Happy Birthday Lindsay Lohan 2011-2014
by Claire Harris
Cost: $5
Contact: claire (at) frailsistercomics (dot) comPutting the fan back in fanzine, fan-artist Claire Harris surveys her annual heartfelt performance homage Happy Birthday Lindsay Lohan. Since 2011 Harris has communed with the infamous Hollywood star by binging on all 25+ hours of Lohan’s movies. Lohan’s birthday marks the date of this annual performance event… of course.
Harris as shrewd analytical artist has pulled together a zine as project catalogue, after which she’s checked out so she can exercise her dumb but transcendent fan love toward Lohan. James Bowen (curator) and Allison Maplesden book end with analytical essays leaving Harris free to draw pictures of Lohan, write to us in red biro “I was sick of people making fun of Lindsay Lohan”, and show us some of her performance artefacts, e.g. the piss jars that Harris filled due to her first movie marathon being staged in a gallery sans toilet (a cheeky nod to the abjection of “serious” performance art with its heroic endurance aspect).
The subplot to Harris’s communion/performance is her self-deprecating attempts to be taken seriously as an artist. “…I began to realise what a vital and necessary artistic practice it is to present the same work over and over until people notice.” Again, this is written directly towards us, in authentic red biro (of the artist’s hand, not reprinted)! Scraps of media attention are reprinted along with online comments by fans (it be a hall of mirrors!) and detractors of Harris’s work; “Agreed, very sad, and hardly “art”” writes one.
Recommended.
– BG
Bryce Galloway is an arts lecturer at Massey University and the author of Incredibly Hot Sex With Hideous People.
