by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2010 | Books, Contemporary
In her new book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art Wendy Steiner posits that the modernist “ ‘separate sphere of the aesthetic’ has become indistinguishable from normal life … [W]e gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists.” To illuminate this new world, she examines models and modeling in history and in contemporary culture: “[By] stressing the model’s identity as a real person beyond the artwork, [the arts] acknowledge the audience’s independent existence, too, unpredictable and equally constitutive of artistic meaning.” Artists considered in the book include Frederick Hart, Picasso, Warhol, and Gillian Wearing.
Chapter 1 asks “what is a model”; chapter 2 examines “creation stories of women; chapter 3 “follows the model into the 1960s, when she suddenly reenters art as the pop celebrity [in the work of] Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan; chapter 4 “shows new media putting everyone in the position of a celebrity,” making “art suddenly obsess[ed] about the real”; chapter 5 “surveys visual works that alter traditional modeling hierarchies in order to promote reciprocity, equality, and empathy”; chapter 6 shows “works that actually change the world through the modeling interactions they incite”; chapter 7 “describes fictions that explore the aesthetics of the model by revising the traditional creation stories”; chapter 8 examines “interactive engagement with the past imaged in works by John Kindness and Peter Eisenman”; chapter 9 “suggests how all-pervasive the issues surrounding interactive aesthetics have become, by considering phenomena as diverse as debates in bioethics and the musical Hairspray [with] Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark” [as] a connecting link.”
In her introduction, Steiner writes that
The Real Real Thing can be seen as the third study in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of Pleasure (1995). That book defended the arts against censorship and literalist interpretation on the grounds of its virtuality, its difference from reality. The next, Venus in Exile (2001), argued that beauty was again becoming a central value in the arts, but re-understood this time in interactive terms. The Real Real Thing elaborates this interactive aesthetics … The problem now is not that art will be treated as a threat to the body politic, but that the body politic has become hard to distinguish from art. Not just artists, but all of us are concerned with the issues the model raises: power differentials in the process of communication, the permeation of the media into everyday existence, and the value of art in the buzzing circuit board we call reality.
For a tremendously entertaining take on culture and virtuality, I recommend “World World: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Blob,” a July 2000 Harper’s essay by Thomas de Zengotita (available in his book Mediated and online for Harper’s subscribers)