JUSTIFIED OFFENSE

Milo Moiré - Mirror Box, 2017

Writing that offense is not always justified is a platitude, but it is worth stating given that, so far, we have mostly examined the positive value of offense. As the previous case studies show, offense has consequences ranging from personal to legislative. In order to determine when offense is justified, these consequences must be weighed against the value of offending. The offense of the following works is arguably not worth the value they contribute, either to the arts or society. Works that fall under this category generally are not found in the canon of art history, as their failure to justify the offense they elicit usually means they do not merit inclusion. However, in the context of establishing the boundaries of justified offense, they are worth examination if only to determine when it is worth crossing the public’s sensibilities and to consider the consequences of doing so. To commence this examination of insufficient justification, we can look to the artist and porn star, Milo Moiré.

Moiré has gained notoriety for staging rather ostentatious stunts in the nude, such as when she posed in front of Documenta with the phrase, “Ceci n’est pas une femme nue.” (this is not a nude woman) written on her chest, or when she squeezed paint-filled eggs out of her vagina onto a canvas outside Art Cologne. The critical reception to Moiré’s work has generally been negative, with reviews trending towards labeling her work kitsch and trite. Moiré’s 2017 performance, Mirror Box, is no exception, but the piece is in the direct conceptual lineage of TAP and TOUCH Cinema, and the two are worth comparing if only to show how the attempt to offend can result in the trivialization of an issue.

To Moiré’s credit, she acknowledges the connection between TAP and TOUCH Cinema and Mirror Box on her personal website, which states:

Milo Moiré’s performance “Mirror Box” can be seen as a further development of the tap and touch cinema (1968) by VALIE EXPORT. However, the artist Milo Moiré distances herself from the old subject and aims at the modern self-determination and progressive sexuality of women. Artivist Milo Moiré utilises her body as an instrument, even as a weapon, in order to depict and disrupt power structures. She aggressively seeks the feminine expression of sexual self-determination and ventures along the boundaries of art and predictable morality.

The last sentence, in particular, is important because it states Moiré’s intention with her work —“the feminine expression of sexual self-determination”— and shows that she is intentionally engaging with “the boundaries of art and predictable morality.” Her attempt to upset the moral sensibilities of the public is clear, but unfortunately, the only people she seemed to succeed in offending were other feminists. As Meghan Murphy bluntly states in Feminist Current, “You are making misogyny not only acceptable, but ‘feminist.’ Fuck your ‘art.’”

It is also worth noting that Moiré was arrested during the performance of Mirror Box in London for “outraging public decency,” but this fact shows the daylight between the law and contemporary public sensibilities. In the video of the performance, none of the spectators indicate that they are offended, and while there are plenty of articles that lambast Mirror Box for its execution, it is much harder to find writing that personally attacks Moiré for public indecency. If anything, the lack of offense concerning Moiré’s performance could be viewed as a public shift to more liberal mentalities between the time that TAP and TOUCH Cinema and Mirror Box were performed.

Despite the fact that Mirror Box Box was created almost fifty years later, it retained, and arguably built upon, all the conceptual flaws of TAP and TOUCH Cinema without succeeding in disseminating any cohesive message about women’s rights. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that Mirror Box contributed to any meaningful change with respect to sexual harassment and consent more than it trivialized the issues. In addition to the problems that Export’s work dealt with, Moiré also stated on her website that the work was made in response to the sexual assault of hundreds of women in Cologne during the 2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations. On top of the fact that Mirror Box, like TAP and TOUCH Cinema, failed to portray women as something more than a non-reciprocative sexual object, it also exhibits the nonsensical and borderline insensitive character of Moiré’s work in response to mass sexual assault. When speaking about the events that happened in Cologne, Moiré stated, “it is important to internalize images that show women as equal sexual partners and not as victims.” “Equal sexual partners” notwithstanding, Moiré posed herself as a woman that any stranger could grope in public without being touched back in a nonsensical response to women being sexually assaulted by strangers in public.

But beyond the conceptual failure of Mirror Box, at its worst, the work can be interpreted as normalizing such behavior. Moiré claims to have enjoyed the performance, and though one cannot know if her proclaimed arousal during the making of the piece was feigned or not, it can be seen as contributing credibility to the false assumption that other women would find it pleasurable as well. If this interpretation seems alarmist, it is certainly the case that the potential attention that Mirror Box could have brought to these issues was overshadowed by the absurdity and overtly sexualized presentation of the piece itself. Unlike TAP and TOUCH Cinema, Moiré’s wearable theater included internal cameras so viewers could get a close-up view of her waxed vulva. This is, in a sense, the direct opposite of Mapplethorpe, whose incorporation of formal elements ostensibly mitigated the explicitly pornographic subject matter. In Moiré’s case, it is hard to conceive of a move more inept than making an unnecessarily pornographic performance about sexual assault.

Mirror Box aimed to draw attention to issues of sexual assault and consent by offending the public. But now, the work exists as a testament of what can happen when an artist attempts to offend but does not succeed, as indicated by the telling fact that, when typing “Milo Moiré Mirror Box” into Google’s search engine, the first page of results mostly contains porn websites. If this is not a normalization, it is, at the very least, a trivialization.