A Human's Remake
13
CHM
plain
2023-04-10T12:17:05-07:00
The clip opens to a woman in all black donning a mask. We know it is a woman because she makes a point of ensuring her face is seen before she covers it. She could’ve easily cut this out and just opened to her already covered face. This intentional exposure of herself is extremely performative as she still wants to be recognized/identified and then be able to re-assume a level of anonymity. Once she has made herself androgynous/ambiguous by masking her face and gender, she pours a bottle of red liquid onto the base around her. The liquid is shockingly bright, not at all as viscerally blood-like** as the original version. She proceeds to mimic the robot holding a brush in her hand and bending down to scrape the liquid to her feet. After a few seconds of this the video cuts to her moving her body in awkward jerky motions before she eventually collapses.
**Follow previous link to look at the already gendered reading of this piece.
The recreation is adhering to authenticity only to a certain extent. Her attempts to embody the work are overly dramatized, performing from a mass audience she will never meet. Viewers ironically filled the comment section with variations of the response people had to the original video, “It looks so tired,” “Guys it looks so tired” In his piece Work of Art in use of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin discusses how in mechanical reproductions of art, the reproduced work will lose its 'aura' for the viewer because it will lack a relationship to it's current time and place (Benjamin 3, 4). To view the art in any realm other than in person will, supposedly, mark your experience as less authentic. This reproduction was shown through a digital medium (Tiktok) so a level of it will not impact the viewer in the same way as if they'd seen the original piece in person.
The recreation is also performed out on the street in a suburban neighborhood. Transposing the work outside of the institution removes an element of authenticity/ 'aura.' The glass that surrounds the robot is integral to the work as it makes the viewer more aware of the fact that they are separated from it, enhancing this state of isolation. It can’t engage with the outside world, and neither can the in-person viewers. Most viewers will never see this work in person, yet they are still consuming it via social media platforms and spliced together video clips with overused sound clips. With the way technology circulates, does that change our empathetic responses? Clearly it doesn't fully, as the comment section of these videos show. People still find ways to connect with it and what it could stand for.
I want to go back, now, to the moment the woman falls over to symbolize the robot’s ‘death.’ I want to ask, could we consider this a disrespectful representation? You may choose to follow this question or continue to looking at my next case study first.