What to do on a Sunday afternoon when you’ve worked up an appetite for art? The galleries are closed and you’ve seen what’s up in the museums. Browse through Art Forum and you’ll see an ad from “The Performance Call Girl”! The Icelandic artist, Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, has for more than a year now been alert by her computer every Sunday in case someone anticipating a web performance rings her on Skype. Each person gets a special treatment, a spontaneous, dreamlike fantasy that invokes questions of the identity of the performer, who transcends a diversity of mythical roles via current image technology.
They are a modern merger of female stereotypes, e.g. the Gypsy fortune-teller and the prostitute who accepts appointments by call. Ásdís has a variety of oddments close at hand; wigs, glimmer, Christmas decorations, feathers, mirrors and lights. Should someone call, she delivers an abstract display – a “visual poem”, she calls it – reciting improvised phrases and demonstrating all sorts of gimmicks. It is fascinating to associate the ridiculously frivolous stunts that she actually employs with the baffling outcome at the other end of the line. The viewer will only get a partial glimpse of what is going on, distorted colours, blurred shimmers and vague messages. Behind the razzmatazz there is a serious investigation into the relationship between artist and viewer.
As an art experience, the Skype performances take place in a unique set-up and far from the traditional art space. The viewer is one on one with the artist, who not only performs for him or her alone, but sees them in the same way as they se her. It is an intimate situation evoking the notion of various trades of the sex industry, such as the peep show, and Ásdís certainly does not attempt to conceal this reference by literally naming the happening “The Performance Call Girl”. However, hers is less an attempt to take on the clichéd metaphor of art and prostitution, as it is a pun aimed at highlighting the unorthodox art site, which is the Internet.
The work became an experiment in presence and absence of artist and viewer … She and the viewer are both looking at a computer screen with a built-in camera, they gaze at her and she gazes back at them. The screen becomes a mystical tool, where the body and the senses get distorted. In Iceland (where there is a tradition for the creation of new local words for new inventions) the word for “computer” is “tölva”, a portmanteau word deriving from “tölur” for numbers and “völva” for seeing stone. The computer becomes a crystal ball that Ásdís and the viewer scry simultaneously.
She flirts with the notion that the persistent enchantment with technology finds its roots in religious or transcendental imagination. Marshall McLuhan, who is considered a leading thinker of the electronic age, once remarked that the telephone might be likened to a form of telepathy. Technology is pursued in order to extend the human condition and the various ways human beings extend themselves affects our relationships with one another. Skype is certainly a form of human extension, a medium that abolishes the limitations of space between people who wish to communicate.
She is generous enough to offer one “client” after the other a beautiful and unique moment every Sunday, a genuine afternoon delight. As they engage in the conduct, mesmerized, their senses are challenged and the relationship of art and audience put to the test.
From Afternoon Delight
on Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir’s Performance Call Girl
by Markús T. Andrésson (2008)
