Alter Egos and Avatars

Invented personas and digital stand-ins that artists perform, photograph or sign their work as.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Alter Egos and Avatars are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Artists have long stepped into other people's skins. An alter ego is an invented character the artist performs, photographs or signs work as; an avatar is its digital cousin, a figure standing in for a person inside a game or virtual world. Marcel Duchamp posed for Man Ray as Rrose Sélavy around 1920 and signed works with her name, and Claude Cahun's self-portraits of the 1920s and 1930s cycle through masks, costumes and shaved-head androgyny.

In the 1970s the persona became a long-running project. Eleanor Antin appeared in beard and cape as the king of Solana Beach, California, and Lynn Hershman Leeson spent years as Roberta Breitmore, a fictional woman with her own driving licence and credit card. Kalup Linzy plays several characters in his soap-opera videos. Online worlds opened new stages: Cao Fei built RMB City (2008) inside Second Life and moved through it as her avatar, China Tracy.