The Tragic Ballad of Britney Spears
Excerpts from an essay I wrote over a decade ago during my Master’s. Part analysis of a Britney Spears-inspired video artwork by Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács, part social commentary on celebrity culture.
The article presents a brief phenomenological analysis of the artwork and its social context. In keeping with the theme of the For Real exhibition where the said artwork was showcased, I also quickly touch upon the role of video art in relation to public spaces.
“Leave Britney alone!” pleads Chris Crocker while crying hysterically in front of the camera as tears flow out of his now raccoon eyes, smudged with thick black eye liner. A Britney Spears fanatic, he posted this video on YouTube in 2007 to address Spears’ detractors during the pop star’s highly publicized breakdown involving a divorce, custody battle and subsequent trips to the rehabilitation center. Around the same time, Spears decided to shave her head, an impulsive act that many believed was an act of defiance. (van den Boom 2010) It was this episode in Spears’ life that not only elicited an over dramatic video from Crocker, but also inspired Dutch artists Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács for their 2010 video art Everytime.
As part of the For Real: Utopian Projections in Public Space, Everytime is being exhibited in 105 Avenue Ceramique, in the city of Maastricht for the entire month of October 2010. It occupies a window on the ground floor of a brokerage firm’s office, next to the sidewalk, projected by a beamer placed inside the building.
The artwork in itself is a reminder of that moment in Spear’s life but delving deeper into the context of the artwork, it becomes a haunting reflection of the media’s commodification of celebrities and our society’s insatiable hunger for them.
Everytime by Broersen and Lukács
Everytime is a three-and-a-half-minute video, depicting an animated 3D rendering of a vulnerable and bald Britney Spears “singing” her 2004 hit song of the same title, which artists Broersen and Lukács describe as a “tragic ballad about love and loss”. (van den Boom 2010)
It is just after sundown when I first encounter Everytime in Avenue Ceramique. Business hours have just ended, hence the street is relatively quiet and empty, except for the occasional car or bicycle whizzing past. The growing desolation and the cold autumn breeze ruffling the remaining leaves on shedding trees, create a peaceful yet somewhat eerie atmosphere, which, I will realize a little later, could not have been a more fitting prolegomenon to the artwork I am about to see. From meters away, I can already make out Spears’ head. From that distance, the artwork almost looks static, if not for the slight tilting of the head and the movement of the mouth in sync with the odd singing permeating in the air. I continue walking until I am right in front of it, positioning myself about three meters away from the projection.
As I stand there, I cannot help but think about how peculiar the video is but not being able to immediately point out exactly why. As I continue to observe, I slowly realize the factors contributing to the foreboding atmosphere it evokes.
The video shows a close up shot of the subject from the shoulders up, with Spears’ head taking up most of the frame. The video stands out primarily because of its simplicity on many levels. The execution is unpolished and the movements are not seamless, appearing to be rather heavily disjointed — almost stop-motion like and pixelized. I cannot help but think how much these irregularities reflect the Britney Spears that I am seeing, a deconstructed version depicted by the unusual shaved head.
Although the absence of hair seems to represent emancipation, a rebellion from a society that dictates how she should look like, it is rather ironic if one thinks about the shaved head of prisoners and military recruits, denoting exactly the contrary.
Apart from the baldness, the subject’s attire also reinforces the pared down image of the pop star. Except for the pearl necklace, her attire consists mainly of a basic hooded sweatshirt. The setting is anything but grand, as we see her against a bare wall. The only feature that breaks the wall’s monotony is a light switch, which adds to the domestic atmosphere. This provides a stark contrast to the often glamorous depiction of celebrities in the media, especially of the Britney Spears we see on music videos or in fabulous concert settings.
“Seeing such a close up image of Britney with her shaved head on such a large screen is creepy in and of itself, but it is also almost more voyeuristic than seeing it on the news. It’s like you are just watching her in a mental hospital or something having a break down singing a song from the “glory” days of the high times of her career. It’s just really sad,” viewer J. Warren shares in an interview.
Others, including myself, attribute the strangeness to the subject’s inability to make eye contact. Not once does she look at the viewer directly in the eye, hence evoking a sense of alienation. This, along with the strange voice, creates an unnatural atmosphere devoid of soul. If the eyes were indeed the windows to the soul, Everytime can attest to that.
Once our mind has grasped the visuals, our focus naturally turns to what we hear. Something that people would immediately notice is how raw the voice singing Everytime is, which is rather different from the processed voice of Spears that many of us may be familiar with. In the description of the work provided in the brochure, it is confirmed that instead of using Spears’ actual voice, the artists took the audio from a YouTube video of a teenage Belgian girl singing a cover of the song. The artists also copied and modified her facial expressions and gestures, applying it to the artwork.
This depersonalization seems to allude to the relationship between the real and the virtual, how these two have become heavily intertwined.
During my later visits, I notice the loud volume, which, among the artworks projected in Maastricht, led many viewers, including the curator, Bart van den Boom, to cite it as the most prominent in terms of sound. I find this rather fascinating, as it seems to be making an unintentional statement on the deafening and overwhelming media saturation in our society.
As it is an animation, it is clear that it is not meant to be a realistic portrayal of Britney Spears. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), in their double logic of mediation, would refer to this as hypermediacy. Unlike transparent immediacy, which aims to depict what is being mediated in a manner that one willingly or unknowingly disregards the medium leaving us only in the presence of what is being represented, Everytime does not take attempt to be truly transparent. Nonetheless, it still is just as immersive and the emotions it evokes are just as real. After all, is not the Britney Spears we see on television arguably an animated version too, a marionette controlled by her publicist, agents and record label? An image shaped by the media and a response to what society wants? This brings us to the issue of the blurring structures between of real and the virtual, of celebrities serving as what French post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard (2004) would call a simulacra.
Celebrities as Simulacra
Baudrillard argues that our society has reached a stage where it perceives the simulacra — symbols and signs — as the reality. The current human experience, he believes, is really just a simulated reality. Society has become so saturated with these simulacra that we have come to understand these symbols and signs not merely as representations, but as the actual entities. In his essay the Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard (1994) illustrates simulacra by using Jorge Luis Borges’ fable of an empire and its map. The empire created a map as grand and elaborate as the actual physical kingdom, to an extent that people have come to accept the map as the empire itself.
Likewise, in our society, celebrities are “maps” of real people. Celebrities, as we have come to know them, have become so detached with their real personas because we only see what is fed to us by the media. Show business in particular, in order to come up with a persona that is better than real (because real humans are not good enough), creates ‘realistic’ fabrications instead. Indeed, as Doug Mann perfectly puts it, using television shows as an example, “our television friends (e.g. sit-com characters) might seem more alive to us than their flesh-and-blood equivalents.” (Mann 2002)
Celebrities are commodified and have become objects that society ‘buys’. Society is dominated by the exchange of signs (branding, lifestyle etc.), which Umberto Eco (1975) refers to as “the authentic fake.” If, according to Eco and Baudrillard, Disneyland serves as a perfect allegory to the hyperreal landscape with its simulation of a perfect world, Britney Spears too, epitomizes an icon that quenches society’s thirst for simulated perfection.
While many highlight that the depiction of Britney Spears in Everytime is rather unnatural and unreal, the exact opposite can also be argued. As another viewer R. Jagrikova observed, “I think that in this video I like Britney more than in real life - she seems more ‘real’ to me than her ideal picture presented by the mass media - in this video, she seems more ‘human’ - with bad times and problems, just like everyone.” (Interview)
But is the media entirely to blame? After all, if not for the media, celebrities would not exist. Media has become the celebrities’ food that nourishes them to stardom and yet at the same time; acts as a poison that can just as easily bring them down. “The media is capable of worshipping people or at the same time, creating monsters.” (van den Boom 2010)
Whether basking in the glamour of fame or crawling in shame, there seems to be no leaving Britney — or any celebrities for that matter — alone. Sorry Chris Crocker, but in a world where celebrities are commodities, there will always be media vultures that will not leave them alone.
Video Art in Public Spaces
Although the ghost-town like characteristic of Avenue Ceramique at night where the artwork is located seems to provide a perfect setting to Everytime by amplifying its haunting qualities, regardless whether or not it was meant for exhibition in such an area, the more important question here then is not what the surrounding does to the work but rather, how the artwork affects the surrounding.
Avenue Ceramique mirrors a typical street in many of the world’s cities. It is a commercial area in danger of becoming ephemeral, a place where people merely pass by to get to the shops or offices. By placing the work in this setting, it attempts to make sense of what French anthropologist Marc Augé would refer to as a non-place. In their essay “Place: Networked Place”, Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg, using Auge’s definition, describe non-places as “spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history”. (Varnelis and Friedberg 2008)
In this age of commercialism, public spaces have become so saturated with media products and messages. Artworks like Everytime, give us an opportunity to step out of our daily routines and consumption of these commercial messages, even just briefly, to be awed, contemplate and look at our world in a different light. Furthermore, it also improves the area instilling a cultural experience, benefitting the city by strengthening its image as a cultural capital.
But when the public space is bombarded with commercial messages to which this artwork could be mistaken as part of, it becomes rather tricky. “The increase of video art in public space is inseparably connected with a huge increase in the number of commercial applications of video in the street, such as outdoor screens, projections on the facades of buildings, or forms of interactive applications as part of the architecture,” explains Catrien Schreuder. (2010, pp. 7) Works like Everytime must compete with commercial messages to get theattention of the viewers and sustain it long enough for the message to be conveyed. But how can video art do just that when it is almost impossible to differentiate between art and artistic commercial messages? It seems as if there is no escaping commercialism, but as the tongue-in-cheek saying advises, “if you cannot beat them, join them”, no piece of work illustrates this more clearly than Everytime with its deconstruction of an ultimate icon of consumption. By employing hypermediacy, a tool that commercial messages often employ, it allows us viewers to question the highly mediated space surrounding us.
This leads me to wonder how Everytime would have turned out if the artists had not shelved Britney’s voice for the Belgian girl’s. What if Britney had been depicted the way she usually appears on TV or magazines? Then Everytime would blend right in with the world already saturated with these images. The fact that it is a deconstructed piece makes it standout in a sea of contrived perfection.
Conclusion
Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács’ Everytime highlights the interwoven relationship between the popular media (the virtual) and reality to the point that the two are almost indistinguishable from each other. Everytime, in all its intricacies (hidden behind astounding simplicity), reflects a highly mediated society and critiques the paradox of popular media that unavoidably kills the very stars it creates. Meanwhile, the For Real exhibition acts as a form of resistance to commercialization, an attempt to reclaim public spaces and bring them back to the masses.
Crocker’s video has since gone viral cementing his status as an Internet celebrity while his idol, Britney Spears, is on the rebound slowly making her way back to the top. It seems like the pop star is fine for now, at least until the next media spectacle surrounding her unfolds.
(Originally written in 2010, modified for this post)
References
Baudrillard, J. (1994). The Precession of Simulacra. (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge (MA) and London: The MITPress.
Eco, U. (1986). Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Mann, D. (2002). Jean Baudrillard: A Very Short Introduction. Retrieved October 22, 2010 from Doug Mann’sFabulous Home Page: http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/baudrillard1.htm.
Reuter, M. (2006). What Art in the Public Space Can Achieve. Retrieved October 23, 2010 from Okkupation:http://okkupation.com/theorie_en/link_5.htm.
Schreuder, C. (2009). Pixels and Places. Amsterdam: Nai Publishers.
van den Boom, Bart. (2010). Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács ‘Everytime’. Retrieved October 22, 2010 from FORREAL: http://for-‐real.eu/artists/persijnbroersen.php.
Varnelis, K., & Friedberg, A. (2008). Networked Publics. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Chris Crocker’s YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc Broersen and Lukács’Official Website: http://www.pmpmpm.com
For Real Website: http://www.for-‐real.eu
