After viewing Xandra Ibarra’s work and performances, I had so many questions. I wondered
what was the reason and the point of the performances. I didn’t understand how it was considered art and activism,
but after reading further in the news articles and her personal descriptions, I got some understanding of
her work. At first, I wondered how is getting naked empowering or supporting feminism. But then I
read about her “Nude Laughing” performance, and it came out that her reasoning was way deeper than I
thought. She wore a white nylon sock around her naked body filled with objects stereotypically related
to white women. In her performance, she was recreating a painting by John Currin called
“Laughing Nude”(1998) which features a nude white woman hysterically laughing. She was trying
to show the hardships of white womanhood in the “wrong body” as she called it. How they are trapped
inside of the stereotypes and don’t have freedom when it comes to their own body. She was trying to
express how certain races have certain standards attached to them and how these standards limit white
females to be expressive with their bodies. This makes her art way more interesting and standing to
me. This style of art is new to me. I have never seen or heard about this before. This is actually really
well thought out. And the setting she chose made it even better. Imagine being in a museum and an
unexpected artistic performance this epic takes place. You could see in the pictures how the
performance caught the eye of many and they started following her. This makes her voice even louder
and she doesn’t even sell tickets or anything so everybody can afford to come and watch it and it even
got random people participating.
Question: How did the idea of this style of art come to her head? How did it feel when she first started it?
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