The Unreliable Image: Contemporary Art, Social Identity, & Self­Making in the Digital Age A THESIS SUBMITTED ON APRIL 8, 2016 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS BY Alex Santana 1 Acknowledgements Why am I compelled to write?.... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger…. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self­autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing. ––Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers ​ Without the help of some amazing mentors, the process of writing this thesis would have been impossibly difficult. I would like to express my gratitude, first and foremost, to my thesis advisor, Vicki Mayer. She has both challenged and encouraged me to produce writing that is in line with my own passions. Her commitment to interdisciplinarity, intellectual effervescence, and persistent enthusiasm has been contagious and absolutely inspiring. I would also like to acknowledge some professors who have grounded my thinking for this project, specifically Mónica Ramírez­Montagut, Delia Solomons, and Jimmy Huck. With their thoughtful questions and feedback, the project has developed more nuanced insights and depth. I express a heartfelt thank­you to my brother, Max, who has tutored me with his seemingly infinite digital literacy, as well as to my mother, whose wisdom and dedication has been indispensable to me during the writing process. Ultimately, I thank my partner, Ryan, who reminds me that I am worthy when I need it most. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………… 2 List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………… 4 Thesis Introduction ………………………………………………………………………… 6 Chapter I Melancholy, Glitch, and Power: Rafia Santana’s Subversive Selfies ………………... 13 Chapter II Digital Self­Making, Agency, and Surveillance Anxiety: The Post­Internet Image in the Work of Hito Steyerl ………………………………………………………………………... 28 Chapter III Historical Fetishism, Identity Tourism, and Self­Making on the Internet: Fluid Color in Adriana Varejão’s Self­Portraits ………………………………………………………….. 41 Thesis Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………….. 60 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………... 62 Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………... 66 3 List of Figures Figure 1: Frida Kahlo, El Venado Herido (The Wounded Deer), 1946 ​ ​ Figure 2: Frida Kahlo, La Columna Rota (The Broken Column), 1944 ​ ​ Figures 3­6: Carrie Mae Weems, Photographs from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 ​ ​ Figures 7­9: Ana Mendieta, Untitled and Imagen de Yagul from Silueta Series, México, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 1973­1980 Figure 10: Juliana Huxtable, Untitled (Destroying Flesh) from the UNIVERSAL CROP ​ ​ ​ TOPS FOR ALL THE SELF CANONIZED SAINTS OF BECOMING series, 2015 ​ Figure 11: Rafia Santana, Tired, 2014 ​ ​ ​ ​ Figure 12: Rafia Santana, Worked, 2015 ​ ​ ​ Figure 13: Rafia Santana, Very Little Sleep, 2015 ​ ​ ​ Figure 14: Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov ​ ​ File, video still, 2013 ​ Figures 15­17: Jon Rafman, 9­Eyes, 2009­2016 (ongoing) ​ ​ Figures 18­19: Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File, video stills, 2013 ​ Figures 20­21: Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ .Mov File, video stills, 2013 ​ Figure 22: Adam Harvey, Look No. 5, from the CV Dazzle series, 2010 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Figure 23: Juliana Huxtable, Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), from the ​ ​ ​ ​ UNIVERSAL CROP TOPS FOR ALL THE SELF CANONIZED SAINTS OF BECOMING series, 2015 ​ ​ Figure 24: Trevor Paglen, Autonomy Cube, 2015 ​ ​ Figure 25: Juan Rodríguez Juárez, De Español y de India produce Mestiso, c. 1725 ​ ​ 4 Figure 26: Artist Unknown, De Negro y de India produce Lobo, c. 1730 ​ ​ Figure 27: Byron Kim and Glenn Ligon, Black & White, 1993 ​ ​ Figure 28: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Colored People Grid), 2009­10 ​ ​ Figure 29: Toyin Odutola, Uncertain, Yet Reserved, 2012 ​ ​ ​ Figure 30: William Pope.L, Skin Set Painting: Purple People are Reason Bicarbonate, ​ ​ 2011­13 Figure 31: William Pope.L, Skin Set Painting: Orange People are God when She is ​ Shitting, 2011­12 ​ Figure 32: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), 2014 ​ ​ Figure 33: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), 2013 ​ ​ Figure 34: Screenshot of Swatches tool function from Photoshop Figure 35: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Color Wheel, 2015 ​ ​ Figure 36: Photo by John Smith (@juansmithers), Dallas Contemporary Kindred Spirits ​ exhibition image, from Instagram Figure 37: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Oil Colors, 2015 ​ ​ 5 Introduction Whether consciously or unconsciously, the ways in which users engage with the internet inform how they express versions of their own identities. Processes of identity production are never singular or static, but rather dynamic and adaptable. Self­making on the internet takes many forms. Conscious examples of self­making in the digital sphere include curating and posting textual content, photos, and videos on social media, the construction of email signatures, saved collections of images or music on Pinterest or Spotify, etc. There are also unconscious examples of self­making, like the cataloguing of information about who we are as consumers and as citizens. Examples of these processes include online purchases saved by advertisers and large corporations, Google searches saved by the NSA, and GPS check­ins, etc. There exists a contradictory and dualistic nature to notions of safety and agency when it comes to self­expression on the internet. For many women of color and other members of marginalized groups, interactions on the internet provide highly flexible and open spaces for experimental self­making––in some cases, digital spaces can be safer and more accessible modes for self expression than IRL (in real life). In other cases, an internet user’s assumed ​ ​ anonymity within an omnipresent surveillance state can produce digital experiences that are filtered by fear, violence, and anxiety where members of oppressed groups are more at risk for potential dangers. Some of the conceptual questions this thesis considers are: How do artists consider this paradoxical tension between the digital space as one of potential freedom, and, at the same time, one of sinister control? How do digital images and their unreliability as they exist on the internet allow for transfiguring modes of 6 self­expression? How can manipulated, distorted, pixelated, and low­resolution images serve to subvert oppressive structures through their unreliability? To answer this question, I argue that contemporary artists Adriana Varejão, Hito Steyerl, and Rafia Santana use the genre of self­portraiture in their artwork to illustrate the unreliability of the image in processes of self­making in the digital age. As women artists of color, they have particular gendered and racialized interactions within digital spheres, and are consciously incorporating that subjectivity in their artworks.1 The first chapter of this thesis is on the self­portraiture of contemporary New York­based artist Rafia Santana. She primarily uses digital photography and digital manipulation tools like Photoshop to construct glossy, colorful, highly aestheticized, and partially abstracted self­portraits, which she oftentimes calls “selfies.” In most of these selfies, her use of a glitch aesthetic––a term I will later define––functions to abstract the image in order to convey feelings of frustration, unease, and melancholy. Of Puerto Rican descent and open about her own black identity, Santana is also an artist whose practice extends beyond the production of the self­portraits themselves. She frequently creates spaces of open engagement and networks of solidarity on her various social media profiles for other marginalized groups by voicing her concerns regarding contemporary oppressions relating to race and gender. The second chapter of this project is dedicated to an examination of a video work by contemporary German artist Hito Steyerl. Arguably her most evocative and well­known work, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A F**king Didactic Educational .MOV File ​ 1 I use this term “woman of color” lightly, as not all of these artists have publicly disclosed their own social identities, but rather choose to use the term to emphasize their outsider status, and to illustrate how some of the theory on woman spectatorship on the internet related to the works of these artists. Also, please note that the terminology I use (“women of color”) is site­specific and not universally applicable, but instead comes from my personal understandings of gender and race as a North American scholar. 7 (2013), is a quasi­didactic, satirical video that instructs its audience on “how not to be seen,” especially as participants in a digital world. Through the inclusion of her own body, Steyerl asserts her own self as unequivocally present in the work, but also insists on some of the more sinister aspects of self­making in the digital realm––the very real threats of surveillance,