#matty mo

Firstly, many are understandably skeptical about how this constitutes Art, which admittedly is a debate held around the wider context of contemporary art and how it can often be difficult to read, appreciate or enjoy. Mo receives nude photos which someone else has composed, shot and edited, and has applied an opaque curatorial process in deciding which of the hundreds of photos he used is makes the final exhibition. Many are responding with questions about how Mo’s input has elevated the photos from snapshots into pieces of fine art. 

The artist defends himself by drawing heavily on the Duchampian concept of the readymade, which was birthed just over one hundred years ago and first defined in the Abridged Dictionary of Surrealists, published 1938. Interestingly, Duchamp’s best well known and most controversial readymade, Fountain, was first exhibited one hundred years ago in 1917, and in May of that year, the following text was published in The Blind Man, a magazine run by Duchamp and two friends: 

Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.

Readymades were, and still can be, incredible pieces of art (although I suspect many viewers would disagree with me there), because of the Duchampian act of transformation applied to the object. This was often a simple twist - when Duchamp painted a fake name on the side of a urinal and placed it on its back, on a plinth, he was transforming it from simple commodity into objet d’art, simply by deciding it would become a piece of art. 

At the time, of course the public viewed his work with scrutiny, but the artistic merit of his work was also contextualised by other artistic movements and scientific developments in the world. The problem with the readymade now is that our nearest and most immediate contextualisation is the work of the YBAs - Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998), for example. 

My Bed illustrates the difference between a Duchamp readymade and a late 20th Century readymade, which is the theoretical and contextual framework which surrounds the work. 

Duchamp’s Fountain was made at a time when Dadaism was a huge force for change in contemporary art, and his practice of readymades was supported by the Dadaist tradition of lifting things from their original context and putting them into new ones, creating ridiculous and nonsensical objects and scenes. (Although, to be clear: Duchamp was not directly associated with the Dadaists and was careful of his use of the term.) The Dadaist movement was a forerunner of Surrealism, and made work in a specific time in world history - surrounding the First World War - when modernisation and industrialisation was happening before the eyes of the artists. 

Emin’s My Bed has been referred to as a readymade, but draws from a very different conceptual root from Duchamp’s Fountain. Emin made her bed in the heyday of the Young British Artist, in the 1990s, after years of postmodernist thought. Her work is inherently personal, and My Bed is allegedly a faithful recreation of the scene of a four day depressive episode. It’s impossible to read My Bed without putting it into perspective of the decades of feminist art which came before it - My Bed wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without the work of artists like Valie Export, Yayoi Kusama or Louise Bourgeois (although, please trust me when I say I have multiple issues with that era of feminist art).

To compare Duchamp’s readymades to Emin’s readymades forces us to ask what they really have in common - which is ultimately very little, other than the fact that they both come from pre-manufactured objects. 

This is what brings us back to Matty Mo and his use of Duchampian buzzwords to justify his work. He may say he draws from Dadaist thought on the readymade and the contextualising of items, but the problem is that his work exists in a hugely different context to Duchamp’s Fountain. When Fountain was first presented, the world was just coming to terms with its own modernity, and mediums like photography were still difficult to access for many. 

Now, photography is a staple of the 21st Century. We live in a more visually exciting and explosive time than ever before, and imagery floods our eyes and minds constantly in advertising, popular culture and social media. While the nude portrait has long been a staple of art, we now live in a time where the nude, as a medium, moves between Art and Ordinary. This is probably where Mo draws the link between the readymade and how he sees his “work,” but it is a lazy and shallow comparison. 

Today’s nudes represent a type of self portrait which has previously only existed within the art world. Now, anyone can be both model and artist, anyone can define the parameters in which their body is seen, consumed, transformed into an objet d’art. The power of the nude is in the ability to self define, which is removed by Mo’s clumsy curatorial efforts. 

Look at the images that Matty Mo surrounds himself with - bodies which are traditionally aesthetically pleasing - generally white, generally slim, generally a reflection of the beauty standards applied to society. While Duchamp changed the world with his readymades, Mo merely reiterates oppressive power patterns which are already a part of daily life. As any young woman who’s ever sent or received a nude knows, those power struggles find their way into every aspect of our lives, including our sex lives. 

I fail to see the power or the glory in an artist upholding the same oppressive standards which the feminist artists above worked to subvert. In fact, I see this less as a genuine curatorial effort and more as a man’s way to make himself feel a sense of power and control, by selecting the bodies worthy enough to be transformed into “art”. 

(You’ll also notice a particularly gross moment in the video, where Mo sends a heart-in-eyes-emoji in response to a sexy picture and looks far too pleased with himself. Gross.) 

We don’t gain any conceptual ground from this rehashing of oppressive practice, because Matty Mo is unable to critically reflect on it. He deflects, pointing to Duchamp, pointing to the ephemeral nature of Snapchat, claiming his screenshotting of images is a crucially transformative act instead of a repetition of dynamics seen both inside and outside of the contemporary art circuit.  

Readymades no longer have any inherent value, which means we fall back onto the second most prominent element of Mo’s work: shock. 

The images are designed to be inherently shocking. Snapchat has distinct visual cues, the greyed out text bar or comically enlarged emojis, which feature in most of his images. The shock aspect of his work is broken down into two components: 

Firstly, the idea that people have volunteered to send their personal images to a man they do not know and will probably never meet. Mo banks on the controversy that he gains here, which is made apparent by the lengths he goes to in the video to explain how he gathered the images. 

Secondly, the images have been blown up to large size and hung in a prominent location. Mo speaks at length about how he managed to get a gallery space on Wall Street, which we see features large glass windows. A woman walks past and covers her eyes as she sees the sexualised imagery, emphasising the supposed horror felt by members of the public.  

Both of these factors are designed to shock the viewer with Mo’s brazen curatorial choices. But the problem is? I don’t find it shocking. I find it terribly dull and reminiscent of regular, daily life. Wow, a man asking for nudes which he’ll use for his own personal gain. Colour me surprised. 

Shock art only works where the normal is subverted, bastardised, turned inside out - and even then, you have to be willing to do some pretty weird stuff to be shocking in this day and age. Mo is trying to appeal to a generation who grew up linking each other to shock sites on the internet, he’s trying to market himself to young collectors who probably have memories of the weird stuff we used to send via MSN and AIM. But now? There is very little that can shock a desensitised audience, and children of the internet generation are our most desensitised audience yet. The idea that we are meant to be shocked by nude bodies is a weirdly Victorian throw back, considering the feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s, and today’s contemporary body positivity movement. Perhaps Mo intends for us to be shocked by their method of distribution - he does harp on at length about how he’s ‘subverting’ Snapchat and how humanity have used our base nature to turn it into a sex tool rather than for ‘ephemeral conversation,’ but I find that line of thought just utterly boring and unworthy of being followed up on. Wow, the consumer base has had a huge input in this app is used, humanity is so base and driven by sex, yadda yadda, some crap about the lowest common denominator, so deep, wake up sheeple. 

Besides which, shock art has been thoroughly explored. Artists have worked with shock for decades to disrupt conversations and turn them on their head. Hell, in 1961, Piero Manzoni produced 90 cans of Artist’s Shit and since then nothing has been off limits. We’ve seen artists pull scrolls of paper from their vaginas, tattoo lines across the backs of paid participants, crucify themselves on cars, and generally do anything and everything that has been seen as taboo or off limits. 

Matty Mo’s work is inherently derivative, and he embraces that with open arms. A quick scan of his website, which I will not subject you to, shows work which is openly reminiscent of Yves Klein, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Roy Lichtenstein - that’s without even talking about the parallels between his Snapchat series and Richard Prince’s appropriated (and also gross) nudes. 

While there’s nothing wrong with being derivative, nor drawing on the work of artists who have inspired you in the past, Mo’s work shows a level of entitlement and a sense of ownership through his framing of his use of artistic trope as new, exciting and original. His personal branding as The Most Famous Artist reflects the privilege most white male artists have - repeating a pattern seen many times throughout history before - where a male artist commodifies and uses the bodies of non-men as “inspiration” or “muses,” all the while giving little respect, or financial renumeration, to his subjects. 

Frankly, I am not surprised or startled by Mo’s work. His “work” has the conceptual depth and agility of a first year art school student, which is probably ungenerous to first year art school students. He is the product of a long line of entitlement, an entitlement which does not invite him to critically reflect on his “creations,” but allows him instead to continue to push flat, boring and derivative ideas out while retaining media attention - and that’s without even fully exploring the ethics of the project, the issue of intellectual property, the way viewers and collectors have responded to it, but frankly, I’ve already devoted enough time and attention to him.