Just found this video of a performance artist taking a stroll through a gallery with a baby.
Site Text says "Milo Moiré, nude, with a nude baby during the closing (2015/02/22) of “The naked life” in the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster (Germany) to celebrate the exhibition. Milo and the baby looked at the nudes in the exhibition and, because of their own nakedness, became a part of it….In keeping with the approach of the artists exhibited, Milo Moiré brings everyday life to art. And yet, she goes one step further in removing herself from the abstract form of representation and shows her main motif of the naked life: A naked infant safe in the arms of a naked woman. This direct confrontation with live nude art challenges others to reflect on familiar forms of perception. How close may a form of representation in art approach real life? Milo Moiré’s performance leaves this question within the realm of the museum: “How little abstraction can art tolerate?” From Bohemianizm.com.
Despite the marxist feminist strategy of the deconstruction of the male gaze, the critical compare and contrast between the high figurative art of historical painting and a contemporary artists video can also be an excercise in temporal and technical shifts in museological framing devices.
Putting gender wars aside for now, one can play the game "whats different about these two art acts", suspending judgement whether this video qualifies.
The common element is the figure, with female eros and reproduction as its theme, similar to the referents in the classical baroque art exhibited. Also appreciated is the lighting of the figures in the paintings is simiar to the museum lighting on the flesh of the female artist and child models.
This gives a convenient scientific method, with the fixing of some terms in the equation of the creation and museumification of art, against the many now variable terms of medium, century, politics, and power relations.
It is worth emphasizing one gender variable, that this contemporary artist is a female using her own body, whereas the paintings artists were typically male, using the female form as referent for generally male viewers. Still perspectival space and naturalism dominate both scenes providing an intimacy.
The video borrows the historicity, social proof and privilege of fine art objects to legalize what would usually be considered an act of institutional sabotage, streaking. The titilation of this feat of legalization may be the underlying interest of this performance, besides the appreciation of a now well documented female form, with its health and reproductive beauty.
Possibly in a few centuries again, the old paintings may finally disappear, and we can view this video of a mother and child in a new art museum. Future patrons may consider the natural status of motherhood, at risk with declining fertility, is as hopeless an act of reproduction as a Baroque oil figure painting in the 21st century. Possibly we could then farm humans in a new, more efficient trans-humanist way. We may then say to ourselves, my gods, what have we done?
Museum artifacts document the slow death of eras.