Triple Diesel

Britney Spears, in an unprecedented, Nauman-esque application of her own body as art object, recently and heroically thrust herself into a history-spanning dialogue about nudity, vulnerability, and physiological processes. Does her beaver shot provocatively essentialize and reduce the female body to a single organ? Or is this seeming reduction actually an editing process to focus a celebration on localized anatomy, and via vaginal apotheosis, an elevation of womanhood?



Courbet surpassed his predecessors in frankly and bluntly presenting in a fine art context the distinctly female vagina. Others have followed: Magritte, Valie Export, Carolee Schneeman, John Currin, and countless others. However, Britney surpasses all, in a staggering, simultaneous projection of self coupled with appearance of disinterest; the latter functioning in a successful attempt to deny narcissisisism.























Moreover, Britney offers a new dimension of Rosalind Krauss' famous "expanded field." Eschewing an expansion of the object to architectural space, Britney expands to popular media, filling blogs and publications with her performance. But beyond this formal innovation, Britney also makes an existential proposal and contribution to identity art. "All the world's a stage," she surely thinks as she pushes the performative space into the shared public. We are always performing!




This is all, no doubt, a series of conceptual strategies, and not accidental or a case of overindulgence. Britney is underrecognized and it's time to reevaluate her outpuss - er, output.