Following an unmistakable trend – maybe better to use the word pattern or even a collective consciousnesses-like shift in thematics – of body politics in the emerging art scene, Body Anxiety brings together a group of diverse artists umbrella-ed perhaps only in their examination of “gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet”.
Participating in the exhibition are 20 artists whom have made a practice out of “female-empowering artworks”, including Hannah Black, Ann Hirsch, Georges Jacotey, Randon Rosenbohm, and Faith Holland. Though the link to the site is still password-protected, the site should be open to the public once it goes live, and all the works will be available for viewing.
Taking the sixth issue of SALT. and its manifesto as a starting point, the Dazzle Camouflage group exhibition will run at London’s Rye Lane Studios from December 17 to January 4.
The manifesto disseminated in the feminist magazine’s sixth and latest issue has come across our radar, and we’re glad someone else is giving it the attention it deserves. The group show, which features works by Phoebe Collings-James, Ann Hirsch, Rachel de Joode and Huw Lemmey, takes SALT.’s disobedience as a methodology. The goal is not to dismantle existing power relations, just as it was not the publication’s goal to dismantle language itself, but rather to “negotiate new ways of existing within them disruptively”.
The December 17 opening brings an 8pm performance by artist Beatrice Loft Schulz, starting off the three-week exhibition on the basis of “an investment in embracing the performative potential within these hierarchies, whilst at once making known the paradoxes in doing so” through everything from reality show dating, physically imposing oneself onto objects, or “creating contingent situations from a masculine vocabulary tied up in the miasma of power relations”.
“What’s the realer space?” Ann Hirsch asks the unanswerable at South London Gallery’s Clore Studio during a contextual discussion with historian and writer Giulia Smith closing off the The Posthuman Era Became a Girl two-day event co-curated by Helen Kaplinsky. It echoes the discomfiting lack of distinction a 27-year-old screen name “jobe” makes between online and offline infidelity, in his developing and soon-to-become-sexual relationship with a 12-year-old “Anni” in Hirsch’s most recent play ‘Playground’ (2013). “Does it really matter?” he replies, when the suburban school girl asks via ‘Leet-speak’-informed language whether his current love interest was cheating on him via chat or IRL.
The play, presented the previous night at The George Wood Theatre of Goldsmiths University, is an equal parts funny and disturbing insight into the pre-adolescent experience of an insulated American middle-class raised on the internet in the 90s. Enacted partly via text projected on a screen and partly spoken, the two protagonists access their proscribed sexual fantasies by typing them into the greeny-blue glow of their respective CRT computer screens, from their symbolically isolated desks spaces.
Ann Hirsch, ‘Playground’ (2014) @ Goldsmiths’ George Wood Theatre. Live performance. Image courtesy Felicity Hammond.
“Forbidden moistures trickle into forbidden places”, says the masculine voice of New Degrees of Freedom: ‘Act 3: Water’ (2014); a performance of an ongoing collaborative production by artist Jenna Sutela. Happening the following day in a transformed studio, the audience is sat on the floor of a by now sauna-like space, the icicles handed out on entry melting in the sweaty warmth of a hot afternoon; Amnesia Scanner’s rumbling soundscape washing through the fishing rope and sea sponges scattered among the bodies. Dimly-lit with a dark blue tone, the room comes as physical expression of the porous “semi-aquatic existence” of its spoken text, now dissolved into “the borderlands of material and virtual worlds”.
Distortion. Confusion. Fear. These are themes that present themselves in the work of both a US-based Hirsch and Finnish Sutela, if not in vastly different, even culturally defined incarnations. There’s the puritanical quality to the heavily manipulated spaces and ashen post-production aesthetics of Sutela’s “real-life avatar”, where within three ‘acts’ and across platforms the ongoing New Degrees of Freedom project constructs its own cyborg grotesque. ‘Act 1: The Birth of a Real-Life Avatar’ and ‘Act 2: The Spirit of a Real-Life Avatar’ (2013) inform this third act where attendees become unwitting accessories as a video camera films the faceless mass of humans strewn around icy puddles on concrete.
Act 2 –featuring another anonymous group of collaborators in Finland’s Turku –is screened to follow. This time the omnipresent lens is turned outward on a circle of standing audience members wearing prosthetic organs and arranged around the marble floor of the Vartiovuori Observatory. Funnily enough, the camera remains to film the follow-up Q&A as Hirsch –whose earlier work ‘Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca)’ (2012) also screens –explains the trauma and manipulation of ‘reality’ television. “Ultimately you have no control”, she says about the “mechanism of production” surrounding VH1 ‘reality’ TV program Frank the Entertainer… In a Basement Affair. Confined for weeks at a time in an externally constructed environment under constant surveillance, Hirsch and 14 other contestants vie for the affections of Frank the Bachelor on camera with no choice in how they’re viewed, edited or represented.
“Hack them. Find out all their information. Toss them from AOL”, brags jobe about his online capabilities on the Web 1.0 instant messaging service he and Anni communicate through in ‘Playground’. These are all things he promises he’d never do to her. But after their year long relationship involving chat forum and phone sex, an argument over the “out of control faggots” jobe insists should be ejected from Anni’s school and a subsequent betrayal by her with ex-boyfriend Chris, jobe brands Anni a “whore” and she’s blocked.
Giulia Smith, Jenna Sutela and Ann Hirsch (left-to-right) @ The Posthuman Era Became a Girl (2014). Image courtesy Felicity Hammond.
Ideas of control and manipulation are central to both Hirsch and Sutela’s work, where networked media and its false assumptions of personal freedom is incisively interrogated. In Elvia Wilk’s 2013 essay ‘Where Looks Don’t Matter and Only the Best Writers Get Laid’, from which The Posthuman Era… takes its name, the writer suggests that the anticipated cyberfeminist utopia of the 90s did not only fail but was doomed from the outset. After all, “developing online cultures were often male-dominated and heteronormative”, its exclusive binaries already existed, and questions of A/S/L meant IRL mattered. And it still does, as Hirsch identifies cyberfeminism’s rejection of the body as a sort of “cultural shame”, Sutela suggesting potential in bringing back the body “in a more complex way”. Because after all, in order to overcome Wilk’s traditional “material/immaterial; male/female” labor divide, surely the Cartesian mind/body one, on which a largely man-made technological infrastructure is built, should also be abandoned.
“…the very substance of the self is interconnected not only with biological but also with economic and industrial systems”: so go the words read by Julia Burmingham’s feminine narration in Sutela’s ‘Act 3: Water’. Those systems are omnipresent across the performances and characters, artworks and avatars, presented at The Posthuman Era Became a Girl, where there’s as little distinction between physical and virtual space as there is between notions of consuming and being consumed. **
The first (and now sold out) installment of the collaborative project Re-materialising Feminism is running at London’s The Showroom from June 6 – 8.
The project aims to interrogate feminist theories and practices within the context of contemporary culture, and will feature a series of conferences and events as well as a publication documenting the project to be published by Arcadia Missa publications later in the year.
The 3-day event will feature video work from the Cinenova archive and artist Ann Hirsch, a performance by Nkisi, and conferences featuring Marina Vishmidt, Svenja Bromberg, Theresa Senft, and Linda Stupart.
On stepping into the newish Bed-Stuy space of New York’s American Medium gallery for Ann Hirsch’s first solo exhibition Muffy, Britney Spears’ ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’ is playing out of a child’s cubby house made of blankets. It’s facing two plush toy teddy bears, touching paws, while screening AOL chat windows out of their bellies and standing next to a large-scale painting reproduction of a crumpled paper ode to adolescent angst and histrionics in ‘My Starving Public 1998’. The teen poem reads “so I am dirty. I am hated. I did lie”, while the breathy high voice of Britney fades out to Hirsch’s in the cubby house as she explains, “I’m already 11-years-old. I peer down at my naked body and my huge bush pulls back and forth beneath the water”.
Ann Hirsch, Muffy exhibition view. Image courtesy American Medium.
There are four small screens in the makeshift quilt fort ‘Slave For You/ My Spank Bank’ featuring scenes from Aladdin, Star Wars, Cinderella and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, each with their own references to submission, oppression and exoticism. The viewer is forced to crawl in to watch as Disney’s Jasmine and Jafar, Cinderella and her Ugly Step Sisters, interact between the dunes of George Lucas’ Galactic Empire and the Sheriff of Nottingham’s intended rape of Maid Marian –viewed from beneath and on all fours.
Outside and along the walls are naïve pencil and pastel drawings of a balding and bushy eyebrowed ‘She Devil Jew Lady’ and ‘Truly Exotic’ green-skinned profile of a woman with one tentacled eyeball, while two Hirsch proto-selfies, ‘Photos for jobe #1 & #2 1998’ are obscured by a flash. They’re flanked by more hand-drawn grotesques of ‘Sexy Baby in Repose’ and the three-boobed nude of ‘Reclining Slutty Grandpa’. Meanwhile the AOL chat window projected from the ‘My Big Man’ plushie doll across from it features case insensitive quotes of Nirvana and Matchbox Twenty song lyrics. There’s that, and the puerile online flirtation-via-homophobic slurs between “JoshyWoshy” and “bUrKe13” as everyone ignores ‘Lilac098’’s unassuming “hey every 1”.
Ann Hirsch, Muffy exhibition view. Image courtesy American Medium.
“I climb the pole at recess to get this feeling. Does anybody else know what I’m talking about? I’m afraid to ask,” says Hirsch through the speakers of her indoor cubby house. Part of me wonders whether it should be ‘I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman’ instead of ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’ playing at intervals between spoken word excerpts, recreating the charged inconsistency of repressed sexual development in a teen girl. But apart from being a bit of an obvious choice, it would also preclude the role of the desiring body being realised (“I won’t deny it, I’m not trying to hide it”) as well as the wider mythologised margins Muffy nudges to, well beyond binary gender.
All this plays out via the anonymous attention seeking of an online screen name and the blue-penned sketch of a computer in ‘My Starving Public 1998’: “Words fired at me to make me remember. Make me hurt. Make me feel dirty + loathed all over again”. Behold, the direct emotional results of the internet interactions of the Scandalishious artist’s formative years, their consequences being as real but equally as disregarded as a preteen sexual awakening. **
The Summer 2013 edition of How to Sleep Faster by London collective and art space, Arcadia Missa, is now available. Issue 4 of the ongoing publication, which published its first in 2011, features a slew of some of the world’s most exciting artists, including Jesse Darling, Ann Hirsch, Paul Kneale and recent Auto Italia collaborator Huw Lemmey.
Via their Open Office (AM-OO) programme, Arcadia Missa explored precarity within immaterial labour, within the cultural lexicon of a much discussed and relatively popular ideology based around post-Fordism, including neo-liberalism, consumer agency, and “playbour” in a globalised economy. How to Sleep Faster‘s 4, builds on this critique by asking four related questions: “What now is a radicalised, networked, subjectivity? How can we build a commons through and from this subjectivity? Is it self-critical in its understanding of the ‘we’ it talks for? And lastly, how do, and how must, these subjectivities engage with globalised material realities?”
