On April 20, 2014, Amalia Ulman posted a photo on her social media Instagram with "PART I" in black and white on a white background and "Excellences & Perfections."
From that day on, Ullmann updated his status almost daily, posting more than a hundred photos. Initially, like many sweet bloggers, she wore a pink skirt and white stockings, and was as cute as the cats, strawberries, and pink roses in her photos. This exquisite life has attracted many fans for her and has also collected a lot of praise.
After breaking up with her boyfriend, she transformed into a dark girl: wearing the most intense makeup and doing the most extreme things, including breast augmentation, drug abuse and self-harm. She found that people were starting to hate her. She suddenly woke up to the goddess of healthy living, and yoga, fitness and avocados became the most common elements in photos. This earned her a new number of likes.
During the nearly 5 months of self-presentation, no one doubted that it was a show, even though it had its ups and downs like a TV series. Ullmann garnered 28 likes when she posted her first photo, and by the time she announced that everything was a scripted performance, she had garnered the attention of nearly nine thousand fans. Obviously, not everyone can accept this "teasing", and they regard Ullman's behavior as a "hoax". But in Ullman's view, the experiment is simply meant to bring to light a problem that is already apparent: the gap between our lives and the ones we present online.
Ullmann treated the process as an art project and named It Excellence and Perfection. On March 22, Ullmann brought the work to China for exhibition at the King & Wood Mallesons Center in Beijing. It was also her first solo exhibition in China, along with another of her works, Superiority.
At the press conference, "authenticity" once again became the theme of discussion. Ullman feels that people are overthinking the "real", because with the advancement of the real-name system, the gap between the Internet and real life is getting smaller and smaller. But there's no denying that "everyone is choosing and even producing what they post."
Playing "Yourself"
One of Ullmann's jobs is "acting." She is not an actress, but a performance artist. Born in Argentina in 1989, Ullmann studied art at Central Saint Martins In London. While still in college, she had the idea of "Excellence and Perfection", "when I was living on a relief payment, elitism was prevalent in London, and I had not been able to save enough money to make decent work". She was deeply influenced by the artist Marcel Duchamp in her work. As early as 1921, Duchamp tried to play a lady and had the photographer record it. The work reflects the artist's reflections on personal identity and blurs the line between the real and the imaginary.
In 2013, Ullmann spent a month researching the work, scripting it, "with a beginning, a climax, and an ending." She concentrated the three characters of "Cute Girl", "Honey Girl" and "Life Goddess" on one person because "they seem to be the most popular female figures on the Internet".
To this end, she dyed her hair blonde, changed her dressing style, and became a country girl who had just arrived in the big city, experienced a breakup, and made a living by dating men. This sharp turn made her friends around her think that she had really encountered a major change, and her answer was: "I'm acting, that's not me." ”
Ullmann took inspiration from a number of celebrity PR crisis events that created the climax: hysterical madness. She posted the news of the breakup, and then the style of the picture changed, "had breast augmentation surgery, started taking drugs, had an emotional breakdown and was admitted to a rehabilitation center." "People started hating me, and when I showed some galleries, they got frightened and said to me, 'You have to stop or people won't take you seriously.'" But that's pretty much what Ullman wanted, "The sadder the girl, the happier the netizens are." ”
After Excellence and Perfection, many people knew Ullmann as a performance artist, which made it impossible for her to play roles anonymously. However, Ullmann felt that her creation was more free and she could play more people, because the previous role was nothing more than "a reproduction of some of the characters under the stereotypes."
When she was writing "Superiority," she was thinking about pregnancy, and "the performance on social media is temporal, and pregnancy can set the beginning and end of the story", so Ullmann naturally played a pregnant woman. Even though many people know about the "hoax" that Ullmann previously directed, there are still some followers who leave a message congratulating her after seeing a positive pregnancy test stick, and some even write: "How many more months?" Can't wait to see the baby! "I thought this trick wouldn't work, but I didn't expect to play it again." Ullmann was surprised.
Ullman's studio is located on the 17th floor of a building in downtown Los Angeles, and on a sign on the first floor, her name is crammed into the middle of the name of a law firm and the Lebanese consulate. The studio has gray desks, white walls, and it looks more like a trading company without props like collaged clothes, red curtains, and bright red flowers. Ullmann created "Superiority" here. She began working on the artwork at the end of 2015 and lasted a year before it was finally completed. This time, Ullmann plays an ordinary white-collar worker in the work, and later in the work, she becomes a pregnant professional woman, recording a woman's dilemma in daily life through photography and video, so as to explore the coexistence and contradiction of biological identity and social identity in contemporary women's lives.
Reality and art
In Excellence and Perfection, one of Ullman's crazy moves was to have breast augmentation, in fact, she disguised herself as a post-operative breast with tape, and then stuffed her bra with socks to disguise herself as a pair of breast enlargement. But in her virtual life-like works, you can still find signs of real life. She was born in Argentina, where "girls' 18th birthday gifts are often a breast augmentation for themselves."
To play "Honey Girl", she did inject temporary fillers into her face, which would disappear completely after 6 months. Those high-end costumes that meet the design of the person are also true, but they are borrowed, and they have to be returned after shooting. There are many photographs of Ullmann dancing pole dancing, for which she took a special pole dance class, and in her apartment, even half of the space was used as a dance classroom, mirrors, poles, elastic ropes are readily available. As for the character setting of "Honey Girl", it can be said that Ullman's real experience.
Since graduating from college, Ullmann has been living on relief payments. She later posted an ad on a sex work site and got 200 responses, and she had been looking for a job for two years. She became a true "honey girl" — a girl who got paid for regular social dates with men, "at a time when most of my female classmates were saving tuition by socializing." But she was well aware of the boundaries between the character and reality.
On Ullmann's calendar, in addition to the ovulation period, the day of the performance is marked. She sets aside two or three days a week to perform. Other times, she had very little internet access and even decided not to use the internet in her apartment. "Because I don't need the internet. I love boundaries and need a place where I can do nothing but look at the ceiling and think. ”
Rather than being addicted to the Internet, she prefers to walk in real life. Ullmann worked as a librarian while attending Central Saint Martins. She enjoys wandering around, sorting through books returned by students, "some of which you know, but some of which I never knew." For her, it was a step out of her own realm. The Jewish scholar Walter Benjamin also had a great influence on Ullman. The scholar surveyed 19th-century Paris through long walks on the streets, and Ullmann still retains the habit of "roaming", which helps her discover things that the average person can't see. "Sometimes I think the internet is limited because you find it all by searching for keywords, so the world gets smaller and smaller." Ullmann said.
Instagram artist
A year and a half after the Instagram performance, Ullmann's work Excellence and Excellence was on display in London. After the exhibition, the headline of the relevant report of the British newspaper "Guardian" was: "The first Instagram masterpiece? Despite the suffix question mark, it doesn't affect her hailing as "the greatest Instagram artist." According to Zhang Yuling, artistic director of the King & Wood Mallesons art center and an art historian, "this is indeed a work that can enter art history, because for the first time in art history, someone has used social media platforms as a medium for artistic creation." Ullmann's work has been exhibited in Tate, Whitechapel, and the New Gallery.
There are also people who do not recognize this kind of art. The writer Peggy Orenstein once pointed out sharply that the gimmick of Ullmann's work is "a commercial, one-dimensional, infinitely reproducible form and, to be honest, sexy form without imagination... The purpose is to perform, not to lust."
More attention was discussed on the "authenticity" embodied in Ullmann's work. At the Lianzhou Photography Annual Exhibition, which opened in December 2017, Ullmann was one of the artists invited to participate. Curator Zhang Bing said in an interview with The Paper: "Her work contains a variety of integrated methods such as analysis of social psychology and color psychology, strict script setting, just the right performance, popular selfies, beauty pictures and the use of social media platforms, and its purpose is not simply to use social media platforms to exhibit and show a selfie and retouched picture, but to explore the boundaries between real and unreal." ”
In order to more realistically imitate social activities, Ullman's works are mostly shot on mobile phones, and the low-pixel works with obvious graininess show a snapshot texture. For her kind of artistic creation, James Fuentes, a new York gallery representative, said that she shows that "the boundaries between art and life can penetrate each other."
When Ullman announced that Excellence and Perfection was a scripted work of art, most of her followers were shocked and even angry, especially some men, who asked her: "Is this not the truth?" How dare you lie to people! Another person left a message for her: "I used to think of you as an artist, but after reading your Instagram, I think your mind is similar to that of a 15-year-old sister." ”
These questions seem interesting to Ullman, because in real life, many girls go to a high-end hotel just to take a photo and post it on social networks. Ullman said: "People should know that everyone lies online and I am not the first. ”
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