Wellington-based artist Claire Harris will present a live-stream performance piece at Window Online this month, acting out a ritual of fandom and celebrity worship that hinges between humour and misery. Harris will undertake to lick a poster of Donnie Wahlberg, of New Kids on The Block, until the paper is worn through, and the image erased, leaving a void. Through this act of homage and literal consuming of an image, Harris will enact the fantasies of availability and reciprocity that fuel the fan quest for face to face interactions, referred to as ‘face time.’

Harris’s performance playfully acknowledges the legacy of performance art through her strategies of repetition, endurance and duration played out through the body but framed within the context of popular culture’s recent past rather than traditional existential concerns. Streamed from a suburban bedroom, adjusted to resemble ‘the studio,’ Harris presents a non-heroics of performance art, domesticating and ‘trivialising’ tortured expressionism while hinting at the hunger and consumption that celebrity culture endorses.

Unofficially, Facetime happily coincides with the departure of the annual New Kids On the Block cruise ship voyage, a journey in which fans of the group (now aged in their thirties - forties) fulfill the dream of facetime, an experience that is contrasted yet complimented with the extensive connections and secondary networks NKOTB fans generate via social media. In this sense, Harris’ work, framed by Window Online’s ongoing investigation into the digital, locates the nexus of contemporary performativity in the online/offline blur.

Facetime streams continuously 8am-10pm with Harris performing the work in three shifts each day, Wednesday - Saturday each week. The performances will occur from 10am-12pm, 2pm-4pm and 8pm-10pm.

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Claire Harris is a Wellington-based artist who graduated with a PGDip in Fine Arts from Massey University, Wellington in 2009. Recent shows include Domestic Goddesses, 19 Tory Street, Wellington, 2012, Typical Girls, Cur. Bryce Galloway, The Film Archive, Wellington, 2011 and Knowing You, Knowing Me: New Artists Show, Cur. Emma Bugden, Artspace, 2010.