Live Art Denmark – existential experiences that shake the bag

The 11th edition of Live Art for Children is coming to an end at Arken Museum of Contemporary Art under the theme Staged Identities in the Age of Social Media . Last weekend, international artists presented cosmetic surgery on a beloved American children’s doll and sent us into a frenzy with a harrowing TikTok livestream.

Large art museums have a tradition of providing spaces for much more than exhibitions. They also function as live stages for performances that seek an alternative scene or to create new relationships in cross-aesthetic settings. This applies not least to dance and performance art, which, like Live Art Denmark, gives people unique experiences across generations. 

Art museums generally do not distinguish between children’s and adult art, as the theater genre typically does. Visual art is something we experience together from the time the children are sitting on their stomachs in a baby carrier. The same principle applies to Live Art Denmark’s festivals, where children are involved in art that is not originally made for them, but is of such good quality that it can be seen and debated across generations.

Cosmetic surgery on a child’s doll 

Los Angeles-based, award-winning performance artist Marsian De Lellis works in an interdisciplinary and activist manner with installations and narratives. Dolls and models are often included to enlarge and materialize what we are preoccupied with in our lives. They ask questions about phenomena that fill, arouse wonder, or are taken for granted. And they do it with love and lots of humor. 

In the performance  Raggedy Ann to Real Doll , cosmetic surgery is the subject of debate. At the end of Arken’s large entrance hall, an operation is in full swing. The patient on the operating table is the very popular American children’s doll, Raggedy Ann, who is about to have cosmetic surgery. Today, it is the face that is subject to needle and thread, while it is filmed and streamed to Instagram.

“Instruments are ready on metal tables, and the bright operating light reveals that Raggedy Ann’s mouth is hanging at the corners.“

De Lellis and their assistant, Tim Lagasse, are dressed in full surgical gear: surgical gown, gloves, mask, and headgear. Instruments are ready on metal tables, and the bright operating light reveals that Raggedy Ann’s mouth is hanging at the corners. The surgeon turns to the audience:

“Is it fine like this? Do you think the mouth is good? Or should we change something?”

De Lellis shows us the drawing for the operation. People comment and say she might not look so happy. But what do we think should happen, the surgeon wants to know. Then children and adults themselves have to jump into the operating room clothes to assist the team in the room with the corners of Raggedy Ann’s mouth so she can smile again

Same work – several generations

Some women over 60 come by and look at the performance in amazement. We have a chat about what you expect when you come to an art museum. Had they expected to see a performance of an operation, and what do they think about it? They had come to see one of Arken’s current exhibitions, but find the performance thought-provoking:

“Imagine that you would rather go under the knife today. Even young women get things done.” The woman looks shocked, and I ask if she thinks it’s ironic and made for debate? She breathes a sigh of relief and says: “Yes, it’s definitely ironic. Of course it is. But the reality is that you can’t get a job after you turn 50. You can’t be old these days.” The group continues with food for thought.

“Imagine going under the knife these days.
Even young women are getting things done”

The day before, Raggedy Ann had her granny arms, stomach and eyebrows fixed. A museum visitor performed brilliantly as a (perhaps real) surgeon and could untangle knots with tweezers. Today, a child stands and assists, and the performers effortlessly juggle between ages and skills, asking the child if she has a teddy bear, how old it is and what it’s called. 

About Raggedy Ann to Real Doll, Marsian De Lellis writes on their website:

“I created this experience to dissect what is just beneath the surface of our collective preoccupation for physical perfection and to examine how we negotiate the contagion of identity – a repetition of a repetition for which there is no original.”

The blanket is pulled out from under us.

Social media, with its possibilities for self-presentation, wealth and fame, is the subject of debate in Sunday’s second performance,  Famehungry. It is an international hit by performance artist Louise Orwin, who has received awards almost annually since 2015. She is known for puncturing prejudices with precision and clarity in provocative and political analyses of society from a queer point of view.

“An international hit by performance artist Louise Orwin”

In  Famehungry, she delves into the world of TikTok users. A platform that in 2021 became the most used App on Google with over 3 billion users worldwide. In Arken’s black box, it is clear that the almost 100 attendees came to experience the show, and only a few happened to drop by. 

Before the artist arrives, we warm up with upbeat SoMe pop music, so few people can sit still. There is a big screen all over the backstage and a smaller screen to the right. Tripods are wrapped in green glitter fabric and are ready with phones for streaming. To the left is a table with pink drinks behind a cage full of teddy bears. Pink and red wigs hang from the ceiling.

Louise Orwin enters with a cool attitude in a red Adidas tracksuit and shouts “Hi guys” in a high-pitched, sugary voice. The jacket must be taken off, because the less dressed, the more followers. Co-commentary directorial remarks appear on the screen, so we get a sense of the irony that contributes to the debate about whether performance art can even compete in a digital age?

Fake but real

The performance is an online streaming, projected on the big screen with likes and comments. Orwin’s red lips and sugary smile send kisses and hysterical laughter into the ether as she jumps up and down and eats ice cream, lollipops and a cucumber: “Send me some love guys!” The goal is 20,000 likes, then she will do something “amazing.” 

It’s important to avoid “shadowing,” which is TikTok’s ability to hide content in a form of censorship. But with him on a smaller screen is Orwin’s mentor, 21-year-old “cromically online” TikToker Jaxon Valentine. She has gained 80,000 followers in five years, while Orwin himself has 4,000. 

They have done over 40 shows together, and Orwin’s work examines with frightening intensity and vulnerability what it takes to flatter the algorithms into shedding a little love: “Be cute like a child, not sexual. And don’t make performance art,” she has learned.  

Digital abuse

“People get caught because they’re lonely,” Jaxon says. Another TikToker appears on screen, and the audience shouts “Hi Arthur!” He quickly makes £5,000 in a month without putting in any effort. Orwin wonders what it’s contributing to the world. Are we wasting our lives until we die? “Are we looking for hope?” Meaninglessness blares out in text and digital TikTok clips.

Orwin paints a terrifying picture of the future for us, for the experience economy and for art, leaving us completely disempowered. She often holds two fingers to her temple: “It feels like being in an abusive relationship.” Today she doesn’t reach 20,000 likes, but we still get “the amazing thing” as a final blow.

Performance art and So-Me

Performance art embraces the media of our time and uses them to hold up the famous mirror to us. It is both frightening and dystopian images of a humanity at the mercy of increasingly hollow values, but also a glimpse that we know very well that this is an escape from reality that we should not take too seriously. We take “brain breaks” in the midst of virtual information flows because we barely know how to turn off our devices anymore.

The digital ocean of entertainment and self-expression is eternally accessible, and many young people have more followers than most art institutions. The role of art for children and young people has therefore changed significantly in recent years. Where we used to offer a form of expression, it now lies in their own hands.

The role of art towards children and young people has therefore changed
significantly in recent years.

It has therefore become even more important to create space for reflections between children and adults and to debate life. For 20 years, Live Art Denmark has worked with performance art both for, with and by children, where the interactive encounter is at the center. 

Their experience is that performance art can open up reflections between generations that contribute to making children wiser about the world rather than about a specific art form. Children are not seen as a special category, but as people who are acquiring rules for behaving in different contexts.

Performance art is not dead

The debate-provoking works, which children and adults can experience together, focus on the journey itself and the investigation the artists take the children on. In De Lellis’ operating room, the relationship was quickly established between the child’s own references and the specific task. All children play doctor at some point, but they don’t need to understand the subtext about the beauty industry or the debate about natural aging.

Performance art can open up reflections between generations

The value is that the individual finds their own answers or keeps asking. While Orwin’s work was a potential existential crisis for adults, a few accompanying children yawned casually with their heads leaning against their parents. An antidote that brought laughter and cohesion to the room. Older children spoke quietly with their adults along the way to reconcile their experiences.

Performance art is not on a ventilator in the face of the successful but smooth self-staging of social media. On the contrary, it is a vibrant, important and debate-generating actor that offers both children and adults the opportunity to reflect critically on an increasingly complex world. 

Even after 20 years, Live Art Denmark is perhaps more important than ever with their unique, engaging approaches and extensive experience in curating international, debate-provoking art in places where different people have their way. There is food for new insights here.

The Live Art for Children 2024 festival is supported by the Augustinus Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation.