Olympia is Looking at You, or “Who’s Afraid of Deborah De Robertis?”

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 & Auguste Clésinger, Femme piquée par un serpent [Woman Bitten by a Snake], 1847

Olympia dares to look at us. This is the real scandal: she is looking at us. This unworthy woman, showcased only to be glared at, sister to the nude featured on an Orsay Museum poster inviting the public to come and look at nudes with their children (26 years after the famous Guerrilla Girls poster which was taking to task the Met Museum), is looking at us. So passive, her desirable flesh ready for the taking, she should not have any agency, she should not be soliciting… And yet she dares to look at us in the eye, she dares to face us, brazenly, immodestly, defiantly. One day, maybe, we will have her, as they say, thanks to our charm –or rather our money. But we won’t own her: possessing her will be more akin to submitting to her.

Performance Art of All Kinds

The Serralves Foundation in Porto has organised two days of performance art, a rather modest event in comparison to the Nouveau Festival at Centre Pompidou or Performa, but the compact timeframe of these two days displayed a wide variety of approaches, and therefore offered an opportunity to examine the very definition of performance art. In such a vein, does the simple reading of a text (a text which was not fully comprehensible to me), read without the least theatrical intonation and with a heavy monotone voice during roughly an hour, really constitute performance art (Isabel Carvalho, Tartaruga)?

Loreto Martinez Troncoso, Waiting