Laughing at Our Inadequacies: Contemporary Cartoonish Painting, Internet Culture and the Tragicomic Character

Home , Alice the Goon, Bittersweet World, Eugene the Jeep, Internet art, Maria Lassnig, Nicole Eisenman

Amber Boardman

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of Art and Design

Faculty of Art and Design

October 2018 Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname Boardman Given Name Amber Degree PhD Faculty Art and Design School Art and Design Thesis Title Laughing at Our Inadequacies: Contemporary Cartoonish Painting, Internet Culture and the Tragicomic Character

Abstract

This practice-based project examines ‘cartoonish painting’, an emerging trend of contemporary figurative painting which draws on links between cartoons, humour, narrative, character and bodily transformation. In my practice, cartoonish painting depicts and comments on the endless desire to transform body and self as promoted by Internet culture and social media. This thesis argues that the social media driven desire for self-improvement—bodily alteration and transformations of the self—creates a tragicomic effect that unfolds through the devices of narrative and character. I examine the still influential, Romantic theory of character developed by William James. James articulated well-rounded characters evolve over time through a series of identifications with external others. This thesis proposes that James’s formulations about character retain currency, as people identify with depictions of idealised bodies, high-performing and socially sanctioned selves disseminated through the Internet. This thesis argues, however, that this aspirational selfhood and identifying with idealised others creates feelings of inadequacy. The ideology of a striving, perfected self in search of the ‘American Dream’ will be analysed through Henri Bergson’s theory of the comic. Bergson argued that the failure of machine-like pursuits uncontrolled by consciousness can be manifested through comic depictions of the human body. This thesis argues that the objectification of oneself in meme culture, in which people make themselves the butt of jokes, inverts the superiority theory of humour which contends that the person telling the joke dominates the person being laughed at. This thesis analyses cartoonish characters presented in works of Philip Guston, Dana Schutz, Tala Madani and Maria Lassnig for their depiction of striving and often bumbling comic characters subject to both bodily and character transformations. My paintings involve two characters, whose painted narrative also exist as a network of social media feeds and posts on Instagram. The paintings explore the desire to display a curated persona online by appropriating models from Internet culture and the drive to constantly improve oneself as trends and fads endlessly change. The effect of this is described as simultaneously comic and tragic.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

24 August 2018 John Paul Kessell ********************************** ************************************ ********************************** Date Signature Witness Signature

The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award:

i Inclusion of Publications Statement

UNSW is supportive of candidates publishing their research results during their candidature as detailed in the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure.

Publications can be used in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter if: • The student contributed greater than 50% of the content in the publication and is the “primary author”, ie. the student was responsible primarily for the planning, execution and preparation of the work for publication • The student has approval to include the publication in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter from their supervisor and Postgraduate Coordinator. • The publication is not subject to any obligations or contractual agreements with a third party that would constrain its inclusion in the thesis

Please indicate whether this thesis contains published material or not. This thesis contains no publications, either published or submitted for ☒ publication

Some of the work described in this thesis has been published and it has ☐ been documented in the relevant Chapters with acknowledgement

This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ☐ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: • I have complied with the Thesis Examination Procedure • where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy) Amber Boardman 24/08/18

Postgraduate Coordinator’s Declaration I declare that: • the information below is accurate • where listed publication(s) have been used in lieu of Chapter(s), their use complies with the Thesis Examination Procedure • the minimum requirements for the format of the thesis have been met. PGC’s Name PGC’s Signature Date (dd/mm/yy) Uros Cvoro 24/08/18

ii Statement of Originality

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

iii COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT

'I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.'

Abstract

This thesis argues that the social media driven desire for self-improvement—bodily alteration and transformations of the self—creates a tragicomic effect that unfolds through the devices of narrative and character. I examine the still influential, Romantic theory of character developed by William James. James articulated well-rounded characters evolve over time through a series of identifications with external others. This thesis proposes that James’s formulations about character retain currency, as people identify with depictions of idealised bodies, high-performing and socially sanctioned selves disseminated through the Internet. This thesis argues, however, that this aspirational selfhood and identifying with idealised others creates feelings of inadequacy. The ideology of a striving, perfected self in search of the ‘American Dream’ will be analysed through Henri Bergson’s theory of the comic. Bergson argued that the failure of machine-like pursuits uncontrolled by consciousness can be manifested through comic depictions of the human body. This thesis argues that the objectification of oneself in meme culture, in which people make themselves the butt of jokes, inverts the superiority theory of humour which contends that the person telling the joke dominates the person being laughed at.

This thesis analyses cartoonish characters presented in works of Philip Guston, Dana Schutz, Tala Madani and Maria Lassnig for their depiction of striving and often bumbling comic characters subject to both bodily and character transformations.

My paintings involve two characters, whose painted narrative also exist as a network of social media feeds and posts on Instagram. The paintings explore the desire to display a curated persona online by appropriating models from Internet culture and the drive to constantly improve oneself as trends and fads endlessly change. The effect of this is described as simultaneously comic and tragic.

Acknowledgements

As anyone who has enjoyed the character building process of completing a PhD thesis will know, there are so many people who provide guidance, support, encouragement and love without which this vast undertaking would have ended differently or not at all.

If not for the patient, kind and loving support of my solid rock of a partner JP Kessell at every step of the way, I would have never finished this project. In fact, I never would have moved to Australia and embarked on a PhD in the first place if not for him. He is truly a force for good in this world and in my life.

I will be forever indebted to David Eastwood, an early supervisor who patiently endured my seemingly interminable wandering from idea to idea, and who then, skilfully, gently and kindly, helped me find my way into settling on cartoonish painting as a central pillar on which to construct my thesis. Without David’s help I may have become one of those poor souls lost in the PhD desert, wandering aimlessly around the dunes for years.

Dr. Toni Ross, my supervisor, has been an absolute tower of intellectual strength, a deep and sustaining well of insightful comments and edits, generously and ardently dispensed, always pressing me to make the tome better. Any rigour and clarity discernible in this thesis can be accredited to her.

Dr. Rochelle Haley, my supervisor, has contributed her guidance generously, always ready to read yet another draft or discuss ways to move over, under, around or through yet another apparently insurmountable roadblock on the path to thesis completion. Rochelle, your unwavering support of my efforts has been so very much appreciated.

Laurie Watel and Louis Corrigan, my dear friends, essentially family, in Atlanta, provided emotional support during the darkest hours of this journey, as they have done for me, with unbounded love, so often in the past. My great friend Liron Gilmore was always ready to provide empathy, encouragement, and a sense of humour over endless phone calls, while my friend Alice Grundy held my hand at just the right moments and cast a seasoned publisher’s eye over the work. My studio-mates at Bushwick South were always ready to lend an ear and cast their eyes over the developing paintings. I want to thank my siblings, my mother and mi querida Jackie Levi for regularly checking in over the course of this project and helping me to keep going.

Capstone Editing provided copyediting and proofreading services, as per guidelines laid out in the university-endorsed national ‘Guidelines for Editing Research Theses’.

Table of Contents

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet ...... i Inclusion of Publications Statement ...... ii Statement of Originality ...... iii Abstract ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v List of Figures ...... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Background ...... 3 1.2 Methodology ...... 5 1.3 Process ...... 9 1.4 Thesis Structure ...... 11 Chapter 2: Cartoonish Painting ...... 13 2.1 Characteristics of Cartoonish Painting ...... 14 2.2 Cartoonish Painting in Contemporary Art ...... 17 2.3 Philip Guston ...... 30 2.4 Dana Schutz ...... 37 2.5 Tala Madani ...... 42 2.6 Maria Lassnig ...... 46 2.7 Conclusion ...... 50 Chapter 3: The Tragicomic Character in Internet Beauty Culture ...... 52 3.1 Theories of Character ...... 53 3.2 Humour, Tragedy and the Tragicomic ...... 59 3.3 The American Dream Machine ...... 64 3.4 Internet Beauty Culture ...... 68 3.5 Internet Memes ...... 77 3.6 Conclusion ...... 84 Chapter 4: Cartoonish Painting and the Social Media Feed ...... 87 4.1 @jadefad: A Social Media Feed in Paint ...... 91 4.2 Social Media Narrative Conventions...... 104 4.3 Conclusion ...... 111 Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 113 References ...... 118

List of Figures

Figure 2-1: ‘Self-Portrait of the Manifold Worries of a Manifoldly Distressed Artist’ (Murakami 2012) (detail) ...... 15 Figure 2-2: ‘Head and Bottle’ (Guston 1975) (detail) ...... 16 Figure 2-3: ‘L’Ellipse’ (‘The Ellipsis’) (Magritte 1948) ...... 18 Figure 2-4: ‘Woman’ (de Kooning 1950) ...... 19 Figure 2-5: ‘Picture for the Fathers’ (Baselitz 1965)...... 20 Figure 2-6: ‘Night in Day’ (Schutz 2002) ...... 20 Figure 2-7: ‘Breakup’ (Eisenman 2011) ...... 21 Figure 2-8: ‘Self-Portrait with Friend’ (Tyson 2011) ...... 22 Figure 2-9: ‘Birdwatcher’ (Sillman 2004) ...... 23 Figure 2-10: ‘Threat’ (Williams 2009) ...... 23 Figure 2-11: ‘Roommate Trouble’ (Juliano-Villani 2013) ...... 24 Figure 2-12: ‘Father’ (Rauch 2007) ...... 25 Figure 2-13: ‘Mascara Game Strong’ (Boardman 2016) ...... 26 Figure 2-14: ‘Fascinator Discomfort’ (Boardman 2016)...... 27 Figure 2-15: ‘Lips N’ Tits’ (Boardman 2013) ...... 28 Figure 2-16: ‘Resting Bitch Hair’ (Boardman 2016) ...... 29 Figure 2-17: ‘Where Are They Now: Patrick’ (Boardman 2015) ...... 30 Figure 2-18: ‘Drawing for Conspirators’ (Guston 1930) ...... 33 Figure 2-19: ‘Martial Memory’ (Guston 1941) ...... 33 Figure 2-20: ‘Bad Habits’ (Guston 1970) ...... 34 Figure 2-21: ‘Aggressor’ (Guston 1978) ...... 36 Figure 2-22: ‘Teen Tone’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 36 Figure 2-23: ‘Reclining Nude’ (Schutz 2002) ...... 38 Figure 2-24: ‘The Breeders’ (Schutz 2002) ...... 38 Figure 2-25: ‘Face-Eater’ (Schutz 2004) ...... 40 Figure 2-26: ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’ (Boardman 2018) (detail 1) ...... 41 Figure 2-27: ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’ (Boardman 2018) (detail 2) ...... 42 Figure 2-28: ‘Diving in Cake’ (Madani 2006) ...... 43 Figure 2-29: ‘Pink Cake’ (Madani 2008) ...... 44 Figure 2-30: ‘Preparing for summer with some spray tan research @paintjobbod today ; )’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 46

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Figure 2-31: ‘Sci-Fi Self-Portrait’ (Lassnig 1995) ...... 49 Figure 2-32: ‘Electric Self-Portrait’ (Lassnig 1993) ...... 49 Figure 2-33: ‘Hair Loss and Eyelash Extensions’ (Boardman 2016) ...... 50 Figure 3-1: ‘Experiencing some middle aged gravity out on the yoga mat today :/ #ThatPrincessHairTho’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 57 Figure 3-2: ‘Eyeliner Competition’ (Boardman 2015) ...... 58 Figure 3-3: Example of Eyeliner Trends ...... 59 Figure 3-4: ‘Be your own plastic surgeon #WatchOutWorld!’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 64 Figure 3-5: ‘Self Care Exhaustion’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 68 Figure 3-6: Example of Meitu Digital Filter Retouch ...... 72 Figure 3-7: Plastic Surgery, Before (Left) and After (Right) ...... 73 Figure 3-8: Example of a Glamour Shot Photo ...... 75 Figure 3-9: ‘Before and after glamour shots’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 75 Figure 3-10: ‘Renovated Painting’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 77 Figure 3-11: ‘Where Did All Your Money Go’ Meme ...... 79 Figure 3-12: Better Without Makeup Meme ...... 80 Figure 3-13: ‘I’ve Had This Container’ Meme...... 81 Figure 3-14: Example of the ‘Philosoraptor’ Meme Format (Know Your Meme 2008) ...... 82 Figure 3-15: ‘Me Trying to Excel’ Meme ...... 84 Figure 4-1: “Excellences & Perfections”, (Ulman 2014) ...... 89 Figure 4-2: Miquela Sousa ...... 90 Figure 4-3: ‘Makeup Bus Commute Mashup Fail’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 92 Figure 4-4: ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’ (Boardman 2018)...... 93 Figure 4-5: ‘Me at the “45 and Over Awards” beauty pageant #NewLookWhoDis’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 95 Figure 4-6: ‘That time I caught Blob wearing my beanbag dress’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 98 Figure 4-7: ‘#GrilledPainting That time Blob knocked back too many cold ones and fell into the grill on the 4th of July #StarsAndStripesForever #AmericanDream’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 99 Figure 4-8: ‘Paint rags in a landfill. RIP Blob. #YouWillBeMissed’ (Boardman 2017) ...... 100 Figure 4-9: ‘Hope you liked my Blob saga! :) Check out my new line of painted sweaters! DM for purchase #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 101 Figure 4-10: ‘The Goals AF Sweater #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 102 Figure 4-11: ‘The Singularity Sweater #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’ (Boardman 2018) ...... 104 Figure 4-12: ‘Feeling Nothing at Major Life Events’ (Boardman 2016) ...... 109 Figure 4-13: Installation View of ‘Titlist’ at Chalk Horse, Sydney in 2016 ...... 110 Figure 4-14: ‘Dad Inspects Your Dye Job’ (Boardman 2016) ...... 111

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Cartoon forms have been adopted in a range of contemporary painting practices, drawing on links between cartoons and humour, narrative and bodily transformation. These forms refer to cartoon animation, comics and single panel cartoons. This practice-based research investigates how this emerging pictorial trend—cartoonish painting, which can be defined in visual terms as deploying the language of cartoon forms—can be used to depict and comment on the desire to transform the body and the self, as promoted by Internet culture and social media. This thesis argues that the consequences of this desire for self- improvement—bodily alteration and transformations of the self—may be interpreted as creating a tragicomic effect that unfolds through the devices of narrative and character. The thesis examines the still influential Romantic theory of character developed by William James in the late nineteenth century. James articulated well-rounded characters or selves as not fully formed from the beginning, but as evolving over time through a series of identifications with external others. Transferring James’ formulations about character to the present, the thesis proposes that the subjects of such identifications may be depictions of idealised bodies, high-performing and socially sanctioned selves disseminated through the Internet. This thesis argues, however, that the flip side of this aspirational selfhood is the creation of feelings of inadequacy or failure arising from the process of identifying with idealised others. The ideology of a striving, perfected self in search of the ‘American Dream’ is analysed through Henri Bergson’s (1911) theory of the comic. Bergson (1911) argued that the failure of machine-like pursuits uncontrolled by consciousness can be manifested through comic depictions of the human body.

This thesis will also argue that the objectification of oneself in Internet meme culture may be viewed as inverting the superiority theory of humour. This theory contends that the person telling the joke dominates the one being laughed at, yet in meme culture people make themselves the butt of jokes. Memes can be defined as ‘an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation’ (Oxford English Dictionary [OED] 2018). Online, memes are usually expressed as photo-based images with a humorous juxtaposition of text. The technology involved—often photo editing apps and social

media—aids in the rapid creation and dissemination of this form of information. Once posted online, memes can be copied, varied and rapidly spread by Internet users.

This thesis investigates how cartoonish characters are presented in the works of Philip Guston, Dana Schutz, Tala Madani and Maria Lassnig. The works of these artists are analysed for their depiction of striving and often bumbling comic characters subject to both bodily and character transformations. The paintings of these four artists foreground my own research and practice in the field of contemporary cartoonish painting. There are similarities between the work of these artists and my own, including visual characteristics and explorations of character. However, my contribution to this field involves paintings that comment on the desire to transform the body and the self, as promoted by Internet culture and social media, and the tragicomic results of these desires and transformations.

The paintings I have produced for this project culminated in an exhibition entitled ‘@jadefad: A Social Media Feed in Paint’. These narrative paintings explore the lives of two tragicomic characters, Jade and Blob. Through the two characters, the paintings investigate the desire to both display a curated persona online through the appropriation of models from Internet culture and the drive to constantly improve oneself as trends and fads endlessly change. The effect of this is described as simultaneously comic and tragic, or tragicomic, which can also be defined as one with a drive for improvement but who falls short.

The narrative structure of these paintings is modelled on the social media feed through Internet conventions such as diction and other aspects synonymous with the way images and text are consumed online. In addition to a narrative told through an exhibition of paintings, my works simultaneously appear as social media feeds on the social media platform Instagram, rounding out the world of these painted characters as Internet personas. The online social media feed becomes supplementary material to the temporary painting exhibition and will serve as an archive of the work online after the exhibition finishes. Rather than a repetition of photographic documentation of the paintings in the show, the social media feed on Instagram adds another dimension to the work through a series of 10-second animated versions of the paintings.

1.1 Background

As a child, I watched an extraordinary amount of television. I set my Muppet Babies– themed alarm clock early so I could watch an hour of Looney Tunes before getting ready for school. I did not understand what animation was. It did not occur to me that I was watching thousands of individual drawings sequenced in rapid succession to create an illusion of life. I liked the colours and shapes of the characters and the textures of the backgrounds. I laughed at the jokes. I was surprised and relieved when the characters would be flattened on the pavement in one scene and reinflated in the next. I was interested in the relationships between the characters and how they would try to trap, control and trick each other. I noticed how different characters had different aspirations. Some of these were achievable—Bugs Bunny always cleverly got his revenge—while other went unmet—Wile E. Coyote never did catch and eat the Road Runner.

My evolution as an artist began with the combination of my childhood obsessions, creating drawings and watching television. Aside from cartoons, my primary sources of inspiration came from the Miss America and Miss Universe beauty pageants. I was also fascinated by television commercials that announced new technological breakthroughs in mascara and hair dye. As I observed women who dyed, curled or straightened their hair, I was struck by the idea that whatever sort of hair people have, they seem to want it to be different. I often wondered if a perfect colour or hair texture could exist and not require its owner to make any alterations.

One of my most cherished possessions in my early years was a cardboard box I had protected by drawing a padlock and chain on its exterior. The box contained drawings of women winning beauty pageants. At eight, I wanted to be a fashion designer and I tried to invent as many gown ideas as possible for the contestants to wear. I wanted to capture the essence of the winning moment and freeze it in time in my drawings. Spotlights at the top of the page shot bright yellow rays onto the winner. A disembodied hand on the right side of the page presented a bouquet of flowers to the newly crowned beauty queen. I remember being confused as to why the pageant winners would cry and cover their mouths when they won. My mother told me they were crying because they were happy. This incongruity fascinated me, so most of the women in my drawings had uncontrollable streams of tears formed into arcs bursting out of their eyes.

I decided with certainty to devote my life to being an artist when I heard my name announced as the winner of the ‘Best in Show’ award at a local art competition for high school students. The winning piece was a clay sculpture of a pregnant woman—based on my pregnant sister who was 17 at the time—ripping off her own hollowed-out head. I was 16 and won $300 in prize money. A woman (a lawyer) at the event asked if she could buy the sculpture for $300. While I had always excelled in art classes, it had not occurred to me that money could be made through art, that being an artist could be a profession with nice people with respectable occupations eager to purchase what I could create, and that art could be a vehicle for upward mobility and the American Dream. I was hooked.

After graduating high school, I enrolled in the art program at Georgia State University in Atlanta. I painted cartoonish characters—based on the doodles in my sketchbooks—in environments inspired by Gentileschi, Vermeer, Caravaggio and Velasquez. I liked the idea of bestowing importance and dignity on these throwaway doodle characters, many of which were drawn on napkins. In 2002, I was introduced to animation software by one of my professors. I was fascinated by the idea that I could bring my drawings and paintings to life by making them move to music, all within a contemporary art context.

My first solo exhibition was entitled ‘Drawings Paintings and Animation’, but soon afterwards drawing and painting began to fall away as animation became my primary pursuit. I worked in an art gallery featuring Outsider artists by day and practised animation at night, eventually finding a job as a character animator on the broadcast television series Squidbillies for Cartoon Network’s late-night comedy programming, Adult Swim. On this show, I animated the faces and stretchy bodies of a family of destitute, violent and drug-addicted hillbilly squids living in North Georgia. Then, I worked on the series Freakshow for Comedy Central, which featured a cast of circus sideshow characters with deformed bodies. Working in commercial animation was incredibly time consuming, so I would wake up at 5am to work on my own art before heading to the animation studio. The consumption and creation of cartoons had flipped from the early morning television watching of my childhood before school to the early morning labouring on my own projects before animating the cartoons of others.

After nearly two years of working in commercial animation, I had saved up enough money to take a year off and work on my graduate school portfolio fulltime. I was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York

City with a portfolio—focused on the body and its fluids—consisting of hand-painted frame-by-frame animations mixed with video footage and music. This period of creating fine art animation lasted throughout my time at graduate school. While I had abandoned painting as a finished object, it was still an important part of the process in my work, which took the form of animated performance—musicians performing live alongside projected animations—and public art installations I thought of as visual representations of music.

After meeting an Australian in New York and making the move from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Sydney to be with him, I found myself in a tiny art studio near the beach with no other artists or art world pressures around. This gave me the space to realise I wanted to make paintings again. I had always had a love for paint and its wide range of qualities. I love its venerated fine art tradition and its gross physical qualities akin to bodily fluids— paint is oily, smelly, toxic, messy, leaky and malleable. With this return to painting, I wanted to combine the elements that had informed me up to this point—cartoons, women’s beauty aspirations, transforming bodies and the unending desire for improvement associated with the American Dream. By this point, television as a source of inspiration in my work had been replaced by new formats—social media and Internet memes.

While the forms my work has taken have changed over time, from paintings to animated works to public art installations involving classical music set to animation, a central theme unites them, aspiration. From the placement of doodled characters in the environments of renaissance painting to combining what could be considered a low form of art— animation—with the height of symphonic romanticism—the musical compositions of Richard Wagner—my interest in combing high and low culture continues with the paintings produced for this thesis which presents the narrative of a character who endlessly aspires to improve herself.

1.2 Methodology

The methodology informing my practice, both before and after a painting session, involves reflective practice which can be defined as ‘the systematic activities an artist critically engages with concerning the conceptual, practical and theoretical aspects of

research’ (Boud, Keogh and Walker 2013).1 The model of reflective practice I have applied involves the circular process of reflecting on an experience after it has occurred (in this case, the act of creating painting 1) and then testing the experience in a new situation (the act of creating painting 2).2 This methodology is the most appropriate means by which to answer the research question. Cartoon forms have been adopted in a range of contemporary painting practices, drawing on links between cartoons and humour, narrative and bodily transformation. How can this emerging pictorial trend—cartoonish painting—be used to depict and comment on the desire to transform the body and the self, promoted by Internet culture and social media?

As new knowledge becomes applied and reapplied, building on each experience as it happens, the subject matter of repeating and transforming characters throughout the body of work progresses the narrative of the paintings in this exhibition. Before a painting session I dissect—scalpel in hand—a range of international art magazines including Artforum, Art in America and Frieze. Maintaining an awareness of the current state of painting worldwide is an essential part of my practice. Before a painting session, I select a different contemporary art magazine and look for paintings exhibiting cartoonish characteristics such as distorted bodies, simplified forms and thick outlines. Cutting out relevant images, I then stick them in a journal alongside my text-based observations about these images. This archive becomes a map with which to navigate the field of contemporary cartoonish painting. It helps me to understand how the field grows and changes and where my work fits within it. André Malraux referred to collections of reproductions of artworks as Musée Imaginaire (‘imaginary museum’ or ‘museum without walls’). Precedents for this type of archival research in art include Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ project, a collection of images collected since the 1960s from magazines, newspapers and sketches (Benjamin 1999).

During a painting session, an idea may directly respond to the treatment of a body from my archive of images. I begin with a blob of paint on the canvas and, as more paint is added, I create the narrative about the character’s current state of being or behaviour.

1 Ideas about reflective practice were first put forth by Dewey (1910). A key principle of reflective practice is that concentrated reflection on an experience is essential for learning (Dewey 1910). 2 Kolb and Fry (1975) outlined this model of reflective practice. It is analogous to the agile methodology (Kolb and Fry 1975). 6

Sometimes, the titles of the paintings are developed simultaneously with the paintings. Other times, the titles are developed after the work is finished.

After each painting session, I keep a digital photo journal of work in progress. I keep a text-based analysis of these paintings, detailing how the body is treated and how the character is functioning in the series. As I continue to push the limits of how far I can distort a character while retaining its essence, the titles can aid the viewer in recognising the distorted figure as a particular character in the progressing narrative.

My fear of wasting paint has become an integral part of my process. When I have leftover paint at the end of a session, I use it to create the background of a new painting. Because my aim is to use up the paint, more than being mindful of its cost, I paint with more abandon, which is useful for creating new shapes, colours and arrangements. I am drawn to the idea that the leftover paint from one painting is the beginning of the next painting, creating a continuous connection between the works.

As I work on these Internet-inspired paintings, I often post them online on Instagram and Facebook. Establishing an Instagram audience for my work is part of the foundation for this project, so that when Jade begins ‘posting’ on her account in advance of the exhibition, there is an existing audience for the work. As I continuously build a social media feed and grow an audience, these posts become a kind of intermediate exhibition between exhibitions in the gallery spaces and often reach a larger audience than gallery visitors.

I think of Instagram as a kind of art medium. Concerned with how it functions and changes, I have continuously followed the commentary about developments in Instagram’s algorithm and best practices through technology blogs, newsletters, online forums and analytic tools available on the platform of my own account. Through these sources, I have learned about how and when to post and what kinds of behaviour to avoid. The more advanced nuances of Instagram are so complex that many businesses hire dedicated Instagram consultants to take full advantage of its potential. One of the methods I have developed for best engaging with Instagram’s algorithm is to create a spreadsheet for the hashtags3 I include with my posts as a way of furthering the reach and engagement

3 Hashtags are words preceded by the # symbol and are used to organise topics in social media. 7

with these paintings. I do this because the rules for creating proper hashtags are so complex it would be difficult to follow them otherwise.4

I am also interested in the cultural differences and demographics for each platform. For example, in the last few years Generation X and baby boomers have become much heavier users of Facebook. Younger generations are using it less now that their parents have adopted the platform, making it ‘uncool’, and have migrated to different apps such as Snapchat or Instagram (Hart 2017). When I post my paintings online, I upload them to both Facebook and Instagram to expose the work to a broader audience.

Sources for this thesis include both primary—Henri Bergson (1911), William James (1890) and others—and secondary sources such as Simon Critchley’s (2002) writings on historical theories of humour including the works of Plato and Aristotle. I have researched texts on the history of cartoons and philosophy and theoretical texts on humour, character, self-improvement and Internet culture. I have consulted a range of visual media including art magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Art in America and Eyeline. I also follow an array of Instagram accounts for the purpose of investigating and questioning trends in art, notions of beauty and social media culture. These Instagram accounts belong to artists, curators, art theorists, meme creators, beauty bloggers, celebrities and Instagram influencers. For some of my analyses of Internet culture, I contacted those who regularly research and report on the Internet, including Adrian Chen, former staff writer on technology and the Internet for The New Yorker, who was helpful in pointing me towards resources on the connection between the history of fine art and Instagram.

Since commencing this research in 2015, I attempted to visit as many relevant painting exhibitions as possible in Australia and the United States (US). I travelled to New York several times throughout the duration of this research, visiting painting shows in Chelsea and Lower East Side commercial galleries, art museums and artists’ studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The exhibitions I attended that were most pertinent to this research included The ‘Dana Schutz’ exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (in 2017), Tala Madani’s works at the Whitney Biennial (in 2017) and the ‘Something Living’ exhibition

4 For example, one of these rules is the ‘10/10/10 Hashtag Strategy’, which has shown to increase the chances a post will reach Instagram’s ‘Explore’ page of highlighted posts. In this rule, each of the 30 hashtags chosen for a post must contain a specific threshold of posts (previous usage by other Instagram users) before it qualifies as a reasonable hashtag to use (Pepe 2018). 8

at the Art Gallery New South Wales (in 2018) which included works by Dana Schutz, Philip Guston and other cartoonish painters.

The exhibition of my paintings in 12 separate shows throughout the duration of this research allowed me to experiment with the ideas that led me to my final body of work. These 12 exhibitions, from the most recent, are:

1) The Archibald Prize, 2018, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2) Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, 2018, Geelong Gallery, Australia 3) Up in Arms, 2018, University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, Kentucky 4) Regrowth, 2017, Sandler Hudson Gallery, Atlanta 5) Sitcom Studies, 2016, Ivy Brown Gallery, New York 6) Methods for Making Eye Contact, 2016, First Draft, Sydney 7) Julie Spoke Softly Under Her Long Skinny Nose, 2016, Field Projects, New York 8) 13.04.16, 2016, Home@735, Sydney 9) Expansion, 2015, Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane 10) Sydney Contemporary, 2015, Carriageworks, Sydney 11) Porque No, 2015, Gaffa Gallery, Sydney 12) Permission, 2015, Chalk Horse, Sydney.

1.3 Process

The process of creation in this research involved spending the first year painting intuitively with no preconceived ideas about subject matter concerning the narrative of the characters I was producing. I exhibited some of these works in Australia and the US. In the final two years of my research, I wrangled the characters and imagery into a narrative that made sense for what the work was already doing. I realised I had been creating the same characters over and over. I dove into what these characters are like and what their personalities could signify, wrote backstories and plots for them and created new paintings and revised older paintings to round out the story.

The narrative in these paintings involves the lives of two characters, Jade, the character who is creating the paintings and titling or creating captions for them, and Blob, a character of Jade’s invention. This narrative is aided by the titles and proceeds in a three- part structure as a fictional story about the characters in the physical paintings in the exhibition. These paintings also become actual posts on Instagram on an account I set up 9

for Jade’s character. The name of this account is @jadefad, which will become an archive of the project once the exhibition finishes.

Jade’s character embodies the common obsession of young women with Internet-driven ideals of beauty. To enhance Jade’s authenticity as a realistic, life-like character, I made Jade essentially the creator of her own paintings. I painted the paintings of Jade herself as if they were Jade’s own selfies, which Jade posts on Instagram. The titles of the paintings, which are also the Instagram captions, are in Jade’s voice. I gave Jade the capacity to paint her own muse, the Blob character, and to design and paint a line of sweaters. Jade posts all of these images on Instagram.

In part one, the paintings—fictional Instagram posts—concern Jade’s dissatisfaction with her looks. These works show Jade transforming herself through the surface treatments of makeup, hair dye and spray tan, which can be thought of as forms of paint. The viewer observes Jade’s changing but recognisable appearance across these works. After drinking too many turpentine cocktails at an open bar with friends one night, Jade experiences herself dissolving—turpentine is a paint thinner—and realises she is a character made of paint. With this knowledge, Jade transforms herself in more extreme ways by becoming her own plastic surgeon. She remakes herself into her own ideal image of beauty, enters the ‘45 and Over Awards’ pageant and wins the crown.

In part two, Jade decides she can create a character of her own. She invents a working- class flesh-like shape of paint she names Blob and posts the tragicomic bumbling narrative of his life from his birth to death on her Instagram feed.

In part three, the ‘Blob saga’ garners Jade enough attention to become an Instagram influencer.5 Jade uses this influence to launch her own product line of hand-painted sweaters.

The catalyst for Jade’s character came from my observations of the ways people curate and portray themselves online, creating characters of themselves. I noticed that many people desire to transform themselves to keep up with changing fads, which seemed to move more quickly than the kinds of self-improvement trends I had noticed as a child and teenager. I wondered what it must be like to adhere to these constant changes. I think of

5 ‘Influencer’ generally refer to users of Instagram who have at least 10,000 followers. They often use this status to sell products or advertising. 10

makeup and other beauty products as a kind of paint, thus, anyone who uses them is a sort of artist creating paintings daily on a sculptural surface, the face.

Blob developed out of noticing I was repeatedly painting egg-like, flesh-coloured shapes. I wanted to explore how a formless blob of paint could become a character. I also asked the question of what would a character made out of paint—Jade—create as a character, perhaps a blob of paint? She would create something lesser or more formless than herself because, having a great desire to shine and garner attention, she aims to maintain her prestige and position of power in relation to her own creation.

1.4 Thesis Structure

This thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 1 has introduced the background to study, including my personal narrative, experiences and professional development prior to and during the research. This chapter also detailed the methodology and process of creation undertaken during the research.

Chapter 2 investigates the history of the cartoon and its relationship to painting. This chapter surveys the field of cartoonish painting in contemporary art and examines the work of artists who use expressionistic visual characteristics of cartoonish style, those who work in cartoonish abstraction and artists whose paintings are influenced by comics, illustration and collage. Four artists who explore ideas of character in their work are examined in greater detail. Philip Guston explored ideas both of the painter as a character and a changing narrator in a work in works such as his ‘Klansmen’ paintings. Dana Schutz explores character as a malleable material in her ‘Frank from Observation Series’. Tala Madani enquires into the comic buffoonery of men who use body fluids as paint in her ‘Macho Men’ paintings. Maria Lassnig investigated depictions of the self as a series of character transformations in her ‘Body Awareness’ paintings.

Chapter 3 addresses the idea of character and what it has come to mean in the digital age. This chapter looks at the role of makeup and plastic surgery in developing an online character and investigates some of the ways the Internet fuels the desire to transform ourselves. It also explores what I propose as the tragicomedy of extreme versions of contemporary beauty culture and how this is played out for characters online. Henri Bergson’s theories on the comic are applied to the machine-like desires associated with the ideology of the American Dream to analyse how the endless disappointment of self- 11

transformation does nothing to dampen the desire for it. Theories of consistency and identification related to character, as addressed in the work of William James, Sara Ahmed and Sigmund Freud, are discussed and examined.

Chapter Four addresses how this thesis contributes to the field of cartoonish painting by developing an argument regarding the tragicomic character influenced by Internet beauty culture. These paintings adopt forms of narrative associated with the social media platform Instagram and this chapter examines the role of painting titles in expressing narratives related to pictorial forms. Instagram as a medium in contemporary art and the artists who use this medium form another aspect of this chapter. In addition to social media, my paintings are also influenced by Internet memes which I argue are an extension of the single panel cartoon, as both memes and single panel cartoons use similar methods for telling jokes. These methods include creating humorous and incongruous juxtapositions of image and text. However, memes diverge from single panel cartoons and traditional theories of humour when they contain an inversion of the superiority theory of humour. In this theory, a person telling a joke dominates the one being laughed at. In meme culture, people are often laughing at themselves, rather than another person, thereby upending the power dynamic in this theory of humour.

Chapter 2: Cartoonish Painting

The words ‘painting’ and ‘cartoon’ have been linked since the first documented uses of the word ‘cartoon’, which originated in the 1670s to describe a sketch for a work of art such as a painting (Bryant 2005). The root of the word ‘cartoon’—French carton, Italian cartone and Latin carta meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard—describes the type of paper used for these sketches (OED 2018). Centuries later, its meaning split into classifications quite different from its original inception and close ties to painting. The emergence of the word ‘cartoon’ as it is understood today—which can refer to anything from single panel cartoons to comic books or animation—began at a precise date in history. On 15 July 1843, Punch Magazine6 published a drawing by John Leech with the caption ‘Cartoon No.1: Substance and Shadow’, which was a comment on a contentious exhibition held at Westminster Hall in London.7 The drawing featured ragged, starved- looking people viewing an exhibition of traditional cartoons (sketches) submitted as potential painting commissions for the new houses of parliament. Many felt the exhibition was a profligate use of public money when poverty and illness were abundant in London. ‘Cartoon No. 1’ was the first of a series of six satirical drawings highlighting the social inequalities of the time. All of the drawings in the magazine soon came to be referred to as ‘cartoons’. Before this, exaggerated comical drawings were known as caricatures, political sketches or ‘comic cuts’ because they were made from engravings on wood (Bryant 2005). The term ‘caricature’ can be defined as ‘a picture, description, or imitation of a person in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect’, and ‘a ludicrous or grotesque version of someone or something’ (OED 2018).8

In the nineteenth century, the cartoon split off into various classifications—single panel cartoon, narrative cartoon (comics) and animated cartoon. With the exception of the original meaning of the word cartoon referring to a sketch, contemporary connotations of

6 A British weekly magazine of satire, humour and caricature founded in 1841. 7 John Leech was also the first person to be labelled a cartoonist. 8 Some of the earliest works on caricature include Thomas Wright’s (1865) A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, a comprehensive history of comic literature and art since the Middle Ages. 13

the word reflect the traits and tropes of caricature, and they often share characteristics such as exaggerated figures and simplified forms.

Cartoon forms—a term used in this thesis to refer generally to animation, comics or single panel cartoons, and clarified as necessary when discussing a specific format—began to appear in fine art painting with the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s. Subsequently, the first major post–Pop Art exhibition of contemporary art inspired by comics was The Comic Art Show: Cartoons in Painting and Popular Culture of 1983 at the Whitney (Carlin 1983).9 Since 1983, there have been numerous exhibitions on the influence of cartoon forms on contemporary art. Because of US hegemony in the production of cartoon forms from the beginning of the twentieth century, the source of much inspiration for artists working with cartoon forms stems from North America. Comic Iconoclasm in 1987 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London was based on The Comic Art Show but showed the influence of cartoon forms on European art (Wagstaff 1987). Other notable museum exhibitions include High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture of 1990 at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, which focused on the relationship between art and commercial popular culture (Varnedoe 1990), and Comic Abstraction of 2007, also at MOMA, which investigated how artists create abstractions out of dismantled cartoon imagery (Marcoci 2007).

2.1 Characteristics of Cartoonish Painting

Cartoonish painting can be defined as deploying the language of cartoon forms, which can involve simplified shapes and exaggerated physical characteristics of figures. Since this thesis is concerned with the relationship between cartoon forms and painting, it might seem to follow that its focus would be the flatness, solid colours, sharp lines or Ben-Day dots10 generally associated with paintings inspired by cartooning such as the work of Takashi Murakami or Roy Lichtenstein. However, this thesis is interested in work that is both painterly and cartoonish. To clarify, the use of the term ‘painterly’ here describes a method of paint application that is generally loose and expressive, with visible

9 An even earlier, comic-inspired sculpture was part of a Fluxus solo show in 1974. ‘The thoughts of Robin Page No 1’ (1973) by Robin Page contained the crumpled up self-portrait with a cartoon-esque speech bubble, ‘There’s a lot of art around these days that’s not getting the kind of recognition it deserves’ (Gravett 2007). 10 Ben-Day dots is a printing process that uses closely spaced dots of colour to create the illusion of multiple colours and gradients. 14

brushstrokes that expose the mechanics or activity of paint application. The flatter methods of applying paint obscure the mechanics of application (i.e., display no visible brushstrokes) and can appear as if printed, rather than painted, as in Superflat painting, an art movement founded by Takashi Murakami inspired by the graphic qualities in anime and manga. In Murakami’s (2012) ‘Self-Portrait of the Manifold Worries of a Manifoldly Distressed Artist’ (Figure 2-1), bright and multicoloured flowers with smiling faces at their centres contrast the mood of a self-portrait of the artist who appears worried or afraid, with eyes widened and eyebrows raised. Murakami’s imagery resembles the graphics of manga, and although this work was created with paint (rather than a printing process), Murakami often takes pains to ensure brushstrokes are not visible (Thornton 2008).

Figure 2-1: Takashi Murakami, ‘Self-Portrait of the Manifold Worries of a Manifoldly Distressed Artist’, 2012, acrylic on canvas mounted on board, 150 x 150cm. (Murakami 2012) (detail)

In contrast to Superflat, painterly methods call attention to the surface of a work when thick paint and loose unblended brushstrokes are used, as in Guston’s (1975) ‘Head and Bottle’ (Figure 2-2). In this work, a large, pink, bulbous head stares at a wine bottle very closely with an eye nearly as large as the head itself and almost touches the green glass

of the bottle. On the forehead, bottle and hovering light bulb appear many loose brushstrokes of various shades of pinks, greens and whites. Thick black and grey outlines contain the boundaries of each shape. Although both Murakami and Guston’s work contain thick outlines synonymous with cartoon imagery, the lines differ drastically. Guston’s outlines are wobbly, messy and sometimes broken, while Murakami’s are of uniform colour and thickness.

Figure 2-2: Philip Guston, ‘Head and Bottle’, 1975, oil on canvas, 166 x 174cm. (Guston 1975) (detail)

The treatment of bodies in cartoonish painting can be grotesque, a term that may refer to something ‘comically or repulsively ugly or distorted’ (OED 2018), following on from the tradition of caricature which often uses selective exaggeration of body parts to create a comic effect. While a focus on mutations of the body in contemporary painting is not new,11 cartoonish painting not only mutates the body but combines these distorted depictions with cartoonish characteristics such as thick outlines and bulbous simplified

11 MOMA’s exhibition ‘New Images of Man’ in 1959 highlighted bodily distortions in painting with works by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn among others. More recently, Robert Storr examined the notion of the grotesque in ‘Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque’, an exhibition he curated at SITE Santa Fe from 2004 to 2005. 16

forms. In cartoonish paintings, bodies can be bent and stretched into unrealistic proportions and angles resembling a freeze-frame of a body in motion or in the process of transformation. Some of these bodies seem to be governed by the laws I refer to as ‘cartoon physics’. Cartoon physics refers to the rules that govern the world of animation, for example, characters can be burned or exploded in one scene and return to normal in the next. In Comedy, Andrew Stott referred to this concept of cartoon physics as ‘the comic body’ and described the phenomena as ‘exaggeratedly physical, a distorted, disproportionate, profane, ill-disciplined, insatiate, and perverse organism. Any Tom and Jerry cartoon exemplifies this extenuated corporeality in its parade of bodies that mutate, disassemble, reconfigure, and suffer endless punishment while refusing to die’ (Stott 2005, 83). These ideas of immortal figures refusing to die by traditional violent means can also operate within a series of cartoonish paintings, for example, the treatment of the character Frank in the ‘Frank from Observation’ series by Schutz (Zach Feuer Gallery 2002). Throughout this series, the character Frank is continuously morphed and recycled into other characters and objects as if he is a sculptural material, rather than a character.

2.2 Cartoonish Painting in Contemporary Art

Cartoons first appeared in fine art in the 1960s, although cartoonish characteristics were evident much earlier, as in the following examples of Western art. While not a comprehensive survey of cartoonish painting, the works mentioned below indicate some of the techniques and tropes relevant to the field of cartoonish painting and to my own practice. As early as the late 1940s, cartoonish characteristics emerged in the Vache period works by René Magritte (from 1947 to 1948). Vache can mean ‘cow’ or ‘dirty’, and vacherie ‘a dirty trick’. The exhibition of these works was born of out the frustration he felt as he believed his work had previously been overlooked by the Parisian art world and not received the attention it deserved. He created these works in part to make fun of the art world that ignored him. These paintings mark a conspicuous departure from Magritte’s tightly rendered surrealist works and contain bright garish colours, exaggerated features and expressionistic execution of paint (Marcadé 2009). In ‘The Ellipsis’ (Figure 2-3), a wide-eyed, lime green, humanoid figure with a cylinder-shaped head topped with a black bowler containing an opened third eye extends the shotgun-like barrel of a nose reminiscent of Pinocchio. Wearing an orange checked jacket painted with wobbly expressionistic lines, the figure holds a disembodied green hand in front of an

unfinished looking cerulean sky background. This cartoonish approach to the figure contains the simplified shapes and painterly strokes of contemporary cartoonish painting.

Figure 2-3: René Magritte, ‘L’Ellipse’ (‘The Ellipsis’), 1948, oil on canvas, 53 x 70cm. (Magritte 1948)

Willem de Kooning’s portraits of women beginning in the late 1940s were crude and flat simplifications of form inspired by photographs of women in advertisements. A prominent figure in the New York School known for his use of abstraction, de Kooning’s return to the figure came as a shock to the art world in the 1950s at the time of Abstract Expressionism’s pre-eminence (Zilczer 2017). In ‘Woman’ (Figure 2-4), thick painted lines resembling drawing define the figure while wet-on-wet painterly strokes fill in the woman’s blond hair and the green and pink nondescript background. The woman’s enlarged and simplified eyes and bulbous breasts are a common feature in cartoon and manga characters.

Figure 2-4: Wilem de Kooning, ‘Woman’, 1950, oil on paper mounted on Masonite, 93 x 62cm. (de Kooning 1950)

Georg Baselitz’s paintings from the 1960s contain the loose painterly treatment of mutable forms and body parts. In ‘Picture for the Fathers’ (Figure 2-5), a warm yellow background contrasts the cool desaturated tones of a pile of body parts—delineated with thick outlines—atop barbed wire and other darkly shaded metal objects. There is a visible similarity between Baselitz’s dismembered body parts and that of a flesh stack in Schutz’s (2002) ‘Night in Day’ (Figure 2-6). In Schutz’s work, the warm yellow ground occupies the lower half of the painting, while cooler light and dark blue tones hang above, threatening rain. Rather than a mix of flesh and metal, as in Baselitz's work, ‘Night in Day’ shows broken sticks and planes of wood meshed with rounded flesh-like shapes. While I am not convinced Baselitz’s work was a direct influence on this painting by Schutz, it is notable that piles of cartoonish body parts get repeated over time in the works of several artists discussed in this chapter, including Schutz, Lassnig and Guston.

Figure 2-5: Georg Baselitz, ‘Picture for the Fathers’, 1965, oil on canvas, 50 x 65cm. (Baselitz 1965)

Figure 2-6: Dana Schutz, ‘Night in Day’, 2002, oil on canvas, 81 x 90cm. (Schutz 2002)

Nicole Eisenman’s oeuvre oscillates between large works with multiple figures, referencing historical paintings and simplified cartoonish portraits. In 2015, Eisenman was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (or ‘Genius Grant’) for ‘restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century’ (Pogrebin 2015). In Eisenman’s (2011) ‘Breakup’ (Figure 2-7), a cartoon-like figure stares blankly at a smartphone through blue dot eyes while a pencil-thin mouth frowns slightly. The nose and ears of the figure are painted in unrealistic bright fluorescent mottled oranges and pink. The figure’s skin comprises shapes of olive green, blue and dark purple. A grey phone is held by peach- coloured hands delineated by thick outlines articulating fingers and knuckles. This painting could be interpreted on purely visual terms as a person in a screen-induced

trance, a state recognisable to many of us who overly use our technological devices. Through an interpretation of the work based on both visuals and title, the figure now looks shocked or paralysed, perhaps learning through a text message that their lover is no longer interested. Like several other artists mentioned in this research, Eisenman cites Guston as an influence on her early work (Loellke 2017).

Figure 2-7: Nicole Eisenman, ‘Breakup’, 2011, oil and mixed media on panel, 142 x 109cm. (Eisenman 2011)

Nicola Tyson describes her painted figures with misshapen and exaggerated proportions as ‘psycho-figuration’ (Tyson n.d.). These works, primarily concerned with sexuality and gender, explore the limits of what constitutes a human figure (Tyson n.d.). In ‘Self Portrait with Friend’ (Figure 2-8), two figure-like shapes stand on a purple field resembling paper cut-out collage forms. These figures contain two legs and a head, but only one arm is visible between the two of them. This arm juts out and droops from the figure on the left. Bright aqua, red, yellow and green shapes resemble a kind of clothing in this abstracted world.

Figure 2-8: Nicola Tyson, ‘Self-Portrait with Friend’, 2011, oil on canvas, 183 x 241cm. (Tyson 2011)

Several contemporary artists can be grouped under the stylistic category I refer to as cartoonish abstraction. These artists often use heaps of shapes, thickly outlined, resembling bodily organs and appendages. Amy Sillman mentions the influence of ‘the cartoon line’ on her work (Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston 2013). Sillman’s (2004) ‘Birdwatcher’ (Figure 2-9) contains a mix of drawn lines and multicoloured solid but painterly shapes that resemble imagery related to the title, such as yellow duck feet in the lower left corner of the painting. A figure on the left outlined against the blue sky holds binoculars up to its face. Much of Sillman’s work maintains a tension between painting and drawing, abstraction and figuration.

Figure 2-9: Amy Sillman, ‘Birdwatcher’, 2004, oil on canvas, 168 x 198cm. (Sillman 2004)

Sue Williams explores abstraction through piles of accumulated body parts with thick or tapered outlines, echoing the language of cartooning. In ‘Threat’ (Figure 2-10), dripping, intestinal shapes in soft pastel tones are splayed all over the canvas in a scene that looks like a Dr Seuss book gone wrong. No central figure emerges and each shape appears as if a freeze-frame in an animation.

Figure 2-10: Sue Williams, ‘Threat’, 2009, ink and acrylic on acetate, 48 x 61cm. (Williams 2009)

Some cartoonish artists utilise a process of collaged imagery to create compositions. Jamian Juliano-Villani uses a digital projector to experiment with combining images before she paints them. Juliano-Villani admits to using cartoon imagery because of its populist mode of communication, making the imagery recognisable to a wider audience (Art21 2017). In ‘Roommate Trouble’ (Figure 2-11), two figures enter a bright orange room, stumbling on a figure who looks as though he has hanged himself. A green overturned stool lies on the red carpet nearby. These headless figures manage to communicate shock and horror through white-gloved hands and shiny black noodle arms, which reference early Disney animation.

Figure 2-11: Jamian Juliano-Villani, ‘Roommate Trouble’, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 91 x 102cm. (Juliano-Villani 2013)

Neo Rauch, although not generally considered a cartoonish painter, occasionally uses simplified forms with thick outlines as evidenced in rendering of the yellow hands in ‘Father’ (Figure 2-12). In this work, the cartoonish hands hold the figure of a fully grown man in the arms of a much larger and more realistically painted man who wears the formal attire of another time period. Various abstracted objects lie on a table in the foreground in a mix of realist and cartoonish painting. Rauch collages figures in layers to create dreamscapes.

Figure 2-12: Neo Rauch, ‘Vater’ (‘Father’), 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 150cm. (Rauch 2007)

The cartoonish painters previously mentioned all have relevance to my own practice. De Kooning’s depictions of women inspired by advertisements are similar to the inspiration I derive in my own work. But rather than images of women in magazines or newspapers who advertise products, the depictions of women in my paintings are influenced by the ways women advertise themselves in social media, either to sell products or to garner attention among their friends or followers. Sometimes they do this by highlighting a fashionable aspect of themselves, as in the case of my painting ‘Mascara Game Strong’ (2016) (Figure 2-13). This painting is a reference to some of the ways women pursue longer and darker eyelashes through the addition of eyelash extensions and mascara, and shows a figure who has taken this longest lash arms race too far. This multi canvas work shows the oddly shaped profile of a woman’s head on a smaller canvas resting atop a larger canvas. Her cadmium yellow hair, lips and mascara are made up of thick strokes of paint. The inky black stroke resembling mascara-soaked eyelashes is so long it continues onto the canvas below, fading as the paintbrush runs out of paint. These eyelashes appear so long and heavy it would be impossible for this figure to open her eyes. The lower canvas serves as both an abstract painting and the clothing of the woman. This canvas comprises shapes of mint green and pink crossed by two burnt orange strokes.

Figure 2-13: Amber Boardman, ‘Mascara Game Strong’, 2016, oil on polyester, 71 x 33cm.

Eisenman uses titles to enhance the specificity of the content of her paintings. Likewise, titles are essential for the advancement of narrative within my paintings because visuals alone cannot communicate a concept as clearly as the combination of visuals and text- based information. In my 2016 work ‘Fascinator Discomfort’ (Figure 2-14), a portrait of a woman with an unclear expression looks off to the right. She wears a teal-coloured top and a string of oversized pearls. On top of the woman’s head is an explosion of line and colour in a cross of thick, dusky, pink strokes. Numerous squiggly, multicoloured lines emanate from the centre of the explosion. The title of this work clues the viewer into the concept that this abstraction over the woman’s head is actually a type of hat, known as a ‘fascinator’, often worn to formal events such as weddings. These hats are intended to get attention from others present at the event. The title of this work aids in the interpretation that this woman is uncomfortable about the attention-seeking device she has chosen to wear on her head. Silly hats have become a festive tradition which many women conform to despite feeling ill at ease by the glances and stares the hats are designed to attract.

Figure 2-14: Amber Boardman, ‘Fascinator Discomfort’, 2016, acrylic on paper, 38 x 29cm.

The exploration of abstracted bodily shapes in the work of Nicola Tyson and Sue Williams constitute figures that echo my own search for the ways amorphous shapes of paint can become not only a figure, but a character with a personality. The ‘figure’ in my 2013 work ‘Lips N’ Tits’ (Figure 2-15) is made up of a pile of body parts, breast-like shapes contained by an olive green garment and a neck topped with large silicone enhanced–looking lips. This mostly abstract figure becomes a reduction of the sexualised body parts many women emphasise on social media. The brushstrokes are loosely applied with wet-on-wet paint and left unblended, giving the work a dashed-off appearance.

Figure 2-15: Amber Boardman, ‘Lips N’ Tits’, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 23 x 31cm.

Some of the formal qualities in Amy Sillman’s work, including her interest in ‘the cartoon line,’ have influenced the ways I combine elements of drawing into my painting through the use of outlines. In ‘Resting Bitch Hair’ (Figure 2-16), the hair of a woman in profile is constructed from a few thick curving lines of deep blue paint. This line work posing as hair is an approach more similar to drawing than to painting, as painting often involves shapes butting up against shapes. The woman’s face, painted in multiple shades of peaches, pinks and yellows, looks as though it were very quickly rendered. Her eyelashes are made of fast streaked lines of dark blue paint, similar to the ways in which children add details such as eyelashes to eyes.

Figure 2-16: Amber Boardman, ‘Resting Bitch Hair’, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 38 x 29cm.

The Disney-esque gloved hands in the work of Rauch and Juliano-Villani reflect references in my work to cartoon characters. My ‘Where Are They Now’ series asks what might become of cartoon characters if they were able to live on after a show in which they appear gets cancelled. In ‘Where Are They Now: Patrick’ (Figure 2-17), the character Patrick, a starfish from the SpongeBob Square Pants television series, appears as a washed-up celebrity. His facial hair has grown out into a beard. He wears denim shorts and a singlet shirt. With his stubby limbs outstretched, yellow armpit stains and armpit hair are visible. His peach-coloured body appears to be walking out of frame as if, perhaps, he was not interested in being ‘filmed’. An orange pineapple house (Sponge Bob’s house from the television series) is set off in the distance, giving context to the otherwise sparsely painted scene.

Figure 2-17: Amber Boardman, ‘Where Are They Now: Patrick’, 2015, oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm.

While these artists explore many of the formal qualities associated with cartoonish painting (painterly strokes, simplified shapes, thick outlines and bulbous forms), they do not generally explore repeating characters in their work. In my own practice, I have come to realise that to explore the development of characters as part of an extended narrative— in particular, one that shows development or change—it is essential to present the characters over a number of different works. In my survey of contemporary cartoonish painting, four central artists have emerged who explore ideas of character across multiple works—Guston’s ‘Klansmen’, Schutz’s ‘Frank from Observation’ and ‘Face Eater’ series, Madani’s ‘Macho Men’ paintings and Lassnig’s transformations of self. Commonalities in their work include the use of humour, expressionistic application of paint and exploration of character.

2.3 Philip Guston

Guston, once a well-known Abstract Expressionist, is a significant antecedent of contemporary cartoonish painting. Many contemporary cartoonish painters cite his work as an influence on their own. Guston’s early works in the 1930s and 1940s involved figuration that contained some elements of the cartoonish, such as simplified forms and exaggerated physical features, while his middle period in the 1950s and 1960s involved 30

pure abstraction. Following the retrospective of his abstract works at the Jewish Museum in 1966, Guston became dissatisfied with his previous output. He stopped painting for over a year, although he continued to draw (Guston 2011). He referred to this experience as ‘clearing the decks’ and described this period as having been very important for the development of his later works (Guston 2011, 193). He shifted to painting objects and minimal abstractions from line drawings—using only a line or two. Guston realised that even when working with a simple stroke, he could not help but personify lines and shapes into stories on the picture plane. He would imagine one line was talking to another, or was annoyed by another. Guston was creating characters and narratives out of what limited material he was working with, even if was just two small lines on a page. These ideas of narrative and character eventually culminated in Guston’s pivotal 1970 exhibition of cartoonish figuration at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, which marked the beginning of the late period of his work. This radical return to figuration and narrative ran contrary to the popular Greenbergian12 notions of modernist advancement of the 1950s and 1960s, which postulated allegory and narrative as antithetical to ambitious modernist painting. The early reactions to this work were negative.13 These paintings contained repeated characters with a kind of narrative unfolding over multiple canvases. Guston’s characters were constructed from simplified forms with thick outlines and painterly brushstrokes (Storr 1986). Storr (1986, 7) described the lasting influence of Guston’s 1970 Marlborough exhibition:

for countless painters who came to their vocation around that time or during the thirty-plus years since that show, Guston was embraced as a near contemporary in a way that none of his celebrated coevals have been. The resulting paradox— of being at once Avant Garde, old master and a perennial beacon for emerging or re-emerging talents—points to the essentially anomalous historical status from which Guston both suffered and benefited most of his career.

Many contemporary artists including Schutz and Madani cite both Guston’s work and his willingness to undergo significant stylistic changes as an influence on their own work.

Thinking through the possibilities for character was a catalyst for much of Guston’s late period from 1970 to 1980. These ideas concerned not only the exploration of characters

12 Clement Greenberg, American art critic, proposed the idea that there are inherent qualities of each art medium that must be apparent in the work. Essentially, he was in favour of painting about painting and promoted Abstract Expressionism and, later, Post-Painterly Abstraction. 13 The title of Hilton Kramer’s negative review of this show in The New York Times was ‘A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum’. 31

on the canvas but the artist himself painting from the perspective of different characters. After leaving the studio at the end of the day, he wanted to feel as if he had left not a painting behind, but a person—something that could live on without him and did not need him anymore (Storr 1986, 60). To this end, Guston found it useful to try on different personas or characters as methods for expanding the ideas in his work. In the beginning of his late period, his car broke down and he took it to the mechanic. His dealings with the mechanic led him to the idea to pretend to be a mechanic in the studio who did not know anything about painting or art. He wanted to see what might result if he painted from that perspective. Guston wanted to appear strange to himself and creating characters as different painters in the studio facilitated this shift (Guston 1980, 300). In a conversation with Chuck Close, Guston mentioned the idea of killing himself off as a plot device to explore how he might paint differently if he were dead (Guston 1972, 160). Perhaps the idea of being unburned by his famous legacy would allow him to explore new directions in painting, directions that perhaps had no connection to works he made while he was alive.

A strong visual memory that impacted on Guston was of an old ice delivery truck he happened to see on a street in Manhattan. Painted on the side of the truck was a wooden bucket with ice cubes spilling out of it. When Guston reached an impasse in his work, he remembered this truck and asked himself how he might paint if he were a sign painter, rather than a professional artist. Trying on a different persona allowed him to sidestep the burden of the history of painting: ‘I’d like to paint as if I’d never painted or seen a painting before’ (Guston 1980, 303).

Although Guston explored character through other representations—such as the Poor Richard drawings of U.S. President Richard Nixon, of his wife Musa and a series of self- portraits—I focus on his ‘Klansmen’ paintings as the Klansmen acted as the breakthrough characters for Guston’s later work (Guston 1974, 266). Intrigued by violence and power, Guston returned to these themes over the course of his career. In his earliest figurative works, he painted the brutality of children’s street games and Ku Klux Klan members. A drawing for ‘Conspirators’ from 1930 (Figure 2-18) shows the softly rendered pencil- drawn shapes of hooded Klan figures contrasted against the sharp grids of floor tiles and a brick wall. ‘Martial Memory’ from 1941 (Figure 2-19) is a crowded composition containing children painted in cool tones, wearing paper hats and trying out acts of violence in a street scene with homemade wooden weapons. The figures and street 32

detritus are painted as though they are paper cut-outs with flattened geometric shapes. Thirty years after painting ‘Martial Memory’, Guston’s cartoonish ‘Klansmen’ paintings of his late period mark a return to a lifelong fascination with violence. The use of heavy outlines, exaggerated features and two-dimensional representation mimics early Disney animation’s three-fingered gloved hand in ‘Bad Habits’ (Figure 2-20), thereby transforming the Klan’s brutality into cartoon violence.

Figure 2-18: Philip Guston, ‘Drawing for Conspirators’, 1930, graphite, ink, coloured pencil, and crayon on paper, 57 x 37cm. (Guston 1930)

Figure 2-19: Philip Guston, ‘Martial Memory’, 1941, oil on canvas, 102 x 82cm. (Guston 1941)

Figure 2-20: Philip Guston, ‘Bad Habits’, 1970, oil on canvas, 186 x 198cm. (Guston 1970)

The device of character became a scaffold on which to build Guston’s ideas and his late shift from abstraction to figuration. He developed a narrative that these characters would inhabit, observing:

then they started becoming very real to me. Stories of what they did. I couldn’t keep up with the ideas. Like a novelist, I had to write down memos to myself: Paint them! They’re eating. They’re having beer and hamburgers. They’re out in the car. I mean, ideas kept coming so fast I really should have hired some assistants and tripled the production. (Guston 1972, 156)

These ‘very real’ characters both disturbed and intrigued Guston. He described himself as a film director while working on them. He would think through what the characters might be doing in their spare time when they were not committing acts of terrible violence. He could imagine what their rooms would look like, what kind of furniture they would have and what mood they might be in. Guston mocked the Klansmen by showing the buffoonery of characters inclined to commit senseless group violence (Guston 2011, 158).

Thick black outlines, the hasty application of paint and the use of simplification in representation of the body all invoke cartoons as an aesthetic reference. Guston’s cartoonish paintings, with their focus on violent, frightening characters, also become

objects of derision. It is difficult to take a violent and racist person seriously in the case of the Klansmen when they look ridiculous in their hoods and cartoon gloves as they fumble through life performing adolescent shenanigans like the smashing of glass bottles, as in the case of ‘Bad Habits’.

Guston has had a profound influence on my work, in both style and content, ever since I first saw some of his late period works at MOMA, New York when I was a teenager. Before that time, I had not realised cartoonish paintings could be the kind of art museums would collect. Having no prior knowledge of contemporary painting, I thought the kind of paintings that would be shown in museums had to be realist painting of actual people or still lives. I was happy to discover artists can invent fictional cartoon-like characters in their paintings.

Stylistically, there are several elements of Guston’s works that have influenced my own. Among these, is his palette of pastel pinks and greys and his wet-on-wet method of paint application. In this technique, paint is applied on top of the layers beneath them which are still wet, creating a messy effect of combined colours. Guston often applies numerous short strokes without blending them together. As a result, the history of many individual actions in the creation of the painting are left visible.

In some of the content of Guston’s work, large, round and simplified heads become characters with emotions. In ‘Aggressor’ (Guston 1978) (Figure 2-21), two of these head shapes in profile stare at each other through glaring oversized eyes. The figure on the left, angrier looking, painted in darker pink tones is perhaps the aggressor the title suggests. Similarly, the character Blob in my 2018 work ‘Teen Tone’ (Figure 2-22) is comparable in appearance to Guston’s disembodied heads. In my work, two peach-coloured bulbous shapes with no other distinguishing characteristics other than teeth, pimples, hair stubble and a vomiting face piercing become two angsty teenagers with dark clouds hanging over their heads.

Figure 2-21: Philip Guston, ‘Aggressor’, 1978, oil on canvas, 122 x 152cm. (Guston 1978)

Figure 2-22: Amber Boardman, ‘Teen Tone’, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 40cm.

2.4 Dana Schutz

Born in the US in 1976, Schutz’s paintings feature both bright and busy compositions that appear to be freeze-frames of chaotic motion. Curator Justin Paton (2017) describes her work as containing a ‘life force that comes off the paintings, pushing the work at you with motion and spring-loaded compositions’. Other recurrent themes in Schutz’ paintings include grotesque comedy and the use of repeated characters who carry out a narrative emphasising the physicality and mutability of flesh.

‘Frank from Observation’ was an exhibition of paintings in 2002 at the Zach Feuer Gallery, New York. The works depicted a fictional narrative in which Schutz and a fictional character named Frank are the last two people on earth, Frank the last man and Schutz the last painter. Some of the works in this show are portraits of Frank and some depict items that have washed up on an island shore (Zach Feuer Gallery 2002). Some of the humour of the series comes from Frank’s apparent nonchalance about the end of the world. Other paintings show Frank recycled into other figures. While Frank morphs into different people, he never dies. He just becomes a new form each time Schutz remakes him. Frank serves several functions. He is the subject of the works and the material to be sculpted and recycled—an object. An example of Frank as subject is ‘Reclining Nude’ (Figure 2-23). In this work, a portrait, Frank lies naked and bored looking. His bright pink sunburned skin stretches over a sandy yellow ground. In ‘The Breeders’ (Figure 2-24), Frank becomes an object, an art material to be sculpted like clay forming the hodgepodge bodies of Kim and Kelly Deal from the 1990s grunge band The Breeders. Frank’s pink- skinned limbs mixed with sticks and twigs from the landscape form the legs of the band as they stand against a landscape backdrop of chopped up shapes that look like a cut paper collage.

Figure 2-23: Dana Schutz, ‘Reclining Nude’, 2002, oil on canvas, 122 x 152cm. (Schutz 2002)

Figure 2-24: Dana Schutz, ‘The Breeders’, 2002, oil on canvas, 213 x 229cm. (Schutz 2002)

Schutz was asked in an interview with Chin if she felt guilty for destroying and recycling Frank. She replied that because she can always remake him she feels no remorse (Chin and Schutz 2006). A speculative line of questioning about Frank and his world was helpful to the development of the narrative: ‘And what would happen if I got really sick of him? Then I could take him apart and build other things out of him, but he was a material that was there to work with, perhaps one of the only materials’ (Chin and Schutz 2006, n.p.). In this killing and reincarnating of a character, Schutz employs cartoon physics to shift from creating a human being to inanimate object and back again. Throughout these transformations and recycling of forms, Frank’s enduring presence is

signified by the title of the show, ‘Frank from Observation’, clueing viewers into a cohesive fiction and Frank’s recurring presence as he shape shifts.

Although Schutz is strictly a painter and has never exhibited in another medium, her work frequently references sculpture. Chin talked about many of Schutz’s paintings as containing characters that are being sculpted. Schutz described her work as ‘a process of building things’ and prefers to paint sculptural objects, rather than physically making them, because gravity is not a concern—another nod to cartoon physics—as she paints imaginary worlds and cartoonish characters like Frank (Chin and Schutz 2006).

Comparable to the ‘Frank from Observation’ series, another body of work by Schutz, ‘Face Eaters’, also explores the jumbling of subject and object within characters. The ‘Face Eaters’ series involves a race of people who devour and rebuild themselves out of their own excrement, creating a complete autarkic circuit of destruction and creation. In ‘Face-Eater’ (Schutz 2004) (Figure 2-25), a figure wearing a green collared shirt is in the processes of devouring itself with a toothy mouth almost as large as its head. Inside the mouth are unsurprised-looking blue eyes, a tongue and other nondescript flesh parts. Similar to the Frank series, these paintings employ dark humour and impossible characters and situations. Like Frank, the Face Eaters seem to transform, in this case by devouring themselves, with a nonchalance. The Face Eaters’ ability to continuously recycle themselves into new characters reduce them to basic reproductive functions. They become contemporary representations of Ouroboros, ancient Greek mythic beings who devour and recreate themselves (OED 2018). Schutz explained that this series attempts to catch the painting in the act of creating itself:

I became interested in the way they could open up into a situation. If you took death out of the equation, they could eat themselves and then remake themselves to be any form they wanted to be. In this case the subject was a site—something that constantly produced and consumed itself. I felt like it could relate to painting, since there was so much recycling going on, but also to other systems in the world. They could produce their own parts, so you could paint whatever you’d think they would choose. It would be a society of builders or makers, so perhaps they would make really long fingers to grip with or extra ones. (Levine 2011, 15)

Figure 2-25: Dana Schutz, ‘Face-Eater’, 2004, oil on canvas, 147 x 117cm. (Schutz 2004)

What Schutz is describing here is a kind of painting machine, something that can devour and reproduce itself endlessly. While the Face Eater characters appear as the subjects of her paintings, Schutz’s descriptions of these characters as a ‘site’ also relegate them to objects. In both the Face Eaters and Frank series, Schutz, like Guston, enlisted cartoonish characters to develop narrative. Unlike Guston, Schutz’s work deploys cartoon physics as impossibilities, structures and events that play out on the canvas to blur the lines between subject and object. Characters become sites for creation and characters become the recycled material of new characters.

Schutz has influenced my work in the ways she implements narrative structures around her work and in the way she represents figures visually. Schutz often employs the unrealistic proportions, stretching and transformations of characters synonymous with cartoon physics. These unrealistic mutations of character and narrative structures surrounding the work can also be found in my paintings. In my diptych, ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’ (Boardman 2018) (Figure 2-26), a cartoonish figure wearing a teal-coloured neck brace looks off to the left through brown dots for eyes. Her skin is mottled with wet-on-wet swirls of brown and tan paint. The woman purses her lips in ‘duck face’ fashion, a way to hold the mouth to make one’s lips appear larger. While she appears to be an unstable figure made up of mostly wobbly strokes, she still remains somewhat solid looking.

Conversely, in the second canvas (Figure 2-27) the narrative structure of this work has progressed. This same figure has started to dissolve after drinking too many turpentine cocktails at an open bar. She is almost unrecognisable as a figure except for the duck face pink lips which remain. Her face has become a nest of swirls and her hair has exploded into wild paint strokes emanating from her scalp as she dissolves into near abstraction. Like Schutz, the mixing of subject and object in a work is a theme I explore in my work. In this painting, the figure, who is one of the subjects of the work, also becomes an object, the material of paint that can be dissolved by turpentine. This is a quality of paint, not of a person.

Figure 2-26: Amber Boardman, ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’, 2018, oil on canvas, 76 x 204cm. (detail 1)

Figure 2-27: Amber Boardman, ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’, 2018, oil on canvas, 76 x 204cm. (detail 2)

2.5 Tala Madani

Born in Iran in 1981 and now based in Los Angeles, Madani paints macho men in compromising situations. In these cartoonish paintings, Madani’s messy, wobbly lines and shapes at times resemble children’s finger paintings. An animator and a painter, it is not surprising Madani is able to achieve a freeze-frame effect in her paintings, which seem to capture the chaotic behaviours of her characters in mid-motion. She expresses, with humour, the heavy themes of power, violence and masculine culture and describes the characters in her work as ‘men as phenomena’ (Schwabsky 2007). Huldisch (2016, 27) described Madani’s work as ‘a reflection on human cruelty, fantasy, and folly’. While much of Madani’s work does reference violence, it is usually packaged side by side with humour.

In Madani’s ‘Cake Men’ series, birthday cake becomes both a stand-in for bodily fluids and an ‘emblem for the male ego’ (Nilsson and Björnberg 2013, 45). The series was inspired by a combined event the artist attended in Iran—a celebration of both a child’s birthday and an Islamic holiday. Despite the origin of the inspiration for this series,

Madani stresses that the male characters represent generalised machismo and not a stereotype of Middle Eastern men (Nilsson 2013, 9). Throughout the ‘Cake Men’ series, buffoonish male characters morph, shave and administer enemas to themselves and others. Unlike the specific character Frank in Schutz’s work, Madani’s characters function as archetypes of masculine abuse of power, akin to the generalised violence and buffoonery of Guston’s Klansmen. In ‘Diving in Cake’ (Madani 2006) (Figure 2-28), a bearded man—naked save for black underwear—steps either into or out of a large pink cake, which envelopes his leg thigh high as he looks mischievously off to one side. His hand appears to be in motion. A bright light shining on him casts his shadow on the wall, aiding in the appearance that he has been caught doing something wrong. In ‘Pink Cake’ (Madani 2008) (Figure 2-29), two underwear-clad men rub pink frosting onto each other’s bodies. Cake oozes onto the floor below them. The cake’s birthday candles have been placed on their heads. Both of these paintings give the sense that the viewer has glimpsed a private moment of the secret rituals of this group of men.

Figure 2-28: Tala Madani, ‘Diving in Cake’, 2006, oil on canvas, 79 x 61cm. (Madani 2006)

Figure 2-29: Tala Madani, ‘Pink Cake’, 2008, oil on canvas, 102 x 76cm. (Madani 2008)

The comic, or that which makes us laugh, can have several meanings, which is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. In both the analysis of Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, the comic involves humour that arises from the loss of bodily control. Accordingly, Madani’s characters seem not to be entirely in control of their bodily functions and fluids. In the ‘Cake Men’ series, pink frosting acts as a stand-in for bodily fluids, which becomes the focal point of the men’s shenanigans. The fact that her characters play with their own excrement suggests they might be stuck in an infantile phase of development (Ljungberg 2013, 53). Wiley (2013, 73) explained that Madani’s use of bodily fluids can also be a reference to painting and regression: ‘...we are furnished with the idea that bodily excretions may be the most primeval of all painting tools, placing the origins of painting not in the caves at Lascaux, but in infants finger-painting with their own faeces, pictures pissed in the snow, and blood smeared on bodies in preparation for war’. While excremental fluids in Madani’s paintings suggest a base-impulse for expression, the cake as a motif is an ‘emblem for the male ego’ and a character in itself. This cake character can stand as a symbol of community and celebration or as a means to humiliate when it is smashed into the face of another, a slapstick comic trope. Ljungberg (2013, 45–46) pointed out that the cake in Madani’s works ‘has a remarkably erotic charge, pink and fluffy as it is, but can suddenly turn into an ominously smouldering, explosive paste’, thereby subverting the celebratory sugary birthday cake into an element of grotesque violence.

Notably, several critics have taken issue with Madani, as a woman, depicting fumbling and bumbling men in her art. She retorts that caricature, rather than a form of belittling, is actually a form of engagement with the ways men express their own power. She

believes that because satire has historically been the domain of men, her work is difficult for some to view as social criticism, an interpretation nineteenth-century cartoonists Honoré Daumier, James Gillray and William Hogarth all enjoyed (Madani 2016, 76).

Some of the ways Madani represents figures, both visually and through the content of her work, have influenced aspects of my own work. Her quick and messy wet-on-wet renderings of figures show visible brush strokes and often reference drawing in their approach to form by using simple lines to delineate shapes within the body, such as the inside curve of an arm. Many of these aspects also appear in my work. In ‘Preparing for summer with some spray tan research @paintjobbod today ; )’ (Figure 2-30), a blond figure with windblown hair and ‘muffin top’14 spilling over a pair of blue jeans is covered with messy swatches of paint resembling a range of skin tones from unrealistic sunburned reds to fake-tan oranges. Light pink lines on the body show where bikini straps have masked either the sun’s rays or the aerosol dispersion of paint in the spray tan booth. Her asymmetrical breasts also serve as her arms, the bikini line straps resembling an arm sling. Multi-coloured spray tan drizzlings linger on the walls in the background, perhaps from previous clients.

14 Slang for the fat that spills out over tight, low-rise jeans. 45

Figure 2-30: Amber Boardman, ‘Preparing for summer with some spray tan research @paintjobbod today ; )’, 2018, oil on canvas, 122 x 91cm.

The content of Madani’s work often references bodily fluids, either through the depiction of urine and excrement, or through a stand-in for bodily fluids, such as the pink frosting of a birthday cake. The characters in her work paint themselves and each other with these bodily fluid substances as ways of exploring power dynamics between men. In my own work, rather than exploring the power dynamics of men, I highlight the desire (mostly of women) to improve one self. The cosmetic pastes and fluids women apply to themselves daily become the vehicle for these transformations.

2.6 Maria Lassnig

Using introspection as her central theme, Austrian painter Lassnig uses her own bodily sensations as data to morph representations of herself in her paintings. Born in 1919 and having worked up until her death in 2004, Lassnig asked one central question throughout her painting career: ‘what is a body capable of?’ or more specifically, ‘what is this body which paints capable of?’ (Patrick 2015, 235). Through the repetition of a two-part process, her paintings answer this seemingly simple question. The first step requires an awareness of sensations within the body. The second step is the act of painting these

sensations. Over time, Lassnig created many variations of self-portraits, which I am interested in exploring for the ways these paintings become variations of an endlessly transforming character.

Lassnig coined the phrase ‘body awareness paintings’ to describe the invisible aspects of inner sensation. After becoming bored with depicting nature, she began to search for a reality that was more readily available to her than the external world. She found the sensations within her own body to be the only accessible and accurate reality. This awareness presented itself in the form of pressure, tension and straining within a particular position. She could develop a physical relationship to a painting by lying down next to the canvas as she worked, as if next to a person (Lassnig 2006b, 32). If, perchance, Lassnig leaned on her left elbow while painting, her elbow might be in pain and would likely appear brighter and larger because of the space it occupies in her awareness of it relative to the rest of her body. To paint these interior physical sensations of her body, Lassnig attempted to switch off her memory. Her aim was to paint a feeling, rather than an idea of a feeling. She referred to the body as a sort of cage we inhabit and peer out of. She described the act of painting the changing sensations of this body cage as ‘fencing in clouds’ and stated that ‘finding stability and permanence in the variability is a challenge for art. I can therefore describe the possibilities of transformation better than the transformation itself. The variety of transformations IS the transformation’ (Lassnig 2006b, 36).

Lassnig’s focus on portraiture and simultaneous invocations of the grotesque is perhaps part of the reason German critics Bazon Brock and Jean-Christoph Ammann negatively assess her work as ‘just caricature’ (Lassnig 2006a). But this derogatory assessment provides a useful way to think about Lassnig’s work. Since caricature is comprised of exaggerated features that call attention to certain aspects of the body, it is consistent that the object of Lassnig’s attention—a particular inner sensation—would become exaggerated in her visual representation of it. Lassnig described her process as: ‘To remember our body whilst inhabiting it. To see through our body. Close your eyes, think about it, what do you feel the most, standing there? The soles of your feet, the nape of your neck, the small of your back? What colour do you associate these with?’ (Patrick 2015, 233). Lassnig’s paintings are caricatures in that they call attention to, and exaggerate, specific parts of the body, emphasising what is highlighted in her consciousness. 47

Lassnig often referred to elements of vanity as central to why we gaze at ourselves. She talked about the surprise of seeing oneself from an unexpected angle in a mirror, momentarily becoming strange to ourselves. She referred to the unrecognition of oneself when the mirror reflects age (Patrick 2015, 234). The feeling of becoming strange to oneself is akin to observing the self from a distance, perhaps perceiving the self as if a character, which was also of interest to Guston as he tried on different personas from which to paint. In her diary, Lassnig ruminated on her reasons for painting: ‘Horror and humour. A monstrous female. Oh why did I make this picture? To veil or to reveal my face, to reveal my heart, my heart feeling? Or not to become a wood-head, a machine, a camera, a respirations machine? Oh to get communication is so hard’ (Patrick 2015, 236). The body in question is not just a bio-machine but a communication machine with a sense of humour that struggles with externalising inner sensations.

These attempts by Lassnig to create impossible representations of changing sensations within the body are akin to the ideas of cartoon physics, described earlier, as she distorts and stretches the body to impossible proportions to picture her vision of a particular sensation. Pinning down these changing sensations is also similar to seeing still frames of animation that show transformations taking place.

While Lassnig paints a self-portrait character again and again, the work does not only reference the internal world, but advancements in technology. ‘Sci-Fi Self-Portrait’ (Figure 2-31) was painted in 1995 when wearable technology was in its infancy. In this painting, a naked figure made of short brushstrokes in pastel pinks and purples gazes with fascination into virtual reality goggles. Rather than a technological appendage, the goggles appear to be part of the figure’s face, painted in the same tones as the figure’s skin. Following the theme of the fusion of humans and technology, ‘Electric Self-Portrait’ (Figure 2-32) shows a figure made of electrified lines of magenta and blue and cream. The blue lines of electricity resemble suspenders holding up pink pants. The figure wearing these pants is illuminated in whites, cream and light pink tones. For this character, the body and electricity are one and the same.

Figure 2-31: Maria Lassnig, ‘Sci-Fi Self-Portrait’, 1995, oil on canvas, 125 x 100cm. (Lassnig 1995)

Figure 2-32: ‘Electric Self-Portrait’ 200 x 145cm. (Lassnig 1993)

A few of the ways Lassnig represented the body in her paintings echo investigations in my own practice. These aspects include painting a single character over time amidst a host of transformations incorporating age, health, mood, technology and current events. Lassnig’s focus on technology’s effect on the body and the self is also of interest to me in my own work. The main difference is that my work focuses on Internet culture, the content disseminated through technology, while Lassnig’s work was more focused on technology itself, as in the case of virtual reality. Lassnig exaggerated parts of the body that she felt more prominently in her inner sensations. In my work, I exaggerate features of the figure that are emphasised in Internet culture. In both cases, the catalysts for these exaggerated depictions are constantly in flux. I usually observe an emphasis on a particular part of the body through consumer products that advertise new technological breakthroughs, for examples, in mascara technology. In ‘Hair Loss and Eyelash Extensions’ (Boardman 2016) (Figure 2-33), a tan-coloured mound of paint sprouts sparse coils of yellow paint. The figure’s eyelashes are exaggeratedly long, an effect of

the emphasis on long eyelashes in Internet culture. The figure, standing in front of a childlike painting of a landscape, is bordered with a fake gold frame, comprised of two strokes of yellow paint.

Figure 2-33: Amber Boardman, ‘Hair Loss and Eyelash Extensions’, 2016, oil on canvas, 41 x 51cm.

2.7 Conclusion

Some of the features synonymous with cartoon forms, such as thick outlines, simplified forms and distorted figuration—have developed into what can be called cartoonish painting. This encompasses a range of practices from cartoonish abstraction to paintings influenced by collaged cartoon imagery. In this thesis, I focus on the cartoonish artists who use an expressionistic application of paint, which intrusively brings attention to the surface of the work, exposing the mechanism and material of paint, rather than obscuring it. In cartoonish painting, the artist is unbound by the laws of nature, instead being free to employ cartoon physics. This allows the representation of fantastic and rationally impossible imagery through distortions and transformations of the body, which can sometimes resemble freeze-frames of animated films.

The various ways some cartoonish artists depict recurring characters in their work have become key influences in my own creative practice. Among these artists is Guston, who

explored the lives of repeated characters in his work while foregrounding some of the visual aspects of cartoonish painting that I use in my own work including the blobby disembodied head shapes that inspired my Blob character. Schutz blurs the boundary between the subjects and the objects found in her paintings. Her characters are malleable and recyclable, as if they were made of clay or other repurposable material. Schutz’s mutable approach to her subjects has influenced some of the concepts for my characters, who, being composed of paint, obey the physical laws that apply to paint’s material qualities. Madani’s characters experiment with bodily fluids and other paint-like substances. My own work echoes Madani’s characters in the way my character Jade experiments with the essential components of the beauty industry—spray tan, hair dye and makeup. These materials become the primary vehicle for self-improvement and transformation that Jade employs. Several themes of Lassnig’s work, including the endless transformation of character, the vanity of self-portraiture and the fusing of body and technology, also appear in my own work, which fuses vanity, physical transformation and technology in depictions of the body and the self as inspired by Internet culture.

Through exploring the rich history of cartoonish painting, I have been propelled forward to consider the role of this practice in the Internet age. Just as Lassnig was influenced by the development of technology in her later works, my paintings consider the effects of social media and explore the consequences of the endless drive for self-improvement through products and services to reach the ever-elusive goal of physical perfection. Painterly cartoonish painting allows for wild imaginative exaggerations, making it an apt medium for depicting the Internet-inspired body. As Internet trends inevitably change, emphasis on improving specific parts of the body shifts from one area to another. Features in vogue may require permanent or semi-permanent physical alterations, such as butt implants or lip fillers. This can lead to the body becoming exaggerated, distorted and grotesque, particularly once the fad has passed, ironically making the sought after goal of physical perfection ever more elusive.

Chapter 3: The Tragicomic Character in Internet Beauty Culture

This chapter explores what I argue is the tragicomic character in Internet beauty culture through examination of theories of character, humour and tragedy. This chapter also investigates practices in Internet beauty culture as performed and showcased on social media platforms and through Internet memes. Referencing theories developed by James Wood, Sigmund Freud and William James, this chapter considers the role of character in painting. The tragicomic character can be defined as one containing both tragic and comic elements. I look at the comic element of the cartoonish characters in my painting through the incongruity theory of humour, which contains a two-part structure. The first part, the setup, leads one to make an assumption; the second part, or the punch line, upsets the expectation of that assumption. The comic setup of my characters involves the desire for beautification and improvement of the self as observed in Internet culture. Through the endless array of improvements witnessed online, my characters have subscribed to ideologies of the American Dream and the new trends in wellness culture, both of which promote the idea that health, wealth and happiness can be reached by anyone who works hard enough for them. The comic punchline of these characters arrives in the form of the unexpected ways my characters fall short of these ideals, through the exaggerated, distorted and grotesque results of these ‘improvements’. These characters can also be described as tragic in the Aristotelian sense because they have brought about their own downfall—in appearing grotesque, rather than beautiful—through their own doing, rather than as a result of external forces. This tragicomic character who is influenced by and who participates in Internet beauty culture repeats this mode of striving and failing in a faster and more public way than ever before as a result of the ubiquity of social media.

For the purposes of this research, character is defined as 1) ‘the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual’ and 2) ‘strength and originality in a person’s nature’ (OED 2018). The origin of the word is the Latin and Greek Kharakter ‘a stamping tool’, while the definition ‘distinctive mark’ and ‘token, feature, or trait’ arose in the early sixteenth century, eventually giving rise to ‘distinguishing qualities’ of a person or thing (OED 2018).

In creative practice, character is a slippery concept. Wood (2008), in his work of literary criticism How Fiction Works, is unable to arrive at a comprehensive single theory of

character, as he finds exceptions whenever attempting to settle on qualifying features such as character’s connection to consciousness or to an interior life. Moreover, in the case of differences between minor and major characters or ‘flat’ or ‘round’ characters, no single encompassing theory of character emerges because there are always exceptions as to how character can function (Wood 2008, 83). While Wood (2008) is unable to settle on one definition for what character is, he does designate what character is not. He disputes William Gass’ theory that a literary character can be reduced to an ‘instrument of verbal organization’ by asserting:

I find this deeply, incorrigibly wrong. Of course characters are assemblages of words, because literature is such an assemblage of words: this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined ‘world’, because it is just a bound codex of paper pages. (Wood 2008, 81)

In the same way that it is fatuous to attempt to reduce a literary character to words, dismantling a painted character to its component parts, pigment applied to a surface, does nothing to express the possibilities for painted characters. In agreement with Wood (2008), I feel that characters are multifaceted. Characters can build worlds, carry a narrative and create impressions and feelings in viewers. Even unconventionally drawn characters, or those made up of little signifying information, can do this.

This research starts from the premise that character is a complex aspect of narrative and there are many different ways character can be represented. The model of character central to this research is based on a naturalist tradition, which makes an attempt to represent familiar types of characters and events as they appear in our everyday lives, such as characters created online through social media channels.

3.1 Theories of Character

In terms of contemporary cartoonish painting, character operates in a similar fashion to Wood’s (2008) depiction of character in fiction, that is, as a complex set of signifiers revealed over time that create an impression in the reader’s—or viewer’s—mind. In painting, some of the tools that generate this impression of character can include titles or discrete visual details that are repeated over several works. For a ‘figure’ or a ‘body’ to become a character—rather than, for example, just a portrait—the character must be repeated across multiple paintings. This repetition and continuation across more than one

work contributes the necessary component of time. Viewers can identify this character even if the body is altered, so long as some signifying details remain consistent. The details may be language based, as in the title of a work or exhibition, or imparted visually in repeated colours, shapes or physical features.

To develop an account of character in cartoonish painting, film animation offers a useful analogue for discussing how character consistency may combine with character transformation, which is facilitated by the constant motion that constitutes the form. Looney Tunes director, Chuck Jones, developed his characters between 1939 and 1960 by taking an unusual approach. Rather than increasingly transforming his characters over time, he aimed to change them as little as possible. He realised over the course of the 15 years that Looney Tunes was produced, that, ‘because animation lets you do anything, you have to think about what you won’t do’ (Jones 2015). This idea may be applied to cartoonish painting, which also affords great creative scope because the distortions and exaggerations inherent in cartoon physics allows the painter to do anything. A cartoonish painter must decide which elements to distort and which to keep consistent when painting a transforming character that appears in multiple works, otherwise this character becomes unrecognisable. For example, in the early days of Looney Tunes the characters would often go through a barrage of quick expressions, giving the impression of insanity. Over time, Jones simplified these expressions as much as possible, resulting in more cohesive characters combined with subtler and funnier jokes (Jones 2015). In the same way, by limiting certain elements in a character that change across different works, cartoonish painting can develop consistent characters, but with nuanced traits.

An example of the role of character consistency from comic studies is E. C. Segar’s treatment of the central character in his Popeye comic. Popeye behaves as an anchor to the stories (echoing the anchors tattooed on his bulging arms) by appearing and behaving in a predictable manner. These consistencies in Popeye’s character allow Segar to experiment with the reality around him. Although Popeye remains consistent and predictable, Segar achieves an element of fantasy within the comic by introducing odd and inhuman characters around him such as Eugene the Jeep and Alice the Goon. Charles Shultz, creator of the Peanuts comic, cited these fantastic elements in Popeye as inspiration for his invention of the WWI Flying Ace character as a persona of Snoopy in the Peanuts comic (McDonnell 2005). In both cases, one central unchanging character allows the rest of the comic to diverge from its anchor point while still maintaining a 54

cohesiveness in character and narrative. After all, if every element appears fantastic and constantly changeable, the comic becomes difficult to follow. Another example of character consistency in comic studies is the 100-year-old comic Gasoline Alley. Begun in 1918 and still in syndication today, the comic initially focused on a growing car culture in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century. The comic evolved over time to become the first of its kind to represent the everyday lives of a community of characters who develop and change over time in company with the changing lives of the comic’s readership (Marling 2005).

Contrary to the idea of character consistency, wilfulness—acting outside of norms— disturbs the expectations of those observing a person or a character, making this person difficult to neatly characterise. Ahmed (2013, 231) remarked that a character is comprised of its consistency of behaviour and the expectations of behaviour that others have about it. Wilfulness can extend to the idea of a person acting ‘out of character’ when they do not behave in a way that corresponds to the idea we have of them (Ahmed 2011, 233). Again, this is connected to the idea of character continuing over time—there can be no contravention of expectation without the prior development of assumptions about the way a character should be or should behave.

Another theory of character, identification, is a psychological process that concerns transformations of the self through the modelling and assimilation of features or characteristics of another person. In this theory, the roots of which are found in Freud’s writings, personality is developed through a succession of identifications with others that happen unconsciously (Laplanche 1974). The theory of identification in character is that a personality is incomplete in and of itself and requires the influence of others. This runs contrary to another view of character as comprised from the beginning of innate and unchanging qualities.

James (1890) synthesised both views. He described character as ‘the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once’ (James 1890, 105). In James’s (1890) theory, he defined character as if it is a sculptural material, one that contains enough of a solid core so as not to be transformed completely by external influences, but malleable enough to be altered, at least in part, by exterior forces. In this theory, character is initially modelled through a series of identifications with others, then, over time, a character becomes more hardened and less likely to be

swayed by the model of others, resulting in a central unchanging core emerging later in life. James’s (1890) idea of characters who contain a kind of porousness which allows them to be open to external forces while still retaining tenaciousness, a central strength of character, is different in kind from the idea of a successive series of identifications forming character.

The present research is informed by each of these theories of character concerning consistency, wilfulness, identification and the combination of a character with a solid core but susceptible to external influence. My character, Jade, remains consistent and recognisable, even as she transforms from one painting to the next in the series. Her distinctive blond hair colour (cadmium yellow blond with cream-coloured highlights) always contains brushstrokes of brown regrowth hairs stemming from her roots, which aid in her recognisability. The consistency in her character is also created by the titles of these paintings which become an organising principle as they contain consistency in the type of diction used, Internet slang, which allows the narrative voice of the character to emerge.

Rather than stressing wilfulness in behaviour, as described by Ahmed (2013), in my practice it is more useful to speak of the wilfulness of a character’s body. Perhaps many will recognise the experience of having a body that does not seem to obey our will when desperately trying to lose weight or in seeing our sagging skin over time. The body does not always—and sometime cannot—obey the desires, ideals or expectations we have set concerning our bodies. For many, these ideals for how the body should be or behave are derived from depictions of the body online as part of Internet beauty culture. As Jade tries to alter her appearance based on these Internet-inspired ideals, parts of her body rebel. Throughout the Jade paintings, her desires may be consistent but her body remains wilful. An example of this wilful body can be found in my 2018 painting ‘Experiencing some middle aged gravity out on the yoga mat today :/ #ThatPrincessHairTho’ (Figure 3-1). In this work, a headless figure sits atop a mint green yoga mat in a sparse pink room with few defining features save for a decorative abstract painting hung on the wall behind the figure. Both the yoga mat and the painting signify popular wellness trends this figure aims to adhere to. This figure consists of mostly lopsided breasts, legs and hair. Asymmetrical body parts jut out or sag from multiple angles. A pencil-thin leg, topped with bright red nail polished toes, stretches diagonally from the side of the body. As the title suggests, this character is dissatisfied with the way middle age has caused one of her breasts to sag 56

as she nakedly performs her yoga routine. Through the title, this character, though dissatisfied with her body, calls the viewer’s attention to her hair which flows out from her scalp in perfect blond waves. This is a part of her body she has more control over and so she has coiffed it to her liking. This simplified figure is made from three basic shades of a Caucasian skin tone; a lighter tinted colour signifies the highlight effect of a light source, while a darker mauve stands in for shadows. This three-colour method of coloration—base colour, light tone and dark tone—echoes, for example, the coloration of cartoon animation in Disney films. It is one of the most basic ways of representing a light source on a figure, standing in opposition to the complicated way light is represented in realist painting.

Figure 3-1: Amber Boardman, ‘Experiencing some middle aged gravity out on the yoga mat today : / #ThatPrincessHairTho’, oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm.

In addition to ideas of consistency and wilfulness regarding character, my research is also informed by James’s (1890) theorisation of character, which proposes that while a character may be influenced by surrounding forces, it also consists of a solid inner core not modelled on others. This solid core usually emerges more clearly later in life. In the case of Jade, a strong sense of a solid core is not visible because the paintings in this project show only a small slice of her life. What is visible are the ways Jade repeatedly models herself on depictions of the body she observes through Internet beauty culture. As 57

a result, Jade is stuck in a perpetual loop of middle-aged dissatisfaction, constantly striving to remodel herself as new trends emerge. An example of this behaviour can be seen in ‘Eyeliner Competition’ (Figure 3-2). In this work, a blond-haired figure has observed that winged eyeliner has become fashionable (Figure 3-3). As a result, and as the title suggests, this figure has made maximal enlargements in her own makeup, taking the idea of longer eyeliner wings to an extreme, as the eyeliner (long strokes of black paint) extends preposterously far beyond the face into the open space of the painting. In addition to ridiculous eyeliner, the lips of the figure are pursed into the duck face Internet beauty trend (also displayed by the ‘eyeliner trends’ model in Figure 3-3) to make them appear fuller. The background of this work is made of a continuous thick swirl of yellow and grey paint atop a pink base, which the figure dissolves into. The clothing of the figure, delineated only by a thin line of aqua to represent shoulders, simultaneously becomes a shirt and an abstract smear of paint.

Figure 3-2: Amber Boardman, ‘Eyeliner Competition’, 2015, oil on canvas, 40 x 30cm.

Figure 3-3: Example of Eyeliner Trends

3.2 Humour, Tragedy and the Tragicomic

This section continues to develop the argument that the characters in my works related to Internet beauty culture can be described as tragicomic. I will look at the comic element of the cartoonish characters in my painting through the incongruity theory of humour, which sets up the expectation my characters can transform themselves to attain the improvements they desire. But then, both comically and tragically, these characters fall short, appearing more grotesque than beautiful. My paintings shine a light on the pressures women in particular feel to fit in by conforming to the beauty trends of the day. There is already an element of tragedy in this drive to meet external expectations of appearance, or to make oneself attractive in an image sanctioned by contemporary culture. But there is further tragedy in the irony of the characters’ earnest strivings leading to a paradoxically grotesque outcome.

Three interrelated terms often used to describe that which makes us smile and laugh are the comic, comedy and humour. These terms, not commonly associated with painting, will be examined in this chapter to describe the relationship between the comedic operations in my paintings and a theme often associated with the comic, transformations of the body. The comic can be defined as ‘causing or meant to cause laughter’ (OED 2018).15 The label ‘comedy’ can be applied to a range of historical and contemporary forms designed to elicit laughter, including caricature, burlesque, satire, pantomime, cartoons, slapstick films, sitcoms and stand-up comedy (Stott 2005, 2). While comedy is a constructed form, such as a stand-up joke routine, humour, by contrast, is typically

15 Originating in the late sixteenth century via Latin from Greek Komikos, from komos (‘revel’). 59

unplanned, coming into existence the moment we laugh. The term humour has three key meanings. The first is the quality of being amused. The second relates to mood or a state of mind. And the third has a historical meaning (also known as cardinal humour), which refers to the relative quantities of a person’s bodily fluids—blood (sanguine), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric) and black bile (melancholy)—and which were thought to determine a person’s physical and mental states.16 In this thesis, the term humour refers to a state of amusement, though the third definition of humour and its relationship to the body is evidence of the strong tie between mirth and the corporeal that began in the fourth century (Critchley 2002).

The most obvious example of the relationship between humour and the body is the effect of laughter, which can be defined as ‘the spontaneous sounds and movements of the face and body that are the instinctive expressions of lively amusement and sometimes also of derision’ (OED 2018). The reasons why bodily spasms and sounds are linked to something humorous is as yet a mystery (Gutwirth 1993). Critchley (2002) pointed out that the physiological difference between smiling and laughing is that the latter is comprised of the disruption of a normal flow of air. Being out of breath or having pain in the sides as a result of laughter correlates with Plato’s idea of humour involving both pain and pleasure (Critchley 2002).

Charles Baudelaire, René Descartes, Helmuth Plessner and André Breton all referred to laughter as a kind of ‘explosion of the body’ (Critchley 2002, 9). According to some theorists, smiling, the showing of one’s teeth, may have developed as a mark of superiority or aggression for the purpose of displaying dominance over others (Klein 2007). Alternately, Jaram van Hooff advanced the view that the baring of teeth could have signified defensive behaviour or a signal of submission (Gutwirth 1993, 5). Gutwirth (1993) summarised the differences between the two phenomena: smiling is a signal of our recognition of pleasure and laughter our uncontrollable surrender to it. These powerful responses were condemned by Christians in the Early Middle Ages. Laughter made the Church uncomfortable because ‘as a bodily phenomenon, laughter invites comparison with similar convulsive phenomena like orgasm and weeping’ (Critchley

16 Originating in Middle English via Old French from Latin humour ‘moisture’, from humere. 60

2002, 8). Perhaps the Church feared that the less control people had over their bodies, the less control the Church had over them.

Anthropologist and humour theorist Douglas (1968) summarised the theories of two of the central figures in twentieth century theory on the comic, Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, by noting that both see the comic being an attack on bodily control. For Bergson, a man slipping on a banana peel is funny because of his loss of control, rendering him akin to a ‘helpless automaton’ (Douglas 1968, 364). Douglas disagreed with Bergson, as she believed it is not always funny when a person behaves in a machine-like manner, helpless to the whim of larger environmental forces that they have no control over. For Freud, a person slipping on a banana peel is funny because the suddenness of falling reveals a suppressed and hidden life force and a release of pent up energy waiting to get out (Douglas 1968). While slapstick comedy often concerns the loss of bodily control, I agree with Douglas’s (1968) assertion that these comic actions are not always funny.

While Bergson and Freud both proposed the possibility of identifying universal characteristics of humour, several contemporary theorists disagree. Currently, there is no commonly accepted definitive theory of humour. Douglas (1968) remarked on this impossibility, arguing that to understand humour a near-complete grasp of the social context of every culture is necessary and stating that much of humour is social context specific. Concurrently, Higgie (2007, 12) wrote, ‘If humour has a common characteristic, it is to thumb its nose at pigeonholes’, because a universal theory of humour would be too complex to categorise neatly. In line with Douglas (1968) and Higgie (2007), Bremmer and Roodenburg (1997, 3) stated that the problem with searching for an all- encompassing theory of humour is that it entails the ‘tacit presupposition that there exists something like an ontology of humour’ and ‘that humour and laughter are transcultural and ahistorical’. While a universal theory of humour does not seem to exist, discrete elements of humour are useful to the present research, including the superiority theory of humour.

The superiority theory of humour was considered the central idea of humour by Plato and Aristotle. This theory can be described as humour that arises from the inequality between two subjects. In the format of a joke, for example, the person telling the joke dominates and laughs at the subject of the joke, the inferior person. According to Critchley (2002),

the idea of humour as an expression of superiority over others remained the dominant form of humour until the nineteenth century.

Presently, there are three general theories associated with humour which are related to the terms relief, superiority and incongruity. Humour related to relief is usually associated with Freud and Herbert Spencer, who both saw humour as a way to expend repressed energy, for example, a person slipping on a banana peel. Superiority theory, as previously mentioned, requires one to feel dominant or superior to others to laugh at them. Humour arising from incongruity is often associated with the thinking of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, although it can be traced back to Aristotle. Incongruity involves an element of surprise, where something is expected and instead something else is encountered (Smuts n.d.) This is a classic structure in jokes. For example, the setup, ‘do you want to hear a joke about construction?’ leads one to make an assumption about a building project. The incongruous punchline, ‘I’m still working on it’, upsets that assumption by alerting the joke’s audience to the idea that the subject of this joke had been about the construction of the joke itself, rather than a building site.

Standing in opposition to comedy is tragedy, which can be defined as ‘an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress’ or a ‘play dealing with tragic events and having an unhappy ending, especially one concerning the downfall of the main character’ (OED 2018). The origin of the word tragōidia, via Latin from Greek, literally means ‘goat song’ (OED 2018). Consensus among scholars has not been reached on the reason of this origin, but theatre scholar Brockett (1991) speculated the ‘goat song’ origin of the word can be traced back to ritual sacrifice of the animal. While the form of tragedy is based on suffering, it can also invoke feelings of pleasure and catharsis in an audience through the purging of emotions the drama invokes. Nietzsche (1872) referred to this paradoxical aspect in tragedy as the experience of pain that catalyses a feeling of pleasure. Williams (1966) argued that the tradition of tragedy has played an important role in the establishment of a cultural identity in Western civilisation through challenging and character building events in a society.

While the earliest origins of tragic drama in ancient Greek theatre can be found in the work of Sophocles, Oedipus and Antigone, and Euripides, The Cyclops, the earliest surviving writing on dramatic theory and the origin of the tragic form is Aristotle’s Poetics (Brockett 1991). While tragedy today is commonly referred to as any story that

has a sad ending, Aristotelian tragedy conforms to specific rules which were laid out in Poetics. According to these rules, the tragic hero must invoke feelings of fear and pity in the audience. This tragic hero must come to their downfall through their own actions, inner compulsions and character flaws. If the downfall of the character is the result of an external force, this is known as a misadventure, rather than tragedy (Aristotle 350 B.C.E).

Traditionally, genres were divided into two distinct categories, tragic or comic in drama, or epic and lyric in poetry. Today, these distinctions have splintered into blended forms which include melodrama, epic theatre and the tragicomic (Carlson 1984). The tragicomic can be an idea or an art form that contains elements of both tragedy and comedy. Although the term tragedy usually refers to the forms of novels or plays, it can also apply to characters in painting.

The characters in my work, in some ways, are reflective of the representations of self in Internet beauty culture and also the contemporary culture of self-aspiration. In this reflection of Internet beauty culture, they become not only comic characters but tragicomic characters as they strive towards a perfection they will never reach, tragically and comically failing in these pursuits. One of the sources of comedy in my paintings concerns the grand aspirations of my character Jade. The comic element arises out of Jade’s obsession with self-improvement derived from a belief that if she follows the methods and techniques women’s beauty culture espouse, she too will be beautiful. The actual results of Jade’s strivings are comic failures of these beauty ideals because of the grotesque results of her efforts. Tragically, Jade’s search for vanity has led to her own undoing. In ‘Be your own plastic surgeon #WatchOutWorld!’ (Figure 3-4), Jade uses her newfound knowledge that she is a character made of paint to become her own plastic surgeon and, therefore, transform herself in more extreme ways than the topical methods of makeup application. In this work, Jade stands in a doctor’s office, presumably her own, with her arm propped casually on a yellow desk. White pasty fingers spill out of boxes of latex gloves attached to the walls. Nondescript medical degrees hang on the wall behind her. She is dressed as though she were a sleazy used car salesman. Her lilac button-up shirt is opened a few extra buttons to show a gold necklace and a bit of chest hair. The red plaid print on the lower end of her shirt resembles blood smatterings, perhaps left over from her last surgical procedure. A gold bracelet circles her wrist and a large golden pinkie ring rests on the little finger of a tan splotch of a hand, un-delineated by fingers and edged with bright red marks resembling nail polish. The centre piece of the image is 63

Jade’s grotesque swirl of facial features. Churning among peach and pink squiggles, some teeth, eyebrows and eyes can be made out to look as though a smiling and self-satisfied face is in the process of being transformed. Jade does not seem to notice how frightening she looks. If in the market for a plastic surgeon, one would probably not make an appointment with Jade.

Figure 3-4: Amber Boardman, ‘Be your own plastic surgeon #WatchOutWorld!’, 2018, oil on polyester, 71 x 92cm.

3.3 The American Dream Machine

Bergson’s (1911, 39) central contribution to humour theory can be summarised as the idea of ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’. He postulated that humour arises out of a situation when a person’s vital life force is involuntarily taken over by what he sees as lifeless automatic behaviour. When these unconscious and machine-like pursuits lead to failure, Bergson defined these effects as ‘comic’. In the essay ‘Laughter’, written in 1900, Bergson commented that the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable when the body reminds us of a machine (Bergson 1911, 79). That is, when a person behaves without thinking, as if controlled by an external force they are not aware of (Bergson 1911, 17). In contrast to machine-like behaviour, Bergson’s (1911)

reflections on humour value freedom and vitality over rigid automatic behaviour. According to this theory, a person will be laughed at if they behave without thinking (i.e., like a machine).

Given the significant changes as a result of both the industrial and technological revolutions, elements of Bergson’s (1911) theory now seem outdated. It is notable that Bergson wrote his essay on the comic in 1900, in the era of industrialisation. His essay on humour created the novel idea that human bodies could emulate the repetitive actions of a lifeless machine, something like a robot. However, when examined with a contemporary view of machines in the era of technology, the theory can still apply considering the ways many people interact with machines today in the form of computers and smartphones. The repetitive actions now involve the endlessly scrolling thumb as we access ideas and images on the Internet. The machine-like behaviours in our lives today involve the compulsive checking of email, texts, news and social media. The difference is that, rather than being laughed at, as Bergson’s (1911) theory suggested, it seems to be generally socially acceptable to regularly check one’s device. Even though this behaviour is discourteous in company by withdrawing engagement in favour of attentive self- absorption, it is nonetheless ubiquitous and not usually met with laughter.

An extension of this automatic drive to check one’s device, and one of the central aspects in this research, is the machine-like motivation not just to view the images and ideas on social media but to conform to the trends for self-improvement. Two ideological examples of these improvement trends are the American Dream and wellness trends.

The American Dream is an ethos of the US (imported to many other countries) that includes the idea that people should be free to succeed and strive for upward mobility, with each generation presumed to be better off than the last. In theory, this dream is achievable for anyone through hard work and determination, although this does not necessarily work in practice. The American Dream is defined by James Truslow Adams as the doctrine that ‘life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement’ (Library of Congress n.d.). This stands regardless of a person’s social class or circumstances of birth. The roots of the American Dream stem from the Declaration of Independence which states that ‘all men are created equal’ with the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ (Kamp 2009). Those who are born into this ideology do not necessarily step back and question

these ideas, and so, automatically in the Bergsonian sense, these ideas are adopted. Tragicomically, those who unconsciously subscribe to the American Dream can sometimes blame themselves when they do not achieve their desires, even if they had been born into the democracy, rights, liberties and equal opportunity that the US lays claim to. This is comic in the classic sense of the comic hero adopting the hubris of grand aspirations. It is tragic in the Aristotelian sense that the tragic hero brings about their failing through their own hubris, their need to rise above their current circumstance, which can lead to great suffering.

A related notion to the American Dream is that of the wellness trend. Cederström and Spicer (2015) examined some of the ways health and wellness have ‘become an ideology’ (Poole 2015). Those who do not subscribe to this ideology, for example, those who fail to stay fit, get enough sleep and eat healthy foods, are considered lazy and weak. While both authors agreed there is nothing particularly wrong with the pursuit of health and happiness, when this pursuit becomes obligatory within a culture, it can have damaging effects when people are made to feel like failures when they cannot achieve the health, fitness and happiness they desire. Underneath the veneer of health and happiness, the ethos of wellness contains undertones of capitalist consumption, both through the emphasis on productivity in life and in the workplace and through the need for associated products and services such as yoga equipment, mindfulness retreats, juice cleanses and expensive green smoothies (Cederström and Spicer 2015).

Cederström and Spicer (2015) argued that the wellness fad promotes the ‘well’ individual, rather than a healthy society as a whole as the activities associated with wellness can be considered self-indulgent and narcissistic. This ideology is particularly sneaky because, on the surface, health and happiness appear to be very positive pursuits. When the onus of wellness gets turned onto the individual who is made to feel as if they are a failure if everything in their lives does not match up to an ideal, especially ideals espoused through social media, this can lead to suffering (Cederström and Spicer 2015).

An example of the tragicomic reflection of wellness in painting is my 2018 work ‘Self Care Exhaustion’ (Figure 3-5). This work, a square painting,17 is a portrait of Jade in the

17 This painting is square rather than rectangular because, initially, Instagram allowed only square images to be posted. In 2015, the company changed this feature to allow vertical and horizontal rectangular images and videos. 66

bath painted with a contrasting, awkward and unrealistic perspective. Jade is portrayed as if the viewer is standing above her, but the paintings and palette in the lower right-hand corner appear as if they are standing straight up, parallel with the viewer’s line of sight. This work mostly consists of a pastel-toned palette with garishly bright flourishes in the landscape and abstract paintings strewn around the bathroom scene. Jade’s head is framed by a grid of pink square wall tiles from which framed paintings hang. The pale yellow porcelain of the tub frames her upper body and serves as a mantle holding an overwhelming clutter of paint brushes, candles, bright yellow wig and drinks. A precariously balanced yoga mat seems about to fall out the window. Jade’s lower body is framed by the churning, squiggly blue and white swirls of water. Jade’s bathrobe encased figure appears pinned down to the bath by a wooden reading stand. Her eyes are covered with cucumber slices and her hair is wrapped in a purple grey turban towel. Jade displays a tight tan facial mask sucking in her cheeks, bold red lips and bright red fingernails. Jade is stressing about trying to relax as she follows the recently popularised wellness trends of ‘self-care’ and ‘me-time’. For many people, ‘self-care’ has become yet another stressful thing to tackle on the weekly to-do list. As usual, Jade goes over the top, attempting multiple ‘self-care’ tactics simultaneously, surrounding herself in the bath with a glass of wine, a blender full of green smoothie, self-help books, scented candles, a facial mask, a yoga mat and her newfound hobby, painting.

Figure 3-5: Amber Boardman, ‘Self Care Exhaustion’, 2018, acrylic on polyester, 183 x 183cm.

3.4 Internet Beauty Culture

The tragicomic character abounds in Internet beauty culture.18 Internet characters can exist in two iterations, the physical and the digital. The physical character can be created through alterations of the body through the use of makeup, hair dye, clothing and plastic surgery. Often, these alterations are made for the purpose of creating the optimal selfie. A selfie, which was the 2013 OED word of the year, is ‘a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website’ (OED 2018). A person can then alter this selfie beyond physical reality through the use of digital software such as digital filters to create yet another iteration of the self, the digital character. The motivation to alter these two forms of self can stem from a sense of insufficiency or lack and a desire for improvement based on images and

18 A popular example of this in recent years is the character Miranda Sings, who has achieved significant success as a parody of YouTube beauty culture and the associated pitfalls of social media. 68

ideas circulated and consumed online through social media and influenced by ideologies of improvement like wellness and the American Dream.

Social media is not simply a means of posting information in the way that a news article might be posted on a website. Of equal or greater importance than the initial content is the reaction that follows. Person A posts a photo online, for example, on Instagram, and a person who follows this account (Person B) can see this image in their ‘feed’, a scrollable stream of photographic content. Person B can then show approval of this image by clicking a heart (on Instagram) or a thumbs up (on Facebook), showing their endorsement or ‘like’ for the post. These likes and the number of people subscribed to an account, or followers, have become status symbols for social media users. The more followers a person has, the more their content is generally trusted as being important or interesting. It is now possible to purchase followers in the same way it is possible to engineer good responses to posts through paid sponsorship posting options. On Instagram, people with large numbers of followers—in the tens of thousands or more— are referred to as ‘influencers’. Many influencers use this status to monetise their accounts, for example, by posing with a new brand of tea they are drinking in exchange for payment from the producer of the tea.

The ways social media is used and consumed have been said to have a range of different effects on viewers. Recent studies of the emotional effects of social media on passive users, those who mainly watch other people’s posts, rather than create posts themselves, have found a correlation between consumption of social media and feelings of loneliness and depression. Following the vacation posts of others can also trigger feelings of resentment and jealousy (Chua and Chang 2016). According to Hannah Krasnova of Humboldt University, Berlin and co-author of a study on Facebook and envy, the passive consumption of a friend’s vacation photos or glamorised selfies can invite comparison and catalyse what Krasnova calls the ‘envy spiral’ (Winter 2013). Krasnova explained:

If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram…one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self- promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality. (Winter 2013)

Here, the word ‘reality’ refers to a representation of a range of ups and downs of everyday life, rather than a highlight reel of the best constructed moments. This ‘reality’ Krasnova

referred to seems to eventually become the new normal as social media users become accustomed to seeing glamorised versions of people, rather than representations of the way people actually look in day-to-day life.

Berger’s (1972, 148) thoughts on the politics of social envy, written long before the advent of social media, are still relevant today:

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society, which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.

Berger (1972) astutely linked the promoted aspirational ideals of glamour and universal happiness to envy and action, or disappointment and feelings of failure. The idea that likes and followers equate to feelings of self-worth is an example of how we are creating ourselves, or our personas, as a response to what we see on the Internet. I think of the combination of a person with their digitally altered self—either through digital filters or the influence of online beauty culture—as a kind of character. Social media requires people to become ambassadors of their own brands, their own crafted image or character. We can feel a certain way about ourselves, but when that butts up against social media, our perception changes. Perhaps this has always been the case in human society, that we base our opinions of ourselves on other’s reactions to us, but with social media the feedback loop is much faster.

A pitfall of this system of likes and followers is perhaps an attack on a person’s sense of self-worth. Laine (2009, 6) described the effect of attacks on vanity in the context of Wile E. Coyote’s failures in the Looney Tunes cartoon, but it aptly applies to the effect of social media on its users:

Probably there is not a single failing that is more superficial or more deep- rooted. The wounds it [vanity] receives are never very serious, and yet they are seldom healed. The services rendered to it are the most unreal of all series, and yet they are the very ones that meet with lasting gratitude. It is scarcely a vice,

and yet all the vices are drawn into its orbit and, in proportion as they become more refined and artificial, tend to be nothing more than a means of satisfying it. The outcome of social life, since it is an admiration of ourselves based on the admiration we think we are inspiring in others, it is even more natural, more universally innate than egoism; for egoism may be conquered by nature, whereas only by reflection do we get the better of vanity.

Laine’s (2009) insights about vanity’s gravitational pull, its power to wound and its subservience to others’ opinions are as profound as his understanding that self-growth is the only path to loosen its hold. The pursuit of especially female beauty has been with us from antiquity to today as evidenced by objects like the Venus de Willendorf of the Palaeolithic era, Botticelli’s Venus of the Italian Renaissance, Barbie dolls of the American 1950s to the supermodel explosion of the 1990s and Instagram models today (Davis 2014). Dramatic appearances often garner more likes on social media. With the advent of a multitude of tutorials showing professional makeup application, lighting and posing techniques, access to beauty guides and aids has become more democratised. So long as the user can pay for the necessary products, more people can join the self- improvement club. Since the 1980s, the commercialisation of self-improvement has escalated and the narrative that one is lacking and in need of products to change this situation is ubiquitous. The ideologies around striving to improve oneself all seem to thrive on instilling a sense of lack within people. The ubiquity of this system of striving, failing and the envy spiral has created an ever-growing cult of self-improvement that makes the body the mechanism, the vehicle, for striving and failing.

Wissinger (2015) used the term ‘glamour labour’ to define the work required to create a ‘look’, or the alteration of one’s physical appearance to resemble that of models, or at least to curate an idealised version of oneself. This labour consists of both the work on the body before an image is taken and on the image itself through filters. Glamour labour also requires one to constantly stay aware of trends as they change, which requires one to log many hours of online research. Many of these trends involve the use of makeup.

Historically, the term ‘makeup’, which was in common use by the 1920s, ‘connoted a medium of self-expression in a consumer society where identity had become a purchasable style’ (Peiss 1998, 4). Rather than promote self-expression, the producers of cosmetic products focused on the manipulation of emotions through marketing to increase insecurity and fear to sell more of their products. The change in status for many women from mothers to citizens to workers to consumers is related to this change in appearance 71

to a more glamorised look, one requiring the consumption of cosmetic products. Peiss (1998, 6) referred to this concept as the ‘public woman’, explaining, ‘Beauty culture, then, should be understood not only as a type of commerce but as a system of meaning that helped women navigate the changing conditions of modern social experience’. In the nearly 100 years since the initial marketing of makeup to women, the rise of social media has added to the escalation of insecurities through a much larger public and greater emphasis on physical perfection.

Filters, a kind of digital makeup, are a recent addition to beauty culture. Only a few years ago, the retouching of images was the domain of those highly skilled in photo editing software. Now, almost anyone can digitally transform themselves through filters that come pre-packaged with smartphones. For example, it is becoming an increasingly frequent practice in China to ‘beautify’ oneself with a digital retouch filter and, subsequently, undergo multiple surgical procedures to mimic this idealised (and often more Westernised) version of oneself. Figure 3-6 shows the alterations applied to a woman’s image with the digital filters of the Chinese smartphone brand Meitu, which means beautiful picture (Fan 2017). The alterations of these digital apps reveal the particular features users, or at least the software developers, consider beautiful. These features include lighter skin, larger eyes, darkened and raised eyebrows, longer and slender noses, rich pink lips with perfect cupid’s bow upper lip and pouting lower lip and pointier chins. Through this digital transformation, the woman’s filtered image in Figure 3-6 is unrecognisable from her original image.

Figure 3-6: Example of Meitu Digital Filter Retouch

Similarly, but through more painful and permanent methods, the woman in Figure 3-7 has undergone a series of plastic surgeries to achieve many of the same features listed above, including larger eyes, a slender nose, a shapelier mouth and a pointier chin. This woman’s altered appearance is also unrecognisable from her original visage. This surgically altered ‘beautified’ human can be thought of as a kind of cyborg, a term which refers to the enhanced abilities or restored function of an organism that are the result of an integrated artificial component or technology (Carvalko 2012). In the case of the surgically beautified human, perhaps the restored function and enhanced ability leads to an increase in confidence in one’s self-image. Humans have always developed in tandem with technology, and as people create idealised versions of themselves online, plastic surgery is keeping step to physically mimic these digital persona ideals. In addition to advancements in plastic surgery, technology has kept in step with the desire to have as much control as possible over one’s own image by redesigning camera phones to have front facing cameras. The pursuit of the perfect selfie is so important to some people that it can even go against human survival mechanisms—for example, several deaths have occurred by standing too close to a ledge while leaning back to take a photo over a beautiful vista. Priceless works of art in museums have been destroyed by those attempting to capture images of themselves climbing onto a sculpture and knocking it over, or by bumping into it and knocking it over while staring at their phone while walking backwards (Cascone 2016).

Figure 3-7: Plastic Surgery, Before (Left) and After (Right)

In a recent essay, Popova (2013) analysed Sontag’s (1977) views on photography in terms of the selfie today. Sontag (1977, 155–156) wrote that ‘needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted’. I agree with Popova’s (2013) assertion that the ways images can change our relationship to our sense of self and the world around us is even more relevant today within the endless self-affirming selfie culture. Popova (2013) reminds us that before the invention of photography, awareness of one’s image was only possible for the wealthy who could afford to have their portraits painted. Now, many feel it is their duty and obligation not only to create images of themselves but to create ‘beautiful’ images, which culminate in a personal brand.

In my own experience, the first time I encountered the idea that regular people could become glamourous was when Glamour Shots became popular in my childhood. Glamour Shots reached the height of their popularity in US shopping malls in the 1990s. Businesses sold soft focus photographs of ‘made over’ people, usually in sexy poses. These shops were mostly frequented by working class women who wanted stylish photographs of themselves (Marages 2016). Figure 3-8 shows a typical Glamour Shots idea of beauty, which involves voluminous permed hair, an abundance of thick foundation, eyeshadow, blush, lipstick and fluffy pink clothing. The Glamour Shots model is an earlier version of today’s professional makeup practices, camera filters and selfie culture. My painting ‘Before and after glamour shots’ (Figure 3-9) simultaneously shows the before and after attempts of Jade’s desire for improvement. On the left is a streaky-haired zombie-looking creature with thick dark blue lines for wrinkles and lidless eyes. The figure on the right is a soft-focused woman with permed hair looking longingly off in the distance, cleavage in view. The parts of this painting that mimic the glamour shot image include the presence of pink tones, large and permed blond hair and the soft focus halo around the figure on the right. This painting differs from the Glamour Shot photo in Figure 3-8 because, even in Jade’s ‘after’/glamorised image, she still looks hideous. Her face is long and streaky as if it were melting off. Her earnest expression reveals she is attempting to look good even when she looks frightening.

Figure 3-8: Example of a Glamour Shot Photo

Figure 3-9: Amber Boardman, ‘Before and after glamour shots’, 2018, oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm.

While there is a long history of creating an image of oneself in art, never before in history have people felt encouraged to take and share manipulated images of themselves on the scale that exists today. Such physical and digital alterations turn people into characters in their own dramas with the desire for the requisite attention. Instagram artist Amalia Ulman, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, describes her own online persona as follows: ‘Once it goes online, it goes online, but it’s true that it’s not me anymore. It’s just this thing that keeps on growing…it’s just this copy that keeps on growing and acquiring new meanings’ (Eler 2018). Perhaps what appeals to some is precisely this distancing of oneself from one’s image. In this sense, an image can achieve a kind of immortality that lives on outside of its originator. One’s Instagram brand becomes something that has a life of its own, operating separate from oneself. This is the case with Jade, who starts a brand for herself with her own images, then distances herself from the

brand by creating her own character, ‘Blob’, and then a product line of hand-painted sweaters.

Jade’s character comes from the lineage of the previously discussed ‘public woman’, who is now part of a culture arguably far more public through social media technology than ever before. Jade unintentionally unveils her vanity, anxieties and desires through the act of disguising them with makeup and other paint-like body products such as hair dye and spray tan. By showing us her disguises, she shows us her vulnerability. This mimics the way the application of thick foundation makeup, in its attempt to cover over skin conditions, often calls more attention to itself and the imperfections that might be hiding beneath. An example of this sort of effect is depicted in ‘Renovated Painting’ (Figure 3- 10). In this work, Jade has taken a portrait I have made of her and has then ‘enhanced’ it in ways that show us, the viewers, some of her desires and insecurities. In this work, smoother, shinier skin has been added atop slightly ruddier-looking skin. Jade has given herself straighter, blonder streaks of hair in the form of parallel horizontal and vertical brushstrokes. Some of the structural features of the face have also been changed—higher cheekbones, bluer eyes, larger lips, a pointier chin and larger cleavage. These renovations of the painting look as though they have been carried out by an unskilled hand, making Jade appear as though a botched painting restoration. Jade’s clothing is made up of simple yellow lines and red squares, which contrast against a pale blue top. Her neck has been painted blue, which is Jade’s inept way of pushing her neck into shadow so her new pointy chin can stand out in contrast.

Figure 3-10: Amber Boardman, ‘Renovated Painting’, 2018, oil on polyester, 50 x 40cm.

3.5 Internet Memes

Memes, which usually appear as photo-based images with a humorous juxtaposition of text, can be defined as ‘an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation’ (OED 2018). The significance of memes for this thesis is that much of the language and aesthetic aspects in the paintings in my exhibition are influenced by the language, imagery and trends I have observed in meme and Internet culture. In this thesis, I focus on the memes that concern the simple striving and failings—the tragicomic—in the participants of Internet beauty culture. These types of memes are ubiquitous, reinforcing the idea that meme culture and social media have become the notice board for voicing concerns about the difficulties of trying to keep up with ever-changing trends related to self-image. The technology involved in memes—often Photoshop, smartphone apps and social media—aids in the rapid creation and dissemination of this form of information. Once posted online, memes can be copied, varied and rapidly spread by

Internet users. A key function of meme culture is that it creates a community around processing the fears, frustrations and anxieties of everyday life through humour. This culture relies on the omnipresence of social media and the Internet and the ease of transmission using smart phones and computers.

Memes often contain a structure similar to a joke. The image sets up an assumption and the text, or caption, becomes a punchline, upsetting that assumption. Memes use the incongruity theory of humour to create this two-part structure between image and text. In the meme shown in Figure 3-11, a woman poses provocatively and stares at the camera in a way that suggests she is aware of how strikingly beautiful she looks. Her hair is highly stylised and dyed almost blue-black. Her nails have been manicured and painted pink. The woman’s makeup looks as though it might have taken a professional makeup artist several hours and years of experience to expertly apply. While there is nothing ‘natural’ about the way this woman looks, meaning she could not have emerged from the shower in the morning looking this way, images like these are common and typical of glamorised photographs used not only in advertisements but in many personal social media accounts in the form of selfies. The incongruity of the caption ‘when someone asks where did all your money go and you give them this look’ gives a very different read to the image itself. This caption refers to the costs associated with ‘looking good’ which are not often alluded to, as people might want viewers to infer that they effortlessly appear glamourous.

Figure 3-11: ‘Where Did All Your Money Go’ Meme

Many memes aimed at women reference beauty trends and the drain on time and money required to transform oneself to uphold standards of beauty, what Wissinger (2015) dubs ‘glamour labour’, as both frustrating and necessary. The creator of the meme shown in Figure 3-12 uses a hypothetical image of the way a Disney princess, in this case Snow White, would look without makeup (i.e., plain faced) as a metaphor for the dissatisfaction the creator themselves feels being seen and exposed without the enhancement of makeup.

Figure 3-12: Better Without Makeup Meme

I think of memes as extensions of the single panel cartoon because of the similarities in the image/caption structure and the emphasis on humour. It is, perhaps, easy to dismiss memes as throwaway jokes, but I think they have a significant role to play in understanding contemporary life. Humour has the capacity both to reinforce our ideas and to reveal to us what we have not noticed in everyday life. What was once seen as normal can suddenly appear strange because humour can show us what we have come to take for granted. Humour can also be a kind of social glue in a community because it utilises shared cultural knowledge. Memes build on other memes and bring people together through the altering and sharing of jokes in a time when many people may have less in-person contact with friends than in the past. For many, memes represent a way of staying connected and ‘woke’.19 Similar to jokes, the content of memes can evidence the concerns of the participants of Internet culture.

Memes are also a good example of what I am describing and analysing as the tragicomic in Internet culture. While the tragicomic is also present in other sectors of the Internet (e.g., in many YouTube videos), memes offer a more readily made, easily shared and

19 Slang for those who are socially conscious and aware of current events. The term first appeared in print in The New York Times in 1962 (Holliday 2016). 80

quickly consumed means of communication. Many memes are created and consumed by twentysomethings20 and humorously express the anxieties, strivings and failings of emerging adulthood. While some memes are political in nature and refer to high-stakes current events, many memes concern quotidian occurrences in the lives of young people, sometimes referred to as ‘adulting’.21 Figure 3-13 shows the poignant evolution of a person through the kinds of objects they keep in a plastic container as they age, from dinosaurs to markers to medicine, described as progressively ‘more depressing’.

Figure 3-13: ‘I’ve Had This Container’ Meme

Often, memes contain references to the ubiquity of substance abuse as at once pathetic and humorous, or to put it another way, as both tragic and comic. Figure 3-14 shows a popular meme format, the ‘philosoraptor’, a dinosaur that thoughtfully touches its claw to its chin while pontificating on metaphysical ideas (Know Your Meme 2008). In this particular example, the raptor remarks on the developmental shift in its peers from carefree partying youth to (hopefully) responsible parents. The creator of this meme, perhaps, does not fit either of these categories and feels ‘awkward’ as a result.

20 The hypothetical phase for people living in developed countries between late adolescence and early adulthood (Arnett 2000). 21 Millennial slang for the difficult tasks involved in living on your own, which include paying rent, cooking for yourself, working a job and general life administration. 81

Figure 3-14: Example of the ‘Philosoraptor’ Meme Format

To more fully explain meme culture, it is useful to describe the ways that jokes and humour function in memes. While memes often use the joke structure of the incongruity theory of humour, or an unexpected relationship between the image and text, memes can also use the superiority theory of humour. In this theory, the person telling a joke is laughing at, or is in a dominant position to, the butt of the joke, or the one being laughed at. In meme culture, however, I have observed that this theory is often turned inward. The ubiquitous objectification of oneself in meme culture may be viewed as inverting the superiority theory of humour. This theory contends that the person telling the joke seeks to dominate the one being laughed at, yet, in meme culture, people often make themselves the butt of jokes, as is the case with the memes shown in Figures 3-11 to 3-14.

Douglas (1968) contended that it is essential to understand the social conditions surrounding a joke to fully understand a joke’s meaning. She asserted that a joke is a symbol of a situation occurring within a society at a given time. Jokes can serve a number of functions, for example, the shared understanding and laughter at a joke can act as societal glue. Alternatively, a joke can function as an attack on established social hierarchies by mocking ritual practices in a society. Douglas (1968) referred to this latter act as the ‘joke rite’, which celebrates the power of an individual over societal structures or laws. Adding to Douglas’s (1968) theory, while the attack on cultural norms can elevate the individual over society, the joke rite can also serve as a bond between individuals by helping them feel less alienated. Within a joke rite, there is recognition of a shared experience, acting as a bond between rebels, or at least the bond between individuals. Memes can serve both of these functions, the elevation of the individual over the structures of society and as a bond between social rebels.

Similarly, Critchley (2008, 17) defined jokes as ‘tiny anthropological essays’ and humour as a ‘form of critical social anthropology’. I agree that jokes can resemble ‘anthropological essays’, especially in the form of memes which so quickly disseminate humour surrounding important features and events within a culture. Similarly, Drissen (1997, 222) wrote that studying humour for the anthropologist and historians can show us what really matters to a culture—their interests, values, sense of identity, anxieties and fears.

With the ideas of these humour theorists in mind, it is not surprising to find that memes often form the basis of cohesive Internet subcultures. The website 4chan.org was initially a site populated by memes, created and shared for the purpose of eliciting ‘Lulz’.22 In 2008, Hacker groups comprised of the same people who circulated memes began to use 4chan to organise social protests, which became known as hacktivism—a combination of hacking and activism used to promote social change (Olson 2012). These cyber-attacks were often focused on large corporations the hacktivists identified as abusing power (Knappenberger 2012). Even though jokes may seem insignificant, the shared understanding and bonding they create, even between people who have never met and may not even know each other’s real names, can result in events that alter the ways large corporations function.

Figure 3-15 shows similar ideas to those portrayed in my painting ‘Self Care Exhaustion’ (Figure 3-5) expressed in a meme. In ‘Self Care Exhaustion’ (described in Section 2.3), humour arises out of the paradox of the stressful, anxiety-provoking lives we lead and our desperate search to restore calm in ourselves which, in turn, can lead to more stress coupled with a sense of failure that we have not found peace. The viewer is invited to commiserate with the determined figure in the bath. Dealing with difficult topics in disarming ways helps us laugh at our desires and feelings of inadequacy.

22 A variation of ‘LOL’, which is Internet slang for ‘laughing out loud’. Lulzsec is the name of a prominent hacktivist group. 83

Figure 3-15: ‘Me Trying to Excel’ Meme

Figure 3-15 shows a similar theme in a meme. The character, Cruella de Vil from Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, appears to be either irate or incredibly stressed while driving. The caption indicates the ways that attempting to manage stress and behave in a healthy fashion often incites greater anxiety. Because Internet culture presents an edited version of life, it may seem as though some people manage to simultaneously be busy and Zen, highly productive and perfectly even-tempered. This meme uses humour to highlight that managing the competing demands of contemporary life is sometimes actually unachievable. While it is difficult for me to say if this meme directly inspired my ‘Self Care Exhaustion’, given that I have looked at so many examples of the meme culture zeitgeist, memes like the one in Figure 3-15 certainly inspired this work and others in my research.

3.6 Conclusion

Never before has there been a method for an efficient, large-scale, peer-to-peer, daily flow of media and information that highlights the struggles and aspirations of contemporary life. Within Internet beauty culture, the desire to keep up with beauty trends encourages those who participate in this culture to transform their bodies both physically and through digital means of retouch filters. As a result, the creation and presentation of characters online have become ever present on social media in the form of glamorised digital versions of the self, the beautification designed to enhance brand appeal while at the same time temporarily nourish self-worth.

The tragicomic is an element that runs through the narratives of these transformations of character. These characters can be considered tragic because my research on selfie culture repeatedly reveals the theme that people feel as though they are not good enough or beautiful enough and suffer as a result of their participation in social media culture. Disciples of Internet beauty culture are likely to have fragile senses of self-esteem. External approval for, and validation of, their worth as people is commonly attributed to physical appearance. I imagine the persistent striving for greater personal beauty and popularity feeds some measure of envy for the success of Internet celebrities they seek to emulate. Living in a state of perpetual envy is another tragic facet of the lives of Internet beauty culture devotees.

At the same time, these characters can also be considered comic through the depiction of memes, which create humour through an incongruous juxtaposition of image and text. The sharing of memes about the anxieties surrounding beauty culture have perhaps become a way of coping with the pressures that participation in the culture entails. By depicting people laughing at themselves, rather than at another person, memes often upend the superiority theory of humour, which usually involves a person laughing at someone they consider inferior or mistaken in some way.

The combination of Freud’s theory of identification with Bergson’s ideas about machine- like behaviour can also lead to the tragicomic. Those who unconsciously identify with ideologies like the American Dream and wellness trends can possibly blame themselves when they do not achieve their desires for improvement. This is comic in the classic sense of the comic hero adopting the hubris of grand aspirations. It is tragic in the Aristotelian sense that the tragic hero brings about their own failing through their need to rise above their current circumstance, which can lead to great suffering.

This thesis aims to show the tragicomic result of the grand aspirations and failures of these automatist desires for self-improvement. The cartoonish characters in my paintings become visual representations of aspiration. For my character, Jade, there exists a gap between what she is and what she desires to be, which causes suffering. Jade sees Internet depictions and blindly follows an assumption that she must look like those she observes. And so, she reads self-help books, buys makeup, watches makeup tutorials and tries to improve her looks and her status on social media. Jade is a comic character because she desperately strives for beauty but ends up looking ugly and grotesque. This is a classic

setup and punchline structure of the incongruity theory of humour. Jade is also tragic because her desires for a perfected body, inspired by the Internet, get continuously squashed as the narrative unfolds. As she tries to exaggeratedly conform to beauty ideals, she takes it all too far, thus the resulting horror is a tragedy brought about by her own doing.

Chapter 4: Cartoonish Painting and the Social Media Feed

This chapter builds on the examination and discussion of the tragicomic character in Internet beauty culture, selfies and Internet memes in Chapter 3. This chapter discusses the evolution of Jade’s tragicomic character through the use of narrative conventions established by the social media platform Instagram, from a beauty-obsessed woman intoxicated by social media’s influence to a self-aware being, both calculating and ambitious, who is pursuing a strategy to become one of social media’s influencers. The chapter also examines the use of Instagram as an art medium. The thesis demonstrates how the narrative surrounding my tragicomic character can broaden the reach of cartoonish painting with powerful, widely accessible messages disseminated via Instagram.

Instagram, an image-based social media platform launched in 2010, is an efficient medium, broadly speaking, for consuming Internet culture, memes in particular, because imaged-based information can be ‘read’ instantly (O’Dell 2010). Instagram has also become a platform for visual culture and contemporary art, both as a way of reproducing and sharing artworks and as a new platform for original art pieces. Davis (2014) examined the ways that claims made by Berger (1972) can be applied to the visual culture of Instagram. Berger (1972) described the democratic potential of technology to reproduce images of art, making it more accessible and integrated into everyday life.23 Through reproduction, the average person, rather than only the wealthy elite, can access works of art. The traditional hierarchy of images changes when people print reproductions of paintings and tack them up on a wall next to to-do lists or photos of their cat, essentially replacing the museum with one’s own bedroom wall (Davis 2014).24

Davis (2014) continues an argument begun by Berger (1972) that the aesthetics and motivation behind the creation of images are the same, whether the image is a European nude painting, a pin-up in men’s magazines or the selfie post of an Instagram model. Berger (1972) argued that painting was not about depicting truth but about ‘advertising the lifestyle of the rich as fantastic and powerful’ (Davis 2014, n.p.). In addition to

23 Berger (1972) credits Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ for some of these ideas. 24 Davis (2014) suggested that this bulletin board analogy now applies more to websites like Tumblr and Pinterest. 87

portraits, the other most popular types of images on Instagram, photos of food and vacation spots, also align with common subjects in painting, still life and landscapes. Davis (2014, n.p.) refers to this type of imagery as ‘middle-class leisure iconography’.

As in the past, much contemporary advertising is concerned with promoting aspirational desire to influence consumer behaviour. By advertising certain parts of their lives, Instagram users—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes with purpose—create a character or a personal brand of themselves for others to ‘follow’, creating feelings of desire in those followers. Those participating in this kind of ‘look at me’ or ‘look what I have’ culture proliferate the ‘envy spiral’ mentioned in Chapter 3. My work highlights what I have identified as the tragicomic aspect of social media users who present themselves as character brands, striving after but typically failing to fulfil self- improvement aspirations encouraged by social media culture. My paintings engage with those who participate in Internet beauty culture, but at the same time also draw on meme culture, which pokes fun at attention-seeking beauty culture participants.

While many artists post images of their work on Instagram (myself included) as a way of finding a larger audience for their work, some artists are using Instagram as a medium for their art practices. For a short time, some of these practitioners were referred to as ‘post internet’ artists, but the term quickly fell out of fashion (Chen 2017). Egan (2015) wrote that Instagram artists can be thought of as an extension of the ‘pictures generation’, a group of New York–based artists including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince who appropriated photo-based imagery by others in their work, either thematically in the case of Sherman or by direct image sampling in the case of Prince. As previously mentioned, Amalia Ulman is an artist who explores digital media culture and where art fits into it. In 2014, Ulman created a photo-based performance work ‘Excellences & Perfections’ on Instagram about a relationship breakup and recovery (but did not initially admit to this being an artwork, rather than a real-life event). The work highlighted the stereotypical ways in which young women portray themselves online and fictionalise their lives to elicit sympathy and attention. One of the posts in Ulman’s Instagram project (Figure 4-1) shows a bathroom mirror selfie, a typical style of selfie photography, in which Ulman shows off her butt, also a typical pose among many young women. Through this work, Ulman commented on the pressure that some women feel to learn how to be a celebrity in the ways they look, pose and act, and aimed to ‘prove that femininity is a construction and not something biological or inherent to any woman’ (Sooke 2016, n.p.). She was 88

interested in showing that the woman of Internet beauty culture is not natural, but learned and laboured over (Sooke 2016). When Ulman revealed to her followers that this project had not been documentation of real events in her life, but an artwork, her followers were angered by the deception. They felt Ulman had crossed the sacred line of ‘authenticity’25 that should be impermeable. Even though it is relatively easy to fake imagery through Photoshop and filters, users of social media seem to prefer to assume that the posts of ‘regular’ people (as opposed to those posted by corporations) can be trusted. If a user betrays this trust by having a hidden motive, fans deem this person ‘inauthentic’ or a ‘sell- out’.

So to summarise, Instagram is being used as an art medium by an increasing number of artists. Amalia Ulman aimed to prove through her work that femininity, at least online, is a construction rather than an inherited set of traits and behaviours. I think of Amalia Ulman’s Instagram project as containing both a narrative and the construction of a character. Similarly, my work also contains a constructed character, Jade, who depicts and comments on some of the ways women portray themselves online.

Figure 4-1: Amalia Ulman, ‘Excellences & Perfections’, 2014, photograph uploaded to Instagram, dimensions variable. (Ulman 2014)

The reception of Miquela Sousa (or @lilmiquela) is an interesting case of the issue of authenticity in social media. Figure 4-2 shows a selfie post of Sousa lying in bed wearing a t-shirt from the jazz musician Sun Ra. Miquela began posting on Instagram in 2016 and

25 Authenticity is a type of currency in Internet culture. Followers reward people for being ‘real’ by engaging with their accounts with likes, follows and comments. 89

quickly became very popular, with over 50,000 followers in the first three months. Miquela resembles a 3D digital model and, initially, her followers were unsure whether she was a heavily Photoshopped person, a 3D graphic, an art project or a marketing gimmick, since she often poses in designer brands (Donoughue 2018). As the use of photo editing software has progressed, it has become increasingly difficult to discern the difference between these different categories of Instagram content. After Miquela’s account was ‘hacked’, she was forced to admit that she is in fact a robot created by a Silicon Valley corporation. She posted about her difficulties in coming to the realisation that she is not real. This admission of the truth of her lack of authenticity as a person ironically worked as a sign of authenticity, making her even more popular with followers (Donoughue 2018). It is still not entirely clear what purpose @lilMiquela’s creators have in mind.

Figure 4-2: Example of a Miquela Sousa Instagram post

While Miquela inhabits a space somewhere between the actual and the ideal, Jade, the character I created, represents the actual and the non-ideal. As previously noted, the paintings of Jade are not trying to be an illusion of a character in the way of @lilmiquela. It is obvious that Jade is made of paint and real in the sense that the physical object of a painting exists. But she is not cool, hip or young and she often looks hideous. Like @lilmiquela, Jade also becomes aware that she is not a real person but a confected character. Unlike Amalia Ulman, who alienated some followers by betraying the authenticity code expected by the user community, Jade is clearly fictional and makes no pretence that her antics, creation (Blob) or line of sweaters are real. My paintings and postings are clearly a work of art.

4.1 @jadefad: A Social Media Feed in Paint

My exhibition project is comprised of two distinct but interrelated components, 1) a physical exhibition of paintings in a gallery and 2) a social media feed on Instagram. The exhibition of paintings, entitled ‘@jadefad: A Social Media Feed in Paint’, is the primary element of the project. These paintings serve as the ‘social media posts’ of the character Jade. While the social media posts on Instagram will accompany the paintings on an iPad in the gallery space (and also in the cloud, publicly available to Instagram users), this component is supplementary to the paintings and will become an archive of the show once the exhibition is over.

The specific narrative of the paintings in this exhibition, aided by the titles, proceeds in a three-part structure—Jade (part one), the life of Blob (Jade’s creation) (part two) and Jade’s product line of hand-painted sweaters (part three). In part one, the first seven paintings concern Jade’s dissatisfaction with her looks. In these paintings, she transforms herself with surface treatments such as makeup, hair dye and spray tan. In ‘Makeup Bus Commute Mashup Fail’ (Figure 4-3), Jade attempts her morning beautification routine on her bus commute to work. As the result of a bumpy ride, her foundation has smeared, her eyebrows and mascara appear to be drawn on with wobbly lines, her lipstick has smudged and other unknown kinds of makeup of flesh tones and oranges and reds create wobbly intestine-like shapes on her cheek and chin. She appears surprised, with wide-open lidless eyes, and also a bit sad, with a downturned mouth. Jade’s hair is dyed lemon yellow, but her brown roots show through. The base layer of her face is a single squeegeed layer, as if it were formed from a smear of foundation, flat with nothing behind it. Jade’s face essentially fills the canvas and the other bus passengers are not seen, highlighting Jade’s self-absorption with her makeup ritual. She is presented as a bodiless head to highlight the importance of her made-up face to her sense of self.

Figure 4-3: Amber Boardman, ‘Makeup Bus Commute Mashup Fail’, 2015, oil on canvas, 50 x 40cm.

Another example of Jade’s experimentation with surface transformation is depicted in ‘Preparing for summer with some spray tan research @paintjobbod today ; )’ (Figure 2- 30). Like many of my paintings of Jade, her efforts to improve her body image are somewhat cruelly exposed as a dismal failure. In this work, a full body image of Jade shows her facing the viewer with a grotesque smile plastered on her face as though she is posing for a fashion shoot or glamour photo. Her lurid yellow hair with prominent black roots is so excessively windblown it stands up vertically as if she has received an electric shock. Her muffin top fat spills over her blue jeans which are spattered with blobs of spray tan. Different shades of brown, orange and red are unevenly applied to her upper body to suggest a disastrous combination of serious sunburn and ham-fisted spray tan application. These colours are echoed in a background comprised of paint splotches, squiggles and drips that both recall Abstract Expressionist paintwork and hint at a misfiring fake tan spray gun. Jade’s body is striped with white lines left by her bikini straps, another faux pas in the all-over tan stakes. I have also taken advantage of the unreality of cartoon physics, as her grossly asymmetrical breasts become her arms in this work, with the bikini lines transformed into white straps that resemble slings supporting either breasts or arms. The mention of @paintjobbod in the title becomes a hyperlinked

tag when viewed on Instagram, bringing users to the Instagram account of Jade’s beauty salon, Paint Job Bod, the fictional place Jade has her hair, makeup and spray tan done.

After drinking too many turpentine cocktails at an open bar with friends one night, Jade finds herself dissolving (turpentine is a paint thinner) and realises she is a character made of paint (Figure 4-4). This work, ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’, is a diptych showing the moments before and after Jade and her friends get drunk and messy. This format comically inverts the temporality of before and after photographs advertising bodily improvements, where the before image is normally a horror story and the after image shows a magical transformation for the better. The before painting in my diptych shows Jade in the centre with two friends on either side. All are dressed up (some might say their outfits are excessive), with Jade sporting a huge bouffant hairdo, a hot pink top and a demure pair of spectacles. In the after painting, the women’s carefully confected appearances are transformed into a chaos of mixed colours and exploding lines meant to suggest their heavy intoxication and the disarray of their carefully curated appearances.

Figure 4-4: Amber Boardman, ‘Before and after open bar. Complete carnage last night. I’m thinking I must be a character made of paint?!’, oil on canvas, 76 x 204cm.

With Jade’s newfound knowledge that she is a character made of paint, she begins to transform herself in more extreme ways. In ‘Be your own plastic surgeon #WatchOutWorld!’ (Figure 3-14), Jade stands in a doctor’s office surrounded by boxes of latex gloves and medical degrees on the wall behind her. She is dressed like a sleazy used car salesman and is sporting the sordid, self-confident grin that is reminiscent of a debauched womaniser. Her lilac button-up shirt is opened a few extra buttons to show a gold necklace and a hint of chest hair. On her hand is a heavy gold bracelet and she wears

a prominent gold pinkie ring. Her fingernails are painted a gaudy, bright red. The plaid print on her shirt resembles blood stains, hinting at her sloppy or cavalier surgical skills. In her plastic surgeon persona, the blood stains could make her the central character in a slasher movie. Jade’s facial features, swirled with peach and pink tones, look as though they have been subjected to a series of plastic surgeries conducted by someone who is not (yet) particularly skilled in the art. She has a prize-fighter’s flattened nose, a crooked and slightly too large mouth and skin that appears either pudgy or too taut in places. Her face would also not be entirely out of place in a horror movie.

With her new skills in plastic surgery, Jade remakes herself into her ideal image of beauty, enters the ‘45 and Over Awards’ beauty pageant and wins the crown. This portrait of Jade, ‘Me at the ‘45 and Over Awards’ beauty pageant #NewLookWhoDis’ (Figure 4-5) is comprised of four stacked canvases. In the top canvas, Jade has become part of a beauty machine. Her body is both emerging from and incorporated into geometric lines and shapes which reference to gears, cogs and steel-coloured metallic machinery which contrasts Jade’s organic dress and body. She wears cascading tresses of permed hair. She smiles with silicone-filled bright red lips and peers out at the view with overly large eyes emphasised by heavy eyeliner. Jade’s beauty pageant look is a contemporary, Internet- inspired image of beauty evidenced by the duck face expression and thickly filled in, high arching eyebrows. Her ‘Miss America’ type sash is inscribed with a series of illegible pink paint strokes. The bottom three canvases depict an abstract, cellular pattern in saccharine pink and glittering gold that represents Jade’s long flowing dress. This dress is an awkward construction of unstable canvases which appear on the verge of toppling over. The dress hints at a lacy construction, but paint drips make it look dirty and messy. Flesh tones and red spots on the garment suggest nipples or sores.

Figure 4-5: Amber Boardman, ‘Me at the “45 and Over Awards” beauty pageant #NewLookWhoDis’, 2018, oil on canvas, 168 x 91cm.

There is some uncomfortable humour in Jade’s entry into an over-45 beauty contest and trying so hard with her outfit, makeup and hair to win. But the humour is tragicomic as there is an undeniable element of pathos in Jade’s middle-aged need to compete in beauty contests and the sad inference that she has still not developed sufficient self-esteem to have become less fixated on her appearance.

Though it is not always funny when people behave like machines, as Douglas (1968) pointed out in response to Freud and Bergson (1911) (discussed in Chapter 3), the body- as-machine as a comic trope may be applied to the behaviour of my characters. Bergson posited that comedy comes out of human’s behaving unconsciously and machine-like. Aspects of Jade’s single-minded, almost mechanical obsession in her drive for youth and beauty, and her desire to promote her beauty through social media, recall Bergson’s (1911) definition of the comic as pure mechanism. Jade is a vanity machine, conformist machine and transforming machine. Jade is a distillation of the idea that on Instagram and social media, who you are is entirely about how you look. She seeks happiness in ways

that society tells her are a good idea and tragically fails to live up to the ideals she strives after. She cannot see outside of her desire for beauty, physical improvement, gaining attention and commercial gain. When she becomes self-aware, that she is a character made of paint, she is shrewd enough to realise she may now be able to exert more control over her destiny. Sadly, she applies that control to further ways of becoming more beautiful and more popular on Instagram. She does this by designing and executing changes in herself through plastic surgery, by creating her own ‘original content’, the character Blob, to add to the engagement of her own story and by creating a line of sweaters as merchandise.

Eventually, Jade decides to create a character of her own. I was inspired to introduce this turn in Jade’s story by seeing how, on social media, people create accounts for their pets and children, turning them into Internet characters to sell products.26 Jade creates a flesh- like shape of paint she names ‘Blob’ and posts the bumbling, by turns comic and tragic, narrative of his life on her Instagram feed. The feed elliptically traces Blob’s life from birth to death as he pursues the American Dream. Blob is the plaything of his ‘mum’, Jade. She uses Blob to achieve her own personal gain in popularity on Instagram. To maximise Blob’s audience appeal, Jade typically puts Blob in embarrassing, humiliating or failure type situations, such as in ‘That time I caught Blob wearing my beanbag dress’, ‘#GrilledPainting That time Blob knocked back too many cold ones and fell into the grill on the 4th of July #StarsAndStripesForever #AmericanDream’ and ‘Blob hungover after a weekend bender. #TakeItEasyOnTheSauceBuddy’. This is akin to news publishers programming shocking or sensational stories to keep viewers or readers interested. By placing Blob in situations that make him seem guilty (discovered in mum’s clothing), naughty (Blob’s view of his time-out corner) or an alcoholic mess (hungover, burned with a broken leg), his creator Jade is ruthlessly subjecting him to the traditional superiority theory of humour. At the same time, we can identify with some amusement at the little vignettes of Blob’s life. Who has not been caught doing something naughty by their parents and reflected fondly on that moment later in life? Which of us cannot recall with some good-natured cringing about moments in our angsty teenage years? And who has not ever drunk that bit too much and said or done something we still squirm about? The superiority theory is perhaps best exemplified in the painting ‘Ticklemonster: Me Terrorising Blob’, where Blob appears to be enjoying Jade’s tickling but the giant hands

26 An example of this type of account is @pixiecurtis. 96

may be taking the tickling too far, and the size of the hands and the painting title make Jade’s dominance over Blob clear.

In the Blob canvases, I explore the limits of figurative painting and how even entities that look barely human can be personified and imbued with character traits. Blob is just a blob of paint, which can be adapted to any situation or experience and can be used to convey any message. As noted above, according to the superiority theory of humour Jade cruelly subjugates Blob. But Blob also conveys humour of the incongruity variety incongruity theory because people do not expect a blob of paint to be a character with a life. Jade shares scenes from the whole span of this endearing egg-shaped character’s life, from birth through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age, to death. In these scenes, humour also arises from the personifications of Blob’s behaviour, particularly as displayed in his alcoholic phase and his wheelchair-bound presence holding court in a nursing home.

Blob is a quintessentially tragicomic character. Paired with the humour that surrounds his character, there is undeniable tragedy. He is brought into the world not by caring parents but by a woman uses him to gratify her desperate need to build her social media presence and status. He experiences no warmth from or connection with his ‘mum’ in any of the paintings, except perhaps when he is being tickled. However, the title ‘TickleMonster: Me Terrorising Blob’ refutes this activity as an affectionate, play-based bonding experience between mother and child. Even in the scene with Jade and the ‘sometimes boyfriend’ (which itself hints at unstable father figure experiences), Jade is portrayed with a disengaged stance, erect and arched backwards with hands in her pockets. Tragedy is in full flight with Blob’s alcoholism and his sudden realisation that his bodily processes are deteriorating. And of course, the callous scattering of his remains in a landfill that will become his unmarked grave can hardly be considered a joyful ending to a blessed life.

My painting ‘That time I caught Blob wearing my beanbag dress’ (Figure 4-6) shows an interaction between Jade and the adolescent Blob, who has just been caught wearing his mother’s (Jade’s) dress. In a room with wood floors and purple walls, Blob sits on the floor propped up by a plank of wood, his body spills out over Jade’s feet. Jade, only visible from the waist down, wears a 1950s style green leaf print. Her feet are crammed into bright red high heels. Blob’s face appears as though he also got into Jade’s makeup kit and applied eyeliner and lipstick. His expression appears surprised and apprehensive

as though Jade had just rapidly walked up to him and confronted him about what he is wearing. The tight composition and perspective of the corner of the room gives the feeling that Blob is trapped or caged between the walls and his ‘mum’. Jade’s erect stance, towering over Blob, carries a judgemental, scolding aspect. The cropped image of dress, legs and heels is a cartoon trope from Looney Tunes in the 1950s, Who Framed Roger Rabbit from the 1980s and the Muppet Babies cartoon, also in the 1980s.

Figure 4-6: Amber Boardman, ‘That time I caught Blob wearing my beanbag dress’, 2018, oil on canvas, 91 x 122cm.

As Blob ages, the paintings change from his portrayal as a misbehaving child to rebellious youth to a working adult with substance abuse issues. As noted above, Jade does not treat her child creation kindly. Perhaps this helps boost Jade’s own sense of self-worth, which is inferred to be fragile by her constant strivings for conforming beauty, by making herself seem less of a failure in comparison. In ‘#GrilledPainting That time Blob knocked back too many cold ones and fell into the grill on the 4th of July #StarsAndStripesForever #AmericanDream’ (Figure 4-7), Blob’s grill-scarred skin fills most of the canvas while cartoon-like stars swirl around the top left-hand corner of what looks like a rare slab of the meat just off the barbeque. The spiral of stars is a long-standing device from cartooning that signifies a character seeing stars, having been knocked out or physically brutalised in some way. In this case, the presence of the stars indicates where Blob’s featureless head is located. Four corners of the painting variously show a picnic scene

with ants, crushed and leaking beer cans and food associated with Fourth of July (US Independence Day) parties (hot dogs and potato salad) atop a paper plate printed with a US flag. In the top left-hand corner, a fireworks display is sketched above iconic US imagery such as a baseball diamond. In addition to chronicling Blob’s downward spiral and Jade’s ruthless attempts to use Blob’s misfortunes to propel her own Internet popularity, this painting references the failure of the American Dream for many people who have aspired to achieve its ideals of health, wealth and happiness.

Figure 4-7: Amber Boardman, ‘#GrilledPainting That time Blob knocked back too many cold ones and fell into the grill on the 4th of July #StarsAndStripesForever #AmericanDream’, 2018, oil on polyester, 183 x 216cm.

Blob’s story ends with his death and burial. Because he is a character made of paint, his burial site is the same repository as for clean-up rags used in painting practices, a landfill. The painting, ‘Paint rags in a landfill. RIP Blob. #YouWillBeMissed’ (Figure 4-8) is multilayered. Blob’s telltale flesh tones are scattered in mounds of various sized splotches around the canvas. Teal, yellow and brown horizontal stripes in the background represent cutaways revealing layers of earth. Lightning bolt–like streaks of dark blue and white could be the edges of the crinkled rags. Blob’s dismembered body is cast among drippy green, brown and yellow daubs depicting other festering trash in the landfill.

Having used Blob to further her Instagram popularity ambitions, Jade unceremoniously buries him in painting’s equivalent of an unmarked grave. Blob becomes indistinguishable from other paint blobs. This is a sad ending for Blob, who as a character with life and personality was able to evoke some empathy. However, as just an inanimate splotch of paint on a canvas, the landfill becomes a perfectly normal place for Blob to end up. There is some humour in a viewer’s dawning sheepish awareness of feelings of grief or sorrow for a personified bit of cloth and paint. Jade could have ended Blob’s story at any point of his ‘life’ simply by not doing another painting of him. So there is a degree of black humour in Jade’s act of closing Blob’s life by depicting his burial, and choosing to do that not with any sensitivity, compassion or gratitude for his services to her self- promotion, but by discarding his remains in a public landfill. There is also humour in her hashtag ‘#YouWillBeMissed’, which proclaims a mother’s tenderness, while her choice of burial site suggests just the opposite.

Figure 4-8: Amber Boardman, ‘Paint rags in a landfill. RIP Blob. #YouWillBeMissed’, 2017, oil on canvas, 153 x 122cm.

The ‘Blob saga’ garners Jade enough attention to become an Instagram influencer. Shifting abruptly from sentiments in the Blob burial painting such as #YouWillBeMissed,

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she immediately begins to sell products, a line of hand-painted sweaters. In ‘Hope you liked my Blob saga! :) Check out my new line of painted sweaters! DM for purchase #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’ (Figure 4-9), Jade’s messy abstract painting becomes a sweater with the addition of a pink crew neck collar at the top of the painting. Painted with thick clumps of paint, which protrude from the panel, the painting exudes the sense of a real garment. The nooks and crannies of the dried paint reference the ins and outs of knitted yarn. The palette is dominated by shades of blue and grey with splashes of green and red arranged in a viscerally messy, clumpy way interspersed with slashes of colour. Nearly square in form, as if folded, the sweater rests against a pink pastel background. Jade has created an ugly sweater that not many people would want to wear, which is ironic given her life revolves around self-beauty. The sweater’s striking pink collar is reminiscent of the headless, wooden animal cut-outs found at circuses that invite onlooker amusement and photo opportunities by filling the gaping hole with one’s own head.

Figure 4-9: Amber Boardman, ‘Hope you liked my Blob saga! :) Check out my new line of painted sweaters! DM for purchase #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’, 2018, oil on panel, 30 x 28cm.

Other sweaters in Jade’s line contain titles that reference ‘cool’ millennial Internet slang such as ‘The Goals AF Sweater #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’ (Figure 4-10) which translates to ‘goals as fuck’. This means that a person who writes ‘goals AF’ on an image has the desire or goal to become more like the person in an image. For this sweater, Jade uses this slang term as a marketing ploy. The sweater is composed of a rounded pink collar, buttons down the middle and swatches of pinks, reds and blues. In the ‘Goals AF 101

Sweater’, the collars and buttons turn this abstract painting into an object. The broad, gaily pink collar evokes those worn by young girls. The colours, shapes and lines create an effect almost like the finger painting of a three year old. A lot of the colours do not quite go together, like the magenta bordering the reds. This canvas was executed with many rapid slashes of single strokes. Little sophisticated blending was employed here, enhancing the little girl nature of the sweater’s image. However, Jade’s sense of tasteful design is marred by the inclusion of baby poop–coloured forms on one side reminiscent of a stomach and bowels. It is almost as if the sweater is revealing the intestinal contents of the wearer. Just as Jade strives for beauty but never quite carries it off, her sweater line is imaginative but the designs do not quite hold together.

Figure 4-10: Amber Boardman, ‘The Goals AF Sweater #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’, 2018, oil on polyester, 50 x 40cm.

The final painting in the series is ‘The Singularity Sweater #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’ (Figure 4-11), which has a 1950s V-neck collar and looks like the sci-fi novel covers of that era. ‘The Singularity’—also referred to as ‘the intelligence explosion’—is a hypothesised moment in technology when artificial intelligence (AI) improves at a runaway pace making the future of human existence unpredictable (Eden 2012). This sweater creates its own hypothetical singularity, an explosion resulting from the mix of commerce (the painting is an object for sale), technology (can be viewed on a smartphone) and culture (it is a work of contemporary art). ‘The Singularity Sweater’ is

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also a play on the scientific meaning of the word, which refers to the centre of a black hole where matter is infinitely dense and its gravitational pull sucks in everything that approaches it. The radiating lines of the painting evoke an explosive starburst streaking away from a central flash of light, signalling the origin of a supernova (the antecedent to a black hole). These lines are set on a deep blue background suggesting space. The browns and pinks, however, have fleshy qualities, retaining a link to humans. Returning to the technological meaning of singularity, Jade exists as a character on the Internet, but her AI has not quite reached the point of runaway improvement. However, she has become self-aware, a feared consequence of singularity when applied to AI machines because of its unpredictable consequences. Self-awareness came at the moment she realised she was made of paint and could, therefore, accelerate her beautification through self- administered plastic surgery, create a character of her own to further her status on social media (Blob) and design and promote her own line of merchandise (the sweater collection). ‘The Singularity Sweater’ seems the perfect place to leave Jade, as it leaves us uncertain about where Jade’s self-aware intelligence will take her from here. Perhaps her future lies in the self-implosion implied by the black hole meaning of science’s use of the term singularity. Perhaps not.

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Figure 4-11: Amber Boardman, ‘The Singularity Sweater #JadesHandPaintedSweaters’, 2018, oil on polyester, 50 x 40cm.

4.2 Social Media Narrative Conventions

The paintings in my PhD exhibition follow conventions of narrative used in memes and social media feeds, rather than typical traditions of narrative established in literature (e.g., novels, biography or memoir). Narrative in painting is of interest to me because it allows another dimension to be explored once plot and character are introduced, rather than using only visual elements such as shape, colour, line, representational or non-representational imagery. Narrative functions differently in different formats and I have explored how the social media feed can function as a narrative form.

Among the works displayed in the exhibition are 32 paintings hung in a specific linear narrative order. However, the placement of moveable walls in the gallery will also encourage viewers to experience the work counter clockwise as they wind around the

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room walking in a spiral. At the end of the spiral is a plinth with an iPad displaying Jade’s Instagram account, where users can browse the animated posts of the paintings.

While this project is primarily an exhibition of paintings, in the storyline of the project these paintings are Jade’s Instagram posts. So of course the project also exists on Instagram, both in the gallery on the iPad and publicly to anyone with an Instagram account. Rather than just posting reproductions of the paintings in the same order of the exhibition, I wanted to explore ways of utilising the medium of Instagram to further its potential. To this end, I have created a series of videos for many of the posts, which become a kind of advertisement for each painting—a nod to Jade’s marketing ploy (and the goal of many Internet influencers) to sell products. These videos are short animated versions of many of the paintings, set to music that highlights the content of some of the work, often humorously. For example, in the animated video for ‘Be your own plastic surgeon. #WatchOutWorld!’, close ups of Jade’s office, stethoscope, her pinkie ring and her face are synced to the climactic ending of Gustav Mahler’s second symphony (also known as the ‘Resurrection Symphony’), a lamentation on death and resurrection that resolves musically after 90 minutes of tension. This resolution is synced to the moment we see Jade’s transforming face in extreme close up as if to say that her awareness that she can transform herself with plastic surgery is a kind of resurrection of the true self, one defined by physical beauty.

While the entire narrative of the exhibition will be posted to Jade’s Instagram account, serving as an archive of the exhibition after it is finished, I will also use my own account @amberboardman to call attention to the project. This project spills over into other related accounts, including Blob’s account @blobofpaint and Paint Job Bod @paintjobbod, which is Jade’s local hair and spray tan salon. In the months leading up to the exhibition, Jade, Blob and Paint Job Bod have used their own Instagram accounts to write comments (via my hand) on my @amberboardman posts to alert viewers of the existence of the accounts and give them a sense of what these characters are like.

One of the ways narrative on social media is distinct from literary narrative, for example, is the variation in chronology in how posts are viewed. If someone were to see every post as they are posted, a narrative would run forward. But if someone were to happen upon Jade’s account after all the works were posted, it would appear to run backwards, as the last post appears first in the social media grid. It is also possible that the posts could be

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viewed in a more random and fragmented order because of the non-sequential nature of Instagram’s algorithm.27 Because the paintings posted on Instagram can be consumed in a number of ways, a structure that signifies chronology will be included with the caption of the post to indicate to viewers that the post is part of a larger narrative (part 1 of 32, for example). And as I have noted before, narrative allows painting to transcend visual elements alone. The temporal aspect of narrative helps convert a collection of ideas into a story, and stories speak to people in a way individual paintings or images cannot.

The title of a painting can function in a multitude of ways. It may signal the thought or internal dialogue of a character in a painting. A title can present a narrator’s thoughts, an omniscient declaration inaudible to a character in a painting. Titles can describe, add specificity to the visuals, or they can generalise what is seen. Titles can also obfuscate the meaning of the work entirely. In my work, because my characters recur in multiple paintings, the titles add enough specific information over time to allow the personality of these characters to emerge. This makes my titles extremely important to the artwork, rather than simply being an accessory to the painting. For example, the titles help to catalyse the transformation of a blob of paint into a character. Conventions in the language of the titles reflect the diction of social media, including slang, hashtags and @ symbols (or tags), which reference individual user accounts on social media platforms. The titles of the works in my exhibition will be printed in small text and mounted underneath the work in a style that references the Instagram caption. For example, hashtags are coloured blue on the app and will be coloured blue in the wall text. These printed titles will be small enough to disregard if the viewer desires, but readily available to read if one is interested and willing to approach the work more closely.

An important aspect of narrative is that the apparatus of the telling also tells the viewer about the narrator, the author and their relationship to the character. The narrator of a work is also a type of character with a specific point of view (Smiley 2006). In the case of my own work, the narrative voice is a constructed one, that of Jade. Some of the tone and opinions of this narrator come across through the titles in the form of indirect speech, which can be described as a ‘technique of presenting a character’s voice partly mediated by the voice of the author’ or reversing the emphasis so ‘that the character speaks through

27 Instagram has changed the way users see posts. They no longer simply appear in chronological order but according to an algorithm that takes into account the post’s popularity, the user’s past engagement with the account and other factors. 106

the voice of the narrator’ with the voices effectively merged (Stevenson 1992, 32). Smiley (2006, 18) explained that the reader (or viewer) must relate in some way to the narrator and that

In every case the story is coloured by the idiosyncrasies of the narrative voice, and how those idiosyncrasies strike the reader. Even the blandest, or most charming, or most skilful narrators have their detractors, because this aspect of the novel is irredeemably social, and draws constantly upon the reader’s semiconscious likes and dislikes. Some narrators offend, some narrators appeal, but all narrators are present, the author, but not the author, the protagonist but not the protagonist, an intermediary that author and reader must deal with.

Smiley’s (2006) point about the reader (or in my case, the viewer) finding the narrator inescapable applies perfectly to my paintings. Jade’s relentless search for self- beautification as she chases the vapour trails of prevailing Internet fashions, and her ironic, generally dismal results of doing so, cannot help but entice the viewer to reflect on her shallow pursuits and the society that has led her to this path. Whether the viewer takes a generous, empathic and possibly bemused attitude to Jade’s strivings and self- esteem struggles, or adopts a less charitable, judgemental line on her sheep-like devotion to societal expectations around personal appearance, the viewer will engage with Jade’s narrative.

As in fiction, my paintings are coloured by the opinion of a narrator, Jade, who I have confected as the character creating the paintings and titling or creating captions for them. As previously noted, empowering Jade in this way deepens Jade’s authenticity as a living, breathing being with aspirations, feelings, beliefs, insecurities and vulnerabilities. Interpretations of this narrator/character can change depending on how their opinions or ways of doing and thinking land with the viewer. In the @jadefad paintings, depending on the viewer, Jade’s behaviours or personality could be startling or humorous or both. For example, in one post Jade laments the death of her Blob character and in the next she is selling sweaters to take advantage of the character’s demise.

Jade’s character, aspirations and role as narrator evolve across the 32 paintings in this exhibition. In the first 12 paintings, Jade is both the subject of the story and the narrator, as these are ‘photos’ she has taken of herself. The titles or captions are written in the first person. In the ‘Blob saga’, the story within the story, Jade is still the narrator but no longer the subject. She has made a quantum leap, realising that she is made of paint, and been

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liberated by this insight to create her own character. In the final seven paintings of sweaters, Jade takes further creative steps, designing her sweater collection and becoming a salesperson hawking her wares on Instagram. Jade’s behaviour arc mirrors the path taken by many on social media. An initial phase of simply emulating prevailing trends is followed by attempts to build a presence on social media using interesting, unusual or shocking posts and then, once a presence has been established, capitalising on that status for commercial gain.

My Jade narrative grows out of previous experimentation with elements of narrative, especially the contextualising role that painting titles can play. There is an inherent distance between a viewer and the subject in a painting based on how the subject is framed. This operates in a fashion similar to film (close up, wide angle). However, the addition of a title can transcend this physical distance, helping the viewer relate to the painting and inviting the viewer into a greater intimacy with the subject. In Figure 4-12, the cartoonish figure wears a green graduation cap and an expression open to many interpretations. For example, the subject could have stage fright, manifesting a terrified wide-eyed look while awaiting his name to be called up to the stage to receive his degree in front of a large audience. Alternatively, the subject could be staring dreamily into the distance thinking about the great future he imagines lies ahead of him. However, if this painting is displayed with its title, ‘Feeling Nothing at Major Life Events’, viewers are brought into the mind of the character. The title marks the subject’s expression as detached, unmoved and numbed despite the significance of the graduation ceremony. The title guides the viewer to experience a feeling of connection to, and empathy for, the subject’s sad condition of being unable to experience feelings, even at grand events. Those who have had a similar experience to this character at a graduation or wedding ceremony will be drawn in closer through this identification. Other viewers who have experienced depression, which often is associated with feelings of emptiness, demotivation, or pervasive boredom, will relate vividly, perhaps painfully, to this painting. The distance between viewer and subject cannot help but be narrowed by the title in this case.

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Figure 4-12: Amber Boardman, ‘Feeling Nothing at Major Life Events’, 2016, acrylic on paper, 38 x 29cm.

Titles create relationships between the artist and a hypothetical, ‘ideal spectator’ who understands and identifies with any cultural references necessary to fully grasp the work (Bann 1985). I imagine the title as a hand reaching out to this ideal spectator who will then be able to best understand the meaning of the work.

The titles in my exhibition ‘Titlist’ (2016) operated like cartoon captions as they were physically displayed with the paintings, and the installation of the works referenced comic book panel layouts. Documentation of this format for displaying the paintings is shown in Figure 4-13.

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Figure 4-13: Installation View of ‘Titlist’ at Chalk Horse, Sydney in 2016

In the ‘Titlist’ exhibition, the paintings worked like single panel cartoons with captions, a format consisting of a single image with the caption below. Usually, titles are communicated in a standardised way that is much the same in galleries around the world, either on a printed sheet for people to carry around the gallery, or in wall texts. But in this exhibition, I wanted to explore alternative ways of titling a work by framing the title with the painting as a singular object. ‘Dad Inspects Your Dye Job’ (Figure 4-14) shows an example of this ‘painting with title’ display format. This way of titling work was a useful exercise because it gave me a way to explore how image and text can work together. But I have since decided that presenting the title as physically connected to the painting does not allow for a slower read of the work, that is, it does not allow the viewer to take in the visuals for as long as they wish before engaging with a language-based component of the work. While I consider a painting to be comprised of two parts, a painting and a title, in my work the painting is primary and the title is in service of the visuals.

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Figure 4-14: Amber Boardman, ‘Dad Inspects Your Dye Job’, 2016, acrylic and graphite on paper, 29 x 38cm.

4.3 Conclusion

The social media platform Instagram has become an efficient way to understand Internet culture because of the speed of transmission of image-based information. It is also beginning to be used as an artform itself. Engaging with the narrative structure and conventions of social media and memes, my practice depicts the lives of two tragicomic characters in the medium of cartoonish painting as a ‘social media feed in paint’ and a social media feed on Instagram. This narrative, aided by the titles, proceeds in a three- part structure involving Jade in part one, the life of Blob—Jade’s creation—in part two and Jade’s product line of hand-painted sweaters in part three.

Jade’s tragicomic character is disaffected with her appearance and pursues increasingly extreme measures to transform herself in the image of social media–sanctioned beauty. Once she has experienced the searing insight that she is made of paint, Jade in effect determines her own narrative destiny by creating a new character of her own, Blob. She

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posts his bittersweet life on Instagram, while aspiring to become an Instagram influencer. As a vanity machine, Jade shines a bright light on the shallow premise of social media’s beauty culture that you are how you look. As a designer of a line of sweaters, Jade sees branding on Instagram as a path to commercial exploitation.

My project uses Jade to highlight the tragicomic aspect of social media users who slavishly emulate beauty norms or yearn for online acceptance, evidenced by large numbers of followers for their online character brands. At the same time, my work demonstrates how a narrative surrounding a tragicomic character can broaden the reach of cartoonish painting with powerful, widely accessible messages disseminated via Instagram. I have placed Jade in the role of narrator in my paintings as a device to enhance Jade’s authenticity as a complex being with needs, flaws and dreams that the viewer can more readily relate to. In the Blob canvases, I test the boundaries of figurative painting and demonstrate that a simple paint splotch can be personified and developed into a tragicomic character with a life of its own.

The paintings in my PhD exhibition follow conventions of meme and social media narrative, rather than typical literary style narrative. Narrative in painting enriches plot, character and visual imagery. In this body of work, I have explored how the social media feed can function as a narrative form. My painting titles help give depth to the personalities of my characters as their lives play out from painting to painting. The titles also enhance the viewer’s understanding of the painting, thereby inducing empathy for, and intimacy with, my characters.

In summary, the body of work in this exhibition explores the desire to create a curated persona or character of oneself online through the appropriation of Internet culture. It also delves into the desire to constantly improve as trends and fads change. This drive to improve is machine-like and unconscious, fed by consumerism and ideologies like the American Dream, and echoed through social media culture. My cartoonish paintings highlight the constant striving and failing, the tragicomic aspect of these drives.

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Chapter 5: Conclusion

Those who regularly access the Internet, especially social media channels, cannot fail to notice a multitude of images of idealized bodies. An online subculture I have called Internet beauty culture has sprung up in response to these idealized bodies in the form of selfies and memes posted on platforms such as Instagram. Those who actively participate in this culture may undergo the psychological process of identification, whereby participants aspire to model themselves on the appearance and behaviour of those they see online. One theory of identification can be found in the writings of Sigmund Freud (Laplanche 1974). Understood in Freudian terms, those who identify with the enhanced and perfected bodies that populate online beauty culture seek to make themselves over into these ideal models or characters because of a sense that their given body or appearance is lacking or flawed in various ways. Devotees of this culture transform themselves into these desirable characters either digitally (using software filters) or through makeup, tanning or plastic surgery in order to create selfie images to post online.

A slightly different theory to Freud’s view that individuals develop socially and psychologically through a succession of identifications with external others was developed by philosopher William James. James contended that a well-rounded character contains two layers: a central core that is not excessively influenced or determined by others coupled with a kind of porosity that enables the character to evolve or develop over time under the impact of external forces (James, 1890). Implicit in James’ theory is an idea of balanced subjectivity or character that is neither too rigid to learn from others, nor so conformist that a character becomes a slave to societal ideals or others expectations. In my research project I have focussed on how Internet beauty culture and social media tend to foster the latter plane of character to the detriment of the former.

The characters in my art practice identify with depictions of idealised bodies, endlessly striving to construct high performing and socially sanctioned selves disseminated on the Internet. This study has also argued that this constant striving for a perfected version of oneself, along with the inevitable failures of such striving, may be described as tragicomic. I am aware that my approach to this topic and to characters such as Jade depicted in my paintings might be considered slightly moralistic. However, I have countered a slide into easy moralising in two ways. First, I have drawn on meme culture

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to show that as well as sustaining a beauty and optimum performance obsessed ideology, the Internet also provides rich resources in the form of memes for making fun of or satirising this ideology. Second, I do not present the characters I create as though they should be pitied or disdained as mere dupes of said ideology. Rather the combination of comic effect and pathos inscribed within the characters with their widely recognizable, contemporary aspirations invites beholders to identify with the characters rather than simply disowning them. As the title of this thesis suggests: this project offers an invitation to laugh at our inadequacies.

The characters I have created may be considered tragic in that identifying with idealised others can lead to intense restlessness, dissatisfaction and suffering because the ideal body or self is impossible to reach, especially as the bar keeps moving as trends change. There is tragedy in being unable to accept one’s ‘perceived’ physical flaws when such perceptions are based on conforming to prevailing beautification fads driven by commercial imperatives. The characters can also be considered comic in line with Henri Bergson’s theory, which argues that comedy can be generated by the failure of machine- like pursuits of the human body that are uncontrolled by consciousness.

In this research, a striving self in search of endless improvement, which I have argued parallels the ideology of ‘The American Dream’, can be viewed as machine-like behaviour in Bergson’s terms. My representations of the grand aspirations and abject failures of mechanical adherence to this ideology can be considered comic. At the same time, the characters I have created are marked by tragedy. In the Aristotelian sense the tragic hero brings about his or her downfall through their hubris. Moreover, they turn blame upon themselves when they fail to achieve their desire to rise above their current circumstances. This generates great suffering. In my project, over-zealous efforts at self- improvement are shown to result in tragically awful outcomes.

This project has also sought to demonstrate that cartoonish painting is a particularly effective way of depicting tragicomic characters of Internet beauty culture. The gravity and age-defying bodies displayed on the Internet lend themselves to cartoonish painting depiction because it too can defy the laws of nature by adopting cartoon physics. Features synonymous with cartooning such as simplified forms, thick outlines, distortions and transformations of figures have been adopted in cartoonish painting. Although cartoonish painting encompasses a range of practices including abstraction and the Superflat variety,

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my cartoonish painting adopts an expressionist style because this method exposes the materiality of paint as an agent of transformation, and is thus particularly suited to themes explored in this research. I have in fact made the plasticity and malleability of pigment (oscillating between form building and formlessness) a key plot element in my narrative paintings. In one painting, the painted character Jade drinks turpentine, and as she dissolves she makes the discovery that she is made of paint. The rest of the narrative spirals out from this ‘self-awareness’.

I have situated my painting practice within a lineage of expressionist type cartoonish painting that combine the depiction of bodily transformations with the construction of narratives and characters. These characters and narratives can develop across multiple canvases. Cartoonish painters who transform characters in their work include Philip Guston, Dana Schutz, Tala Madani and Maria Lassnig. The work of each of these artists contain elements that have relevance to my own painting. Philip Guston explored the lives of repeated characters in his work, while foregrounding some of the visual aspects of cartoonish painting that I use in my work, including the blobby, disembodied head shapes that inspired my Blob character. Dana Schutz blurs boundaries between subjects and objects in her paintings. Her characters are malleable and recyclable, as if they were made of clay or other material able to be constantly repurposed Schutz’s creation of highly mutable characters has influenced some of the concepts for my characters, who, being composed of paint, obey physical laws related to paint’s material qualities. Tala Madani’s characters play with bodily fluids and other paint-like substances. My own work echoes Madani’s in the way my character Jade experiments with the essential material components of the beauty industry - spray tan, hair dye, and makeup. These materials are the primary vehicles for Jade’s obsessive self-improvement and transformation. Several themes of Maria Lassnig’s work, including the endless transformation of character, the vanity of self-portraiture, and the fusing of body and technology, also appear in my work, which blends vanity, physical transformation and technology in depictions of the body and the self as inspired by internet culture.

While there are similarities between the work of these artists and my own, my contribution to the field of contemporary cartoonish painting lies in the way my work comments on the desire to transform the body and the self as promoted in internet and social media culture, and the tragicomic results. There are also distinctive stylistic aspects that separate the work of these four artists from my own work. One of these aspects is the 115

way that I use garish colours to express the psychological states of my characters. I also use colour to suggest the disastrous grotesquery that is the result of some of the transformations of my characters. The way I handle paint oscillates between a lose sort of chaos, to occasionally a more controlled application of paint in the rendering of a particular face or object. But rarely is this paint handling controlled completely.

This project has culminated in an exhibition entitled “@jadefad: A Social Media Feed in Paint” that contains narrative paintings that explore the lives of two tragicomic characters, Jade and Blob. Through the two characters, the paintings investigate the desire to both display a curated persona or character online through the appropriation of models from internet culture, and to constantly improve oneself as trends and fads endlessly change. As noted in this study, the drive to self-improve can be seen to be machine-like and unconscious, fed by consumerism and ideologies like the American Dream, and disseminated through social media culture. Social media users who present themselves as character brands are encouraged or seduced to do so by social media culture. The character of Jade I have invented relentlessly pursues self-improvement, but always, and often disastrously, falls short of her aspirations, making her a quintessentially tragicomic character. My paintings not only engage with those who participate in Internet beauty culture, but also draw on meme culture, which satirizes attention-seeking, beauty culture participants.

In addition to an exhibition of paintings, my works simultaneously appear as social media feeds on Instagram, rounding out the world of these painted characters as internet personas. The poses of the characters in the paintings and the painting titles are inspired by Instagram culture and jargon. The social media feed is supplementary material to the temporary painting exhibition and will serve as an online archive of the work online after the exhibition finishes. Rather than a repetition of photographic documentation of the paintings in the show, the social media feed on Instagram adds another dimension to the work through a series of ten second animated versions of the paintings.

This project has been an intensely explorative and rewarding journey in the further evolution of both the conceptual and technical aspects of my art. I have gained a tremendous amount of insight into my process, taken risks with new styles, subject matter and scale of canvas, expanded my thinking about character development, delved deeply into the sad, seductive, bittersweet world of internet beauty culture and reflected on social

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media’s capacity to generate an ever-growing wave of obsession, conformity, pride, envy and self-mockery among its users.

During this project, I have learned that I am capable of creating much larger paintings that tackle far more complex subjects than I was previously doing. Where previously I was creating a multitude of cartoonish characters, each with their own vignette-specific theme or message, I have now opened a door to building rich character lives over time. Perhaps more importantly, this project was the catalyst for my leap in asking the question: What if my characters could become self-aware, and make their own choices about what they do? How might they behave if they really were autonomous and self-directed, and were no longer constrained by the way I might expect them to behave? What if their autonomy were given free reign even if this led to self-destructive, erratic or inconsistent behaviour? What if a little chaos, anarchy or even simple disobedience were added to the personas of my characters? This insight, which would not have been possible without the rigorous evolution process of this project, is a wonderful gift I now take away with me to further explore.

I hope that my research into the American Dream-like pressures and disappointments inherent in Internet beauty culture and the mesmerising, black hole-like lure of social media has invited further research into these areas in fields such as psychology (for example, what is the psychological process that drives identification with trends in Internet beauty culture), and anthropology (for example, how are Western and Eastern cultures changing as a result of Internet beauty and meme culture). Similarly, I hope my research will inspire other artists to research and explore character development in fresh, new ways. My dream is for my paintings, in time, to make a substantive contribution to contemporary art. Perhaps my work on character in this research could also light a path forward for current and future contemporary artists.

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