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(Re)Presenting the Self: Image-Bodies and the Politics of Display in Contemporary Feminist Art

It seems almost platitudinal now to speak of the schizophrenic nature of subjectivity under neoliberal capital. The paradigmatic shift to late-capitalism, with its emphasis on ubiquitous distribution technologies and surveillance-entertainment logics, has fostered unprecedented change in the way we identify with and manage our own modes of self-representation, both online and further afield. The internet itself has become a keen embodiment of the Janus-faced nature of much technological apparatus, on the one hand signalling a democratizing and emancipatory potential, and on the other, an austere mechanism for social control and insidious modes of systemic oppression. Our contemporary relationship with the internet is defined by this oxymoronic dissonance and yet sustained by our ambivalence toward it. The emergence of social media, online-gaming and smart-phone ubiquity, to name but a few instigations, has ushered in a new and fragmented understanding of subjectivity and the role of self-representation in an age of accelerated dissolution. Quotidian life is increasingly defined by the logics of these parasitic instruments, and the ‘politics of display’ has become a conflicted and paradoxical question.[1] This ambivalent posture of Web 2.0 has produced an anxious and hybridized, anamorphic body, and capital is slowly but surely feeding off of its excrement.

As Deleuze noted in his influential essay ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ (1992), late-capitalist neoliberal societies have instigated the production of what he terms ‘dividuals’.[2] The performance of subjectivities – the aesthetic choices, feelings, moods, images etc. embodied in their online activities – become fiercely cognized and objectively transformed into data for the role of markets and capitalist imperatives. They become – the performance of subjectivies – open to exploitation as a form of ‘affective labour’ as theorized by the Hardt and Negri.[3] As Joshua Simon writes, “one should consider the internet as a global time clock on which we punch our card of subjectivity via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram”.[4] Thus our performances online – our social media profiles, our various online-accounts from shopping to gaming to email – all become a site of antagonism between ostensible platforms for the fostering of singularisations and new modes of self-representation and expression,[5] and as sites of subjugation, exploitation and unpaid affective and cognitive labour. In a sense then we are immediately put into a position, especially fervent with regard to artistic practice, where to operate at the level of online performances of subjectivity is unextractable from the mechanisms and exploitation of neoliberal capitalist prerogatives; Kirsty Bell comments in an interview with artist Katja Novitskova for Frieze magazine: “given our own inescapable engagement with corporate technology – from search engines to laptop brands – the kind of critical distance to the mainstream assumed by left-leaning artist of previous generations is no longer tenable.”[6]

From this position, it is ambiguous whether a not-so-oblique complicity in art with the logics of neoliberal capital – the use of brand marketing, nepotism, Accelerationist aesthetics, and social-media tact – must itself be engrained within the production and dissemination of artworks in order to subversively counter it. Or whether such methodologies simply serve to intensify modes of already existing consumption and exploitation inherent to a culture defined by media-obsessed narcissism and cliquey, esoteric market-trends. In the last few years the rise of discourses concerning whether we are really ‘post-’ the internet have been flourishing, and art practices have been flocking to its call. Yet, as Rózsa Farkas tells us, an isotope of the increasing pervasive nature of the Internet in art, and our relation to it, has produced a new art of feminist self-representation: “by employing forms of self-representation in their work that is entangled with Web 2.0 [they] use the internet to mediate the self-image, as opposed to art that uses the self-image to show how we are mediated by the Internet.”[7] The question of representing ‘the self’ on web 2.0 – an unprecedented vehicle for the profiling and representation of ‘self’, with its emphasis on social networking sites and online communications – becomes one unextractable from the logics of neoliberal capital, or the “neoliberal surveillance-entertainment nexus.”[8] And to navigate the problematic issues concerning self-representation today, these female artists “take as a given that social media—as a platform for art, activism, and sexual expression, and as a potent facilitator of image appropriation and abuse—is the primary context for such investigations today.”[9] For the sake of this essay I would like to consider the work of Amalia Ulman and Ann Hirsch.

These ‘performances’ diverge from the typical history of feminist performance,[10] the reification and authenticity of the body in earlier works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975) has been negated for a new ‘image-body’ – or a dis-embodied, circulated image of the self: “Internet circulation changes bodies into image-bodies”[11] – “To represent the self is to ascribe an image a body.”[12] These works – that take on a purely digitized form (although some of them would be later reified in the gallery) – promote the use of the artist’s body, or ‘image-body’, as a tool for pushing back “against an online culture of hidden camera porn and violently misogynist trolling.”[13] Their engagement with what Hito Steyerl would coin ‘Circulationism’ – the economy of digital images, that through relations of uploading and sharing pierce ‘material reality’ with real political punch, modulating and transmuting as they travel on and off the screen: “[a] nail paint clip turns into an Instagram riot. An upload comes down as a shitstorm. An animated GIF materialises as a pop-up airport transit gate”[14] – confers a ‘new productivism’, that whilst tip-toeing the line between criticality and complicity, “could become the art of recoding or rewiring the system by exposing state scopophilia, capital compliance, and wholesale surveillance”[15] (not to mention the violent misogyny previously noted). What is key to note here, is that the artworks I shall now address concern themselves with the post-production of the image, or its life in circulation; similar to Seth Price in his essay-artwork Dispersion (2002), these artists ask what were to happen if “an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur.”[16]

First, we shall cast our eyes to the most frequently cited of these contemporary online instigations, Amalia Ulman’s 2014 performance, Excellences and Perfections (Fig, 1 & 2). For this, the Argentinean artist went into a four-month IRL hiatus, transforming her life into a swarming feed of choreographed Facebook status updates and Instagram posts. Taking influence from middle-brow, bourgeois internet-stylism, a host of ‘real’ sugar-babies’ content feeds, and the K-Pop ‘cute-girl’ aesthetics of Instagram, Ulman performed the story of a provincial girl coming to the big city, dreaming of becoming a model,[17] or as Rabea Ridlhammer describes it, “a naïve sexuality with a pinch of American Apparel modelling aspiration.”[18] In this constructed yet all-too-familiar narrative, Ulman followed the lines of “Money, boredom, malaise, addiction, self-esteem [and] surgery”,[19] to establish a self-representation that towed the lines of previously entrenched and identifiable online female narratives. Her body – presented in the image – became an object to be marketed and improved; the body as a vessel that through the avenues of capital investment can overcome physical flaws, social-, and class-division. The ‘virtual’ body that Ulman created sought to expose the insidious and deeply rooted misogyny of online social cultures, the “kind of silly, non-malevolent normality that becomes highly offensive when observing it in close up”,[20] through the feedback that she acquired on her posts, images and followers. Using the veneer of ‘prettiness’ – a sub-visible aesthetic choice that masks what Cadence Kinsey, in her reading of Pierre Bourdieu, sees as an “underlying, pernicious ideology”;[21] by means of complicity, rather than criticality – Ulman fed “the conditioned and violently claimed desires of people and in this way expos[ed] them.”[22]

Now, whilst some have claimed that we are all in fact this ‘Young-Girl’– agents of our own commodification, marketization and exploitation, historically rather than biologically defined: “The Young-Girl sets in motion the self-commodification of what is beyond the market; the auto-estimation of the inestimable.”[23] And whilst others have proposed an ostensible empowerment to be found in the objectification and Spectacle of female bodies, through their re-appropriation as vehicles of assertion,[24] Ulman’s performance insists, in concurrency with the writing of Hannah Black, that the former is a gendered concept, and that there is a deep ‘internalised misogyny’ operating within the latter.[25] What Ulman is presenting to us then, is the “dark core, the cancer cell of her infinite image dividing and multiplying at pace, and the mechanisms allowing the disappearance of the female subject within her, in plain view.”[26] Whilst the reification of Ulman’s work in various documentations and presentations, not least in the form of two large canvas prints in the Whitechapel’s current exhibition, Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), leaves much to be desired for the work, reducing its (site-specific) subversive complicity to pure Spectacle (a blown up image of a young, attractive girl’s selfie, posing half-nude and angled towards the camera merely reproduces the male gaze for the viewer, with little-to-no criticality (Fig, 2)), the work’s real-time manifestation online was successful in exposing the quotidian violence enacted against women online. The dictum that Ulman later relayed, “The sadder the girl, the happier the troll”,[27] pointed to the increasing abuse she felt from online voyeurs throughout her pseudo-vértié saga of depression and addiction. The conjunction between gender production and brand development was laid bare, and contrary to the cyborgian optimism of her peers, Ulman points towards Haraway’s most ominous caveat: “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.”[28] Yet, more than a simple set of misogynistic cracks at her appearance, success, values etc., Rózsa Farkas explains how the piece highlighted a fundamental gendered distinction: “In this, her authenticity was pulled into question, rather than a questioning of the lack of difference in her self-representation.”[29]

Another artist who similarly engages in these praxes of self-representation and gender production is Ann Hirsch. Her work Playground (2013) (Fig, 3), which took the form of an on-stage play with two characters, male and female, messaging in an AOL chatroom with some of the messages projected on the wall behind them and some spoken aloud, too “revealed that ideas of authenticity and ‘being real’ were still pervasive in the context of this text-based chatroom [and that] the demand for authenticity is placed upon self-representation – particularly online and on female bodies.”[30] What Playground showed, contrary to the representations of cyberspace and –sex as disembodied and comical (such as in Frances Stark’s My Best Thing (2011)), is a world of “heart-pounding exhilaration and fear […] the emotional intensity of cybersex for a child.”[31] And further, rather than evaporating gender, the move to online domains, particularly Web 2.0, has re-established existing power and gender relations (Angela Washko’s Playing a Girl (The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioural Awareness in World of Warcraft) (2012), is a poignant example of these gendered relations in the context of online video gaming). From this preface (Playground was in fact based on Hirsch’s own experiences age twelve), Hirsch has nonetheless developed a more optimistic, yet never naïve view of social media platforms and their roles in gender production and self-representation. From 2008-2009 Hirsch created, in similar vein to Ulman, a constructed online persona, or a pseudo-vértié: Caroline, a SUNY freshman and devout camwhore. The Scandalishious Project (Fig, 4 & 5), as it was known, existed predominantly on YouTube, Twitter and her own personal website.[32]

Along with Hirsch’s personal drives for the performance – her own insecurities over looks and confidence, insecurities mitigated by her ‘fake’ confidence and sex appeal as Caroline – was a desire to dismantle a dichotomy she had noticed whilst herself a voyeur of vloggers and camwhores: that provocative, sexual videos rarely included the face, and that to be taken seriously, sexual tones were removed as much as possible from the image. To do this, “mixing hipster references, self-parody, and cultural criticism with provocative dancing”,[33] Hirsch attempted to conjure a new and radical online subjectivity – one which attempted to “disrupt technogender defaults as they emerged.”[34] Hirsch’s splintering of the shaking-ass/talking-face dichotomy was aimed to propel forward more complex forms of female self-representation online. And by utilising prescribed narratives of feminine/feminist identity online, Hirsch complicated the simple divides between the two. As has been noted, the traditional relationship between feminine and feminist aesthetics has been one held in strict dialectical tension.[35] Yet what both Ulman and Hirsch are attempting to do in their online performances, is play on this dialectical tension that is rooted in an essentialist, authentic reading of the feminine (as corporeality, sensibility, affectivity etc.). And now, as the terms from which aesthetic languages develop hosts itself in a radical inauthenticity – the simulacra – a total subsumption of self-representation has opened this dialectic into a parallax dynamism, both against dialectics and the affirmation of difference:

Feminine and Feminist does not need to state itself as other, as its appearance states its presence and writes itself. Instead of calling out the inauthentic, it weaponizes this. It forms itself, not in binary to ‘the norm’, not in celebration of difference, but in its own self-desire, or, […] desire to write itself.[36]

As Rózsa Farkas continues, “Neither operate with cynical distance or ironic turn, parody or pastiche, but stand up in their own inauthenticity.”[37] What this is to say, is a shift in our way of thinking from a neoliberal mantra of ‘who do you want to be’, to instead, ‘how do you want to be’.

If we are to accept, that as Farkas comments, “Immanence mutates and embeds itself according to the system it is located within, and has become holistically embedded into processes of commodification under capital”,[38] then the feminine aesthetic used by both Ulman and Hirsch, and the embedded affect-as-medium that is established through the artworks obscuring of reification as it travels across platforms in a post-mediatic condition – the reader/viewer unable to place the ‘true’ reified commodity of the image-body, woman, object etc. – then this affective performance stands as a site of possible resistance to reification under capitalist real subsumption. It becomes a:

mediation between the biopolitical sublime and the social media interface, or its cognitive mapping, as a claiming of territory within and amongst intersecting biopowers [using the] affective gap, between subject position and proposed alternatives [as] almost a material proxy of reflexivity.[39]

Now although this reflexivity has by its very nature – a performance of femininity inspired by ‘Internet Babes’ of a conventionally attractive white European middle-class – neglected and overshadowed the presence of trans and coloured peoples, asking the question: “Which bodies get to be freedom’s icons and emissaries?”,[40] it seems that the work of these artists does go some way to illustrating the current “feminist malaise of a generation”[41] that must inscribe both its affect and body within systems of capitalist exchange and contemporary misogynistic violence. It also appears that “the artist[s’] own complicity in a continued (re)production of traditional relationships between class and taste feels of little consequence”[42] to their fervent ability to expose our own (the viewer’s) complicity in these matters also. As these “artists swap the external commodity for the commodification of themselves through online social networks”,[43] they ask us to consider the roles we all play in consolidating these representations of self online – especially when gendered and violent. Furthermore, the insistence of these artists in injecting a feminine aesthetic of affect into a ‘neutral’ (patriarchal) structure of representation, sees “affect as not simply being, but moving, acting as a means to open up the thirdspace, as opposed to adapting to the neutral.”[44] A dynamic affect that meshes itself through our networks and circulates without control, piercing into material life and then back into the image, disseminating subjectivity and opening up an impure immanence; this “feminine aesthetic, whose commonality is the trail, or ebullition of affect, holds more potential for collective radical subjectivity, than the rejection of the feminine.”[45]

The historical relationship between Feminism and femininity has been a complex one, and indeed, the recent shift to an incorporation of the feminine in Feminism is not an entirely new concept: the work of 70s artists who engaged with typically female occupations – such as traditional feminine crafts, quilting and sewing – is a proficient example of its previous historical insurgence. Yet, what is key to understanding these new artists and their adaptation of the feminine, is to see it through its radical use of the ‘inauthentic’ as opposed to both dialectical and affirmational difference:

This writing of the self, rather than ‘calling out’ of the phallocentric feminine ‘authentic’, still generates a feeling of creating truth. Here though it is creating as opposed to finding. […] And specifically for now, our inauthentic selves – inauthentic to the status quo of authenticity, and inauthentic as it is created.[46]

Artists such as Ulman and Hirsch, through their use of social media interfaces and an incorporation of the feminine – in its contemporary neoliberal form – revel in their own inauthenticity. They produce an affective self-representation that provokes and manifests contemporary forms of patriarchal structures and online misogynistic cultures: they “pull off the paradoxical feat of taking back their images at the very moment of surrender.”[47]

[1] I use the term ‘politics of display’ in reference to Benjamin’s formulation in his seminal work The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction (1955), of the rise of exhibition-value over cult-value in art objects. Benjamin argues that the work of art, through its reproduction and dissemination, loses its auratic authenticity, “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at a place where it happens to be”, and that the image thus performs in a politics of display, where the existence of the object alone is no longer what is important, but it is the display, circulation and distribution of the image-object that derives its meaning and potency. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (London: Phaidon, 1992): 298.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Societies of Control,’ October 59 (1992): 3-7.

[3] The varied terms used to refer to contemporary capitalism – immaterial, cognitive, neoliberal, semio-communicative etc. – are all used to essentially describe the historical shift from the previously predominant capitalist extraction of value from the labour of human bodies, to the extraction of value from their mental/affective capacities.

[4] Joshua Simon, ‘Shockwork: The Selfie And The Labour of the Overqualified,’ ICA Journal (2014) Accessed April 11, 2016, http://journal.ica.org.uk/posts/shockwork-selfie-and-labour-overqualified’

[5] Summarised well by Jasmin Heiderich, as she writes that this form of technological mediation “seems to offer unprecedented freedom of choice in the act of self-presentation in everyday digital life. This freedom of choice could then allow individuals to exceed traditional limits of what is considered true to their physical equivalent.” See Jasmin Heiderich, ‘Bodies Between the Real and the Virtual The Relationship of Digital Photographic Records of the Self to Contemporary Digital and Physical Modes of Existence on the Example of GoPro Selfies in Surfing’ (Unpublished Masters Dissertation, 2015): 19.

[6] Kristy Bell, ‘In Focus: Katja Novitskova,’ Frieze 166 (2014), 232.

[7] Rózsa Farkas, ‘Whose Bodies 2,’ Temporary Art Review (2015) Accessed April 17, 2016,

http://temporaryartreview.com/whose-bodies-2/

[8] Joshua Simon, ‘Shockwork’.

[9] Johanna Fateman, ‘Women on the Verge,’ ArtForum, April (2015): 219.

[10] Arcadia Missa, ed., How to Sleep Faster 5 (London: Arcadia Missa Publications, 2014): 53-54.

[11] Rhizome, ed., ‘Do you follow? Art in Circulation 3 (transcript),’ Rhizome (2014) Accessed April 13, 2016 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/oct/28/transcript-do-you-follow-panel-three/

[12] Farkas, ‘Whose Bodies 2.’

[13] Fateman, ‘Women on the Verge,’ 220.

[14] Hito Steyerl, ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?’ e-flux (2013): 4. Accessed April 13, 2016, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/

[15] Ibid., 7.

[16] Seth Price, Dispersion (2002) Accessed April 12, 2016,

http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf

[17] In fact, quoting Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Ulman asserts that “the model phantasy is probably the most widespread contemporary dream shard by young women from all backgrounds.” See Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1990): 41; Rhizome, ‘Do You Follow?’

[18] Rabea Ridlhammer, ‘Let’s talk about Gender, Baby!’ (Unpublished Essay, _____): 16. Accessed April 15, 2016, http://www.gerritrietveldacademie.nl/files/download/Scriptie/2015/Rabea_Ridlhammer.pdf

[19] Rhizome, ‘Do You Follow?’

[20] Ridlhammer, ‘Let’s talk about,’ 19.

[21] Cadence Kinsey, ‘Taste-y /// There’s a Maggot in My Edamame,’ in (networked) Every Whisper is a Crash on My Ears, ed. Arcadia Missa (London: Arcadia Missa Publications, 2014): 69.

[22] Ibid., 17.

[23] Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012): 77.

[24] Sarah Gram, ‘The Young-Girl and the Selfie,’ Textual Relations (2013) Accessed April 22, 2016, http://text-relations.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-young-girl-and-selfie.html

[25] Hannah Black, ‘Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Hot Babe,’ The New Inquiry (2013) Accessed April 20, 2016, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-hot-babe/

[26] Isobel Harbison, ‘Hot Babe,’ Art Monthly 395 (2016): 5.

[27] Rhizome, ‘Do You Follow?’

[28] Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in Late Twentieth Century,’ in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 293, quoted in Fateman, ‘Women on the Verge,’ 221.

[29] Farkas, ‘Whose Bodies 2.’

[30] Ibid.

[31] Fateman, 221.

[32] http://scandalishious.com/

[33] Fateman, 221.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Rózsa Farkas, ‘Feminine//Feminist: Feminine Aesthetic as Feminist Aesthetic: Incorporation of the ‘Affective’ Sensibility,’ Arcadia Missa (2013) Accessed April 23, 2016,

http://arcadiamissa.com/files/ro%20text%20htsf4.pdf

[36] Ibid., 38-39.

[37] Ibid., 45.

[38] Rózsa Farkas, ‘Immanence After Networks,’ Arcadia Missa (2013): 2, Accessed April 23, 2016,

http://arcadiamissa.com/files/old.pdf

[39] Ibid., 10.

[40] Fateman, 222.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Kinsey, ‘Taste-y,’ 60.

[43] Brad Troemel, ‘Art After Social Media,’ in You Are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester & London: Cornerhouse & Space, 2014): 40.

[44] Farkas, ‘Immanence After Networks,’ 6.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Farkas, ‘Feminine//Feminist,’ 44.

[47] Fateman, 222.

#feminism #contemporary art #art history #art theory #ann hirsch #amalia ulman #Deleuze #farkas #instagram #affect #neoliberalism #essay

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