PEOPLE – MANNEQUINS
People – Mannequins
Glamurous prosthesis
Artificial/Artistic Life
Künstlerich/lich Leben
Photo album:
Artificial/Artistic Life
Künstlerich/lich Leben
An installation called ‘’Artificial/Artistic Life’’ depicts a mannequin family standing motionless in a glass cube, in plastic bags attached to an oxygen bottle, while the life of the family “takes place” outside that space. The mannequin-people have their own passports and ID cards that give them identities, as well as a photo album that records the movements of their artificial lives.
A body that is being refined, beautified, changed, glamorous; the perfect, non-natural body is the body of a mannequin. Artificial/artistic life is the life of mannequin-people. Humanity is lost through cosmetics and plastics, human dignity culminates in the appearance of the perfect “mannequin on the cover” of Vogue, the ideal of Barbie is transformed into humane pure emptiness that is not humane anymore. Human-phantoms are trapped in an ever-accelerating system whose production transcends itself.
The lens reveals the secret of the mannequin, the secret of people who look like mannequins and whose only secret is that they do not know how they live.
The human corporeality is still seen as sexualized, but the body has become a place of programming and machine connection of all processes. We can no longer talk about aesthetics (nor politics, economics, sexuality) without adding one prefix – trance. The trans-aesthetical is characterized primarily by the mixing and confusion of genres, and the paradox of the whole situation is manifested through the imposition of a law that supports this mixing. When everything is aesthetic, beautiful and ugly do not exist and art disappears. The self-abolition of art takes place in the general aestheticization of everyday life, in the pure circulation of images, in the “aesthetics of banality”. The mannequins have their own shop window, completely elusive to the human eye, which is persistently searching for the artistic, there, somewhere, behind the glass … Artistic? It disappears slowly in the mist of the smoke screen.
Milica Stojaković
