Conventional Beauty - Yaya Wang & Kayla Tracy
Over her career, Marina Abramović has had a great impact on performance art as well as the criticism and judgement of the female body in Western culture. She often creates extreme situations for both her and her audience through performance, pushing herself to her limits and testing how far she can go both mentally and physically.
The original piece that we were inspired by, “Art is Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful”, is a film. It is simple and minimalistic in appearance but has a major impact on viewers. Abramović stands directly in front of her camera, showing only her face, hands, and bare shoulders. She then performs a simple action, often viewed as something quite mundane and feminine, but goes on to change how it is normally viewed by putting the audience in a sort of trance as she continues, repeating the phrase, “Art is beautiful, artist must be beautiful.” This repetition goes on for over fifty minutes.
Inspired by this film, we took shots inspired by screen grabs from her original video. We tried to push ourselves out of our comfort zones just as Abromović would aspire to whenever she set out on a new piece.
Photography by: Yaya Wang
Models: Kayla Tracy, Ruth Woerdeman
