Gendered Embodiment in Internet Culture the Practice of Women Internet Artists in Twenty-First Century Patriarchy
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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 2 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. 3 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 4 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