From the book #artselfie, by DIS. Collection FOLLOW ME, Collecting Images Today, Jean Boîte Éditions, Paris, 2014. Photo by Rebecca Fanuele
As our “Me, Myself and Art” series might suggest, the art gallery has long provided a space for reflection, but the form which this reflection takes has undergone a radical change. Now, armed with smartphones, gallery-goers need no longer settle for merely gazing on a masterpiece, hoping for a moment of transcendent rapture. Instead, with a single snapshot and a WiFi connection, they and their chosen work can be bound together forever, happy ever after in digital eternity.
New York-based collective, and 2016 Berlin Biennale curators, DIS, have been responding to this phenomenon for some time now, and their latest work, the book #artselfie, marks the most recent instalment in this ongoing project. Published by Jean-Boite Éditions in Paris, the book intersperses texts by Douglas Coupland, Marvin Jordan, Simon Castets and DIS with images taken from their accompanying blog, artselfie.com. The project, which explores the consumption of art, and the image-making that surrounds it, first began as an installation at Frieze in 2012. The blog then followed, launched on the eve of Art Basel in Miami that same year, initially devised as an alternative perspective on the South Beach fair. So-called “selfie pros” were sent out to snap it, and their images were collated using the #artselfie hashtag. It became something bigger, however, as the site began to aggregate and archive images from far further afield.
#artselfie is a phenomenon that undoubtedly divides opinion, and detractors are as prevalent as practitioners. As Douglas Coupland wryly reflects, can we truly welcome a post-Instagram world where a gallery visit consists of finding “a Rothko that flatters your complexion”. In Britain, the possibility of hourlong “selfie-bans” in public institutions has now been raised in a bid to appease traditionalists.
From the book #artselfie, by DIS. Collection FOLLOW ME, Collecting Images Today, Jean Boîte Éditions, Paris, 2014. Photo by Rebecca Fanuele
For DIS, however, there is no need for such a sombre response. The book looks at things with a lighthearted curiosity, and explores the images which this selfie subgenre has produced, considering how they might mark a change in our relationship with art. Pleasing tropes begin to emerge; shiny surfaces, for instance, are understandably popular for #artselfies, but the mugshot complete with recognisable masterpiece remains king. Exhibitions can be ranked in terms of their photogenic qualities: rAndom International’s “Rain Room”, for instance, attracted hordes to the MoMA and the Barbican for just this reason, and if Yayoi Kusama and Van Gogh were ever to become bedfellows, then their shared popularity on artselfie.com might provide a place to start.
From the book #artselfie, by DIS. Collection FOLLOW ME, Collecting Images Today, Jean Boîte Éditions, Paris, 2014. Photo by Rebecca Fanuele
As Marvin Jordan points out in his introductory essay, critics enjoy tracing parallels between self-portraiture and the selfie, and the latter is often cited as the mass-market offspring of the Renaissance forebear. Certainly, technology had a hand in both, with the production of silver mercury in Europe largely responsible for the Renaissance era’s self-reflexive gaze. For DIS, however, this comparison proves limiting, and they class the #artselfie instead as “a new form unto itself, with its own artistic sovereignty, and not just a continuation of the self-portrait”. As Jordan summarises, it “pertains primarily to circulation, not just representation”.
As for what comes next in the selfie saga, Coupland playfully suggests in his essay the arrival of the “2 1/2th dimension”, where the world becomes littered with 3D Mini-Mes. Walking along Auguststrasse to DIS’s new base at Kunstwerk, and his words in fact come true. Just a few doors down, you can peer into the the windows of “Twinkind”, a start-up pioneering exactly this. The sculptors of Ancient Rome would surely be proud.
Text by Imogen Greenhalgh
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