Whatiftheworld / gallery

04 OCTOBER - 04 NOVEMBER 2006

OPENING: 18H00 TUESDAY 04 OCTOBER 2006

WHATIFTHEWORLD / project room 11 HOPE STREET. CAPE TOWN

Artist statement:

The French Academy was founded in 1648, and began holding biennial exhibitions called Salons from then until 1883. This was the first time art had been exhibited in huge public shows, and the Paris Salons ultimately became known for controlling the public’s understanding of art, and commodifying it into the beginnings of conservative mass culture. The power of the Salons was eventually broken by dissenting voices, particularly those of the Salon des Refusees.

So, in art-historical terms, The Paris Salon signifies an era famous for scraping the bottom of the barrel of triteness, authoritarianism and conservatism. Within the century that the Salons lasted, another era of enduring notoriety blossomed in France, now remembered as the Ancient Regime. This was the spiralling decadence, cruelty and abusiveness of the French ruling classes, whose still-shocking excesses are recorded in the works of the Marquis de Sade and the novel Dangerous Liaisons. The Rococo style of painting arose during this era, and is likewise notorious within the history of art for its vapidness and vanity. The works of its foremost master, Jean-Honore Fragonard, present endless vistas of erotically-charged flirtation and sexualised scamperings around fake woodlands and sculpted streams.

It is about here that one starts being reminded of Paris Hilton. Marie Antoinette’s nostalgic vogue for dressing up as a shepherdess resonates with Paris’s reality show, The Simple Life, and a cult of miniature decorative pets evokes Tinkerbell. The lapdog fetish is taken to an extreme in Fragonard’s extraordinary painting, The Ring Biscuit, which I have copied here but made Paris its subject. The utter lack of any grasp of, or sympathy with, ordinary peoples’ reality mirrors the nonchalance with which George Bush laughs off concerned voices and takes another holiday, and Paris camps up her cossetted outlook with a statement like “Is Wal-mart where they sell, like, walls?” It’s a bizarre contemporary echo of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake?”

Our South African parallel of this kind of culture at its height is the apartheid regime. In its heyday in the 1970s I was a schoolgirl in its cultural capital, Pretoria. There was a particular kind of poppie found only in Pretoria, who was so deeply enculturated by that regime that she could travel the world without ever leaving Pretoria, whose memory I am confronted with by every image I see of Paris Hilton. With her fluffed blonde hair, her yapping stoepkakker, her tan, her plucked eyebrows, her perverse Christianity, her femininity stretched between family values and porn, she is the female of the species. Pretoria was the theme park in which her culture played out its monstrous self-absorbtion.

As a schoolgirl I used to draw those girls in my homework diary. I know their ‘visual semiotics’ by heart, and cannot believe it has changed so little across the Atlantic Ocean and in nearly thirty years. I could almost have drawn Paris Hilton from memory before she was born.

David Hockney, in attempting to describe the power that painters held around the time that the Salons started hitting their stride, said that a major painter’s studio was the contemporary equivalent of the headquarters of CNN. If Rubens, say, was equivalent to CNN, then perhaps Fragonard’s equivalent would be Fox TV, the mouthpiece of jingoistic Republicanism, and the channel on which The Simple Life gained massive popularity. If the mass media are today what painters were three hundred years ago, then Paris, mass media celebrity and branded persona, is the consummate contemporary artist within a long and hallowed tradition.

Lizza Littlewort, October 2006