Gendered Embodiment in Internet Culture the Practice of Women Internet Artists in Twenty-First Century Patriarchy

Gendered Embodiment in Internet Culture The Practice of Women Internet Artists in Twenty-First Century Patriarchy

Faith Holland

Student Name: Jeanette Bisschops Student Number: 11151188

Supervisor: Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen Co-reader: Prof. Dr. Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes

MA, Art and Cultural Sciences: Art History, University of Amsterdam Master Thesis August 2016

Abstract

This thesis explores the state of patriarchal power relations in contemporary online culture by examining gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet, guided by works of female internet artists. The study proposes to research the timeline of gender constructs in a system of patriarchy and the first artistic protests towards this system in the seventies and creates a link to gender constructs during the emergence of internet cultures and internet art. To illustrate the artistic critique in this discourse during the seventies, this study will analyze both a case study by Carolee Schneemann as well as by VALIE EXPORT. To examine critique on gendered embodiment in internet cultures, in-depth close readings of works by Shu-Lea Cheang, Faith Holland, Ann Hirsch, Amalia Ulman and Rupi Kaur will be provided. The results present and compare the artist’s motivations, constraints, setting of their work and responses and will paint a picture of the time line and the current state of patriarchal power relations.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 2 1. Introduction ...... 4 2. What is gender? ...... 7 2.1 Gender as a construction ...... 8 3. Gendered art history ...... 10 3.1 The Male Gaze ...... 12 3.2 Reclaiming the body ...... 13 3.3 Case study – VALIE EXPORT: Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968) ...... 16 4. Cyberspace and gender ...... 18 4.1 (Dis)embodiment and gender ...... 19 4.2 Internet and the rise of internet art: new possibilities, new freedoms? ...... 20 4.3 Case Study 2 – Shu-Lea Cheang: Brandon (1998-1999) ...... 22 5. The Male Gaze on the Web ...... 25 5.1 Case Study – Carolee Schneemann: Fuses (1965) ...... 29 5.2 Case Study – Faith Holland: Lick Suck Screen (2014) ...... 30 6. Online spectatorship ...... 32 6.1 Gendered self-representation ...... 33 6.2 Case Study – Ann Hirsch: Scandalishious (2014) ...... 38 6.2 Case Study – Amalia Ulman: Excellences and Perfections (2014) ...... 38 7. Censorship ...... 43 7.1 Case Study – Rupi Kaur : Period. (2015) ...... 46 8. Status of women online art ...... 49 9. Conclusion ...... 51 Discussion and recommendations ...... 54 References ...... 56 List of figures ...... 62

1. Introduction

We live in a gendered world. The clothes we put on in the morning are either made for the female or the male body, sold by stores that have divided their departments between the two genders, giving each their own fitting rooms. When we go to the bathroom we have to choose between the door that has the little stick figure with the dress on it, or the one that wears pants. When we are addressed by strangers who do not know our name, they do so by calling us by our gender. Public space is a gendered space.1 This fact in itself would not be problematic, if it wasn’t the base for gender inequality. As for centuries, perhaps since the story of Adam and Eve, as historian John Berger surmised, women were deemed to be the weaker sex and to be subservient to the man.2 In the Western world, women have been denied legal, political and financial power until just recently, justified by the claim that they were morally, intellectually and physically inferior to men. This has had its impact on art history. As appears in two of the most important handbooks in Western art history, by E.H. Gombrich and H.W. Janson, published in 1950 and 1962 respectively, no female artist is mentioned. In the sixties and seventies, more and more protest against the inequality in the art world began to arise. One of the precursors in this discourse was the ground-breaking article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” by Linda Nochlin, where she points out and discusses this absence of women in Western art history.3 While Janson’s book did not contain any female artists, its cover did, although the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a sculpture of the Greek goddess of victory, is missing her head and arms. Perhaps inadvertently, this book showed exactly the state of women in Western (art) history: wanted as an object, not as the subject. There is a long history of men-made art, photography and film, using the female body, or the female nude, as a main subject. Historically speaking, the typical viewer of art was also male. In response to this phenomenon, Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe that more often than not, in artworks women are passive objects of desire, and there to be looked at

1 Chan, J., & Schrager, L. (2015, January 24). About. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from http://bodyanxiety.com/about/ 2 Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing (London, UK: Penguin Books), 51. 3 Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, 69, 22-39. 5 from a heterosexual male point of view.4 The fact that Mulvey described this phenomenon mostly from cinematic and television examples, shows the persistence of this way of portraying women. The seventies gave rise to the first protests against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning. During the second feminist wave, many artists such as Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT, employed performances to disrupt the cultural concepts of the female body. Concerns around sexual objectification, however, also resonate with contemporary artists. In the hopes of “reshaping a pre-existing narrative of gendered appropriation” female internet artists such as Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan, feel that the internet would be the best space to allow the questioning of contemporary attitudes towards femininity.5 The central narrative for women internet artists concerned with this subject is to reclaim the female body from all constructs and violence that surround it.

For this thesis I will research gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet, guided by works of female internet artists who examine this field. I will extricate a few important players from the contemporary field, such as Amalia Ulman and Ann Hirsch. It is stated by some of them that self-imagery is the ideal tool to take back control, yet others choose to work with curated images. In doing so they re-create and play with the roles available to women, in a performance-based culture where a women’s self-worth is based on the attention she receives from others. By placing their (self) images by the means of video or photography in this performance based society, I consider their work as performances. Yet as an official term for their work remains to be described, I will refer to them as internet artists, not as performance artists. In choosing artworks and artists, I searched for works by different artists that are theoretically linked to the idea of presenting critique to a system of patriarchal sexual domination. Simultaneously, as female artists have been examining this field since the seventies by the use of (offline) performance, I will compare and contrast these contemporary works with works by artists Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT. These comparisons will allow an observation as to how art by women artists in this particular field has changed. Has the rise of the internet

4 Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, NY: Palgrave), 19. 5 Chan, J., & Schrager, L. (2015, January 24). About. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from http://bodyanxiety.com/about/

6 changed the construct of gender in any way? Does cyberspace provide for more opportunities in art in general, and for women artists in particular? In order to compare the practices of female performance artists in the seventies and those of the twenty-first century, this thesis will be structured as followed: Chapter 2 will present the theoretic framework behind the concept of gender. In chapter 3 an outline of gendered art history will be given, with the emphasis on the prevalence of the female nude and the first protests that arose in the seventies. A case-study will be added to exemplify these artistic protests. Chapter 4 will present a look at the presumed flexibilities of the gender construct online, together with the rise of internet art and provides a case-study to further exemplify. Chapter 5 will explore the online presence of the male gaze and provides a comparison between two case studies from the seventies and the twenty-first century. Chapter 6 explores online spectatorship and self- representation and provides an interpretation by means of two case studies. Chapter 7 presents an exploration of censorship of the female body online, together with a case study. Chapter 8 will investigate the state of the female (internet) artist. This will be followed by the conclusion, which will reflect upon the findings, address any limitations and possible avenues for further research.

2. What is gender?

“ One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.6

According to many sociological and psychological views, our society and our culture has constructed many things we now see as “natural”. One of the most known social constructionist theories is the gender construction theory, which de Beauvoir helped develop and refers to in the quote above. Everything, all the roles and all behavior we associate women with, is not simply innate or biological, it states, but socially constructed. This construction points to a distinction between sex and gender, where sex refers to our internal and external sex organs, chromosomes and hormones. Our sex is the basis on which society applies and expects certain gender roles, be it female or male. It is believed that most – if not all – people fall in to either the female or the male category. However, more than a few fall into the category “intersex”, with their internal and/or external sexual organs not being identifiable as female or male, or identifiable as both, or their chromosomes are different than the usual xx or xy. The biological distinction we make does not seem to be that black and white as we tend to think it is in reality. And besides the complexities of sex, the appropriation of gender implies an added complicated relationship between the body and society, when it comes to traditional assumptions about gender. So can we say for sure that sex isn’t either, in fact, socially constructed? Someone who has discussed and critiqued the distinction between sex and gender extensively is philosopher Judith Butler. Butler states, in her book Gender Trouble (1990) that the distinction between sex and gender proves false.7 A sexed body cannot be signified without gender, and so, both sex and gender are constructed. Nowadays, there seems to be a lot to do about the concept of gender. A new distinction was made between “gender identity” and “gender expression”, where gender identity refers to one’s personal experience of one’s own gender, where one can identify more or less with the sex that was given at birth. Gender expression refers to appearance, traits or mannerisms one chooses to communicate to the outside world. Yet, while more and more people can and do choose to

6 D Beauvoir, S. (1997). The Second Sex (London, UK: Vintage Publishing), 301. 7 Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble (New York, NY: Routledge), 1-25.

8 express their gender as they wish, the main binary still made, and expected, in our society is female-male. So what purpose does this serve society? Why is it so important that the distinction and contrast between these two genders is made? And what role does biology play?

2.1 Gender as a construction

Judith Butler is one of the theorists who states that the gender categories of woman and man parallel the universality of patriarchy. The fact that we are all taught that we are either female or male from the day we are born, and act and look feminine or masculine, is important in order to keep the existing patriarchal system in place and in balance, according to Butler. In the social system of patriarchy the men are the ones who hold primary power, historically seen in many areas such as the social, familial, political, legal and economical. This system has been in place for thousands of years and has been documented by works by Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Christian scriptures such as the bible, just to name a few. And while ancient Egypt gave many women financial and legal power, and Medieval times even had female Empresses, the idea that men are superior to women and they should therefor obey male authority never quite disappeared and even gained strength after the Middle Ages.8 Women, as people who are seen as physically, intellectually and morally inferior to men, have been excluded from education, power systems, and the creation of legal codes. Women have had their sexuality and reproductive capabilities controlled by men, having to be a virgin until married, forced to stay faithful to their partner, while history knows many men and male rulers with concubines and harems. Owning the commodity of female sexual services was only one of the aspects men were judged on. By depriving women from education and knowledge, isolating them from each other, restricting their sexuality, denying them any financial, political or legal power, patriarchy could survive until now. In their struggle to overthrow this system, which served as an obstacle in their way to development and advancement, and to become less inferior in society, women started to fight for legal rights during the 19th and early 20th century. This first-wave of feminism opened up work and education opportunities for women, but mainly focused on the right to vote.9 The second- wave followed in the ’60s and ’70s when women, still disillusioned with their second-class

8 Lerner, G. (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press), 28-40. 9 Schneir, M. (1994). Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (NY, NY: Random House), 112. 9 status, again felt forced to protest for a broader range of social opportunities to be opened up to them. This time the movement extended to the spheres of sexuality and reproduction, and the struggle became more and more about the domestic and private lives of women. Not unimportantly, it didn’t only concern the western world this time, but included other countries such as Turkey, Japan, and Latin American countries.10 In 1992, Rebecca Walker found that the third-wave expanded the topic of feminism to include a more diverse group of women with differing identities, and focused more on queer and non-white women.11 Currently, we are finding ourselves in the time of the fourth-wave feminism, a movement defined and connected through technology. It is linked to online feminism, using social media to discuss gender equality. This is all possible because the barriers of distance and geography are now removed and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter facilitate public discussions between people all over the world with an internet connection. Also, feminism nowadays has broadened its field of interest, and has become more intersectional, creating more solidarity with other social justice movements. All these waves of protest initiated change in many aspects of society concerning the position of the woman. Women in the western world have the right to vote, to go to school, to work – even when they are married or have children –, they regained more control on their reproductive abilities and claimed more legal equality. Yet, we have a long way to go still. Women in non-western countries still fight for reproductive rights, women in war situations such as Syria live in everyday fear of rape or enslavement, and women in the Western world are still not earning the same amount as men, or get the same opportunities to gain a powerful position in a company.

10 G Schmith, B. (2000). Global Feminisms Since 1945 (NY, NY: Routledge), 1. 11 Walker, R. (1992). Becoming the third wave. Ms. Magazine, 11(2), 39-41.

3. Gendered art history

A world where men hold the power, and where women have had little to no access to important institutions such as politics, science, education and art, has had some influence on the history of art. Our Western art history shows a male dominated art world, the most renowned artists being mostly male. Picasso, Pollock, Matisse, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse, no list of just women artists would be equivalent to this one, just simply because no group of women artists have ever been recognized as exceptional. As an illustration to this statement; not one female artist was mentioned in the key art history texts by E.H. Gombrich and H.W. Janson around the year 1960. When one would want to know the state of affairs since more emancipatory times, a look at the modern and contemporary art world perhaps could tell us more than those art history texts. A look at the presence of female artists in exhibitions by museum such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, or the MoMA in New York, shows that their percentage is very low compared to their male counterparts. Looking at solo exhibitions, this percentage even get alarmingly low.12 This implies that the white Western male viewpoint is unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art world.13 The observation that there are “no great women artists” is still often explained by the assumption that women are simply not capable of greatness, whatever that term may imply. For since the first feminist wave, women have strongly advocated the assertion that women are equal to men, so why did no great, ingenious women artist appear? Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expressed his opinion on this matter very clearly when he wrote in his essay “On the suffering of the world”: “women have proved incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed of creating anything at all of lasting value: this strikes one most forcibly in regard to painting…”. 14 Art historian Linda Nochlin was one of the first to discuss this statement during the second feminist wave, by pointing out that the term “greatness” in itself means something else in women’s art than for men’s.15 She stressed that the explanation of this statement lies in many different social factors such as institutional prejudice and practical obstructions. The first and most obvious reason would be the exclusion of women from the institutions of the art world. Female artists have been plentiful since the beginning of time.

12 Chadwick, W. (1995). Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (London, UK: Rivers Oram Press), 138-145. 13 Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, 69, 22-39. 14 Schopenhauer, A. (2005). On the Suffering of the world (London, UK: Penguin UK) 15 Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, 69, 22-39. 11

Seventy-five percent of cave paintings have been identified as painted by a female hand, Hughes found in a recent study.16 Later, during Medieval times, women and men worked alongside one another, and women were allowed to join artists guilds. Yet, they did not gain access to important art institutions and education, when these were set up in the Renaissance. A shift from craftsmen to artists meant there was now an expectation of certain knowledge – perspective, mathematics, the human body – yet women were actively barred from this information until the late 19th century, when art Academies were slowly starting to admit female students. For a long time, however, though training was available to women, they was still an exception at the Academy and received a more compromised form of education than was offered to men.17 Before, female artists could only attend private academies or receive training from established artists and were denied the right to life drawing classes. Male artists did have the possibility to receive adequate training, support, and were surrounded by many peers. This led to a social construct that created the position of minority for women. A person could be gifted with artistic talent, but the simple fact of being of the female gender would prevent you to develop as an artist, let alone be acknowledged for one. “Talent is not enough”, was, very shortly said, Nochlin’s conclusion. In 1981, ten years after the publication by Nochlin, however, art historians Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock draw the conclusion that there are, additionally, deeper structures underlying the differences between male and female artists, which need to be searched for in ideology. In their book Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology they mainly focus on the way female artists were described and depicted. Women in art history are defined in terms of “the other” or “the negative” of the man, emphasizing male power structures.18 Pollock and Parker claimed that categorical divisions such as female artists or female art should not be made, as it would only lead to more oppression. Others, such as artist Judy Chicago and art historian Lucy Lippard, did, however, find it important to assume a separate female iconography. They assumed that typical female art could be distinguished from male art. Either way, if women make different art then men or not, it is a fact women have a substantial different position than men, and their art thus does not receive the same criticism or appreciation. That being said, this evokes some curiosity about the imagery and art that was made by the grand male artists, and how the state of affairs is gender-wise.

16 Hughes, V. (n.d.). Were the First Artists Mostly Women? Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/ 17 Gaze, D. (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists (London, UK: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers), 137. 18 Parker, R., & Pollock, G. (2013). Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (2nd ed.). (London, UK: I.B. Tauris), 130. 12

3.1 The Male Gaze

Besides many other subjects, there is a long history of men-made art, photography and film, using the female body, or female nude, as a main subject. From the renaissance on, when the shift from craftsmen to artist came into life, artworks no longer needed to depict only religious scenes. Many images of female nudes were painted, not only in commission for men, but also for male viewers in general. A nude, here, is not to be equated with a naked body, whereas a naked body is just a body without clothes, and a nude is, as described by John Berger, a naked body aware of being seen.19 These female nudes place women in a context where they become objects to be observed, or “gazed at”, from a male point of view. John Berger takes this analysis of the depiction of the female nude even further in his book Ways of Seeing and describes women in Renaissance paintings often being depicted as aware of this male gaze. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Laura Mulvey has described this phenomenon as “the male gaze”, where women are passive objects of desire, being looked at from a heterosexual male point of view.20 Her theory encompasses mostly examples from cinema and TV, but should be highly applicable for traditional mediums such as painting as well. Women are there to provide visual pleasure for the male viewers. In her book The Female Nude, Lynda Nead states that a certain western aesthetic is used to structure the representation of the female body.21 Men have had the power to decide what they found pleasurable, aesthetic, and can ultimately exert power over how a woman should look like and how she should act Any excess of this body, anything that exceeds the imposed frame, such as blood, hair, fat, is rejected as it would turn the image into something abject. The pictures of the female nude are not made to exhibit the woman in them, but the male voyeur. The female body became a construct, and a construct which we now all see as the normative body, because of the prevalence of female imagery surrounding us at all times. Women grow up with this male gaze, which makes it very difficult not to incorporate this into their own “female gaze”. It is even stated by Mulvey that the female gaze is the male gaze. Women look at themselves through the eyes of men.

19 Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing (London, UK: Penguin Books), 51. 20 Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, NY: Palgrave), 19. 21 Nead, L. (1992). The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, UK: Routledge), 17. 13

3.2 Reclaiming the body

The ever-recurring subject of the female nude in Western art history didn’t escape Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock as well.22 They framed it as a period in which “woman was ever more present as the object of… painting”. However present a certain type of woman was, though, certain bodies were not. Bodies that did not conform to that certain universal aesthetic were never the inspiration of a Botticelli, a Velázquez or any other classic painter. This omission ensured that these non-conforming bodies became invisible, something that can be seen as a reflection of the experiences of women within patriarchal society and a culture of unrealistic bodily standards. We’ve seen how the idealized female body was ever-present in art history and in high culture, but how it always was a representation of male desires and fears. It denied women’s experiences of their own bodies and sexual desires. In the ’70s women had been on the receiving end of a growing social freedom for several decades, yet the public exploitation of female sexuality became more and more present in the form of advertisements and “soft” pornography. After WWII, the Western world had entered an economic boom, with branded products coming into the market, and with that, more and more advertisements. Women’s bodies were used to sell products, not only to men but also to women. This eluded or even forced women to identify even more with the imagery of glamorized nudes, as this imagery became accepted as a part of society by both men and women. During the ’70s, a reaction to this “Old Master/Playboy tradition”, came into life, and many female artists and art historians began an intervention to break down these artistic and bodily protocols.23 Many stated that living in a female body was something very different altogether than looking at it, as a man. In her piece “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality & Women Artists since 1970”, Lisa Tickner (1978) stated that “even the Venus from Urbino menstruated”. Which is, of course, not true, but this statement does remind us of the fact that all living women that have inspired these idealized and aestheticize images menstruate or have menstruated. Tickner was part of the first generation, together with Pollock, who took it on to themselves to reveal the gendered nature of art history. From the ’70s, Tickner states, women artists had two choices: to accept this area as too muddled or dangerous for the production of

22 Parker, R., & Pollock, G. (2013). Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (2nd ed.) (London, UK: I.B. Tauris), 130. 23 Tickner, L. (1978). The body politic: female sexuality & women artists since 1970. Art History, 1(2), 236-251.

14 clear statements, or to attack, reverse or use this tradition. The most significant area of work of artists who choose the latter could be described as de-erotizing or de-colonizing the female body. Rejecting and disrespecting the normative patriarchal patterns of domination, in and outside the art world, could be attained by doing the unexpected. In making visible new female subjectivities and by redefining their femaleness female artists strived to claim back their right to self- representation. They re-integrated female genitals into art, in a sexual and nonsexual sense, depicted menstruation, and showed all sorts of transformation of the body such as loosing weight, ageing and decay. By doing this, they violated all kinds of engrained taboos surrounding the female body. Also, with them, a movement of artists started to blur the line between body and canvas. In the mid-’60s, performance art arose. It created a space for voicing feelings and believes more directly than other forms of art were able to and was an ideal way to challenge orthodox art but also cultural norms. With the main focus of performance art being the body, many feminist artists embraced this way of working and became pioneers of this new movement.24 Through their work, they attempted to disrupt the cultural concepts of the female body. They wanted to influence and change the way their bodies were perceived. The way they presented themselves varied greatly, yet frequently it involved the artist’s own naked body. Sometimes they worked together with other bodies (female and male), but they were always striving to give their bodies back to themselves. By using their naked bodies in their work, though, the risk that always remained present was their work could get re-appropriated for the purpose of male sexual pleasure.25 A female body taking the stage, it was thought, would immediately become an object of the male gaze, of desire. Looking at the history of art as it is (and previous paragraphs), this idea is hardly debatable. The interpretation of a work is never entirely in the hands of the artist herself, the female body can be appropriated for other meanings than the artist intended. With many performances being filmed, and shown in other spaces without the artist being present, this issue increases to this day. Carolee Schneemann was one of the most known feminist artists, who, in her work Interior Scroll (1975 & 1976), stood naked on a table in front of an audience, painted her body in dark paint and continued to read from a script from a long scroll of paper, which she pulled out of

24 Dekel, T. (2013). Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 24. 25 Nead, L. (1992). The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, UK: Routledge), 68. 15 her vagina. Her pose here recalls the traditional representation of the woman as the object, whereas the vaginal scroll represents the matriarchal power and wisdom. The script is a response to the critique of her work by structuralist filmmakers, of which the following is an excerpt:

“we cannot look at the personal clutter the persistence of feelings the hand-touch sensibility the diaristic indulgence the painterly mess the dense gestalt the primitive techniques

(I don’t take advice of men who only talk to themselves) PAY ATTENTION TO CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL FILM LANGUAGE IT EXISTS FOR AND IN ONLY ONE GENDER”26

In a recent interview Schneemann stated that it was a protest against the abstraction of the female body and it’s loss of meaning.27 It was one of the important moments in feminist performance art history. The western, masculine art world had been obsessed with the female nude, yet left out the lived experience of these female bodies. Works by Carolee Schneemann that focused on this bodily experience elicited rage and censorship. These reactions did not stand on themself: many feminist artists received the same criticism from art critics. Their work was deemed obscene, or frivolous, and the artists were often not taken seriously. The imposed female ideal had previously encouraged females and males to despise biological truths such as female body hair, the clitoris, menstrual blood and secretions. So when female artists show that these things do coexist together with socially embraced beauty, the audience became confused at least, and enraged at worst. An

26 Blocker, J. (2004). What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 123. 27 Moreland, Q. (2015, August 29). Forty Years of Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll”. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://hyperallergic.com/232342/forty-years-of-carolee-schneemanns-interior-scroll 16 explanation, Nead mentions, could be that a painting or sculpture allow for an observation at the viewer’s own speed, which gives her/him the time to select their own viewing position, while the fact that the performance artist is moving around prevents an erotizing or colonizing of the body.28

3.3 Case study – VALIE EXPORT: Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968)

Well known for her body oriented video- and photographic work and performances, VALIE EXPORT was eager to counter the misogyny of the dominant Viennese Actionists – such as Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus.29 She felt highly influenced by the movement of Vienna during the ’70s, with all the political protests going on. As her male contemporaries, she protested against the repressive and anxious Viennese society, and subjected herself to pain and danger in her performances. However, her confrontational and shocking work focused mainly on the examination of the ways in which power relations underlying the media representations inscribe women’s bodies. A year after her iconic work Tap and Touch Cinema, that was “the first genuine women’s film”, as she put it herself, she performed Genital Panic. In this performance, EXPORT walked into an experimental Munich art-house cinema wearing a pair of pants that was crotchless, a tight leather jacket and wildly teased hair. Walking past rows of seated spectators, her genitalia were exposed at eye level. By doing this, the audience was forced to engage with real life flesh and a body controlled and offered freely by a woman herself, instead of the passive and idealized female bodies they expected to encounter on screen. While no video of the performance itself is available, a photo series shot a few days after the performance is. Action Pants: Genital Panic [fig. 1] shows EXPORT sitting in a chair wearing the same aforementioned outfit, posing with a machine gun. While the photographs became iconic, EXPORT herself has stated that this was incidental. For her, the performance itself was the main work. As her performance aimed to challenge the voyeurism of cinema, the responses of the public showed an expected response. Many people got up, or walked away when they were able to. EXPORT saw the reaction to her

28 Nead, L. (1992). The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, UK: Routledge), 68. 29 Manchester, E. (2007, March). Action Pants: Genital Panic. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/export-action-pants-genital-panic-p79233/text-summary

17 piece as denial of reality: “People do not want to see reality. When something is constructed, when it’s projected to a screen it’s acceptable, but it’s different when it’s there in front of you in a public space.”30

30 Fore, D. (2012, October 09). Valie Export. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/valie- export/print/ 18

4. Cyberspace and gender

The world has changed a lot since the ’70s. While many of us still visit the cinema to watch a movie in the physical proximity of others, seeing a movie online, on our own and in the privacy of our living room has become a regular activity for many. Acting and interacting online now takes up an important part of our daily life. To explore and understand how our lives and our interaction with each other has changed, I will now turn to a slightly more in depth, yet succinct exploration of how the western world changed after our lives became more engrained in technology and we became more digitally connected. From the 1990s on, the World Wide Web was made available for everyone with a computer and a modem. A new environment – cyberspace – was now reality. One of the primary claims of these early internet days was a promise of an active, inclusive and utopian community. This gave high hopes for the utopian potential of internet in general. In his book The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold refers to the prediction of internet pioneer J.C.R. Licklider that “life will be happier for the online individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interest and goals than by accidents of proximity.”31 Rheingold himself shared this optimistic view in 1994, and while recognizing the threat of consumerism in the offline world, he believed that online communities would rediscover “the power of cooperation”. The internet would give us a chance to create a new world, and we would all feel the responsibility to do better than we did in the physical world. People, in short, would leave behind all aspects of themselves that made it difficult to connect to others in the offline world, such as physical appearance or locations, and form a non-hierarchical place where everyone was equal. Internet would blur all boundaries, including gender boundaries.32 These utopian ideas triggered a new form of feminism: cyberfeminism. Some cyberfeminists were inspired by Haraway’s cyborg myth, in which they saw the possibilities of technology and connectedness for the position of women. Though Donna Haraway’s essay “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) is too dense to go into too much detail here, the important aspect that is of importance here, is that she speaks of a cyborg that blurs all boundaries between human and animal and between human and machine. Though the cyborg in her manifesto is fictional, she

31 Rheingold, H. (1994). The Virtual Community (New York, NY: Harper Collins), 9. 32 Rheingold, H. (1994). The Virtual Community (New York, NY: Harper Collins), 20-24. 19 does believe that there is no difference between nature and man-made objects or technology. Using this knowledge and the tools of technology, women could overcome their gender and break down the patriarchal system.33

4.1 (Dis)embodiment and gender

Thus, this new place called cyberspace would give us the opportunity to leave behind all our physical characteristics and to blend with technology where we wanted to. It would be a bodiless medium, as our bodies remain seated in front of the computer screen rather than immerge into it. This would create the opportunity to connect and communicate not only without the interference of our bodies, but also without our gender. In her book How we became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles explains how gender was included in the earliest stages of the technologization of our lives, by reminding us of the Turing test.34 Developed in 1950 by Alan Turing, the Turing test tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from human behavior. This was not the only test however, as he also offered the test of distinguishing between man and woman. What the Turing test “proves”, Hayles writes, is that

“the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural in-evitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject”.35

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that studies that look at gendered use of technology find that cyberspace is embedded in economic, political and social realities of real life.36 And what we tend to forget as well, states Hayles (1996) in her essay “Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments”, is that our bodies are as much involved in the construction of virtual life as they are of “real” life. We interact with the virtual world through the senses of our body.

33 Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (NY, NY: Routledge), 149-182. 34 Hayles, K. (1996). Embodied virtuality: Or how to put bodies back into the picture. In M. Moser & D. MacLeod (eds.), Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (New York, NY: MIT Press), 1-28. 35 Hayles, K. (1996). Embodied virtuality: Or how to put bodies back into the picture. In M. Moser & D. MacLeod (eds.), Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (New York, NY: MIT Press), 13. 36 Beyer, J. (2012). Womens’s (Dis)embodied Engagement with Male-Dominated Online Communities. In G. Radhika (ed.) Cyberfeminism 2.0 (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.), 156-167.

Even if we leave our physical body upon entering the virtual world, as soon as we enter online spaces we are given rhetorical bodies, male or female. Our inability, seemingly, to leave behind the many factors that make up our offline society, including the gender binary, as soon as this new cyberworld emerged does make one wonder about status of the historically asymmetrical power relationship between men and women. The thought that this relationship could be erased and forgotten, while other factors could not, seems to be naïve. Additionally, cyberspace’s precursor ARPANET was designed and coded by the US Defense Department before it became suitable for commercial use. Thereafter, mostly men were involved in its evolvement: Apple computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Tim Berners-Lee, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. In “Is there a Built form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?”, Thomas Markus wonders if there is a difference between a male utopia and a female utopia, and if it is even possible for men to design a different power relation, considering the asymmetrical power relation that exists in the offline world, in his research of the forms cyberspace was built of. Its language and the use of cyberspace are, in a way inscribed by patriarchy, Markus found.37 Embodiment in cyberspace therefor can never be free from pre-existing patriarchal labeling. Internet’s trope of equality was an utopia that could’ve only been reached when this utopia already existed here, in the physical world.

4.2 Internet and the rise of internet art: new possibilities, new freedoms?

Although cyberspace found its base in a patriarchal society, new technological media like the internet do still offer the opportunity to challenge existing social structures. The social relationships we engage in online, were structured by existing rules that may or should need to be redefined, often extensively. The freedom of the early net days, when these rules were still to be set in place, in particular gave rise to artists operating online: internet artists. Josephine Bosma, a Dutch art critic specialized in new media, writes that in these first years internet art was more about the understanding of the Internet as a new social system, than just a new medium for existing work.38 Internet had created a new culture, and everyone had the same opportunities to

37 A Markus, T. (2002). Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopia’s?. In A. Bingaman, L. Sanders and Rebecca Zorach, Embodied Utopia’s: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (New York, NY: Routledge), 15-32. 38 Bosma, J. (2011). Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam, Nederland: NAi Publishers), 25.

21 claim a piece of space, and shape it more or less as they wanted. This equal position allowed Jodi – one of the most well know internet art collectives – to win a Webby Award, while nowadays mostly online art collections receive an award in the category “Art”, individual contemporary artists such as Jodi now have a much smaller chance of winning. As more and more people started to recognize the possibilities this new culture provided and the entry of big companies emerged, the general nature and status of Internet art changed. Though artists such as Jodi still make work that underlines specifically the innate anarchy of cyberspace, most internet art works are best described as “art based in internet cultures”. This art, though in its content perhaps often unrelated to the internet, does use the hyper- modern and democratic character of it to resist the offline patriarchal culture. Every artist with an internet connection and a computer can, after all, share their work online and everyone with an internet connection can view it. This is a freedom that the offline world does not provide. Offline, the art institutions rule the art world and if your work is not placed or selected, it is hard to get some visibility as an artist. These institutions are not yet set in place online, though institutions such as Rhizome – a pioneering online organization and archive of internet art – could be steadily gaining authority in this field by it’s rather recent affiliation with the New Museum. That is perhaps why it is so difficult to grasp what internet art is, exactly. Without the rules and boundaries of art institutions, who is to say what is art and what is not? The works described as internet art are therefore all very different, formally and conceptually. Bosma does not use the term internet art, but defines net art as art based in or on internet cultures. That the art is based in internet cultures, it means that a physical connection to the internet is not necessary in individual net art works. Julian Stallabrass, however, does make the distinction that net art is a term that has become associated with a small group of early practitioners and cannot be applied to online art as a whole.39 Because the contemporary case studies that are discussed in this thesis do need an internet connection to reach their desired effect, and do not fall into the category of early works, I have chosen to refer to them as internet art. What needs to be mentioned here as well is the place internet art has in both digital art and post-internet art. Internet art is per definition digital art, yet digital art does not need to be based in internet cultures. Post-internet art, a term first introduced in 2008 by artist, curator and critic Marisa Olson, is defined as art that uses internet while it is

39 Stallabrass, J. (2003). Internet Art (London, UK: Tate), 11. 22 produced, yet is does not need to be based online and should also get it’s place in the offline world, which is an important distinction from internet art.40 The internet as a platform differs from an exhibition in a physical space. Art online is somewhat like art in public space; it is available at any time, indefinitely or until a domain name expires, software is not updated or a server crashes.41 Internet, however, cannot be named as a medium like painting, print or video is, states Stallabras. It is a method of distributing and exchanging data, which can be visual art, text, music, radio and video. It therefore has the possibility to be more broadly embedded in cultural context compared to art that is made to be seen only in a white cube. This makes the internet an interesting platform to explore questions on gender and embodiment in both the off- and online world.

4.3 Case Study 2 – Shu-Lea Cheang: Brandon (1998-1999)

One piece where the complex dynamics of gender, sexuality, identity and web-based art come together is Brandon (1998-1999) by the artist Shu-Lea Cheang.42 Cheang was engaged in media activism in the 1980s and 1990s, and made this work when hope was still high that the virtual world would erase all gender and race boundaries. It was also the time of the rape and murder case of Brandon Teena (née Teena Brandon). Brandon Teena was a transsexual man, who was raped and murdered by two men when they found out he was biologically female. In Brandon, a collaborative work, Cheang brought together the “Brandon case” with the first reported “online rape case”, which happened when a male user on one of internet’s earliest forums (also named MUDs) created a program that was able to take control over someone else’s virtual (and textual) body, and used it to sexually violate female characters.43

Brandon [fig. 2] was a digital work, a multi-site with multiple interfaces named “bigdoll”, “roadtrip”, “mooplay”, “panopticon” and “Theatrum Anatonicum”. 44 All interfaces were

40 Cornell, L. (2006, February 9). Net results: Closing the gap between art and life online. Retrieved March 26, 2016, from http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/net-result 41 Bosma, J. (2011). Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam, Nederland: NAi Publishers), 19. 42 Ho, Y. (2012, May 10). Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon. Retrieved May 12, 2016, from http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/10/shu-lea-cheang-on-brandon/ 43 Dibbell, J. (1993, 23 december). A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html 44 The project is offline at this moment, but the Guggenheim is working on bringing “Brandon” back online soon. The images and history are to be found at www.brandon.guggenheim.org 23 collaborative platforms, containing a mainframe that could embody changing content and users. Collaborators could add plug-ins and add-ons to change the narrative. Practically this meant that over the course of a year, a group of curators and artists could upload and create their own “Brandon narrative”. The work, between 1998 and 1999, included live-chat, actual/virtual performance, installations, pop-ups, stories and images. The project was designed without any easy icons to navigate through the sites, stimulating the visitor’s own sense of investigation, and making the experience non-linear. Being that the project was presented online, this meant that allowed participants from all over the world to shape, author and watch the project. Through the exploring of a wide range of “spaces”, from multiple-user chat rooms to offline spaces such as the “Theatre Anatromicum” (a Dutch performance venue), it opened up the exploration of boundaries between offline and online society. Also, it opened up the exploration of the interrelations between sexuality and gender, though this was mostly between artists, curators, institutions and scholars as they had the most freedom to create their own narrative, were they selected by Cheang to do so. Only some of the discussions and input from the audience was put up on the site, so it did remain a limited exploration. Next to being the first internet art piece to be commissioned by the Guggenheim museum, and signaling a point where art institutions and museums became interested enough to invest resources in internet art, it also points to a perhaps less then utopian view of internet in terms of gender freedom. In exploring discourses around identity and bodies, both offline and online, it problematizes the fantasy of gender swapping. It thus isn’t only about trans sexuality, but also about digital bodies and its boundaries. It is difficult but possible to transform the physical body, by the use of hormones, surgery or by simply placing a sock in one’s underpants to create a manly bulge, but how easy is it to embody a different gender online, or even letting go of gender all together? The cases that Brandon works with show us an off- and online society that is not particularly keen on letting go of it’s constructs, and that can even act with violence to keep them in place, or when people dare to try to release themselves from the construct that has been assigned to them. This is illustrated by the fact that internet first seemed to create the possibility for a free and anarchistic space, yet was quickly democratized. While at first, it was used by a small group of specialists, nowadays everyone with an internet connection and a suitable device can use it. This also means that the internet is not only used and partly run by individuals, but 24 also by offline companies and new online companies such as pornographic sites and social media who have now left their mark on how we move around and communicate with each other online.

5. The Male Gaze on the Web

Issues around the concepts of sex and gender constructs are often clouded in sexual urges, desires and (mis)behavior. And as much as the project Brandon tried to use technology and the presumed freedom of the web to break down social assumptions in society about gender, we now find that the internet is an area that does provide critical space, yet it has also, however, proven to become simultaneously a place where the gender binary power construction has become set steady in place. Which is unsurprising perhaps, seen that the first reported “cyber rape case” or online sexual assault, was reported as soon as the majority of western society started to become active online.45 While sexuality and gender is not the same thing, they do have intersections in many interesting ways. The general oppression of women has led to sexual violation in order to regain or remain male supremacy since many centuries. In her book Pleasure and Danger (1984), theorist of sex and gender politics Rubin Gayle states that from the standpoint of this system, female sexuality would be the one to respond to others, and not actively desire itself.46 The ownership of women thus has extended in many societies (and it still does in some) to the sexual ownership and exchange of women. Sexual exchange has played a role in the evolution of money and commodities, and it still does.47 Since the internet has been discovered as a commercial opportunity therefore, sex and sexual exchange has become a huge commodity online. And again, this is created for the mostly straight male gaze, and does not accommodate the sexual desire of the women themselves. What plays a big role in online interaction and content, and is congruent with the aforementioned male gaze, is the sexual objectification of women. Since the early painters became enthralled with the female nude, Western society started to objectify women’s bodies. Objectification theory states that many women are treated as an object by others, and are sexually objectified.48 The woman herself is not regarded as a person anymore, but her body or certain body parts are treated as a sexual object for male desires. The objectification does not need to concern the physical presence of the woman herself, it can be channeled through a Renaissance

45 Dibbell, J. (1993, 23 december). A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html 46 Gayle, R. (1984). Pleasure and Danger (New York, NY: Routledge), 60. 47 Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (London, UK: Duke University Press), 44-61. 48 Fredrickson, B., & Roberts, L. (2006). Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173-206. 26 painting of a female nude, a photograph, a digital image or even through words. Research has now shown that we recognize women in a similar way as we do objects, and women wearing bikinis are less likely to be viewed as human.49 Of course, not all online content on women, sexual content, or sexual interaction is about commercial sexual exchange or the objectification of women. There is a broad pursuit of many internet users that is aimed at sexual interest, and cyberspace proves to be a fertile ground for erotic connections. Next to these consensual, positive interactions however, the internet is engrained with objectifying content and (sexual) violence towards women. Recent research by the Guardian shows that female journalists have to deal with a continuous flow of aggressive responses to their articles, as well as ethnical and religious minorities that are confronted with a disproportionate amount of hurtful comments.50 Articles about rape and feminism rate even higher in the number of vulgar and hostile responses. Many news organizations find themselves forced to close the comment section of their site because of this. Catherine MacKinnon, renowned scholar and feminist, has hypothesized that sexual and racial harassment injures the receiver in a way that it carries the lived experience of those who are actually abused.51 Those words have the power to remind of and reference to actual physical violence, and thus become an act of subordination. To find some explanations for said interactions, we just have to look at our offline world. As said before, sexual exchange is still a big commodity in our world, and the emphasis of this exchange lies strongly on the desires of the man. Men have sexualized hierarchy, making their dominance sexual. Using (nonconsensual) sexual exchange to emphasize the position of power of the man is just one symptom of patriarchy. Not only people who live outside of sex-gender relations will be at risk of assault, women everywhere, not matter their location, will have to live with a constant threat of violence, sexual violence being a big part of it. Rape, as is said by sexual violence theorists, is not merely physical violence but the “ultimate violation of self”, and it reaffirms the patriarchal social order.52 Translating the physical act of sexual violence into the digital space can be traced to porno sites providing videos of violent sexual acts, but also to

49 Bernard, P., Gervais, S., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2011). Integrating Sexual Objectification With Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science issue, 23(5), 469-471. 50 The Guardian. (2016, April 12). The dark side of Guardian comments. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments 51 MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only Words (Cambridge, NY: Harvard University Press), 106. 52 Phiri, A., & Milatovic, M. (2014). Dis(re)membering bodies: disability and self-constitution in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. In S. Wiseman, Assembling Identities (London, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 131-143. 27 verbal, or textual violation of a person. It takes many forms. The world wide web has grown so expansively that it is impossible to say anything about the percentage that pornography sites takes up, but that a large amount of internet users frequently visit and pay these sites is a given. Consumption of pornography in the US alone has resulted in an annual spending of eight billion dollars.53 Produced and run by mostly men, these porno sites show us mostly what men want and what provides the maximum amount of arousal for them. As MacKinnon (1993) states: women bound, women tortured, battered, humiliated and degraded, or at least sexually accessible women, wanting to be taken and used. While MacKinnon wrote this description on offline porn, one quick look at online pornographic material provides a same impression. Pornography constructs women as things for sexual use and it constructs the viewer to want women that crave for this humiliation and possession. Andrea Dworkin, a known anti-pornography radical feminist, states that this emphasis on aggression points to the major theme in pornography being male power.54 Ian Cook has researched a variety of porn sites and found that in these videos, the men are also presented in a less than three dimensional way. The men are represented as the hunter, next to the women being presented as objects who do not deserve any emotional attachment. The videos show the penis of the man being the sole bearer of pleasure for the woman, which translates into the “inextricably tying of the self-identity of men to their penises”.55 Cook even takes it as far as claiming feminism has increased male anxiety (of being “man enough”) and web porn has intensified it. That the porn industry does not only reinforce patriarchal power structures, but is also able to mirror interest into more open-minded views and desires, is illustrated by recent events in the US. In response to a new law that was passed on March 23 in North Carolina that effectively prevents cities and counties in the state from passing rules that protect LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans) rights, the owner of porn website “Xhamster.com” banned all computers from this state. Their spokesman clarified their actions by stating that they believe in equality for everyone, adding that users from North Carolina are obviously more open-minded about their porn choice then this new law might suggest.56

53 Amis, M. (2001, March 17). A rough trade. Retrieved May 25, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1 54 Dworkin, A. (1981). Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York, NY: Putnam), 24. 55 Cook, I. (2006). Western Heterosexual Masculinity, Anxiety, and Web Porn. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 14(1), 47-63 56 Moye, D. (2016, April 11). Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users Due To State’s Anti-LGBT Laws. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/porn-site-bans-north-carolina-users-due-to-states-anti-lgbt- laws_us_570bd057e4b0885fb50d9a92 28

Another driving force of the internet is the advertisement business. It is almost impossible to run any site without the income of advertisements. Newspaper sites, social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, almost all conceivable sites people visit on a daily basis are engrained with advertisements. Advertisements are never only about the product they are promoting, they are about how our culture is structured.57 They tempt someone to buy something, and by looking at who and what those someone’s and something’s are you can get quite an interesting view of how our world is structured. Online advertisements mainly rely on the use of images to convey a message to its audience. These images may “contain elements that can reinforce and reshape societal norms regarding gender equity and depiction of sexuality”.58 There is almost no research available on online advertisement, but the little research there is points to the finding that it follows the same stereotypical trends that print and TV advertisements use, entailing an overrepresentation of women in decorative and traditional roles, often showing a distorted body image and as objects of sexual gratification.59 That these images can have an encouraging effect on attitudes supportive of sexual aggression towards women, has come up in multiple researches, say MacKay and Covell in their study titled “The Impact of Women in Advertisements on Attitudes Toward Women”.60 It does, however also work the other way around, they emphasize. When shown more progressive images in advertising, both male and female participants of their study showed more acceptance of feminism and the woman’s movement. The multitude of non- progressive or sexual female imagery seems to continue the vicious circle of patriarchal sexual domination and the aggression that comes along with it. Disruption of this circle could lead to more positive attitudes towards women, though the way of disruption seems to be long and not without hurdles, as these two case studies will illustrate.

57 J Adams, C. (2015). The Pornography of Meat (New York, NY: Lantern Books), 10. 58 Plakoyiannaki, E., & Zotos, Y. (2009). Female role stereotypes in print advertising. European Journal of Marketing, 43(11), 1411-1434. 59 Stith, D. (2011). Homemaker to Seductress: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in Online Embedded Advertisements (Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects). Retrieved from http://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=etds 60 MacKay, N., & Covell, K. (1997). The Impact of Women in Advertisements on Attitudes Toward Women. Sex Roles, 36(9), 573-583.

5.1 Case Study – Carolee Schneemann: Fuses (1965)

If not digitally, pornography and sexual advertising was already broadly available and present in the censorious America of the 1960s. This time also marks the abandonment of the Hollywood “Hays Code”, a code that was put in place in 1930 that said sex could only be implied and never depicted in Hollywood movies. Simultaneously, the sixties was the starting point of video performance art, enabled by the invention of the portable video camera. Carolee Schneemann, one of the pioneering feminist artists, is mostly known for her work on the body, sexuality and gender by the use of (video) performances. In her video work Fuses [fig. 3], Schneemann responds to the anti-emotional quality of pornography, and questions the reposition of the man by filming any female experience such as giving birth. The video shows Schneemann making love with her partner James Tenney as if being observed by their cat, Kitch. The only actual participants were indeed just Schneemann herself, her partner and their cat, no cameraman. By filming herself, she becomes filmmaker as well as the object, and was thus able to re-create the intimate experience of lovemaking without the objectification of either body. The addition of distortions by staining and painting directly on the film, the video relinquishes any of the fetishization of the female or the reinforcement of male authority normally seen in a pornographic video. The setting for this early video art was very different from a traditional art viewing, as one has to watch it in a theatre like setting, in a dark room, seated. This black box creates an intimate space and immerses the viewer by blurring the self and the visual representation.61 Schneemann takes this added intimacy to her advantage. The beginning of the use of video during the second wave of feminism created a whole new audience for feminist activism and performance art. Fuses could not be broadcast on TV, but the screenings in galleries and festivals made a huge impact. Challenging the tradition of the female nude in Western art as a passive object and breaking the taboo around the active female sexuality, Fuses was bound to receive a large amount of visceral responses. It was banned at the Moscow film festival, and labeled pornographic. This label was not so much given because it follows the pornographic code, as M Serra and Kathryn

61 Beil, R. (2001). Ausbruch aus der weißen Zelle: Die Freisetzung des Bildes in cinematisierten Räumen. In Black Box. Der Schwarzraum in der Kunst (Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag), 51-64. 30

Ramey (2007) mention in the book Women Experimental Cinema.62 In conventional pornography, one sees longer scenes with full body shots of a sex act that most often end in the ejaculation of a man. Fuses does not follow this code as it shows no such images or narrative, as it shows multiple female orgasms and ejaculations in a layered, scratched and painted way. It supposedly led to some frustration with the audience at a screening during Cannes film festival, where some men in the first rows got up and slash their seat with razors and knives. Susan Sontag, present at the screening, surmised it was impossible for the viewers to read the film for conventional pornographic pleasure, and thus it could not fulfill their pornographic expectations.63

5.2 Case Study – Faith Holland: Lick Suck Screen (2014)

As we’ve seen before, the demand for pornography, and thus the amount of pornographic material has only increased since the 1960s. Also, we now spend some eight hours a day consuming media, internet accounting for almost thirty percent of that time.64 During that time, large amounts of (free) pornographic videos are consumed by a high percentage of Internet users, many even watching them from a very young age on. These statistics joined together with the dominantly present advertisement and its objectification of women does not paint the picture of a world that Schneemann and her contemporaries imagined. Today’s artists are not left untouched by these developments though, as we again see artists employing performances to reclaim their bodies, now using the internet as a platform. Faith Holland, a net artist, approaches the discourse around sexuality and gender in the space of internet by using objects and subjects such as porn and found online imagery. Lick Suck Screen (2014) is a video Holland made for the series Porn Interventions [fig. 4]. In this work, placed and to be seen on the popular porn site Redtube, we see Holland taking off her shirt, tantalizingly slow, as she shyly smiles to the camera. The title of the video and the accompanying tags indicate

62 Ramey, K., & Serra, M. (2007). Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann. In R. Blaetz, Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (London, UK: Duke University Press), 103-126. 63 Ramey, K., & Serra, M. (2007). Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann. In R. Blaetz, Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (London, UK: Duke University Press), 103-126. 64 Time Spent Online (January - June 2015) Read more at http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/time-spent-online-january-june- 2015#IWiv3hpiCd0CMEbY.99. (2015, September 08). Retrieved from http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/time-spent-online- january-june-2015

31 that she will be performing a blowjob, yet instead she begins to lick the camera. The video then turns into a loop of tongue-colored abstractions while the hardcore GIFs around the edges of the screen keep on going. By posting her video on a widely used porn site, she is able to intervene directly at the source. Her anticlimactic video disrupts the flow of homogenic pornography that is found online, aiming to create more awareness about the viewer’s pornographic expectations. Seeking out viewers of pornography in their private surrounding, rather than at an art gallery or art house cinema, affects these viewers in one of their most private and taboo activities. Also, it allows for a non-art audience, an audience where the biggest effect can occur in response to Holland’s work. If Lick Suck Screen has left its male viewers as frustrated as the audience watching Schneemann’s work is only left to be pondered. During the correspondence I’ve had with the artist while writing this thesis, she shared that she received few responses, which only happened through private messages that she has not made public. In her own view, these responses were not interesting, as they all expressed sexually attraction to her work, and wanted to see more or to connect with her more privately. These responses may not say anything about the amount of confused or frustrated viewers as no one of them choose to interact with her. It does, however, show that the practice of performing online as an artist brings about some complexities that were not present around the performances of seventies artists.

6. Online spectatorship

What we see is that we, like the viewers of Holland’s work, often find ourselves in the position of the online “spectator”. Where the early days of the internet were more aimed at networked communication, we now spend some time actively communicating with one another online, yet also we spend more time being a more or less passive spectator. Surely, we already were spectators before, of other screens such as our television and cinema screens. Screens that, according to film theorists like Laura Mulvey, reflected the belief system and desires of Western society. And as we saw before, this spectator of screens, the subject of the gaze, is male. We are, as spectators, not just a neutral pair of eyes. The images we view produce a particular way of seeing, reinforcing the already active system of beliefs and aesthetics. The man acts and the woman appears. What we see now, is a version of these views being incorporated on the internet. The omnipresence of imagery of women purely for erotic enjoyment is only one aspect of how the online world seems to mirror the offline world. When it comes to the term spectator, it is not used often within the setting of the internet, as we see ourselves more as an active participator or user than a passive spectator. We are inclined to accept internet conventions as “a given”. This implies, as Michele White theorizes, an idea of the computer and the internet as unmediated and animate.65 Online, we are often targeted with pronouns such as “you”, which additionally creates a sense that its text is created especially for the individual, and the sense that we are interacting with a living object. The imagery of advertisements and pornography, then, is not seen as a collection of information, created and compiled mostly by men, but as parts of a living system that has come into existence by itself. This creates a situation where we accept its settings as a given, which enforces its influence on our belief system. This debate is not a new one, though, as it has been discussed in the online and offline world for years. Artist Barbara Kruger for example, who often played with declarative captions in her work, using pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I” and placing them over images coming from mainstream magazines, and by that revealing the appealing power of advertising and popular culture. In an interview in 2009, Kruger stated that

65 White, M. (2006). The body and the screen: theories of internet spectatorship (Cambridge, NY: The MIT Press), 19. 33

Sometimes these images emerge as “semblances of beauty;” as confluences of desirous points. They seem to locate themselves in a kind of free zone, offering dispensations from the mundane particularities of everyday life; tickets to a sort of unrelenting terrain of gorgeousness and glamour expenditure. If you and I think that we are not susceptible to these images and stereotypes than we are sadly deluded. But to have some understanding of the machinations of power in culture and to still joyously entertain these emblems as kitschy divinities is even more ridiculous.66

Looking at the online world however, beliefs are already appealed to before one enters the portals to any imagery or comments. Most portals, or sites, ask for information on your identity in return for safety while using their services. The type of information that is required though is already based on traditional notions of body and identity. Most often a gender code is required, and only the options of male or female are presented. This brings on several consequences. For one, we might feel as if we are anonymous users or spectators, but we are far from being anonymous. Also, this eradicates the possibility to free oneself from heterosexuality and gender binary, and allows for the enforcement of the already traditional and patriarchal qualities of the internet. These employments of gender categories generate even more limited conceptions of identity and the body and thus result in a sort of social regulation. As White (2006) states: “women are encouraged to be soft and domestic in many physical and internet settings while men are instructed to be rigged and business-focused”. In other words, women are expected to be subdued or muted in their expressions, and interested in domestic concerns such as cleaning or cleaning. Men, on the other hand, are supposed to act more tough and demanding and be mostly interested in their career. The added claim that “if one does not conform to these instructions, society will inflict some kind of punishment, such as harassment, comments or even rape and murder” might be somewhat overstated, and though it seemed to be the cause in the Brandon case, this statement fails substantiation.

6.1 Gendered self-representation

So while the internet seemed ready for online performances that leave behind offline identity and bodily representation, in reality we see that the online environment has quickly become, like the

66 BOMB Magazine. (2009, September 11). Barbara Kruger interviewed by Richard Prince. Retrieved June 03, 2016, from http://blog.art21.org/2009/09/11/barbara-kruger-interviewed-by-richard-prince/#.V2KxaDckNEU

34 offline environment, a highly binary and patriarchal environment. And not only has the internet proven to be an environment with such traditional views because of its representations of women as sexual and passive, it also expects its female users to be passive and soft. So, one might wonder, what are the consequences for women and their self-representations? The internet being a binary and patriarchal place, it is not to be expected that it provides its female users the space they are already not given in the physical world. Social media now are the main online spaces where people are not only spectators, but also become visible online. So how do they choose to become visible in these relatively new social media channels? And what opportunities do social media provide for gendered self-representation? What we see is that in these self-representations online, it has become less easy to play with your identity in such a way that you can pretend to be of another sex, age or skin color. Online identity has become so much more visual because of social media, thus one could infer that people are tempted less and less to construe a fake identity. Which has become even harder even if you’d wanted to, as Facebook now has implemented new rules, stating they will close or remove your profile when they suspect you are not using your real name.67 In addition, nowadays, for more and more people, offline and online worlds are interacting in many and complex ways. Expressions or performances of identity in the offline and online world, therefore, are becoming equally part of “real life”.68 The distinction between “truth” and “fiction” is perhaps more blurry online than it is offline, but that does not always imply that online expressions are less valid. A disembodied environment such as the internet provides a broad range of expressions that enables people to express themselves, sometimes even in a more accurate way that they are able to do offline. We mustn’t forget that online communication comes along with less direct feedback than is common in face-to-face communication, which can lead to people being even more revealing on their identities of actual thoughts than they would in an offline situation. Some cyberpsychologists have discovered a phenomenon supporting this presumption, as the “online disinhibition effect”.69 The negative, aggressive and sexual responses mentioned in chapter four, that are so often addressed to women expressing themselves online, could therefore paint a more realistic picture of offline thoughts and assumptions that would

67 Facebook. (n.d.). Community Standards. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards# 68 Koole, M., & Parchoma, G. (2013). The Web of Identity: A Model of Digital Identity Formation in Networked Learning Environments (Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference), 1-13. 69 Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321-326. 35 normally not be spoken out loud. This could indicate that the Internet is not solely a mirror of the offline world. Yet, concerning hateful comments, it also seems that an interplay between the offline and online world is rising to the surface as well. More and more people are starting to engage with these comments in a more offline manner: by talking back. Mary Beard, an English classical scholar known for her strong feminist views, spoke about her personal experiences in this area during her speech Oh Do Shut Up Dear at the British Museum in 2014.70 She stated that, as an outspoken woman, the abuse comes anyway, it does not matter how you say something – it’s the fact that you’re saying it. She herself reports being on the receiving end of such online interjections on Twitter very often, and has noticed that simply retweeting a hateful response or simply by talking back to them will result in a positive response. In half of these cases, she claims, she will get an apology and a very polite answer and explanation. Her explanation of this “trolling”, as it is also called, is that the Internet was not able to fulfill its promise of equalization. Many articles posted by news sites are still written by an elite group and a large community of commentators exist that feel they still do not have a say. By acknowledging them, Beard feels, you can bridge that gap and also remind them that you are a real person. Social media like Facebook and Instagram are now not just places one can choose to become visible online. For young people it has even become more and more important to be present and visible on social media. Amy Shields Dobson states, in her recent book Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-Representation, that one could say that because of the seemingly minor involvement of women in online media production, female self- representation could potentially be empowering.71 Women in their performativity on social media are now often said to repeat the male gaze in their self-representation, by presenting themselves in a subdued and sexual manner. It’s often a blurry line, however, between an image that is intended to evoke appraisal and a self-representation that is intended to be disruptive or political. This is not a new question, but these new digital technologies force us to investigate this area in a new context. Opportunities for involvement in online media are replete nowadays, and it’s not just the online platforms where we connect with our little brothers and sisters or parents next to our peers

70 Mead, R. (2014, September 01). The Troll Slayer. Retrieved June 05, 2016, from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/troll-slayer 71 S Dobson, A. (2015). Postfeminist Digital Cultures (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 103-130. 36 such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Also spaces like Pornhub, Youporn and Adultfriendfinder give users the opportunity to represent themselves and connect with others, however we will now focus on the more general self-representation.72 Participatory media, such as social media, has seen a huge increase the last few years as recent research suggests. This era is one that focuses on the individual to express themselves online, to be an entrepreneur of the self, as Sarah Banet-Weiner states.73 And for women this means they first have to navigate through an environment that is densely permeated with the sexualization and objectification of female bodies, a fact that came to the attention not only to most women, but to a broader part of society. As Dobson states in her book Postfeminist Digital Cultures:

In order to differentiate the feminine self from older, weaker versions of femininity, and construct the self as sufficiently postfeminist, girls and young women are required not only to engage with heterosexy and pornographic visual tropes, but also knowingly and “playfully” engage with complex binaries of sexual object and subjecthood, sexual desire and satiation, complicity with a masculinized sexual gaze and refusal/noncompliance. And they must appear to do so in the spirit of “fun” and “lightheartedness” that characterizes postfeminist sensibilities, rather than being too “serious” or “earnest” in relation to sexual and gendered self-representation.74

Some discourses have invoked fear of the damaging effects that this digital environment may have on girls growing up, as it could lead to self-sexualization or low self-esteem, as shown in research done by Egan and Hawkes.75 These discourses could lead to a moral differentiation, to a distinction between a child that is a “good girl”, or a child that has been damaged. Which in turn implies a framework of morals that is attached to self-representation and desire of girls. These assumptions, Egan and Hawkes state in their research, tend to ignore the sexuality of children, and girls in particular. The binary that is created between an innocent or a corrupted girl, is one that already had its roots in early patriarchy. You are a “good girl” when you comply with the beauty standard of your time and show no sexual desire of your own, you’re a “bad girl” when you exceed the framework of contemporary aesthetics and when you position yourself as a

72 Fuchs, C. (2011). New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance. Sociology Compass, 10(5), 134-147. 73 Banet-Weiner, S. (2012). AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press), 41-45. 74 S Dobson, A. (2015). Postfeminist Digital Cultures (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 74. 75 Hawkes, G., & Egan, R. (2012). Sexuality, youth and the perils of endangered innocence: How history can help us get past the panic. Gender and Education, 24(3), 269-284. 37 sexual being. The continuing sexualization of women in media seems less of an issue in these discourses, their aim seems to be keeping girls or women from sexualizing themselves. This doesn’t mean that women are only expected to be presented as innocent, objectified and passive objects. Post-feminist debates urge women to navigate themselves through this sexual culture in a savvy way and with agency. In a way, they are expected to consider themselves the winners in this post-feminist culture, say Renold and Ringrose.76 This slightly schizophrenic environment creates a confusing variety on how women are expected to act or appear online, and exactly that expectation of the viewer is one of the most important factors on social media. One could say that social media is about expressing oneself, presenting who you are to the rest of the world, this presentation is however, highly influenced by its viewer and their potential positive or negative response. And the response that YouTube videos or Instagram photos featuring young women almost invariably receive are focused on their physical appearance. A few comments gathered by the videos I watched on YouTube concerning the research for this thesis: “wow nice body”, “nice...sexy....any other vids that show your sexy underwear???” and “Just cum across your page.....hot, hot, hot....love the bod....keep the short skirt vids coming.....would be good to have a reply...xx”.77 These judgments, states Banet-Weiser (2012), “exercise a kind of control over women’s self representation, situating videos like these squarely within a familiar script of objectifying the bodies of young women”.78 The emphasis on the sexual body in the viewers’ judgment may be one of the reasons why women are reported to present themselves as overtly sexual online. Though we must remain careful on the exact nature of these self-representations. Where some of the supposedly sexual expressions may be presented to receive appraisal by their male and female viewers, many other of these expressions may be not as linear as we think they are. They are part of a non-linear and sometimes queer sexual identity, as research done by Egan and Hawkes shows. After analyzing data of the performative places (online and offline) of three cases of British female teenagers, Egan and Hawkes concluded that the reality of young women’s identities is so much more messy than the binary of “savvy sexual agents” and “objectified sexual victims”.

76 Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2011). Schizoid subjectivities? Re-theorizing teen girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualization’. Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 389-409. 77 Scandalishious. (2009, June 16). THE LOST CAROLINE VIDEOS #2 [Video file]. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A1v0fqV2OY 78 Banet-Weiner, S. (2012). AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press), 69. 38

6.2 Case Study – Ann Hirsch: Scandalishious (2014)

Ann Hirsch (1985) is a video and performance artist based in the US. She looks at the way technology has influenced popular culture and gender and is best known for two high-profile experiments in how female identity is shaped by technology and the public eye, one of which is Scandalishious.79 This work is a series of 113 YouTube videos, for which Hirsch created a new alter ego for herself – a recurring practice in her work – this time playing the role of a freshman- year college student, called Caroline, aged 18 [fig. 5]. The recurring theme of this series is the performance of a dance to music, where Hirsch clearly mimics the well-established “genre” of YouTube videos of ego documentation: vlogs, personal confessions, and performances of different sorts. In most videos, she performs dances in front of the camera/webcam, often preceded by introductory words, addressing the viewer. While dancing, she addresses the viewers in a self-confident way, both in the way she speaks and the way she dresses. In interviews she often stresses how the performativity of self-confidence actually makes her self-confident. The distinction between an assumed role and her actual self seems to vanish. The self-confidence, though, is combined with a stark awkwardness. The combination of this self-aware, sexual, yet awkward performance gives her dance videos more a “campy” vibe than a sensual one. She seems to seek to attain the sexuality portrayed in typical music videos, but her video is a much more intimate embodiment than that. The webcam videos by Hirsch and her contemporaries in itself already show one big difference from the point of view of the seventies feminist artists, as they seem to act in a more humorous and self-deprecating way. And looking at the setting of their work – popular culture instead of the white cube – it doesn’t seem surprising these artists take on this attitude, as it will help not to alienate their viewers and “trick” them into watching their art work, without realizing it is an artistic performance, as the resulting comments often prove.

6.3 Case Study – Amalia Ulman: Excellences and Perfections (2014)

In her work Excellences and Perfections, Amalia Ulman addresses all the same aspects of the online world: the construction and artifice of the female identity by commercial forces and by

79 Hirsch, A. (n.d.). Bio. Retrieved June 06, 2016, from http://therealannhirsch.com/info.html

39 ways of self-representation on social media [fig. 6]. For this work, she choose the medium of Instagram, an online mobile photo and short video sharing service, allowing users to take pictures of their life and share them either publicly or privately. Here, Ulman gathered more than 89.000 followers over the course of only several months. This was, in the world of social media, not an exceptional thing, as young women who are conventionally attractive such as Ulman and posting many pictures of themselves tend to gather a lot of interest. Ulman posted a total of 186 pictures that showed her moving to Los Angeles, posting pictures of herself half-naked after a shower, with designer outfits, in luxurious interiors, and even of her getting a breast augmentation. In the same year, at a panel on “Instagram as an artistic medium” during Art Basel Miami, she revealed how she had spent five months creating a fictive persona that was part of the performance art piece Excellences and Perfections. As stated she choose to take on the role of three different types, who seemed for her to be the most popular trends online: “cute girl”, “baby sugar” and “life goddess”.80 Both cute girl and baby sugar fall into the category of the passive, sexually objectified victim, and life goddess here falls right under the tag of savvy sexual agent. During this period, even the gallery that represented her was not in the know about her project. The responses she has gotten to her pictures are mainly positive, and mainly compliment her on her beauty and by other women asking her where she gets her clothes or where she gets her hair done. The picture of her breasts wrapped in bandages after the augmentation also only shows positive reactions. Though also here, the vulgar and abusive comments were inescapable. The gallery that was representing her during this time was not at all positive, and let her know that they were worried that her Instagram activity might damage her credibility as an artist.81 Apparently, her gallery maintains a traditional conception of artistic practice. So what does Ulman’s performance show? Firstly, that every one of her followers, as far as we can tell, believed her account was real, even when her images got excessive. We are, seemingly, already used to people making a brand of themselves, and we risk taking reproduced imagery from mass media to be authentic. And what Ulman’s account shows us is that women who do this well, who promote the right physical ideals, will get a lot of attention. But mainly she strived to show how femininity is a construction, something that is still not clear these days, apparently, as the rest of her co-panelists at Art Basel Miami (Kevin Systrom, Klaus Biesenbach,

80 Kinsey, C. (2016, March 07). The Instagram artist who fooled thousands. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160307-the-instagram-artist-who-fooled-thousands 81 Farmer, S. (2016, January 24). AMALIA ULMAN BRINGS PERFORMANCEART TO INSTAGRAM. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from http://www.papermag.com/amalia-ulman-instagram-performance-art-1570060560.html 40

Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon de Pury) made the point that Instagram is for “real selves, real insight and real art” (Art Basel, 2015). As Systrom stated during the panel, Instagram provides a service in which communication can “evolve” from textual to visual. As if to state that visual communication is more real or honest and more direct than textual communication. Not one of the men on the panel responded to Ulman’s presentation, they continued talking about how ideal Instagram functions as a space where one can communicate about their life, and in where artists can share their art. Only when Ulman herself questioned the “realness” of the authenticity that people experience according to Systrom, he replied that her project only highlights the authenticity of Instagram, and thus her posts were the exception and not the rule. Not only does the project Excellences and Perfections proves to be a strong case against the views of this panel, it also shows how normal it has become that women follow, or are expected to follow this physical and behavioral feminine constructs. And while many do resist (consciously or not) and diverge from the expectations, as Egan and Hawkes’s research shows us, Ulman’s project paints a picture of how users of social media can not easily escape from these expectations, if they want to be validated by most of their followers. The importance of validation is, in addition, a tricky and sensitive point concerning young female online artists working with this subject. Jokingly coined “hot girl art”82, some feminist contemporary artists are now being criticized for embodying exactly the cultural ideals of feminine beauty. This is not a new phenomenon, as Schneemann, together with many of her contemporaries, was also criticized for “flaunting her beauty”.83 They could, however, fall back on their label as artists and the fact that they often were part of an avant-garde that was pushing the boundaries of art.84 Internet artists have gained more status in the art world over the years,85 yet they find themselves in an area where the boundaries between artist and amateur are far more blurry. As was said by Simon de Pury during the panel-discussion at Art Basel Miami: “everyone on Instagram is basically an artist”.86 This implies an equalizing of all who present themselves as artist, and thus a decrease of valuation. The fact that the men on the panel did not respond to Ulman’s presentation of her

82 R White, R. (2015, December 11). 'Hot Girl Art' Turns Heads at Art Basel Miami. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/hot-girl-art-turns-heads-at-art-basel-miami 83 Robinson, H. (2015). Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968 - 2014 (2nd ed.) (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell), 341. 84 Schneemann was a performer in Claes Oldenburg’s “Store days” (1962), Wolf Vostell’s “You” (1964), Robert Morris’s “Site” (1964) and choreographed several pieces for the Judson dance group. 85 Ulman’s work Excellences and Perfections was one of the first projects to be exhibited in the offline world. It was both part of Whitechapel’s show Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) and Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera in 2016. 86 Art Basel. (2015, January 20). Salon | Digital Talk | Instagram as an Artistic Medium [Video file]. Retrieved June 06, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PHAtm9Buk 41 project could be explained by that decrease in value, or could simply be a consequence of being too surprised or unprepared to give feedback. Added to that, those who are being accused of creating “hot girl art” are often not only publicly naked during their online performance, but are also blurring the boundaries between art and sex work by charging their viewers a fee. Leah Schrager, for example, is known for posting nude selfies on social media, yet is also involved in a long-running project called Naked Therapy, in which people can share their feelings to her alter ego Sarah White for a fee. The sessions take place via webcam, and the artist undresses over the course of the session, varying the process to the desires of the client.87 It remains difficult to distinguish between “sincerely” posted nude self imagery and nude imagery being posted by artists. One criticism that could be aimed at this work is that some of these artists do not create art that imitates life, but create images that show life itself. With the overload of not only nude in advertising and porn, but also posted by girls and women themselves, contemporary protest risks being taken less seriously. Work by Schrager also differs in another sense from the ’70s artists as VALIE EXPORT and Schneemann, as they confronted their audience in flesh and blood and thus contended with the sexualized female stranger on the screen that could be gazed upon from a safe distance. Work by contemporary artist Faith Holland also aims to do so as well, yet it is much easier to close a video on your computer or telephone screen, than to walk away from a person standing before you. We seem to experience what we are confronted by online as less real and as a consequence it could be that we will be touched or influenced less by that experience as well. What one must not forget as well is that VALIE EXPORT and Schneemann (and their contemporaries) were fighting institutional hurdles as well as feminine constructs. They disrupted public viewings and demanded the same position that male artists got. This additional layer of protest seems to be absent in contemporary artists such as Ulman, Schrager and Holland. Additionally, what has to be mentioned here as well is the phenomenon of the branding of feminism nowadays. Whereas many women did not want to be associated with the term feminist until a few years ago, nowadays it seems to have become a “buzzword”, something about which many people want to read, hear about and discuss. Whereas feminism in the ’70s was a form of personal and political emancipation, its popularity is now also used to sell products or services.

87 White, S. (n.d.). Naked Therapy. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://sarahwhitetherapy.com/naked-therapy 42

The advertising agencies are now not only selling us sex, but also feminism. Brands like Dove, Pantene and Always have all launched feminist campaigns that urges its female audience that as a user of their products they will be empowered.88 The contemporary art world, being market driven as well, has not lagged behind. During Art Basel Miami, many women-only shows dominated the fair, including Schragers project Art GirlTV, a Snapchat project that is run by a different woman artist each day and enforces only one rule: it must contain one selfie at the least.89 The fact that corporations are now using feminism to strengthen their brand may lead to question the sincerity of all who claim to pursue feminist ideals, which could possibly harm the credibility of all contemporary female artists.

88 Iqbal, N. (2015, October 12). Femvertising: how brands are selling #empowerment to women. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/12/femvertising-branded-feminism 89 R White, R. (2015, December 11). 'Hot Girl Art' Turns Heads at Art Basel Miami. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/hot-girl-art-turns-heads-at-art-basel-miami 43

7. Censorship

Social media hasn’t only become a fact of life for individuals to communicate with one another, it involves many more actors who all bring a different motive for engaging with others. As we’ve seen before, the internet is engrained with advertisements and while social media sites were ad- free in the early days, advertising is now a very common phenomenon. Using social media, just as most other sites, implies storing information about yourself not only concerning age, gender and location, it stores all your activity. Thus it has become really easy to direct advertisements to target groups, people that are more likely than others to purchase the product or service these advertisements promote. Not only commercial parties have joined the forces of social media though, we also see artists (being the early adaptors), governments and activists becoming involved. This does not only mean a greater amount of information and more opportunities to engage in collective action. This also means more regulations concerning the use of said platforms. Just a quick look at the terms of use as they are stated by Instagram shows the following: “You may not post violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive photos or other content via the Service”.90 And, in the guidelines:

1. Post your own photos and videos. 2. Keep your clothes on. 3. Be respectful. 4. Don’t spam. 5. HAVE FUN!. 91

Instagram, and YouTube and Facebook for that matter, are known for (temporarily) deleting accounts that do not keep to their rules. This can be executed after someone reports a post or the account, or when an Instagram employee decides it violates the rules. These rules, or terms, however, are still very much open to interpretation. What is hateful for one person, may not be interpreted as hateful for another. Concerning laws, they vary in a great degree when it comes to all different countries. On first look, it seems that Instagram does not execute the nudity rule in particular. When it comes to (partial) nudity, one only has to have to a quick look at a general overview of all posts to see that (partial) female nudity is omnipresent. Also, rule number two in the guidelines (“Keep

90 Instagram. (2013, January 19). Terms of Use. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from https://help.instagram.com/478745558852511 91 Instagram. (n.d.). Community Guidelines. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from https://help.instagram.com/477434105621119/ 44 you clothes on”) seems to give off a pejorative rhetoric, and could be resonant of the many commentaries that many feminist body artists as Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT received.92 Coupled with the last demand, says Magdalena Olszanowski, it implies that taking your clothes off is not fun and is therefore undesirable.93 Diving deeper in this matter, the question arises what kind of clothing is meant. What does partial nude mean, and what parts of the body are supposed to be covered? The longer version of the guidelines phrases does not get any more specific than this:

Remember that our community is a diverse one, and that your posts are visible to people as young as 13 years old. While we respect the artistic integrity of photos and videos, we have to keep our product and the content within it in line with our App Store’s rating for nudity and mature content. This includes photos, videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully- nude buttocks. It also includes some photos of female nipples, but photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding are allowed. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too.94

This implies that only explicitly sexual content will be reported and or deleted. The rules also however distinguish between a female and a male nipple, implying that showing an image of a female nipple is in itself a sexual act, and the showing of male nipples is not. This does not stand alone, as recently, in the off- and online world, heated discussions arose about the act of breastfeeding in public. Many are of the opinion that it should be discouraged or forbidden to breastfeed a baby in a public space, as it would be an inappropriate and embarrassing act to bare ones breast for others to see. So how do these rules apply to actual Instagram accounts of women? Olszanowski has researched three women engaged in self-representational practices on Instagram, who include their body in their posts, often in nude or mature ways, and the tactics they use to avoid censorship. What becomes clear is that the tactics they use to avoid censorship – such as covering the nude body with objects or body parts or removing certain pictures after a

92 Schneemann, C. (2002). Carolee Schneemann: Imaging her erotics : Essays, interviews, projects (Cambridge, NY: MIT Press), 223. 93 Olszanowski, M. (2014). Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing Sensorship. Visual Communication Quarterl, 21(2), 83-95. 94 Instagram. (2013, January 19). Terms of Use. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from https://help.instagram.com/478745558852511

45 short time – makes their body become fragmented. In their quest to express themselves freely, they, in consequence, have to fragmentize their narratives. One of these women is artist Petra Collins, who posted a picture of herself, where one could see her pubic hair emerging from her slightly lowered underwear, and in response had her Instagram account deleted [fig. 7]. In response, Collins posted an essay on her own website, where she questions the motivation of those who regulate images of female bodies:

I’m used to seeing cover after cover featuring stories about a popular celebrity being fat-shamed during pregnancy. I’m used to seeing reviews of an award show performance that critiques a female singer for being “slutty” but then fails to even mention the older male behind her. I’m used to reading articles about whole towns harassing a rape victim until she’s forced to leave. I don’t want to be used to this. I don’t want to have to see the same thing constantly. I don’t want to be desensitized to what’s happening around me all.the.time [… ] Through this removal I really felt how strong of a distrust and hate we have towards female bodies. The deletion of my account felt like a physical act, like the public coming at me with a razor, sticking their finger down my throat, forcing me to cover up, forcing me to succumb to societies image of beauty. That these very real pressures we face everyday can turn into literal censorship.95

Collins’s picture did not exactly break the nudity rules, though what probably led to the removal was the visibility of her pubic hair. From the rules of Instagram (just like Facebook’s and YouTube’s), the dichotomy between the innocent or corrupted girl arises yet again. You can (or should) “have fun” on Instagram, but as befits a truly innocent or good girl, you should not take off your clothes or you’ll be labeled a corrupted girl or a “slut”. It is difficult to fully disclose Instagram’s content management policies, and as a consequence it’s impossible to get a clear view of the amount of pictures or accounts being removed for containing mature content, let alone mature content that is removed because it did not comply to societal beauty standards or could be offensive. By the amount of reports of removal by people using Instagram one can tell that it happens enough for people to speak up about it, though. Surely, the reason of these “social media rules” could be to protect women from being objectified and from receiving aggressive or rude comments of others. One could wonder however, why the focus of censorship lies on women’s activity that can potentially be

95 Collins, P. (2013). Censorship and The Female Body. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.petracollins.com/?page_id=222 46 experienced as offensive, instead of the commentators leaving behind rude and sexually aggressive comments. Again, a clear view of what Instagram’s official numbers of censorship look like is not available, and said commentators are surely less likely to speak out about being censored, so we are left to individual reports being posted on blogs, news sites and on social media itself. But that censorship does occur, is clear, and that it in return occurs to artists being active online such as Petra Collins, as well. The freedom these artists can possibly gain from using social media to share their art actually runs the risk of exclusion.

7.1 Case Study – Rupi Kaur : Period. (2015)

Rupi Kaur (1992) is a Canadian based artist, mostly active on Instagram, where she not only posts her poetry but her photography as well. In her series about menstruation, titled Period., Kaur shot six pictures of a woman supposedly while being on her period and posted them on her Instagram account [fig. 8]. All pictures show the presence of blood in one way or another.96 What the viewer is shown ranges from a pair of feet standing over a shower drain with blood-spattered shower tiles to a woman lying in bed, her pants and bed sheets stained with blood. The series was created to “demystify women’s menstruation, which is seen as taboo, even as women are overtly sexualized without a second thought”.97 When Kaur posted her series online, she quickly discovered that the picture of the woman with the blood stained pants was deleted. In response, Kaur posted a statement on her Instagram and Facebook stating:

“thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. you deleted my photo twice stating that it goes against community guidelines”.98

Again, her picture did not break any of Instagram’s rules. The woman was fully clothed, and the picture does not contain a sexual act, violence or rudeness. It seems difficult to figure out in what category menstrual blood would fit, and apparently the people working for Instagram were not able to do as such either, as they issued the following statement: “when removing

96 Kaur has states that no real blood as been used for her project. 97 Kaur, R. (n.d.). period.. Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://www.rupikaur.com/period/ 98 Kaur, R. (n.d.). thank you Instagram [Facebook post]. Retrieved June 04, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/rupikaurpoetry/photos/a.523823527711928.1073741828.513614775399470/821302664630678/?type =3&theater

47 reported content from the Instagram community, we do not always get it right and we wrongly removed this image. As soon as we were made aware of this error, we restored the content”. This statement, however, does not take back the action of deleting said picture and does not address the rationale of it. Kaur’s work does not stand alone though, as it reminds us of Judy Chicago’s Red Flag, Menstruation Bathroom or Carolee Schneemann’s Blood Work Diary. And when it concerns performance art, the performance Menstruation Wait by Leslie Labowitz. Labowitz, during this performance, familiarized her audience with the female physical condition – openly expressing what she physically and psychologically experienced – while she was waiting for her period to start. This went on in the public area of the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles where Labowitz was studying at the time, and it almost led to her expulsion.99 Mako Idemitsu took a different confrontational stand with her video What a Woman Made, where an image of a bloody tampon leaving a trail of blood in a otherwise very clean toilet is layered with a male voice reading from the Japanese bestseller How to Raise Children wherein women are described as pieces of property, lacking talent and decisiveness. Comparing these several menstruation or period art pieces over time it seems that menstruation still is an enforced taboo playing around female sexuality and the female body. The female body still has the ability to horrify or disrupt, even in this age where we are oversaturated with (semi) naked female imagery. In many cases of the contemporary artists mentioned, their work was shown outside of the art world, and could therefore produce different responses compared to work by most artists from the ’70s as their work was performed or shown in a white cube or some other art institution. Yet, Instagram spokesman Kevin Systrom has mentioned that it is not only for “real selves” but also for “real art”. Instagram (and other social media) creates the possibility for individuals to create their own gallery, but always under their rules. Certain tactics to avoid censorship will help to regain some freedom of expression and sharpen their critique, making it a contemporary form of institutional critique. Either way, being active or creating work online does add the advantage of being able to reach a broad audience, a broader audience that artists in the ’70s were able to reach. By presenting their work on platforms that are not only filled with art related content it is possible to

99 Re.act.feminism. (n.d.). Leslie Labowitz Menstruation Wait. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from http://www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?l=lb&id=86&e= 48 reach an audience that is not specifically looking for art or artists, and the additional options to share and talk about content online makes it possible to create a ripple effect from there and add to the feminist discourse that is going on online. A critical note to this positive effect comes from Internet artist Jennifer Chan. She emphasizes that despite the great viewership, ironic webcam or photography projects use the very language that also serves as entertainment for male audiences (uptalking accents, high angle self-portraits), and risk creating an ambiguous (both disrupting and reaffirming) effect.100

100 Chan, J. (2011, April 06). Why Are There No Great Women Net Artists? Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://pooool.info/why-are-there-no-great-women-net-artists-2/(2011) 49

8. Status of female online art

When we talk about impact of offline work versus online work, internet art now seems to have the benefits to be able to reach a broader audience, an audience outside of art lovers and critics, than the offline work as it was presented in the ’70s. Though, even if work is not presented online, offline work does find its way to an online audience more and more often nowadays. Most media and news outlets are now mostly active online, and the everyday use of smartphones with built-in cameras together with the popularity of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat has lead to an increase of online sharing of museum and gallery experiences.101 This has lead to sharing and communicating experiences concerning art that extend the reach of museums, galleries and other white cubes. Museums and other art institutions are becoming more active online themselves as well. The museum has gone online, taking all offline works with it. Next to the general visibility of offline and online works, however, there is the issue of status of the artist, what in itself causes some works to be more visible (inside the art world and outside) than others. By circumventing the traditional dominance of the art galleries and museums, internet art not only freed itself from many restrictions, but also from the claim of a certain status within the art world. Within this form of art, however, we also find the specific genre of women internet artists, who seem to have a different status from male internet artists. While some internet artists who do not specifically identify as a female artist will perhaps not agree to the need of this binary between female and male artists, others – who are often in the practice of posing questions about female perspectives in relation to femininity and masculinity – do. What we find is a underrepresentation of female artists in new media and web-based art exhibitions, as described by internet artist Jennifer Chan in her essay “Why Are There No Great Women Net Artists?”.102 Despite it not being a broad research, Chan carried out a brief count of female internet artists participating in internet related shows in major art institutions. Here we consistently see fewer female than male artists being represented. In the first ever YouTube biennale at the Guggenheim museum in 2010 for example, only seven out of twenty-five artists were female. An exception of her unbalanced findings however is the New Museum. They not

101 Weilenmann, A., Hillman, T., & Jungselius, B. (2013). Instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing. In C. CHI 2013 (Ed.), CHI '13 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1843-1852). New York, NY: ACM. 102 Chan, J. (2011, April 06). Why Are There No Great Women Net Artists? Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://pooool.info/why-are-there-no-great-women-net-artists-2/(2011) 50 only selected nine female artists out of twenty-three during their exposition FREE in 2010, their affiliate Rhizome has given out two Prix Net Art prices out of four to (partly) female artists (duos).103 With Rhizome being the leading Internet art institution of this time, these numbers could signal positive changes for the position of female artists. And while Claire Bishop might disagree,104 the fact that Rhizome now is the affiliate of a renowned museum such as the New Museum could be a positive signal for Internet art in general. According to Chan, questions about gender equality will remain a second priority as long as internet artists and curators are unclear about the visibility and status of internet art in the gallery. In implementing internet art in an offline gallery or museum, the quest of content and process seems to be a bigger issue, as is authorship and ownership. Often, online works shown in an offline gallery lose their interactive dimensions. In one review published by Artforum on the exhibition Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), it is mentioned that Ulman’s work is represented by “only two large-scale, painterly reproductions in Instagram posts, each showing the artist taking an exaggerated selfie”, a curatorial choice which can lead to giving much more of a “narcissistic repetition of the sexed mechanisms of online social exposure than a critique of them”.105 The question of gender equality isn’t solely an issue for the internet art world, though, but an issue for the art world in general. Women are still underrepresented in the art world. Of all artists represented by US galleries today, only thirty percent is female.106 And, by the count of the Guerilla Girls in 2012, despite the amount of women on display, less than four percent of the artists in the modern art collection of the Metropolitan Museum were female.107 Added to that, perhaps unsurprisingly, gender inequality in elite newspaper coverage of arts and culture (in the Netherlands, Germany, France and the United States) has not decreased between 1955-2005.108 This means that, in 2005, art critics were not writing more about female artists than they were during the seventies.

103 Prix Net Art. (n.d.). Prix Net Art. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://prix-netart.org/2015-winners-of-the-prix-net-art/ 104 In 2013, Artforum published the essay “Whatever Happened to Digital Art?” by Claire Bishop, where she states that mainstream contemporary art has been unresponsive to the digital revolution. 105 Stakemeier, K. (2016). Electronic Superhighway. Artforum, 22-23. 106 Davis, B. (2015, June 23). Why Are There Still So Few Successful Female Artists? Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://news.artnet.com/market/female-artists-pay-gap-307951 107 Guerrilla Girls. (n.d.). naked through the ages. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from http://www.guerrillagirls.com/naked-through-the- ages 108 Berkers, P., Verboord, M., & Weij, F. (2016). “These critics (still) don’t write enough about women artists”: gender inequality in the newspaper Coverage of arts and Culture in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Gender & Society, 20(10), 1-25.

9. Conclusion

In this thesis, I’ve researched women internet artist critique on gendered embodiment in relation to their predecessors, female performance artists in the ’70s. The intention was to first investigate whether gender (construction) plays a different role in the online world compared to the offline world, and if it is possible to leave the physical body behind when one goes online. Furthermore the way contemporary artists choose to protest contemporary culture and its sexual objectification of women was investigated by means of several case-studies and compared to some case-studies from the seventies. Firstly, what was found is that we did not simply leave behind our bodies and constructs when we entered the online world through our computers or smartphones. On the earliest online communicational platforms, such as MUDs, interaction already played out under gender pronouns. These interactions on one specific MUD platform quickly led to the first reported “online rape case” in the year 1993. This leads to careful suspicions that the power structure between men and women was taken over from the offline world and helped shape the online world. Following the time line until recent research around online advertisements and pornography, this suspicion was reinforced even more. A large amount of pornography shows men handling women in derogatory ways, and online advertisements have followed the line of print and TV ads by over-representing women in decorative and traditional roles, and often showing a distorted female body image. Internet has also, however, created more opportunities to call out sexism and misogyny in everyday cultural expressions such as literature, film, television and advertising. Critique on this image of the distorted and passive female figure, by artists such as Faith Holland, has the ability to create awareness about these issues as it is placed directly in popular culture: on a pornographic site. Taking into account that her work received mainly sexual responses by male viewers, however, it will have a hard time creating said awareness. Though these responses are deemed “uninteresting” by the maker, and seem to be the opposite of the response she aims for, this initial attention is very important. It can trigger people to share her work on social media, blogs or (art) news sites, which is needed to reach a broader audience. What complicates the attainment of a bigger audience outside of the porn site she has posted it on, is that exhibitions around internet art are scarce and female (internet) artists are still underrepresented. 52

When we compare her work to Fuses by Schneemann, we see that both their works are interpreted as pornographic while both diverge in their own way from regular pornographic material. While for Schneemann this caused her work not to be shown in a regular film festival reducing the audience able to see her work, by presenting her work in the art world it was picked up by critics and found its way to the Western art canon. By choosing to “exhibit” her work online, and on a porno site specifically, Holland is able to reach an audience outside of the art world, as is Hirsch’s, Ulman’s and Kaur’s work. And even if their work has less of a chance to be taken seriously by the art world, as it is not presented in, and translates difficultly to the white cube, the place where art critics move about more easily than the online space, we do now see that changing slowly as more and more of their work is being exposed in offline art institutions such as Tate Modern. Secondly, the rise of social media and its entanglement in our offline world has led to even less possibilities and perhaps less of an inclination to escape our gender, race or location. The rise of visual self-representation together with the visual female imagery of advertising and pornography that presents them as passive and sexually objectified has led to concerns around females presenting themselves online. And while it could be problematic that women may express this supposedly internalized male gaze in this new era of self-representation online, it seems equally important to point to the underlying tendency to censor women’s sexuality. The inclination to disapprove of and censor women’s sexuality was already apparent in the cases of VALIE EXPORT and Carolee Schneemann, and is seen again in the case of Kaur and some of her contemporaries. That it is as easy to fake an identity or acts online (Amalia Ulman) as it is offline is shown by the remaining rumors that VALIE EXPORT’s performance Action Pants: Genital Panic actually never happened at all. The online world perhaps does not simply mirror the offline world, yet it does seem to do so in increasing ways now. This is illustrated by the way we now handle negative commentary and aggressive debates online. Increased visibility by social media and our increased experience of the online and offline entanglement may have helped realizing that we are not disembodied beings removed from our physical body. By interacting with each other with the awareness of that physical body in mind, seems to have led to a decrease of the dis-inhibition effect the online world apparently gave rise to. And when even porn sites, where users fancy themselves being as 53 anonymous as can be, now start to speak out to its users in political ways, we can cautiously expect a different way of interacting with each other online. All in all it seems we have been unable to escape patriarchy when the new online world was created. Where at first this new space or environment seemed so much more democratic, free and equal than the offline world, we saw the freedom being restricted fairly soon and the internet started to look like our offline society. This included the placement of imagery of passive and sexually objectified women, while censoring women who choose to present themselves in a more or less sexual way. It seems that a woman who exhibits her arousal remains a greater threat than the man who chooses to do so. Still, this online environment provides for women and artists to take control of their own image in a different way than in the offline world. Women internet artists place their protest not against the system, as most artists did in the seventies, but take on the system from within by placing their performances in the system that produces unrealistic images, in popular culture. They are, in theory, able to reach a bigger audience outside the art world, which could lead to a bigger awareness around sexual domination of patriarchy. And if the developments of increased interplay between the off- and online world continue to develop, the interconnected audience that they reach could potentially create a more broad effect – in the art world, mass culture and everyday life – than their inspirations and ancestors were able to in their time. How the digital and internet art world will develop, is still hard to say. During video footage of Art Basel 2016, director Marc Spiegler emphasizes the rise of digital art, with internet art being a part of, and philosophizes that “the question is more about how much these artists want to be a part of the art world and how much they will define their own art world where authorship and ownership is less important than collaboration and production?”.109 For that answer, we can only wait and see.

109 Spiegler, M. (2016, June 13). From selfies to virtual reality, how technology is changing the art world. Retrieved June 14, 2016, from http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/13/arts/marc-spiegler-cnn-style-guest-editor/ 54

Discussion and recommendations

It is important to note that the main focuses of this thesis were the construction of femininity, the visibility of women on (the online) screen and the responses to their presence. The theory and female artists and the accompanying critique that was discussed, however, did not take into account that equality between women themselves has yet to be attained. Many white internet artists and theorists seem to claim a universal female experience, by talking about “the female body” online, thereby ignore the ongoing exclusion of women of color, trans and disabled people from the feminist movement. When looking at exhibitions that focus on this subject specifically, black women internet artists are underrepresented. For instance, the online exhibition Body Anxiety curated by Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan, that was concerned with the politics of the gaze online, featured a variety of artists “who examine gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the Internet” only featured two black artists out of the twenty-one selected.110 Together with the ongoing – and very heated – debates on racism and discrimination in the United States and in The Netherlands, the implication that different politics are concerned when it comes to black lives and black bodies arises. Some ethnical groups and black people have had a very different and much slower process of emancipation. The same, in greater or lesser extent, applies to trans, non-binary and disabled bodies. The wish to take in and research these additional politics and the implications arose quite early in the process of writing this thesis. However, to do justice to the exploration of this discourse and include it in the already extensive discussion that was needed for this, additional research and more time was needed. As was mentioned in the first chapter though, feminism has become more intersectional, which enables more solidarity with other social justice movements. In my opinion, it is important that we become aware of all inequalities, in the art world and outside. When attending some gatherings on racism and colonialism in and outside the art world this year, it left me with the feeling that the aim of resolving these issues need priority before all women can address the more general gender inequality. I also think that the issues around sexism, racism and discrimination set some challenges to artists, curators and critics. Feminism has a long and rich history in the art world, and joining forces with other social activist groups would create the

110 Chan, J., & Schrager, L. (2015, January 24). About. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from http://bodyanxiety.com/about/

55 opportunity to empower everyone. Furthermore, no male internet artists were mentioned or analyzed in this thesis. Their view of contemporary culture would have added additional insights when compared to their female contemporaries. Though his work is not based in internet culture, Jon Rafman, for example, made a variety of digital post-internet works that explore the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness. Taken into account the limitations explained above, it is crucial that more investigation on the critique of gender embodiment in a system of patriarchal sexual domination needs to include not online (straight) white cis women, but also women of color, trans-women and men, and disabled. After all, all interpretations and views of this system are needed to contribute to a heightened awareness and change.

References

J Adams, C. (2015). The Pornography of Meat. New York, NY: Lantern Books. Amis, M. (2001, March 17). A rough trade. Retrieved May 25, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1 Art Basel. (2015, January 20). Salon | Digital Talk | Instagram as an Artistic Medium [Video file]. Retrieved June 06, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PHAtm9Buk Banet-Weiner, S. (2012). AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press) Baumgardner, J. (2011). F ’em!: Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press) Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing (London, UK: Penguin Books) Berkers, P., Verboord, M., & Weij, F. (2016). “These critics (still) don’t write enough about women artists”: gender inequality in the newspaper Coverage of arts and Culture in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Gender & Society, 20(10), 1-25. Bernard, P., Gervais, S., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2011). Integrating Sexual Objectification With Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science issue, 23(5), 469-471. Beyer, J. (2012). Womens’s (Dis)embodied Engagement with Male-Dominated Online Communities. In G. Radhika (ed.) Cyberfeminism 2.0 (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.) Blocker, J. (2004). What the Body Costs: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press) BOMB Magazine. (2009, September 11). Barbara Kruger interviewed by Richard Prince. Retrieved June 03, 2016, from http://blog.art21.org/2009/09/11/barbara-kruger- interviewed-by-richard-prince/#.V2KxaDckNEU Bosma, J. (2011). Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam, Nederland: NAi Publishers) Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. (New York, NY: Routledge) Chadwick, W. (1995). Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (London, UK: Rivers Oram Press) 57

Chan, J. (2011, April 06). Why Are There No Great Women Net Artists? Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://pooool.info/why-are-there-no-great-women-net-artists-2/(2011) Chan, J., & Schrager, L. (2015, January 24). About. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from http://bodyanxiety.com/about/ Collins, P. (2013). Censorship and The Female Body. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.petracollins.com/?page_id=222 Cook, I. (2006). Western Heterosexual Masculinity, Anxiety, and Web Porn. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 14(1), 47-63 Cornell, L. (2006, February 9). Net results: Closing the gap between art and life online. Retrieved March 26, 2016, from http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/net-result Davis, B. (2015, June 23). Why Are There Still So Few Successful Female Artists? Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://news.artnet.com/market/female-artists-pay-gap-307951 Dekel, T. (2013). Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing) Dibbell, J. (1993, 23 december). A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html S Dobson, A. (2015). Postfeminist Digital Cultures (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan) Dworkin, A. (1981). Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York, NY: Putnam) Facebook. (n.d.). Community Standards. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards# Farmer, S. (2016, January 24). AMALIA ULMAN BRINGS PERFORMANCEART TO INSTAGRAM. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from http://www.papermag.com/amalia-ulman- instagram-performance-art-1570060560.html Fredrickson, B., & Roberts, L. (2006). Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173- 206. Fuchs, C. (2011). New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance. Sociology Compass, 10(5), 134-147. Gayle, R. (1984). Pleasure and Danger (New York, NY: Routledge) Gaze, D. (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists (London, UK: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers) Guerrilla Girls. (n.d.). naked through the ages. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from http://www.guerrillagirls.com/naked-through-the-ages 58

Hawkes, G., & Egan, R. (2012). Sexuality, youth and the perils of endangered innocence: How history can help us get past the panic. Gender and Education, 24(3), 269-284. Hayles, K. (1996). Embodied virtuality: Or how to put bodies back into the picture. In M. Moser & D. MacLeod (eds.), Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (New York, NY: MIT Press) Hirsch, A. (n.d.). Bio. Retrieved June 06, 2016, from http://therealannhirsch.com/info.html Ho, Y. (2012, May 10). Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon. Retrieved May 12, 2016, from http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/10/shu-lea-cheang-on-brandon/ Hughes, V. (n.d.). Were the First Artists Mostly Women? Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest- neolithic-cave-art/ Instagram. (2013, January 19). Terms of Use. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from https://help.instagram.com/478745558852511 Iqbal, N. (2015, October 12). Femvertising: how brands are selling #empowerment to women. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/12/femvertising-branded-feminism Kaur, R. (n.d.). period.. Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://www.rupikaur.com/period/ Kaur, R. (n.d.). thank you Instagram [Facebook post]. Retrieved June 04, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/rupikaurpoetry/photos/a.523823527711928.1073741828.5136 14775399470/821302664630678/?type=3&theater Kinsey, C. (2016, March 07). The Instagram artist who fooled thousands. Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160307-the-instagram-artist-who-fooled- thousands Koole, M., & Parchoma, G. (2013). The Web of Identity: A Model of Digital Identity Formation in Networked Learning Environments. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Lerner, G. (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy. (New York and Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press) MacKay, N., & Covell, K. (1997). The Impact of Women in Advertisements on Attitudes Toward Women. Sex Roles, 36(9), 573-583. MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only Words (Cambridge, NY: Harvard University Press.) 59

Manchester, E. (2007, March). Action Pants: Genital Panic. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/export-action-pants-genital-panic-p79233/text- summary A Markus, T. (2002). Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopia’s?. In A. Bingaman, L. Sanders and Rebecca Zorach, Embodied Utopia’s: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (pp. 15 -32 ). New York, NY: Routledge. Mead, R. (2014, September 01). The Troll Slayer. Retrieved June 05, 2016, from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/troll-slayer Moreland, Q. (2015, August 29). Forty Years of Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll”. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://hyperallergic.com/232342/forty-years-of-carolee- schneemanns-interior-scroll Moye, D. (2016, April 11). Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users Due To State’s Anti-LGBT Laws. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/porn-site- bans-north-carolina-users-due-to-states-anti-lgbt-laws_us_570bd057e4b0885fb50d9a92 Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, NY: Palgrave) Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, 69, 22-39. Olszanowski, M. (2014). Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing Sensorship. Visual Communication Quarterl, 21(2), 83-95. Parker, R., & Pollock, G. (2013). Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (2nd ed.) (London, UK: I.B. Tauris) Phiri, A., & Milatovic, M. (2014). Dis(re)membering bodies: disability and self-constitution in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. In S. Wiseman, Assembling Identities (London, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing) Prix Net Art. (n.d.). Prix Net Art. Retrieved June 07, 2016, from https://prix-netart.org/2015- winners-of-the-prix-net-art/ Ramey, K., & Serra, M. (2007). Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann. In R. Blaetz, Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (London, UK: Duke University Press) Re.act.feminism. (n.d.). Leslie Labowitz Menstruation Wait. Retrieved July 26, 2016, from http://www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?l=lb&id=86&e= 60

Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2011). Schizoid subjectivities? Re-theorizing teen girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualization’. Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 389-409. Rheingold, H. (1994). The Virtual Community (New York, NY: Harper Collins) Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (London, UK: Duke University Press) Saltz, J. (n.d.). Where Are All the Women? Retrieved June 07, 2015, from http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/40979/ G Schmith, B. (2000). Global Feminisms Since 1945 (NY, NY: Routledge) Schneemann, C. (2002). Carolee Schneemann: Imaging her erotics : Essays, interviews, projects (Cambridge, NY: MIT Press) Schneir, M. (1994). Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (NY, NY: Random House) Spiegler, M. (2016, June 13). From selfies to virtual reality, how technology is changing the art world. Retrieved June 14, 2016, from http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/13/arts/marc- spiegler-cnn-style-guest-editor/ Schopenhauer, A. (2005). On the Suffering of the world (London, UK: Penguin UK) Stakemeier, K. (2016). Electronic Superhighway. Artforum, pp. 22-23. Stith, D. (2011). Homemaker to Seductress: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in Online Embedded Advertisements (Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects). Retrieved from http://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=etds Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321-326. The Guardian. (2016, April 12). The dark side of Guardian comments. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian- comments Tickner, L. (1978). The body politic: female sexuality & women artists since 1970. Art History, 1(2), 236-251. Time Spent Online (January - June 2015) Read more at http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/time-spent-online-january-june- 2015#IWiv3hpiCd0CMEbY.99. (2015, September 08). Retrieved from http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/time-spent-online-january-june-2015 Walker, R. (1992). Becoming the third wave. Ms. Magazine, 11(2), 39-41. 61

Weilenmann, A., Hillman, T., & Jungselius, B. (2013). Instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing. In C. CHI 2013 (Ed.), CHI '13 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1843-1852). New York, NY: ACM. White, M. (2006). The body and the screen: theories of internet spectatorship (Cambridge, NY: The MIT Press) R White, R. (2015, December 11). 'Hot Girl Art' Turns Heads at Art Basel Miami. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/hot-girl-art-turns-heads-at-art-basel- miami White, S. (n.d.). Naked Therapy. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://sarahwhitetherapy.com/naked-therapy

List of figures

Figure 1

VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic. 1969. Screenprints. Photographed by Peter Hassman. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: The Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/06/02/action-pants-genital-panic/ (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 2

Shu Lea Cheang. Brandon. 1998-1999. Screenshot. Collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. From: Guggenheim Museum, http://brandon.guggenheim.org (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 3

Carolee Schneemann. Fuses. 1964-1967. 16mm film transferred to video (color, silent). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From: the Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/collection/works/109935 (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 4

Faith Holland. Porn Interventions. 2014. Online video. Available from: http://www.faithholland.com/portfolio_page/porn-interventions/ (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 5

Ann Hirsch. Scandalishious (Caroline + Heart). 2008-2009. YouTube video. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/user/scandalishious (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 6

Amalia Ulman. Excellences and Perfections. 2014. Instagram post. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/amaliaulman/?hl=en (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 7

Petra Collins. 2013. Photograph. Available from: http://www.petracollins.com/?page_id=222 (accessed July 26, 2016).

Figure 8

Rupi Kaur. 2015. Instagram post. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/p/0ovWwJHA6f/?taken-by=rupikaur_&hl=en (accessed July 26, 2016).