Collection

  • Frances Stark, The Inchoate Incarnate: Bespoke costume for the artist, 2009

The Inchoate Incarnate: Bespoke Costume for the Artist is one of a series of pieces in which Stark uses the figure of an operatic kimono as a metaphor for masquerades and expressions of artistic identity, and demonstrates the eccentricity and egocentricity inscribed in creative personalities. Stark uses nudity to denote how artists are vulnerable before audiences, art critics, and curators. Feeding the audience’s voyeurism and her own exhibitionism, she dealt with this issue in the performance Put a Song in Your Thing (featuring her guests, the British artist Mark Leckey, and Skerrit Bwoy, hype man for the dancehall band Major Lazer). The artist appeared to the audience in her Inchoate Incarnate kimono, standing in front of a scrim with projected fragments of various texts and animations from her earlier works. The pompous-sounding classical music accompaniment, combined with the rather caricatured black kimono, was merely an overture to the artist’s subsequent self-ironic on-stage behaviour. An important element of the pseudo-operatic set was an enormous sound system speaker designed by Leckey, which emitted bizarre booming bass. The fragmentary text and abstract noises could be interpreted as the artist’s rebellion against the domination of discourse, and an attempt to free herself from linguistic restrictions through vocal expression. The finale of the performance literally was The Inchoate Incarnate: a live projection visualised the lyrics of Lady Gaga’s Telephone, as Stark removed her kimono for a raunchy daggering dance with Skerrit Bwoy

Year: 2009
Medium: wrapping paper, color print, paper
Format: 147,4×177 cm

Acquisition: purchase
Ownership form: collection
Source: Galeria Buchholz OHG
Index: MSN: 4300-44/2012
Acquisition date:
Financing source: Purchased with the support of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

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