Woman Recreates Famous Painting By Showing Vulva to Museumgoers (NSFW)
It's amazing, the furor that one woman's genitalia can generate.
ArtFido has posted amazing footage of Luxembourgian performance artist Deborah de Robertis plopping down in front of Gustav Courbet's painting "The Origin of the World" and exposing herself. This happened last month in Paris' Musée d'Orsay and resulted in her being taken away by police and having two museum guards file complaints against her.
ArtFido also has a translation of an interview with de Robertis, in which she discusses her live recreation of a painting of a woman's pubic region:
"If you ignore the context, you could construe this performance as an act of exhibitionism, but what I did was not an impulsive act," she explained to Luxemburger Wort. "There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin."
de Robertis' performance has, of course, generated controversy, and she has shared many reactions on her Facebook wall. Banksy nailed it, though.