Amalia Ulman And The First Work Of The Next Communication Age.

William Pym
Standards & Practices

Comedian Dave Chappelle has a bit in his last standup special where he talks about being called to the Standards and Practices department of his cable network and being told to do things differently. He’s not too bothered about what the network thinks. There’s a vulgar, uproarious punchline. I like the idea of standards and practices. It makes for a good joke. The enforcer of arbitrary rules and norms, a person whose job it is to frame what’s right, right now. For how can you tame a moment? In the international art world, where I have worked since 2002, I grew to become very familiar with a world of amorality, grandiosity and arrogance. I watched pre-2008 hypercapitalism change everyone’s style, and watched money get darker. Now the art world is being rebuilt, like everything else, in the image of a new generation. And one thing is true now as it was then — the art world is a place of porous standards, and practice takes many forms. I am still here, somehow, and I am the Standards and Practices department.

Buenos Aires-born, Los Angeles-based artist Amalia Ulman presented Excellences and Perfections as an unfolding narrative on her Instagram account over the summer months of 2014. She was 25. For this piece, which existed only online, Ulman performed a sustained exercise in character work, illusion and fantasy. She played three young women who offered themselves up for constant validation, overshared and went through drama, shared bland truisms about love and self-empowerment, and posted pictures of flowers, food and, you know, something like a turmeric latte. The drink, like everything else, was made up of a cute, dusted froth. The setting was always beautiful and beautifully lit, always the top floor, a penthouse, sipping and coy in a gilded tea room, or it was locked in the bathroom, ugly-crying about today’s indignity, or it was alone in bed, showing her butt. Ulman broadcast a tightly controlled story, chapter by chapter. The three versions of women designed by Ulman in Excellences and Perfections belong among the fragmented female archetypes of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, except now they’d come to life, rendered in flesh and set free to evolve in real time. It’s a feat of animation. Moreover, Excellences and Perfections was an interactive artwork, to which viewers could constantly respond. Tens of thousands of people were engaged live with the project at its peak, publicly voicing their feelings as Ulman flaunted the glamour of her life, looked slutty or sleepy, shared breakfast or a breakup. The audience was with her every day, waiting for her to reveal herself so they could have an opinion about it.

Excellences and Perfections is more than performance. You can tell, because there isn’t, as yet, a satisfactory and agreed-upon term for what this type of art should be called. We know about durational, total performance art — Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong stints staying outdoors or living in a cage in the late ’70s are their apogee — and we know through artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson that a specific brew of voyeurism, technology and womanhood got figured out as early as the ’60s. Ulman’s Excellence and Perfections is both those kinds of art. Never before, however, has art so insidiously blended with our life and rhythms. The work existed on its viewers’ phones, of course it did, but it also existed in their minds — Ulman as a sprite, hanging out in their consciousness even when they weren’t looking at the work itself. ‘Social media performance’ is, I believe, what the good people at rhizome.org called it. I can’t come up with anything better. There isn’t art language for the particular place this work exists.

Excellences and Perfections was hailed, straight away, as a significant thing, and its reputation only improves. There’s been a lot of stirring writing about the work, and every few years a new group of art people gets hip to it. Ulman herself wrote a first-person column in the FinancialTimes a few weeks ago, appearing without warning on the Thursday opinion pages, revisiting the piece and tacitly reminding us how she had foreseen the future. Technology would transform identity. In 2014, Ulman was a modern-day Cassandra; her curse was that many people would only take her butt seriously, ignoring the actual story.

Let’s consider what Ulman foresaw. At the time of Excellence and Perfections’ making, through the internet, identity was becoming more intricate and faceted than ever before, like the pointillism of Bill Evans or Cecil Taylor at the piano, ten fingers all at once playing on top of each other, making new harmonics. Identity was no longer a single melody. The globe-flattening information revolution of the internet age changed options, horizons, inflections. We could be different, and be more, because we knew more, and could see more.