Pål Hollender’s Moment of Metamorphosis

Sammanfattning: The thesis Pål Hollender’s Moment of Metamorphosis – Transgression through Metamorphosis as an Artistic Strategy for Communication and Power Struggle studies the transformation of Pål Hollender from the artist as media celebrity in the TV show Survivor, to the artist as sex purchaser in the documentary Buy Bye Beauty. Through this specific case from Pål Hollender’s artistic production, the thesis attempts to shed light on the conditions for artistic communication and power struggle presented by his strategy of transgression through metamorphosis. The first part of the thesis is an ontological and epistemological analysis on the concepts of seduction and appearance that attempts to describe the conditions for meaning and communication by a speaking subject. In this chapter Hollender’s method is mainly analysed through the theories of appearance by Jean Baudrillard and Giorgio Agamben. Regarding appearance, Hollender’s strategy seeks to reveal appearance as appearance itself, and therefore presents a possibility of meaning and a speaking subject. The next chapter uses a phenomenological approach to discern how Hollender’s strategy relates to the concepts of the lived body and the dys-appearing body, as defined by Drew Leder. This is done in order to analyse how he uses the body as a tool for communication. In the light of those concepts, Hollender endeavours to make the viewers experience their bodies as a collective of lived bodies. Finally, a discursive approach is used to discern in what way Hollender’s artistic strategy presents a possibility for power struggle. In this chapter Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben form the basis for the discussion regarding e.g. the concepts of discipline, bare life, camp and sovereign. Hollender in this perspective uses a strategy of disruption of stability that puts the viewers in the position of the sovereign, in an attempt to wake them up to experience a world of domination.