TRACEY ROSE

This work is an interrogation of the psychosexual violence embedded within cultural hegemony and its grotesque manifestations in Art, politics, and the void that we call history. The automatic vacuum cleaner— an object so banal, so devoid of agency—becomes a metonymic device for the persistent erasure and sanitization that occurs within the art world. It circles with intent, not to clean, but to confront, to destabilize. In its endless trajectory, the vacuum enacts an absurd, dystopian ballet, echoing the Sisyphean futility of any revolutionary project within institutional frameworks that resist rupture.

The hologram, projected from this obedient mechanical specter, serves as a spectral archive of authoritarianism—dictators, icons, agents of control. But this is not a mere critique; rather, it is an offering of alternative histories. What if the tyrant was the Artist? What if violence became creativity? Each pixelated portrait pulses with a latent eroticism, the pulsations of an unmade decision, the alternate universe where atrocity is aestheticized, and art itself becomes the battlefield for unfulfilled ambitions of power.

The text fragments—lifted from my series, ‘Enema: The Art World Needs to Take a Shit’, which continues to explore the excremental nature of cultural production—dissolve and reappear throughout the holographic plane, as transient and insubstantial as the very critiques of the art world’s complicity in perpetuating structures of violence. Here, the vacuum cleaner becomes the enema, probing the architecture of the museum, forcing a regurgitation of the unspoken, the unsanctioned, and the impolite.

There is a violence in cleaning, just as there is a violence in curation.

The tripod structure is an oblique homage to Tatlin’s Tower—a utopian monument that never was, an unrealized dream of transformation. The impossibility of its realization mirrors the Art world’s feigned commitment to radical change. My vacuum, like Tatlin’s Tower, is suspended between idealism and cynicism, between action and inaction. But this is not a passive failure—it is deliberate. The tripod evokes the sacred geometry of the Mandela Ball, symbolizing the endless loop of oppression, cleansing, forgetting, and re-oppression—a cycle that the Art world continually embodies while pretending to critique it.

This piece is, above all, a meditation on failure. The failure of art to truly transcend its conditions. The failure of political revolutions to dislodge entrenched power structures. The failure of cleaning to ever really make anything clean. Yet, in that failure, there is the space for imagination—for the dictator who chose another path, for the Artist who weaponizes their medium, for the vacuum cleaner that circles endlessly, forever purging but never purged.

I offer no solutions. There are none. There is only the haunting presence of what could have been, and the endlessly circling vacuum, sweeping the debris of our complicity.

Signed:- Hitler-as-a-Girl

Performance Art Avatar.
Conceived by Tracey Rose.
Executed by Adilson De Oliveira: A.I. Video Design & Working Horse: A.I. Audio Design.
Additional illustrations by Nate Higgers.
A cappella epilogue by McCloud aka. VAMPIRO: “CONDITIONZ OF THE SOUL” El Vampiro Noir.
Commissioned by Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway for the exhibition: “Everything is so Alive” curated by Nora-Swantje Almes and Silja Leifsdottir.