15 - Screening Performance: Curating the Artist Persona

Summary

Abstract

While much has been written about the redemptive power of neoexpressionist work, which is said to draw upon the mythological, the cultural, the historical, and the erotic, the artist's curation of the self as a business entity, a consumable product, especially in tangent with screen culture, has been left largely unexplored. This chapter draws on theories of performativity and the work of Zygmunt Bauman on “practices of selfhood” to examine Julian Schnabel as an artist engaged in an act of self-curation onscreen. Using The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) as a case study, the chapter argues that Schnabel's directorial work conserves the notion of the artist as a constructor of history.

Keywords: Schnabel, Performance, Screen, Art, Business, Commodification

Introduction

In the modern West, visual art has traditionally been understood as a form of high culture, participated in through norms of connoisseurship, patronage, and individual expression. Images and objects have been primarily seen as things to view, set apart in museums, galleries, and other public places. Art is viewed, experienced, or consumed – the enactment of modern choice in a world replete with options. Currents within contemporary art include a globalized and relentless re-modernizing, the embrace of the rewards and downsides of neoliberal economics, capital, and neo-conservative politics, pursued during the 1980s and since, by artists such as Julian Schnabel. Sensationalism and spectacle abound in this contemporary visual art, where exhilaration, the lavish excess of emotions, and the construction of the artist as auteur selling his world vision is key.

This chapter unpacks the notion of the artist as curator and composer of his public self, the careful self-coding and self-definition that contribute to the making of the artist as a consumable product, especially within screen culture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's theories of consumerism in the contemporary world and of the “performativity” of the self, proposed by Bauman and Rein Raud in their work Practices of Selfhood (2015), I examine Julian Schnabel as an artist engaged in an act of self-curation onscreen. Schnabel's films are considered “painterly” in that they are persuasive, poetic, and experimental. They also bear the indelible imprint of Schnabel's painting practice, not least in the scale, vigor, and challenge to norms that they present.