FuckThatGallery Presents The First Large-Scale U.S. "Groperformance"
This announcement presents You Feel Good < Grope > as the pseudo-historic arrival of "Groperformance," a new performance category in which groping becomes subject, object, and medium. Its museum-style rhetoric is part of the trap: the press release borrows the solemn machinery of exhibition promotion to legitimize an act that remains comic, invasive, and institutionally impossible. Williams is described as both pioneer and performer, executing hundreds of hours of tactile encounter in a gallery where entry itself is framed as participation. The work's brutality is conceptual rather than documentary: it exposes how easily the art world can aestheticize the body, consent, shock, and access when they are wrapped in avant-garde language. As a companion to the later "Art Visitors Groped" release, it turns the gallery into a courtroom, a nightclub, and a bad joke about freedom all at once.
- DATE:
- April 6, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Marrie Akana
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- FUCKTHATGALLERY; The Estate of LG Williams; Facebook; Twitter
- KEYWORDS:
- Groperformance as pseudo-historic arrival; institutional language for transgression; erotic art-world farce; gallery as body-contact zone; performance and propriety collapsed; art world erotic hypocrisy named