Deborah De Robertis knows how to put on a show
The proud and risk-taking Performance artist Deborah de Robertis provocative life-affirming piece at Museum Paris’ Musée d’Orsay in front of the French master’s Gustav Courbet‘s “The Origin of the World” is courageous. It’s challenging. I immediately went to her Facebook page to express my admiration for her courage. And to get a better look!
There on her Facebook page is a post. “When we see a picture of a naked female, we’re in a safe place, we’re voyeurs and often happy that our gaze is not being returned. Once the portrayal comes to life, however, we’re dealing with a hell of a lot more. We become awkward, embarrassed and nervous — stripped of confidence we boasted when we were merely peeping. What is de Robert is saying about the way society looks at women?” That is a good question.
It’s easy to look at the Gustav Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” without confrontation. Admiring or criticizing the vagina in the privacy of our thoughts is a different lot when confronted with a living person.
We act out what we’ve been thought. Immediately we are faced with shame, social control, collective guilt, and religious ordinance. Our liberal sensibilities are challenged. Why I uncomfortable looking at the vagina of a living person in a gallery? But entirely comfortable celebrating what I’ve been thought: form, light, colors and texture of Gustav Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” marveling its erotic realism, and as artist Betty Tompkins points out, “the Courbet is anatomically incorrect – no clitoris and no outer labia. The realist master did not look.” And how comes I did not notice that before, why is my memory collaborating with this delusion? …“The slave morality of the masses, the submissiveness self-denial,” said Nietzsche. I know better, I’m a good observer.
But this is a safe please to look and not be judged, a place where I can savor my denial, my delusion but not the real thing and certainly not a real the person staring back questioning my motives. Why we look determines our moral character, we don’t want to get caught confronting our shame. And in those reasons lies our collective guilt.
As young men we’re to engross with the vagina, we chase it to substitute for what is missing from a childhood sense of safety, but can’t and refuse to admit … we need that person… mother… To declare our manhood is to divorce ourselves from our mothers. What does that mean?
Expose vaginas are welcoming excuse for lust; Expose faces not so much. A face questions your motives. Even the ones we are not willing to accept. This is our sense of shame. We are unwilling to accept that we crave acceptance from another human being; it’s much easier to objectify the vagina as a receptor for our manhood, we’ve arrived. We validate the vagina with excuses of mother art and love. Or express our repress aggression: cunt, bitch, slut, and pussy. But not the eyes, not the person they will see right in …me. And I’m ashamed to say or admit I needed you, to feel safe. But if I objectify the vagina, the face will stick around. And my delusion my sense of control will continue.
Granted all this may or may not be on the artist mind. But that the beauty of her courage and her art, she is willing to confront other humans, and they will add to the interpretation of the piece. But it’s her courage to engage that got me thinking and growing.
Une artiste expose son sexe sous «L’origine du… by quoi2news
