My sisters and aunt took me to the University Art Museum for my birthday. A visiting exhibit, Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art , included video of a performance artist in a public lobby running a tiny surveillance camera under her blue sweater and under her cargo pants, displaying close-ups of her body, including her most private parts, on a large screen up above. Another surveillance camera records what we're seeing: the artist, the screen, and a dumfounded stray audience.

http://jillmagid.net/Lobby7.php

Just as riveting was a video of a compact man in a shower, but instead of the water raining down, it's falling up (the video playing in reverse). Not just water, but dirty water.

The man uses his hands to scrub himself. As he washes, mud flies up, leaving spots and streaks on his belly, arms, chest and face. The spots grow and interconnect. The longer he showers, the more mud.

Now he's covered, his eyes bright and alive from within a mask of mud. The water turns off. He leaves the bathroom and slowly walks, the encrusted mud man, down a hall through a door and to an elevator. He enters the elevator, faces the camera, the doors close, the end. (“Pure”, a video short by Subodh Gupta, 2000)

I see on the internet that the gunk was not mud, but cow manure. The video was absolving. Watching Gupta muck himself into a pure state challenged my narrow thinking.

Our aunt in her red blouse created art of her own just by sitting in a red chair.