Presenter(s): Claren Walker
Faculty Mentor(s): Emily Scott & Gretchen Soderlund
Poster 149
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
In April 2018, multidisciplinary artist and musician Solange Ferguson (neé Knowles) debuted a collaborative performance piece titled Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Although the piece centers around a choreographed dance performance within a sculptural white cube structure, Metatronia’s ultimate manifestation is the short video that has been widely circulated on the internet and social media. While Solange’s sculptural white cube both relies upon and disrupts the canons of modern architecture and minimalist art, it also occupies a place in the landscape of brand advertising. Critically, the video was executed “in partnership” with the Japanese fast fashion corporation Uniqlo (whose clothes the dancers wear) and produced by their advertising agency of record, Droga5 UK. By critically examining media coverage of the project and bringing it into dialogue with historical and contemporary art, architectural, and media scholarship, this research explores the tension in Metatronia (and other branded cultural phenomena like it) between its status as a work of art for public benefit and its function as a media vehicle to generate capital for corporate interest. Metatronia’s effectiveness as an advertisement depends on the veiling of its very function as one: with brand involvement masked under smooth rhetorics of “partnership,” the piece can exist comfortably in high art contexts while still elevating a fast fashion company. Metatronia exists at a nebulous–but commercially successful–intersection of art, architecture, and advertisement. More broadly, this case study reveals the complex dynamics and contradictions of contemporary cultural production under late neoliberal capitalism.