The Complexity Behind 'Vomit Artist' Millie Brown
This U.K. born performance artist takes her art to the next level... through vomit.
Some may claim that art comes from within; in Millie Brown's case, art from within is equivalent to vomit. Millie Brown is a British performance artist who was born in 1986 in Bath, United Kingdom. Millie Brown is best known for her use of vomit within her pieces, as she is known the be a "vomit artist." Her performance art has been widely controversial, causing a lot of judgment in the media, but has also caught the eye of many other artists such as Lady Gaga. Millie Brown's unique style falls under the criteria that debate is made on whether it is considered "art" by the public, the diversity of her art and the backstory behind her work.
Millie Brown's artistic expression has gotten many audiences to question if it is really a form of art. An example of this would be on April 8th of 2011, where Millie Brown performed a piece within a company called SHOWstudio where she first showcased her art through a live studio video. The video is around five minutes long and contains Millie Brown drinking a series of 8 different artificially colored milks (ranging from different shades of colors such as yellow, purple, green and blue) and purposely throwing it up on a canvas. In the background of her performance are opera singers Patricia Hammond and Zita Syme singing a symphonic and soothing piece.
As the opera singers were singing, Brown creates a rainbow-like spectrum of vomit on a canvas to their melodic interlude. The video has received criticisms for its accusations of glamorizing self-induced vomiting and promotion of bulimia. On the other hand, the video has also been praised for its different style and complete bizarre connection with the expression of art. Brown's expression takes its role with a very distinct audience who appreciate broken norms and different impacts of the art society.
Some sub-criteria that art can fall under is emotion, language, sense perception, and reason. Brown uses language to communicate and convey her message of art being portrayed through vomit, as she uses distinct colors within her art pieces to express different messages towards her audience such as "red" symbolizing her anger and "pink" and "blue" symbolizing her happiness. Brown also uses emotion throughout her art piece to create various feelings between the audience and the artwork. As individuals observed her controversial art, they capture a feeling from what they see, such as cathartic experiences. Some viewed her with broad emotions including disgust, anger, sympathy, and laughter. An elderly woman was so moved by her art that it brought her to tears due to the uniqueness of the abstract creations. Her reasoning for using such a controversial technique is to show how her body can create art from within.
Brown uses a sense of perception as well by allowing her own body to create art through her vomit, with symphonic opera playing in the background as the aesthetic guidance. This calms her and allows her artistry to flourish through the sound of the music and the reactions of her body. All these miniature criteria Millie meets enables her unique style to fall under the category of art. Therefore all these different connections to humanity and how people perceive art allow Millie Brown's pieces to be considered art.
The diversity of Millie Brown's art enhances the quality of her work, making it a unique style. For example, on March 14 of 2014, Lady Gaga put on a performance of her songs off her most recent album at the time "Artpop" at a festival called South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Around the fourth track of the setlist, she brought out Millie Brown to perform with her to a song called "Swine." This song induces a rigorous beat and heavy violent lyrics that convey a lot of anger and disgust to one another, with that in mind the use of Millie Brown within the performance allowed most of the meaning of the song to come to life. Once Lady Gaga got into the chorus of the song, Millie Brown begins to throw up green milk onto Lady Gaga as she performs, sings and plays the drums leaving the audience in awe. Furthermore, by the end of the track Brown and Gaga get onto a mechanical bull facing each other and once the chorus hits Brown starts to again throw up colored milk onto Lady Gaga as she sings, except this time its a black colored milk.
This showcases the diversity of Millie Brown's art and how it does not always have to be within a canvas and vomit, but can also be portrayed in other worlds of art such as music. The song "Swine" derives from Lady Gaga's hatred towards a specific person and how disgusted she is by that person referring to him as a "pig inside a human body/you're so disgusting." Allowing her to help completely execute her message Lady Gaga brought Millie Brown to participate in her performance to go over the level of grotesque yet showing an artistic expression of it as well. This also plays with irony, as Millie Brown is known for being "gross/offensive" to many therefore the use of her art to an angry song allows her to showcase her art in an even stronger manner and allow a shock value to grab the attention of her audience at SXSW. Brown executes her intentions in many ways, usually leaving the audience with an unexpected after-effect of her work.
The only downfall of this experience with Millie Brown is that many found her artistic presence to be rather morbid and unnecessary from many who were only attracted to the shock value the performance offered. Although Brown does meet the criteria of diversity as she creates a mixture of art, controversy, and the media to show what kind of different side art can take and how it can be seen as an iconic piece of creativity. The diversity shown within her work by its presentation allows Millie Brown to claim her role as a performance artist with a unique style.
Brown has provided backstories for her controversial works allows her pieces to meet the expectations of her unique artistic expression. For example, Millie Brown's collaboration video with Jez Tozer uploaded on May 11th of 2012, showcases a moving background story blended with the medium of fashion in a two-minute piece related to Millie Brown's art. In the video, Millie Brown is in a leotard and tutu spinning slowly as "Fur Elise" by Beethoven plays in the background. She is in all white, drinking a glass of milk and, by the one minute mark, she starts to vomit black milk all over the walls around her and all over herself. By the end of the video, Brown is still spinning in a ballet styled pose, but covered in all black even with her surroundings. The collaboration made with Jez Tozer has a moving backstory which helps bring the art to life. It tells a story that many could relate too with the subject of purity and perfection.
The transition from white to black through vomit tells the story of a girl with a completely pure and formulaic mind/lifestyle that she never wanted and was rather taken as an object in her everyday life. With that, she starts to actually find herself but is so struck by the norms of society and how it plays into her own originality, making the public view it as a negative and frowned upon thing (black vomit, Millie's art style). Therefore the use of a backstory allows more sense to be made of Brown's many absurd performance art, as she conveys many disturbing images but puts a reason behind every single detail of her work to allow it to bring emotion or a reaction to the people that admire her. In contrast, some may find her offensive and just insane, but others believe she just has her own way of thinking just like how those offended to have their own way of thinking. She categorizes some as ignorant because of their negative comments on all her videos that are along the lines of "this is not art," "you are not smart," and "all I saw was vomit and now I'm out."
Brown states how the fact that no one takes her art into an actual consideration of its true meaning and its artistry shows how the public does not listen and just allude to the pretty images. The use of "ugly" imagery provided through her conceptual piece allows the people to get a taste of reality as well, and how art does not have to always be visually stunning, but rather mentally stunning. Browns unique style is enhanced tremendously with the help of her backstories in her pieces.
Millie Brown's conceptual artistry is conveyed through a unique style that allowed audiences to debate on if its really "art," diversity of her style and the backstory behind her pieces. Brown conveys different sub-criteria such as language, emotion, sense perception, and reasoning to allow her work to be considered art. The diversity of her work and the mixture of it with music, audiences, controversy, and media shows how out of the ordinary her work is. As well as the backstories behind all her pieces grant her unique style more substance and allow people to challenge their creativity. Finally, I believe that Millie Brown's performance art is creative, as it meets all the criteria for being a unique style, and completely attracts my eye towards her beautifully grotesque performances. Brown showed how even vomit can be made into something beautiful.
