is no. I wasn't nervous at all then. Not cocky, just confident. My work was good. I knew that. But this time there is no work. Just me.

I guess I am no longer 'hot'. But I draw confidence from my fitness and my weight. In clothes I look pretty good. And it is not my nakedness per se that makes me nervous. It is not my body alone that will be on display; my person and reputation will be too. Can I draw confidence from my personality? I guess. But my reputation can work both ways, inspiring awe or ridicule. I don't know. When all is said and done, it is the artistic side that worries me the most.

No backtracking... It's happening now!

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I get started at the gallery

My nerves leave me when I enter the gallery. It is home turf. I am on time, two hours before the opening. Talking to the owner and an assistant, I feel at ease. This is what I am used to doing. They are obviously in awe of me and my fame, despite the intense deliberations I have put them through. They know exactly what I am going to do.

I can't help smiling when this phrase comes to mind: I will exhibit the empress's new clothes.

After we have gone through the organisational details once more, I take another look at the exhibition spaces. The last little things have been taken care of and the finishing touches made. It's a great creation, if I may say so. I enter the half-space for the audience, which consists of three sets of a sofa each, two armchairs and a coffee table. At the far end there is a small coffee bar that will be operational day and night. The rest is open space. I guess it will accommodate about 50 people. Here, the walls and ceiling are matt black. To be clear, there is no door in the large glass dividing wall between my half and this half.

I view my half from the side of the audience, as if I am an audience member. I look at where I will live.

CRAZY! THERE I WILL LIVE!

The exhibition space again, how it is fitted out

The living space is so bare! Mirrors, mirrors, mirrors! All the way up to the ceiling, all along the back wall, and the two sides. Likewise, the ceiling itself and the floor. While living there, I will feel like I'm floating in the air and super-exposed too. Every side of me will be visible one way or the other. To me and to the audience.

My living space has little furniture.

A desk with a chair for working, a table with a chair for my meals, an armchair and a side table with the record player. The tables and the desk are made of Plexiglas. Pens, pencils, crayons, watercolour paint, stacks of heavy paper (A3, A4), a pair of scissors are on a shelf underneath the side table. There's a glass cube for my records.

There is a kitchenette in one corner, again made of Plexiglas. The refrigerator can be stocked from the outside - the gallery office - therefore no one needs to enter my space (except in cases of emergency.) The gallery will provide three meals a day, but the kitchenette will allow me to make tea, peel an apple or fry an egg. That sort of thing.

There is a shower cabinet and a toilet room, free-standing, again with glass walls. A little cabinet with towels. I have a single bed, which in turn is enclosed by a glass partition with a door. I thought this was necessary because I didn't allow myself any duvet, only a pillow, so I need an isolated space without draughts. I am sensitive to those. Finally, the toilet is made of glass and needed its own little room, made of glass of course, because of the inevitable smells. You see, I am only human. Should I have left out this partition? I might have, but here we are now.

The dividing wall between my space and that of the audience... The killer feature is of course the sliding mirror that from my perspective will turn the glass wall into a mirror, whereby all six walls, floor and ceiling included, will be mirrors. Which makes confrontation with myself inevitable. All the while in the knowledge that the audience from their side can still see me, see me front and back, top and bottom. And see my reactions. And state of mind.

So, I can be well seen no matter what I do, including the intimate jobs. Including masturbation, which I can't and won't forego this month.

The space will always be well lit, so that indeed I will be well visible. To sleep, I am allowed a sleeping mask. I searched far and wide for a comfortable and functional one.

The final piece of the inventory, its crowning glory - I have found it necessary to include a large, man-size sculpture of mine (quite rightly my masterpiece, Célibatair et Célibataire, my homage to Marcel Duchamp, La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires. In this context I am the Célibataire, made nue by myself!) The idea is to include this piece is to indicate that I do not renounce what I have created. I am quite proud of my work and this piece is a good, perhaps necessary decoration in this bare environment. It defines my past. I am proud of it. I have merely stopped making more such pieces.

A performance is not a performance if it is not registered somehow. To that end, there are three fixed video cameras - one at the back of the audience space, pointing down from near the ceiling, thus providing an overview; one from the same position at my side, pointing sharply down to the centre of my space, providing a helicopter view; and a third from one of the short sides of my space, at chest level. All have the appropriate lenses to cover my space. Then there is a fourth, moving camera in a corner near the partition that follows me, controlled by my body heat. These cameras will do the job of registering my actions. Whether I will produce a film of my performance and release the inevitable DVD, I will decide later. I am not pretentious. Doing this performance does not necessarily mean that I will become a performance artist. I don't want to fool myself. At the moment it's about escape. A controlled, conceptual escape. So, fine, in my book.

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Arrival of the audience, introduction by the gallery owner

The invited guests enter. I know many of them. Most of them. There are friends, and well-known personalities from the art world, fellow artists, critics, collectors.... They wouldn't know what's in store for them. We have not released a synopsis. They only know - Vitavie - The Opening, from --- to --- (1 Month.) Implicitly, 'The Opening' is the title of the exhibition. I don't let on. 'You'll soon find out', I smile when I greet them, 'It's new for me too.' (I invited my best friend Julia too - more of her later.) The audience and I share a glass of champagne or two and chat comfortably. I have a good time and, better, forget myself and what I am about to do. Until, finally, the gallery owner sounds his glass for attention. We all turn to him, including me, still part of the crowd.

'Dear audience, how do you like the sight on the other side of the glass? What you see, I think, is a beautiful, telling commentary on how easily the essence, the structure of our way of life is overlooked if we are not careful. You see the bare bones of life, transparent, almost absent, of course, if we except Vita's beautiful - and famous - sculpture, the most real object there and very present. Sadly, the Vita who made this no longer exists. So she declares. The sculpture is a memory of her past. A worthy memory. Not revoked, but past. Vitavie will no longer speak through her artefacts. I would lie if I said I don't regret this. Who knows she might again... However, she will now speak through herself. Through her body. Time for the essence, she finds. The essence, not of the world that surrounds us, but of what the human condition is, that of a particular human, a woman, the woman called Vitavie. She will not speak words, but she hopes you will still understand her. Listen.'

He pauses. We all look at him. But as the seconds, a minute, pass, people begin to turn in my direction. I don't speak, just smile.

Until he calls me forward, 'Vita, it's time.' And 'Friends, make some space.' I walk forward and stand next to him. He evacuates a circle of two arms' lengths around me.

'Vita, may I ask you...'

I enter my mirror palace and begin

I look around the circle, look everyone in the eye. I don't speak. They are quite entranced, with one or two sceptics among them, of course, of course... There are always sceptics... Then I walk gently through the crowd to the exit - I know most of them, as I said, Julia first and foremost - and leave this half of the space. In the office, the gallery assistant is waiting for me. He unlocks the door to my space of exhibition, ushers me in and closes the door. I am inside. For a month.

There! I am in this insane room, with mirrors and mirrors and my multiple selves. The window in front of me - they've dimmed the lights, it's all but dark on the other side. I see vague figures - just the ones standing close to the divider. I move to the centre of the room. There I slowly take a series of poses, model poses, dancer poses, using all my limbs, hands and feet and head, and turn in a complete circle as I walk. I can't help but feel embarrassed. I do yoga, but am not a dancer. Nor an actress.