Digital Surrogates, currently on show at David Krut Projects, is unique in that it is arguably the first exhibition in South Africa to showcase the current global fascination for virtual bodies, or avatars. The show features portraits from Eva and Franco Mattes’ 13 Most Beautiful Avatars alongside new work by South African artists, Bronwyn Millar and Pippa Stalker.

Eva and Franco Mattes have been called many names, most notably by Nike officials and the citizens of Vienna, after they ‘stole’ the Nike logo and invented the campaign ‘Nikeground’. ‘Nikeground’ renamed Vienna’s Karlsplatz Nikeplatz, and threatened to install a 36 x 18 metre monument of the Nike logo on the historic square. Then there are also the names they have taken themselves: Luther Blissett, Renato Posapiani, Tania Copechi and the better known 0100101110101101.ORG.

Darko Maver is another alias. This rather infamous Serbian artist installed gruesome murder scenes in public places and after building a relatively high-profile career, was unceremoniously killed off. As Eva and Franco rightfully point out, they have also “embodied the Vatican, Nike, [and] the European Union” and “Eva and Franco Mattes are the last evolution of our long-standing identity derive…” Considering the Mattes’ history of identity-hijacking and persona development, their involvement with avatars, and in particular Second Life, seems inevitable.

The virtual world of Second Life promises a real-time, net-based existence complete with one’s own three-dimensional body (otherwise known as an avatar), social interaction and even shopping. In 2006 Eva and Franco Mattes produced a series of portraits of existing avatars from Second Life entitled 13 Most Beautiful Avatars.

The images of existing residents of Second Life are presented as large-scale, saturated digital prints, which in title reference Andy Warhol’s films 13 Most Beautiful Women and 13 Most Beautiful Boys. The association with Warhol is not coincidental since the work patently emulates a pop art sensibility. Large and saturated, the faces are iconic, and like Warhol’s Marilyn, wholly divorced from the ‘real’. The size of the works highlights the seams of these artificial faces and reminds one of plastic surgery scars. Warhol once remarked on Los Angeles culture and Hollywood celebrities that “They’re so beautiful. Everything’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” The 13 Most Beautiful Avatars portraits are pure plastic. They are images of an idealised and distorted – even grotesque – beauty, recognised as the epitome of portraiture by their makers, the residents of Second Life.

According to the Mattes, beauty as a value in Second Life also conversely becomes meaningless precisely because it is the highest value, “… if anyone can be beautiful, than we will have to figure out new ways to make a difference” , they state. They see Second Life, with its unlimited alter-ego possibilities, not as a place of pretence, but as a free zone where people can at last function without masks, liberated of the social norms of real life .

While the Mattes’ 13 Most Beautiful Avatars share much with Warhol’s portraiture, there is a key difference: Warhol abstracts real people; the Mattes highlight already abstract images of self. Residents on Second Life customise their appearance to the closest resemblance of their ideal selves, which is often unrelated to their real appearance. Eva and Franco Mattes simply frame these subjects – a shift that destabilises the traditional power relation between artist and subject.

Synthetic Performances is Eva and Franco Mattes’ latest project related to Second Life. For this ongoing work they use their own avatars to stand in for the artists to recreate historical performances like Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks, Valie Export’s Tapp und Tastkino, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed and Chris Burden’s Shoot on Second Life. Marina Abromovich, whose work will also be re-enacted for Synthetic Performances, produced a similar project in 2005 entitled Seven Easy Pieces. In it she too re-enacted works by Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Gina Pane and Bruce Nauman, in addition to one of her own. Abromovich was nervous to re-enact these performances and “felt like an archaeologist” , researching every last detail to keep her performance as close as possible to the original, thereby “preserving an art form that is by its very nature, ephemeral.”

While Eva and Franco Mattes’ re-enactments might seem close in intention to Abromovich’s Seven Easy Pieces, Synthetic Performances does not share her conservationist sentiment, nor do the works relate to ideals of accessibility so prevalent in early utopian ideals for the web, but rather to a product of the Mattes’ aversion to performance art . Re-enacting these pieces becomes a way of exploring this distaste, and according to Eva and Franco Mattes, they chose performances that would be ‘particularly paradoxical’ if re-enacted in a virtual world. As such, a proliferation of trees and basalt columns, as in Beuys’s 7000 Oaks, does nothing to promote awareness of environmental issues nor does it oxygenate the air, but rather spreads like a virus across Second Life. Equally, Valerie Export’s Tapp und Tastkino; where strangers, “the audience”, are encouraged to fondle her breasts inside a box strapped to her bare chest, the ‘cinema’; becomes futile in the absence of the tactile. The re-enactment abstracts her transgressive act to the voyeurism that Export was trying to counteract – not surprisingly she “hated” it. In a rationale of Tapp und Tastkino, she asserts women’s right to ownership of their own bodies and calls for the “socialis[ation of] sexuality” and an end to “…private ownership of eroticism” . It seems slightly anachronistic within a present day Second Life, ironically this ‘socialisation’ is something very much embraced by residents, where sexual acts are public domain.

Chris Burden presents another anomaly: what is the meaning of having oneself shot at virtually, if the object was “personal danger as artistic expression”? Again the virtual re-enactment becomes abstract and decontextualised. Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, where the artist lies below a ramp constructed as a second floor in the gallery and masturbates, while fantasising over a loudspeaker about the visitors above, retains some original meaning. While the title, which provokes the idea of fertile ground and Acconci’s interest in architectural space and man’s relation to it is compromised; the artist, or Franco Mattes in his stead, is still engaging over some distance with an unseen participant, forcing some kind of intimacy.

Though the re-enactments clearly subvert the original interpretations, Franco & Eva Mattes’ Synthetic Performances highlights the disjuncture between the real and unreal or virtual, and is an act of cultural terrorism as much as the appropriation of the Vatican or Nike logo was. Their apparent aversion to performance art stands in contradiction to their actual output as artists – all their work is essentially performance, whether re-enacting Darko Maver and Joseph Beuys, or the ephemeral media hijacking that forms the cornerstone of their artistic practice. [posted by Cara Snyman on David Krut]