Interactive DVD menu

The piece is presented in a gallery space, on a monitor or as a small projection onto the wall. The names of the curators are listed, and there is a remote control so that the audience member can choose who to watch first, whether to stick with one person until they’ve finished or skip to someone else. Or one could look at the alternatives presented in the menu and decide not to bother.

As the audience then, we are enabled, but within certain constraints. And as subjects we are both enabled and constrained by the language that is available to us, which presents us with certain identity positions to inhabit. Müller Medeiros’ work inserts itself into the circuits by which meaning is produced and disseminated; in this case, the circuits of production and consumption through which art world meanings are produced, through which one is produced as an artist.
As a subtle intervention this piece is both sly and generous. It not only generates critique, but opens up the possibility for other relationships of meaning. The curators are given very little instruction. They are given the time not only potentially to expose themselves but to reflect on their own positions, and perhaps it is through reflection that we are able to make small shifts, small changes to our way of being in the world, in our relationships with others.
Müller Medeiros hands out cards saying “You are beautiful” to people she meets on the street. The cards have a small text on them which states that beauty is “inclusive and subjective”. As an intervention, this articulates a question about aesthetic judgement, and about subjectivity. We are aware that beauty is both a culturally constructed category and “in the eye of the beholder”. It is language that brings us into being (as beautiful or not beautiful,

as failed or not failed), but how can we be both created in discourse and aware of that creation? If we want to question categories, or resist categorisation, how can we articulate that resistance in a productive manner?
This artist resists in one way by challenging the conventional means of presenting and archiving an artistic practice. The intervention with the cards for example is not described as a finished or an ongoing performance, because it is

You Are Beautiful Card 2003

neither: it is an activity that can be started up again and left again at any time. In a forthcoming book, artwork and documentation of performances from different times is presented randomly, not in a linear organisation that would suggest an evolution of the work through time, and a relationship of causality between one piece and another. And it is significant that the book contains work that was never regarded as “finished”. The book performatively produces the work as finished in one sense, but at the same time always in process,...(Article by Celia Jameson for StateOA Magazine continues at www.flaviamullermedeiros.com)