The$Aesthe(cs$of$Exhibi(onism$ - Arcadia Missa

When I asked myself this question, I didn’t want to approach it by narrating an
ontology of the image, that simulacra has become reality, or even the Deleuzian
concept of virtuality, that our virtual and actual experiences are two different types
of reality; the virtual as an idealised concept of the actual, and that the two acting in
conjunction with each other make up one’s reality as a whole.
I’m sorry to have very much flattened Deleuze here, but I just wanted to note how
through even very established thought, one can argue that our online lives are
wholly part of our material reality, and more recently facts such as the 0.2g of
carbon dioxide produced with every Google search, also attests quite literally to the
materiality of the internet.
So when I was thinking about ‘this altered context’, I thought it better to think of
distribution and what that does to self and artwork. I will focus in particular on the
artist-self, looking at artists we represent or who have exhibited at Arcadia Missa, as
obviously I’m more involved with their practices so hope I can give an interesting
overview of what some of them do.
The above image is one of many Facebook selfies by Amalia Ulman. I unofficially
describe it as ‘Self Portrait with facemask’.
In 1959 Erving Goffman wrote in his book ‘The Presentation of the Self in everyday
Life’, that:
Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is
a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell
And so here, in Amalia’s selfie, it’s the facemask which really struck me and
reminded me of Goffman, that the face is both ones security blanket, or safe cell,
but also a tool in which to hide and to perform. The idea of performing the self isn’t
about questioning authenticity or reality, now. In my mind the performed self is not
threatened or challenged by our ‘altered context’, but rather it becomes outwardly
normalised.
Goffman stated the social constraint of the performed face, and I think today’s
challenge to his notion is more whether this performance in itself is socially
constraining, or releasing.