For the next month, Tilda Swinton is reprising her role in the performance art entitled “The Maybe” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. This Oscar-winning Scottish actress, recognized for her performances in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Emma Recchi’s I am Love, first participated in “The Maybe” in 1995 in London, where she slept in a glass box for eight hours for seven consecutive days. Come 1996, she provided an “encore” in Rome, with the addition of an hour-long break in the middle of the day, during which she hung a “siesta” sign on the door of the box.
The artwork is enigmatic, as is the bulk of information provided in the “materials”: living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, water and spectacles. Appropriately so, on the first day, Swinton slept with ease while donning a simple outfit of jeans and a button-down shirt with her glasses resting next to her pillow. The furtiveness of “The Maybe” is heightened by the randomness of the performances. The schedule for the six coming performances remains secret to all but Tilda Swinton; even the staff of MoMA is unaware of her arrival until the day of. The conceptual and artistic decisions behind this performance piece have aroused discourse among viewers and artists alike; even James Franco was spotted at MoMA on the first weekend.
Penn Art Club president Amy Wu commends Ricchi for her selection of Swinton as a “forward idea to be almost controversial,” citing the mass response to Swinton’s MoMA appearance on Twitter. Wu said, “I’m amused by Swinton’s boldness, but if she [Ricchi] wanted to be groundbreaking—it’s not the first time an artist has encased an animal in glass and called it “art.” Damien Hirst started that a long time ago.” Elaine Liu, another board member of Penn Art Club, concurred. “This exhibit could have been performed by a lesser-known artist, but would have less of an emphasis on the former.”
Another matter of contention is defining what is art, particularly performance art. Gina DeCagna, Arts Editor of 34th Street Magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Symbiosis said, “Performance art is all about the concept and provoking emotional responses. Its materiality—real human flesh—is meant to foster these strong emotional responses.” She continued, “So just like the uproar Marcel Duchamp created when he deemed a urinal to be art, so does this artwork with calling a woman in a box art.”
Lastly is the art of sleeping. Liu considered the art with a rational lens, considering the significance of Swinton’s sleeping. She said, “The piece should provoke a sense of trespassing, as though the viewer has wandered astray from a museum to someone’s bedroom. Sleep and rest are two distinct things in our society—the first constitutes the daily need to shut our eyes and the second requires as sense of privacy.” Likewise, Wu added, “The symbol of sleeping adds further to the mystique since it makes the viewer wonder what she is dreaming about and when she’ll wake up and where she’ll be next.”
“The Maybe” is undeniably polemical. DeCagna interprets the artist’s intentions as deliberately “nonsensical”: “The artistic is probably laughing at the fact that people are trying really hard to label the piece with some sort of rational description. It’s not meant to be carefully analyzed and understood. That’s why there’s no explanation, press release, or anything else about it for that matter.”
She concluded, “It’s getting the exact response it intended to get.”
Image Credits:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/9951531/Tilda-Swinton-sleeps-in-glass-box-at-Moma.html
http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/25/tilda-swinton-momas-sleeping-beauty/
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/25/the_art_of_the_nap_tilda_swinton_at_moma/singleton/
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/tilda-swinton-surprises-moma-visitors-sleeping-installation-article-1.1297328