File:Dorit Cypis X-Rayed 1988.jpg

Performance-installation by Dorit Cypis, X-Rayed (detail, in situ immersive media installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988). The image illustrates an early period and body of work in Dorit Cypis's career in the late 1980s when she produced immersive multi-slide performance, projection and sound pieces that explored the female body, representation and identity. In these works, she overlaid emotionally and psychologically loaded imagery—ranging from erotic photographs, imagery from media, medicine, religion and art, family snapshots, exotic travel slides—to create phantasmagoric installations that engulfed performers and spectators in audio and visual stimuli. This series of work, and this particular work, has been publicly exhibited and performed in prominent venues, discussed widely in national art and daily press publications, and commissioned by major art institutions.

Artist Dorit Cypis. Copyright held by the artist.

Dorit Cypis

Detail

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating an early period and body of work in Dorit Cypis's career in the late 1980s, when she produced immersive multi-slide performance, projection and sound pieces that explored the female body, representation and sexual identity. They employed loaded, sometimes controversial imagery—erotic photographs, imagery from media, medicine, religion and Renaissance painting, family snapshots, exotic travel slides—in order to confront repressive social conventions through strategies of provocation, defamiliarization and stream-of-conscious association. This work differed from much feminist work of the period in its suggestions of multiple, equivalent meanings, role reversals involving gender and agency, and expanded concept of "self," which moved beyond appropriation and pastiche strategies of unmasking dominant tropes. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to visualize a key developmental phase in her art, which brought her initial recognition from art journals, daily press publications, and museums. Cypis's work of this type and this work in particular is discussed in the article and by prominent critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Dorit Cypis, and the work was a performance-installation, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.