The Maybe
Tilda Swinton & Cornelia Parker, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Has the art world gone mad? Or perhaps to sleep? Today, Tilda Swinton is slumbering in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art as a ‘surprise’ performance piece. She will pop-up at unannounced locations within the museum throughout the year, presumably thereby fulfilling the ambiguity of the piece’s title The Maybe.
Is this the ‘still life’ of the modern age? Does it allow us to appreciate a greater level of stillness, allowing a living human to be examined and observed asleep, expressionless, unpenetrable? Or is it just a meaningless stunt that has assumed an apparent legitimacy because Swinton is one of those rare creatures, a respected celebrity?
What’s more, this isn’t even the first time this piece has appeared. The Maybe premiered in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which thus deprives it of the novelty factor that might have been its saving grace, might have made it fresh, modern, even innovative. But between then and now, we’ve had David Blaine imbecilically starving himself in a plexiglass prison over the Thames, Damien Hirst pickling and preserving multiple unfortunates in formaldehyde-filled vitrines, and Southbank Centre proposing a floating glass box as its pioneering new performance space (in which I’m sure much more legitimate performance art will occur). Do we really need another see-through spectacle, an attempt at meaning that is as transparent, vacuous and hollow as the box that contains it? I think not.
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