Apollo Magazine

Commons indecency, perhaps – but was it art?

A fleshy protest made parliament more farcical than ever this week. Marina Abramović, you have competition...

The body politic.

The body politic. Twitter/@ExtinctionR

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories

Pandemonium in Parliament has of late become business as usual, but even so, events that took place in the House of Commons on Monday took naked disregard for procedure to a whole new level. As the house prepared for a series of indicative votes on Brexit, the chamber was invaded by a dozen semi-nude environmental activists, their bare chests providing space for slogans including ‘for all life’ and ‘SOS’.

The protestors were swiftly removed, but not before images of their protest had captured the attention of New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz – who went so far as to advocate a re-enactment in his own country:

Not everyone was quite so happy about the skin show, though. Ash Sarkar – a senior editor at Novara Media hitherto best known for calling Piers Morgan an idiot – took the protest as a prompt to summon her inner Brian Sewell:

Marina Abramović: you have been warned. And as another Twitter user pointed out, the protestors weren’t the only live artworks in the public gallery…


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