Unbecoming: The Private as Public Spectacle presented five artists whose work explores the ways in which media-produced spectacle has redefined (and at times collapsed) what is commonly referred to as "private" and "public" subjects and spaces. These artists primarily dealt with pseudo-documentary, self-portraiture, and performance in various media-based formats such as photography (Elizabeth Campbell, Sarah Lucas, and Joseph Maida), multi-channel digital video (Kara Crombie), and video installation (Connie Walsh).

 

This exhibition was inspired by the Victorian-era rooms in which it is installed. The Philadelphia Art Alliance building was originally the residence of Samuel Price Wetherill and the PAA’s founder, Christine Wetherill Stevenson, until it was acquired by the PAA and developed into a visual, literary, and performing arts center. The first floor galleries, more than any other area of the building, reflect the feel of the building’s history as a private home. The coffered ceilings, fireplaces, and wainscoting are still the galleries’ predominant physical features, though the spatial use has shifted from library, to members’-only exhibition space, to public gallery for contemporary art. Today, the physical features that signal a private home still coexist with this public function, just as the works included in Unbecoming examined what traditionally has been designated as private and public (and how these distinctions have shifted in recent decades).

 

Theorists Guy DeBord and Jean Baudrillard have argued that this confusion of the private and the public is an effect of the pervasiveness of communication and the media in the production of the modern spectacle. As an insidious form of advertising, spectacle produces and perpetuates the need to consume abstracted ideals of economy and ownership, social status, and physical beauty. This ideal is brought to the public through various mediums, including new digital conduits, as well as more traditional forms such as advertising and television. The omnipresence of the spectacle today suggests that Western culture is becoming increasingly defined by communication in all its forms. Media has become a primary influence in every area of life and thus, the spectacle encompasses the invasion and reorganization of work, leisure and recreation, private life, and personal conduct. The strain of contemporary media-based art on which this exhibition focused—-a strain that examines shifting conceptions of private and public—-is both an effect of and made possible by the unprecedented, easy, and seductive access to visual information afforded by technology.

 

The artists in Unbecoming rehearse and critique this culture’s unfettered yet conditioned access to private subjects and spaces. In each project, mass-media techniques are referenced, either directly or indirectly, broken-down, and re-framed or edited so that, paradoxically, we as viewers are made aware of the image’s seductive, voyeuristic qualities. These artists’ strategies of resistance simulate mass media signs by addressing subjects or spaces once considered private, yet remain critical rather than complicit with the publicizing effects of the spectacle. The resistance to easy consumption of these seemingly private images is addressed by the artists through investigations of cultural norms, common-sense attitudes, and everyday activities. Rather than providing unmediated access to images, the very structure of each  work in some way announces an invitation to be observed by the public. These strategies allow the artist to control viewers’ access to what can be seen and the manner in which it is viewed. It is the schism between a practice controlled by the artist and the mass-media format in which it is initially received that creates an engaging dialogue between artist, object, and audience. In each of the projects presented in Unbecoming, it is the subject matter rather than the aesthetic qualities of the projects that addresses this shift.