Provocative Performance Photography: featuring Philip Ringler & Cat Sweet
Updated: 7 days ago
Conceptual photographer Philip Ringler and performance artist Cat Sweet are known for their combinative and provocative performance titled Start Smiling. Photographed in a mall in Newark, California during non-peak hours, Philip Ringler uses a basic Apple I-Phone instead of a professional full-frame or APS-C camera to photograph the series, specifically to avoid the unwanted attention of security as they conduct their provocative performance scenes throughout the mall. Start Smiling as a series is essentially an experimental rebellious statement about infiltration and spontaneity, explicitly being anti-narrative and non-linear.
Cat Sweet is quite a character, what makes her such an interesting performance artist is not only her body language and props, but also her facial expressions in each scene. She seems care-free and completely comfortable with herself, self-confident yet relaxed in her facial features. Philip Ringler has her perform in the most lucid ways possible, from holding a ‘limping’ inflatable gun in corridors to running around remote areas of the mall in her underwear to breaking various rules in the facility such as touching ‘forbidden glass’, etc.
Such a provocative performance is quite refreshing from both Cat Sweet and Philip Ringler who exemplify the art of infiltration and mischief as a sort of ‘punkish’ form of experimental art. This rebellious care-free attitude is best conveyed in the performance by the uniquely quirky poses, engagement with props, and facial expressions of Cat Sweet. Even the very fact of the series being captured on an I-Phone instead of a professional camera communicates the sense of secrecy and act of avoiding detection from the watchful eye of mall security. Although they are not technically breaking the law, the provocative nature of the performance was definitely breaking the behavioural rules of a typical mall and would of assuredly resulted in their expulsion had they been caught by security.
What Philip Ringler and Cat Sweet shows us is when performance artists work with photographers, installation artists, costume designers, set designers, motion-graphic artists, and moving-image directors, a grand interdisciplinary and experimental approach ensues in creating conceptually complex and experimental art. Their provocative approach to performance as ‘outlaws’ is not only engaging and lucid, but also hilarious.
As a result, artists can use performance, interdisciplinary approaches, and selective environments to create provocations which go beyond narratives and into channels of conceptual symbolism and irony. Provocations are an important element of experimental art because too often the masses of the people bathe themselves with familiarity and comfort. The role of the experimental artist is to break the audience out of their comfort zone and consider circumstances which seem not only unusual, but even absurd or taboo. Which is why what Philip Ringler and Cat Sweet achieve is such an important element in advancing discourse in contemporary art.
When we typically think of art with an anti-narrative or non-narrative, we usually think of abstraction. But Philip Ringler and Cat Sweet provide for us the means to consider circumstances which seem improvisational, anti-surveillance, infiltrative, voyeuristic, and quite rebellious. This rebellion they have conducted within this mall is no mere small act, but rather a grand performance of defiance towards the commercialized aspects of society. Similarly, the It’s My Party Too series, photographed by Philip Ringer and performed by James Saxon, also delve into similar circumstances of hypocrisy, rebellion, and anti-narrative as art, but more specifically geared towards the banality of a contemporary birthday celebration in isolated instance, rather than a grand infiltration.
