Faith Holland
Student Name: Jeanette Bisschops Student Number: 11151188
Supervisor: Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen
Co-reader: Prof. Dr. Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes
MA, Art and Cultural Sciences: Art History, University of Amsterdam
Abstract
This thesis explores the state of patriarchal power relations in contemporary online culture by examining gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet, guided by works of female internet artists. The study proposes to research the timeline of gender constructs in a system of patriarchy and the first artistic protests towards this system in the seventies and creates a link to gender constructs during the emergence of internet cultures and internet art. To illustrate the artistic critique in this discourse during the seventies, this study will analyze both a case study by Carolee Schneemann as well as by VALIE EXPORT. To examine critique on gendered embodiment in internet cultures, in-depth close readings of works by Shu-Lea Cheang, Faith Holland, Ann Hirsch, Amalia Ulman and Rupi Kaur will be provided. The results present and compare the artist’s motivations, constraints, setting of their work and responses and will paint a picture of the time line and the current state of patriarchal power relations.
Table of Contents
Abstract ... 2
1. Introduction ... 4
2. What is gender? ... 7
2.1 Gender as a construction ... 8
3. Gendered art history ... 10
3.1 The Male Gaze ... 12
3.2 Reclaiming the body ... 13
3.3 Case study – VALIE EXPORT: Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968) ... 16
4. Cyberspace and gender ... 18
4.1 (Dis)embodiment and gender ... 19
4.2 Internet and the rise of internet art: new possibilities, new freedoms? ... 20
4.3 Case Study 2 – Shu-Lea Cheang: Brandon (1998-1999) ... 22
5. The Male Gaze on the Web ... 25
5.1 Case Study – Carolee Schneemann: Fuses (1965) ... 29
5.2 Case Study – Faith Holland: Lick Suck Screen (2014) ... 30
6. Online spectatorship ... 32
6.1 Gendered self-representation ... 33
6.2 Case Study – Ann Hirsch: Scandalishious (2014) ... 38
6.2 Case Study – Amalia Ulman: Excellences and Perfections (2014) ... 38
7. Censorship ... 43
7.1 Case Study – Rupi Kaur : Period. (2015) ... 46
8. Status of women online art ... 49
9. Conclusion ... 51
Discussion and recommendations ... 54
References ... 56
1. Introduction
We live in a gendered world. The clothes we put on in the morning are either made for the female or the male body, sold by stores that have divided their departments between the two genders, giving each their own fitting rooms. When we go to the bathroom we have to choose between the door that has the little stick figure with the dress on it, or the one that wears pants. When we are addressed by strangers who do not know our name, they do so by calling us by our gender. Public space is a gendered space.1 This fact in itself would not be problematic, if it wasn’t the base for gender inequality. As for centuries, perhaps since the story of Adam and Eve, as historian John Berger surmised, women were deemed to be the weaker sex and to be subservient to the man.2 In
the Western world, women have been denied legal, political and financial power until just recently, justified by the claim that they were morally, intellectually and physically inferior to men.
This has had its impact on art history. As appears in two of the most important handbooks in Western art history, by E.H. Gombrich and H.W. Janson, published in 1950 and 1962
respectively, no female artist is mentioned. In the sixties and seventies, more and more protest against the inequality in the art world began to arise. One of the precursors in this discourse was the ground-breaking article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” by Linda Nochlin, where she points out and discusses this absence of women in Western art history.3 While
Janson’s book did not contain any female artists, its cover did, although the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a sculpture of the Greek goddess of victory, is missing her head and arms. Perhaps inadvertently, this book showed exactly the state of women in Western (art) history: wanted as an object, not as the subject.
There is a long history of men-made art, photography and film, using the female body, or the female nude, as a main subject. Historically speaking, the typical viewer of art was also male. In response to this phenomenon, Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe that more often than not, in artworks women are passive objects of desire, and there to be looked at
1 Chan, J., & Schrager, L. (2015, January 24). About. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from http://bodyanxiety.com/about/ 2 Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing (London, UK: Penguin Books), 51.
from a heterosexual male point of view.4 The fact that Mulvey described this phenomenon mostly from cinematic and television examples, shows the persistence of this way of portraying women.
The seventies gave rise to the first protests against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning. During the second feminist wave, many artists such as Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT, employed performances to disrupt the cultural concepts of the female body. Concerns around sexual objectification, however, also resonate with contemporary artists. In the hopes of “reshaping a pre-existing narrative of gendered appropriation” female internet artists such as Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan, feel that the internet would be the best space to allow the questioning of contemporary attitudes towards femininity.5
The central narrative for women internet artists concerned with this subject is to reclaim the female body from all constructs and violence that surround it.
For this thesis I will research gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet, guided by works of female internet artists who examine this field. I will extricate a few important players from the contemporary field, such as Amalia Ulman and Ann Hirsch. It is stated by some of them that self-imagery is the ideal tool to take back control, yet others choose to work with curated images. In doing so they re-create and play with the roles available to women, in a performance-based culture where a women’s self-worth is based on the attention she receives from others. By placing their (self) images by the means of video or photography in this performance based society, I consider their work as performances. Yet as an official term for their work remains to be described, I will refer to them as internet artists, not as performance artists.
In choosing artworks and artists, I searched for works by different artists that are
theoretically linked to the idea of presenting critique to a system of patriarchal sexual domination. Simultaneously, as female artists have been examining this field since the seventies by the use of (offline) performance, I will compare and contrast these contemporary works with works by artists Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT. These comparisons will allow an observation as to how art by women artists in this particular field has changed. Has the rise of the internet
4 Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, NY: Palgrave), 19.
changed the construct of gender in any way? Does cyberspace provide for more opportunities in art in general, and for women artists in particular?
In order to compare the practices of female performance artists in the seventies and those of the twenty-first century, this thesis will be structured as followed: Chapter 2 will present the theoretic framework behind the concept of gender. In chapter 3 an outline of gendered art history will be given, with the emphasis on the prevalence of the female nude and the first protests that arose in the seventies. A case-study will be added to exemplify these artistic protests. Chapter 4 will present a look at the presumed flexibilities of the gender construct online, together with the rise of internet artand provides a case-study to further exemplify. Chapter 5 will explore the online presence of the male gaze and provides a comparison between two case studies from the seventies and the twenty-first century. Chapter 6 explores online spectatorship and
self-representation and provides an interpretation by means of two case studies. Chapter 7 presents an exploration of censorship of the female body online, together with a case study. Chapter 8 will investigate the state of the female (internet) artist. This will be followed by the conclusion, which will reflect upon the findings, address any limitations and possible avenues for further research.
2. What is gender?
“ One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.6
According to many sociological and psychological views, our society and our culture has constructed many things we now see as “natural”. One of the most known social constructionist theories is the gender construction theory, which de Beauvoir helped develop and refers to in the quote above. Everything, all the roles and all behavior we associate women with, is not simply innate or biological, it states, but socially constructed. This construction points to a distinction between sex and gender, where sex refers to our internal and external sex organs, chromosomes and hormones. Our sex is the basis on which society applies and expects certain gender roles, be it female or male. It is believed that most – if not all – people fall in to either the female or the male category. However, more than a few fall into the category “intersex”, with their internal and/or external sexual organs not being identifiable as female or male, or identifiable as both, or their chromosomes are different than the usual xx or xy. The biological distinction we make does not seem to be that black and white as we tend to think it is in reality. And besides the
complexities of sex, the appropriation of gender implies an added complicated relationship between the body and society, when it comes to traditional assumptions about gender. So can we say for sure that sex isn’t either, in fact, socially constructed? Someone who has discussed and critiqued the distinction between sex and gender extensively is philosopher Judith Butler. Butler states, in her book Gender Trouble (1990) that the distinction between sex and gender proves false.7 A sexed body cannot be signified without gender, and so, both sex and gender are constructed.
Nowadays, there seems to be a lot to do about the concept of gender. A new distinction was made between “gender identity” and “gender expression”, where gender identity refers to one’s personal experience of one’s own gender, where one can identify more or less with the sex that was given at birth. Gender expression refers to appearance, traits or mannerisms one chooses to communicate to the outside world. Yet, while more and more people can and do choose to
6 D Beauvoir, S. (1997). The Second Sex (London, UK: Vintage Publishing), 301. 7 Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble (New York, NY: Routledge), 1-25.
express their gender as they wish, the main binary still made, and expected, in our society is female-male. So what purpose does this serve society? Why is it so important that the distinction and contrast between these two genders is made? And what role does biology play?
2.1 Gender as a construction
Judith Butler is one of the theorists who states that the gender categories of woman and man parallel the universality of patriarchy. The fact that we are all taught that we are either female or male from the day we are born, and act and look feminine or masculine, is important in order to keep the existing patriarchal system in place and in balance, according to Butler. In the social system of patriarchy the men are the ones who hold primary power, historically seen in many areas such as the social, familial, political, legal and economical.
This system has been in place for thousands of years and has been documented by works by Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Christian scriptures such as the bible, just to name a few. And while ancient Egypt gave many women financial and legal power, and Medieval times even had female Empresses, the idea that men are superior to women and they should therefor obey male authority never quite disappeared and even gained strength after the Middle Ages.8 Women, as people who are seen as physically, intellectually and morally inferior to men, have been excluded from education, power systems, and the creation of legal codes. Women have had their sexuality and reproductive capabilities controlled by men, having to be a virgin until married, forced to stay faithful to their partner, while history knows many men and male rulers with concubines and harems. Owning the commodity of female sexual services was only one of the aspects men were judged on. By depriving women from education and knowledge, isolating them from each other, restricting their sexuality, denying them any financial, political or legal power, patriarchy could survive until now.
In their struggle to overthrow this system, which served as an obstacle in their way to development and advancement, and to become less inferior in society, women started to fight for legal rights during the 19th and early 20th century. This first-wave of feminism opened up work and education opportunities for women, but mainly focused on the right to vote.9 The second-wave followed in the ’60s and ’70s when women, still disillusioned with their second-class
8 Lerner, G. (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press), 28-40. 9 Schneir, M. (1994). Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (NY, NY: Random House), 112.
status, again felt forced to protest for a broader range of social opportunities to be opened up to them. This time the movement extended to the spheres of sexuality and reproduction, and the struggle became more and more about the domestic and private lives of women. Not
unimportantly, it didn’t only concern the western world this time, but included other countries such as Turkey, Japan, and Latin American countries.10 In 1992, Rebecca Walker found that the third-wave expanded the topic of feminism to include a more diverse group of women with differing identities, and focused more on queer and non-white women.11
Currently, we are finding ourselves in the time of the fourth-wave feminism, a movement defined and connected through technology. It is linked to online feminism, using social media to discuss gender equality. This is all possible because the barriers of distance and geography are now removed and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter facilitate public discussions between people all over the world with an internet connection. Also, feminism nowadays has broadened its field of interest, and has become more intersectional, creating more solidarity with other social justice movements. All these waves of protest initiated change in many aspects of society concerning the position of the woman. Women in the western world have the right to vote, to go to school, to work – even when they are married or have children –, they regained more control on their reproductive abilities and claimed more legal equality. Yet, we have a long way to go still. Women in non-western countries still fight for reproductive rights, women in war situations such as Syria live in everyday fear of rape or enslavement, and women in the Western world are still not earning the same amount as men, or get the same opportunities to gain a powerful position in a company.
10 G Schmith, B. (2000). Global Feminisms Since 1945 (NY, NY: Routledge), 1. 11 Walker, R. (1992). Becoming the third wave. Ms. Magazine, 11(2), 39-41.
3. Gendered art history
A world where men hold the power, and where women have had little to no access to important institutions such as politics, science, education and art, has had some influence on the history of art. Our Western art history shows a male dominated art world, the most renowned artists being mostly male. Picasso, Pollock, Matisse, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse, no list of just women artists would be equivalent to this one, just simply because no group of women artists have ever been recognized as exceptional. As an illustration to this statement; not one female artist was mentioned in the key art history texts by E.H. Gombrich and H.W. Janson around the year 1960. When one would want to know the state of affairs since more emancipatory times, a look at the modern and contemporary art world perhaps could tell us more than those art history texts. A look at the presence of female artists in exhibitions by museum such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, or the MoMA in New York, shows that their percentage is very low compared to their male counterparts. Looking at solo exhibitions, this percentage even get alarmingly low.12 This implies that the white Western male viewpoint is unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art world.13
The observation that there are “no great women artists” is still often explained by the assumption that women are simply not capable of greatness, whatever that term may imply. For since the first feminist wave, women have strongly advocated the assertion that women are equal to men, so why did no great, ingenious women artist appear? Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expressed his opinion on this matter very clearly when he wrote in his essay “On the suffering of the world”: “women have proved incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original
achievement in art, or indeed of creating anything at all of lasting value: this strikes one most forcibly in regard to painting…”. 14 Art historian Linda Nochlin was one of the first to discuss this statement during the second feminist wave, by pointing out that the term “greatness” in itself means something else in women’s art than for men’s.15 She stressed that the explanation of this statement lies in many different social factors such as institutional prejudice and practical obstructions. The first and most obvious reason would be the exclusion of women from the institutions of the art world. Female artists have been plentiful since the beginning of time.
12 Chadwick, W. (1995). Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (London, UK: Rivers Oram Press), 138-145. 13 Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, 69, 22-39.
14 Schopenhauer, A. (2005). On the Suffering of the world (London, UK: Penguin UK) 15 Nochlin, L. (1971). Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? ARTnews, 69, 22-39.
Seventy-five percent of cave paintings have been identified as painted by a female hand, Hughes found in a recent study.16 Later, during Medieval times, women and men worked alongside one another, and women were allowed to join artists guilds. Yet, they did not gain access to important art institutions and education, when these were set up in the Renaissance. A shift from craftsmen to artists meant there was now an expectation of certain knowledge – perspective, mathematics, the human body – yet women were actively barred from this information until the late 19th century, when art Academies were slowly starting to admit female students. For a long time, however, though training was available to women, they was still an exception at the Academy and received a more compromised form of education than was offered to men.17 Before, female artists could only attend private academies or receive training from established artists and were denied the right to life drawing classes. Male artists did have the possibility to receive adequate training, support, and were surrounded by many peers. This led to a social construct that created the position of minority for women. A person could be gifted with artistic talent, but the simple fact of being of the female gender would prevent you to develop as an artist, let alone be acknowledged for one. “Talent is not enough”, was, very shortly said, Nochlin’s conclusion.
In 1981, ten years after the publication by Nochlin, however, art historians Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock draw the conclusion that there are, additionally, deeper structures
underlying the differences between male and female artists, which need to be searched for in ideology. In their book Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology they mainly focus on the way female artists were described and depicted. Women in art history are defined in terms of “the other” or “the negative” of the man, emphasizing male power structures.18 Pollock and Parker claimed that categorical divisions such as female artists or female art should not be made, as it would only lead to more oppression. Others, such as artist Judy Chicago and art historian Lucy Lippard, did, however, find it important to assume a separate female iconography. They assumed that typical female art could be distinguished from male art. Either way, if women make different art then men or not, it is a fact women have a substantial different position than men, and their art thus does not receive the same criticism or appreciation. That being said, this evokes some
curiosity about the imagery and art that was made by the grand male artists, and how the state of affairs is gender-wise.
16 Hughes, V. (n.d.). Were the First Artists Mostly Women? Retrieved June 12, 2016, from
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/
17 Gaze, D. (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists (London, UK: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers), 137.
3.1 The Male Gaze
Besides many other subjects, there is a long history of men-made art, photography and film, using the female body, or female nude, as a main subject. From the renaissance on, when the shift from craftsmen to artist came into life, artworks no longer needed to depict only religious scenes. Many images of female nudes were painted, not only in commission for men, but also for male viewers in general. A nude, here, is not to be equated with a naked body, whereas a naked body is just a body without clothes, and a nude is, as described by John Berger, a naked body aware of being seen.19 These female nudes place women in a context where they become objects to be observed, or “gazed at”, from a male point of view. John Berger takes this analysis of the depiction of the female nude even further in his book Ways of Seeing and describes women in Renaissance paintings often being depicted as aware of this male gaze. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
Laura Mulvey has described this phenomenon as “the male gaze”, where women are passive objects of desire, being looked at from a heterosexual male point of view.20 Her theory encompasses mostly examples from cinema and TV, but should be highly applicable for traditional mediums such as painting as well.
Women are there to provide visual pleasure for the male viewers. In her book The Female Nude, Lynda Nead states that a certain western aesthetic is used to structure the representation of the female body.21 Men have had the power to decide what they found pleasurable, aesthetic, and can ultimately exert power over how a woman should look like and how she should act Any excess of this body, anything that exceeds the imposed frame, such as blood, hair, fat, is rejected as it would turn the image into something abject. The pictures of the female nude are not made to exhibit the woman in them, but the male voyeur. The female body became a construct, and a construct which we now all see as the normative body, because of the prevalence of female imagery surrounding us at all times. Women grow up with this male gaze, which makes it very difficult not to incorporate this into their own “female gaze”. It is even stated by Mulvey that the female gaze is the male gaze. Women look at themselves through the eyes of men.
19 Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing (London, UK: Penguin Books), 51.
20 Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, NY: Palgrave), 19.
3.2 Reclaiming the body
The ever-recurring subject of the female nude in Western art history didn’t escape Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock as well.22 They framed it as a period in which “woman was ever more present as the object of… painting”. However present a certain type of woman was, though, certain bodies were not. Bodies that did not conform to that certain universal aesthetic were never the inspiration of a Botticelli, a Velázquez or any other classic painter. This omission ensured that these non-conforming bodies became invisible, something that can be seen as a reflection of the experiences of women within patriarchal society and a culture of unrealistic bodily standards. We’ve seen how the idealized female body was ever-present in art history and in high culture, but how it always was a representation of male desires and fears. It denied women’s experiences of their own bodies and sexual desires.
In the ’70s women had been on the receiving end of a growing social freedom for several decades, yet the public exploitation of female sexuality became more and more present in the form of advertisements and “soft” pornography. After WWII, the Western world had entered an economic boom, with branded products coming into the market, and with that, more and more advertisements. Women’s bodies were used to sell products, not only to men but also to women. This eluded or even forced women to identify even more with the imagery of glamorized nudes, as this imagery became accepted as a part of society by both men and women. During the ’70s, a reaction to this “Old Master/Playboy tradition”, came into life, and many female artists and art historians began an intervention to break down these artistic and bodily protocols.23 Many stated that living in a female body was something very different altogether than looking at it, as a man. In her piece “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality & Women Artists since 1970”, Lisa Tickner (1978) stated that “even the Venus from Urbino menstruated”. Which is, of course, not true, but this statement does remind us of the fact that all living women that have inspired these idealized and aestheticize images menstruate or have menstruated.
Tickner was part of the first generation, together with Pollock, who took it on to themselves to reveal the gendered nature of art history. From the ’70s, Tickner states, women artists had two choices: to accept this area as too muddled or dangerous for the production of
22 Parker, R., & Pollock, G. (2013). Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (2nd ed.) (London, UK: I.B. Tauris), 130. 23 Tickner, L. (1978). The body politic: female sexuality & women artists since 1970. Art History, 1(2), 236-251.
clear statements, or to attack, reverse or use this tradition. The most significant area of work of artists who choose the latter could be described as de-erotizing or de-colonizing the female body. Rejecting and disrespecting the normative patriarchal patterns of domination, in and outside the art world, could be attained by doing the unexpected. In making visible new female subjectivities and by redefining their femaleness female artists strived to claim back their right to
self-representation. They re-integrated female genitals into art, in a sexual and nonsexual sense, depicted menstruation, and showed all sorts of transformation of the body such as loosing weight, ageing and decay. By doing this, they violated all kinds of engrained taboos surrounding the female body. Also, with them, a movement of artists started to blur the line between body and canvas.
In the mid-’60s, performance art arose. It created a space for voicing feelings and believes more directly than other forms of art were able to and was an ideal way to challenge orthodox art but also cultural norms. With the main focus of performance art being the body, many feminist artists embraced this way of working and became pioneers of this new movement.24 Through their work, they attempted to disrupt the cultural concepts of the female body. They wanted to influence and change the way their bodies were perceived. The way they presented themselves varied greatly, yet frequently it involved the artist’s own naked body. Sometimes they worked together with other bodies (female and male), but they were always striving to give their bodies back to themselves. By using their naked bodies in their work, though, the risk that always remained present was their work could get re-appropriated for the purpose of male sexual
pleasure.25 A female body taking the stage, it was thought, would immediately become an object of the male gaze, of desire. Looking at the history of art as it is (and previous paragraphs), this idea is hardly debatable. The interpretation of a work is never entirely in the hands of the artist herself, the female body can be appropriated for other meanings than the artist intended. With many performances being filmed, and shown in other spaces without the artist being present, this issue increases to this day.
Carolee Schneemann was one of the most known feminist artists, who, in her work Interior Scroll (1975 & 1976), stood naked on a table in front of an audience, painted her body in dark paint and continued to read from a script from a long scroll of paper, which she pulled out of
24 Dekel, T. (2013). Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 24. 25 Nead, L. (1992). The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, UK: Routledge), 68.
her vagina. Her pose here recalls the traditional representation of the woman as the object, whereas the vaginal scroll represents the matriarchal power and wisdom. The script is a response to the critique of her work by structuralist filmmakers, of which the following is an excerpt:
“we cannot look at the personal clutter the persistence of feelings the hand-touch sensibility the diaristic indulgence the painterly mess the dense gestalt the primitive techniques
(I don’t take advice of men who only talk to themselves)
PAY ATTENTION TO CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL FILM LANGUAGE IT EXISTS FOR AND IN ONLY ONE GENDER”26
In a recent interview Schneemann stated that it was a protest against the abstraction of the female body and it’s loss of meaning.27 It was one of the important moments in feminist performance art history. The western, masculine art world had been obsessed with the female nude, yet left out the lived experience of these female bodies. Works by Carolee Schneemann that focused on this bodily experience elicited rage and censorship. These reactions did not stand on themself: many feminist artists received the same criticism from art critics. Their work was deemed obscene, or frivolous, and the artists were often not taken seriously. The imposed female ideal had previously encouraged females and males to despise biological truths such as female body hair, the clitoris, menstrual blood and secretions. So when female artists show that these things do coexist together with socially embraced beauty, the audience became confused at least, and enraged at worst. An
26 Blocker, J. (2004). What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press),
123.
27 Moreland, Q. (2015, August 29). Forty Years of Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll”. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from
explanation, Nead mentions, could be that a painting or sculpture allow for an observation at the viewer’s own speed, which gives her/him the time to select their own viewing position, while the fact that the performance artist is moving around prevents an erotizing or colonizing of the body.28
3.3 Case study – VALIE EXPORT: Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968)
Well known for her body oriented video- and photographic work and performances, VALIE EXPORT was eager to counter the misogyny of the dominant Viennese Actionists – such as Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus.29 She felt highly influenced by the movement of
Vienna during the ’70s, with all the political protests going on. As her male contemporaries, she protested against the repressive and anxious Viennese society, and subjected herself to pain and danger in her performances. However, her confrontational and shocking work focused mainly on the examination of the ways in which power relations underlying the media representations inscribe women’s bodies.
A year after her iconic work Tap and Touch Cinema, that was “the first genuine women’s film”, as she put it herself, she performed Genital Panic. In this performance, EXPORT walked into an experimental Munich art-house cinema wearing a pair of pants that was crotchless, a tight leather jacket and wildly teased hair. Walking past rows of seated spectators, her genitalia were exposed at eye level. By doing this, the audience was forced to engage with real life flesh and a body controlled and offered freely by a woman herself, instead of the passive and idealized female bodies they expected to encounter on screen. While no video of the performance itself is available, a photo series shot a few days after the performance is. Action Pants: Genital Panic [fig. 1] shows EXPORT sitting in a chair wearing the same aforementioned outfit, posing with a machine gun. While the photographs became iconic, EXPORT herself has stated that this was incidental. For her, the performance itself was the main work. As her performance aimed to challenge the voyeurism of cinema, the responses of the public showed an expected response. Many people got up, or walked away when they were able to. EXPORT saw the reaction to her
28 Nead, L. (1992). The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, UK: Routledge), 68. 29 Manchester, E. (2007, March). Action Pants: Genital Panic. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from
piece as denial of reality: “People do not want to see reality. When something is constructed, when it’s projected to a screen it’s acceptable, but it’s different when it’s there in front of you in a public space.”30
30 Fore, D. (2012, October 09). Valie Export. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/valie-
4. Cyberspace and gender
The world has changed a lot since the ’70s. While many of us still visit the cinema to watch a movie in the physical proximity of others, seeing a movie online, on our own and in the privacy of our living room has become a regular activity for many. Acting and interacting online now takes up an important part of our daily life. To explore and understand how our lives and our interaction with each other has changed, I will now turn to a slightly more in depth, yet succinct exploration of how the western world changed after our lives became more engrained in
technology and we became more digitally connected. From the 1990s on, the World Wide Web was made available for everyone with a computer and a modem. A new environment –
cyberspace – was now reality.
One of the primary claims of these early internet days was a promise of an active, inclusive and utopian community. This gave high hopes for the utopian potential of internet in general. In his book The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold refers to the prediction of internet pioneer J.C.R. Licklider that “life will be happier for the online individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interest and goals than by accidents of proximity.”31 Rheingold himself shared this optimistic view in 1994, and while recognizing the threat of consumerism in the offline world, he believed that online communities would rediscover “the power of cooperation”. The internet would give us a chance to create a new world, and we would all feel the responsibility to do better than we did in the physical world. People, in short, would leave behind all aspects of themselves that made it difficult to connect to others in the offline world, such as physical appearance or locations, and form a non-hierarchical place where everyone was equal. Internet would blur all boundaries, including gender boundaries.32
These utopian ideas triggered a new form of feminism: cyberfeminism. Some
cyberfeminists were inspired by Haraway’s cyborg myth, in which they saw the possibilities of technology and connectedness for the position of women. Though Donna Haraway’s essay “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) is too dense to go into too much detail here, the important aspect that is of importance here, is that she speaks of a cyborg that blurs all boundaries between human and animal and between human and machine. Though the cyborg in her manifesto is fictional, she
31 Rheingold, H. (1994). The Virtual Community (New York, NY: Harper Collins), 9. 32 Rheingold, H. (1994). The Virtual Community (New York, NY: Harper Collins), 20-24.
does believe that there is no difference between nature and man-made objects or technology. Using this knowledge and the tools of technology, women could overcome their gender and break down the patriarchal system.33
4.1 (Dis)embodiment and gender
Thus, this new place called cyberspace would give us the opportunity to leave behind all our physical characteristics and to blend with technology where we wanted to. It would be a bodiless medium, as our bodies remain seated in front of the computer screen rather than immerge into it. This would create the opportunity to connect and communicate not only without the interference of our bodies, but also without our gender. In her book How we became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles explains how gender was included in the earliest stages of the technologization of our lives, by reminding us of the Turing test.34 Developed in 1950 by Alan Turing, the Turing test tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from human behavior. This was not the only test however, as he also offered the test of distinguishing between man and woman. What the Turing test “proves”, Hayles writes, is that
“the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural in-evitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject”.35
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that studies that look at gendered use of technology find that cyberspace is embedded in economic, political and social realities of real life.36 And what we tend to forget as well, states Hayles (1996) in her essay “Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments”, is that our bodies are as much involved in the construction of virtual life as they are of “real” life. We interact with the virtual world through the senses of our body.
33 Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (NY, NY: Routledge), 149-182.
34 Hayles, K. (1996). Embodied virtuality: Or how to put bodies back into the picture. In M. Moser & D. MacLeod (eds.),
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (New York, NY: MIT Press), 1-28.
35 Hayles, K. (1996). Embodied virtuality: Or how to put bodies back into the picture. In M. Moser & D. MacLeod (eds.),
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (New York, NY: MIT Press), 13.
36 Beyer, J. (2012). Womens’s (Dis)embodied Engagement with Male-Dominated Online Communities. In G. Radhika (ed.)
Even if we leave our physical body upon entering the virtual world, as soon as we enter online spaces we are given rhetorical bodies, male or female.
Our inability, seemingly, to leave behind the many factors that make up our offline society, including the gender binary, as soon as this new cyberworld emerged does make one wonder about status of the historically asymmetrical power relationship between men and women. The thought that this relationship could be erased and forgotten, while other factors could not, seems to be naïve. Additionally, cyberspace’s precursor ARPANET was designed and coded by the US Defense Department before it became suitable for commercial use. Thereafter, mostly men were involved in its evolvement: Apple computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Tim Berners-Lee, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. In “Is there a Built form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?”, Thomas Markus wonders if there is a difference between a male utopia and a female utopia, and if it is even possible for men to design a different power relation, considering the asymmetrical power relation that exists in the offline world, in his research of the forms cyberspace was built of. Its language and the use of cyberspace are, in a way inscribed by patriarchy, Markus found.37 Embodiment in cyberspace therefor can never be free from pre-existing patriarchal labeling. Internet’s trope of equality was an utopia that could’ve only been reached when this utopia already existed here, in the physical world.
4.2 Internet and the rise of internet art: new possibilities, new freedoms?
Although cyberspace found its base in a patriarchal society, new technological media like the internet do still offer the opportunity to challenge existing social structures. The social
relationships we engage in online, were structured by existing rules that may or should need to be redefined, often extensively. The freedom of the early net days, when these rules were still to be set in place, in particular gave rise to artists operating online: internet artists. Josephine Bosma, a Dutch art critic specialized in new media, writes that in these first years internet art was more about the understanding of the Internet as a new social system, than just a new medium for existing work.38 Internet had created a new culture, and everyone had the same opportunities to
37 A Markus, T. (2002). Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopia’s?. In A. Bingaman, L. Sanders and Rebecca Zorach,
Embodied Utopia’s: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (New York, NY: Routledge), 15-32.
claim a piece of space, and shape it more or less as they wanted. This equal position allowed Jodi – one of the most well know internet art collectives – to win a Webby Award, while nowadays mostly online art collections receive an award in the category “Art”, individual contemporary artists such as Jodi now have a much smaller chance of winning. As more and more people started to recognize the possibilities this new culture provided and the entry of big companies emerged, the general nature and status of Internet art changed. Though artists such as Jodi still make work that underlines specifically the innate anarchy of cyberspace, most internet art works are best described as “art based in internet cultures”.
This art, though in its content perhaps often unrelated to the internet, does use the hyper-modern and democratic character of it to resist the offline patriarchal culture. Every artist with an internet connection and a computer can, after all, share their work online and everyone with an internet connection can view it. This is a freedom that the offline world does not provide. Offline, the art institutions rule the art world and if your work is not placed or selected, it is hard to get some visibility as an artist. These institutions are not yet set in place online, though institutions such as Rhizome – a pioneering online organization and archive of internet art – could be steadily gaining authority in this field by it’s rather recent affiliation with the New Museum. That is perhaps why it is so difficult to grasp what internet art is, exactly. Without the rules and
boundaries of art institutions, who is to say what is art and what is not? The works described as internet art are therefore all very different, formally and conceptually. Bosma does not use the term internet art, but defines net art as art based in or on internet cultures. That the art is based in internet cultures, it means that a physical connection to the internet is not necessary in individual net art works. Julian Stallabrass, however, does make the distinction that net art is a term that has become associated with a small group of early practitioners and cannot be applied to online art as a whole.39 Because the contemporary case studies that are discussed in this thesis do need an internet connection to reach their desired effect, and do not fall into the category of early works, I have chosen to refer to them as internet art. What needs to be mentioned here as well is the place internet art has in both digital art and post-internet art. Internet art is per definition digital art, yet digital art does not need to be based in internet cultures. Post-internet art, a term first introduced in 2008 by artist, curator and critic Marisa Olson, is defined as art that uses internet while it is
produced, yet is does not need to be based online and should also get it’s place in the offline world, which is an important distinction from internet art.40
The internet as a platform differs from an exhibition in a physical space. Art online is somewhat like art in public space; it is available at any time, indefinitely or until a domain name expires, software is not updated or a server crashes.41 Internet, however, cannot be named as a medium like painting, print or video is, states Stallabras. It is a method of distributing and exchanging data, which can be visual art, text, music, radio and video. It therefore has the possibility to be more broadly embedded in cultural context compared to art that is made to be seen only in a white cube. This makes the internet an interesting platform to explore questions on gender and embodiment in both the off- and online world.
4.3 Case Study 2 – Shu-Lea Cheang: Brandon (1998-1999)
One piece where the complex dynamics of gender, sexuality, identity and web-based art come together is Brandon (1998-1999) by the artist Shu-Lea Cheang.42 Cheang was engaged in media activism in the 1980s and 1990s, and made this work when hope was still high that the virtual world would erase all gender and race boundaries. It was also the time of the rape and murder case of Brandon Teena (née Teena Brandon). Brandon Teena was a transsexual man, who was raped and murdered by two men when they found out he was biologically female. In Brandon, a collaborative work, Cheang brought together the “Brandon case” with the first reported “online rape case”, which happened when a male user on one of internet’s earliest forums (also named MUDs) created a program that was able to take control over someone else’s virtual (and textual) body, and used it to sexually violate female characters.43
Brandon [fig. 2] was a digital work, a multi-site with multiple interfaces named “bigdoll”, “roadtrip”, “mooplay”, “panopticon” and “Theatrum Anatonicum”. 44 All interfaces were
40 Cornell, L. (2006, February 9). Net results: Closing the gap between art and life online. Retrieved March 26, 2016, from
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/net-result
41 Bosma, J. (2011). Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam, Nederland: NAi Publishers), 19. 42 Ho, Y. (2012, May 10). Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon. Retrieved May 12, 2016, from
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/10/shu-lea-cheang-on-brandon/
43 Dibbell, J. (1993, 23 december). A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html
44 The project is offline at this moment, but the Guggenheim is working on bringing “Brandon” back online soon. The images and
collaborative platforms, containing a mainframe that could embody changing content and users. Collaborators could add plug-ins and add-ons to change the narrative. Practically this meant that over the course of a year, a group of curators and artists could upload and create their own “Brandon narrative”. The work, between 1998 and 1999, included live-chat, actual/virtual performance, installations, pop-ups, stories and images. The project was designed without any easy icons to navigate through the sites, stimulating the visitor’s own sense of investigation, and making the experience non-linear. Being that the project was presented online, this meant that allowed participants from all over the world to shape, author and watch the project. Through the exploring of a wide range of “spaces”, from multiple-user chat rooms to offline spaces such as the “Theatre Anatromicum” (a Dutch performance venue), it opened up the exploration of boundaries between offline and online society. Also, it opened up the exploration of the interrelations between sexuality and gender, though this was mostly between artists, curators, institutions and scholars as they had the most freedom to create their own narrative, were they selected by Cheang to do so. Only some of the discussions and input from the audience was put up on the site, so it did remain a limited exploration.
Next to being the first internet art piece to be commissioned by the Guggenheim museum, and signaling a point where art institutions and museums became interested enough to invest resources in internet art, it also points to a perhaps less then utopian view of internet in terms of gender freedom. In exploring discourses around identity and bodies, both offline and online, it problematizes the fantasy of gender swapping. It thus isn’t only about trans sexuality, but also about digital bodies and its boundaries. It is difficult but possible to transform the physical body, by the use of hormones, surgery or by simply placing a sock in one’s underpants to create a manly bulge, but how easy is it to embody a different gender online, or even letting go of gender all together? The cases that Brandon works with show us an off- and online society that is not particularly keen on letting go of it’s constructs, and that can even act with violence to keep them in place, or when people dare to try to release themselves from the construct that has been
assigned to them. This is illustrated by the fact that internet first seemed to create the possibility for a free and anarchistic space, yet was quickly democratized. While at first, it was used by a small group of specialists, nowadays everyone with an internet connection and a suitable device can use it. This also means that the internet is not only used and partly run by individuals, but
also by offline companies and new online companies such as pornographic sites and social media who have now left their mark on how we move around and communicate with each other online.
5. The Male Gaze on the Web
Issues around the concepts of sex and gender constructs are often clouded in sexual urges, desires and (mis)behavior. And as much as the project Brandon tried to use technology and the presumed freedom of the web to break down social assumptions in society about gender, we now find that the internet is an area that does provide critical space, yet it has also, however, proven to become simultaneously a place where the gender binary power construction has become set steady in place. Which is unsurprising perhaps, seen that the first reported “cyber rape case” or online sexual assault, was reported as soon as the majority of western society started to become active online.45
While sexuality and gender is not the same thing, they do have intersections in many interesting ways. The general oppression of women has led to sexual violation in order to regain or remain male supremacy since many centuries. In her book Pleasure and Danger (1984), theorist of sex and gender politics Rubin Gayle states that from the standpoint of this system, female sexuality would be the one to respond to others, and not actively desire itself.46 The ownership of women thus has extended in many societies (and it still does in some) to the sexual ownership and exchange of women. Sexual exchange has played a role in the evolution of money and commodities, and it still does.47 Since the internet has been discovered as a commercial opportunity therefore, sex and sexual exchange has become a huge commodity online. And again, this is created for the mostly straight male gaze, and does not accommodate the sexual desire of the women themselves.
What plays a big role in online interaction and content, and is congruent with the aforementioned male gaze, is the sexual objectification of women. Since the early painters became enthralled with the female nude, Western society started to objectify women’s bodies. Objectification theory states that many women are treated as an object by others, and are sexually objectified.48 The woman herself is not regarded as a person anymore, but her body or certain body parts are treated as a sexual object for male desires. The objectification does not need to concern the physical presence of the woman herself, it can be channeled through a Renaissance
45 Dibbell, J. (1993, 23 december). A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html
46 Gayle, R. (1984). Pleasure and Danger (New York, NY: Routledge), 60.
47 Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (London, UK: Duke University Press), 44-61.
48 Fredrickson, B., & Roberts, L. (2006). Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental
painting of a female nude, a photograph, a digital image or even through words. Research has now shown that we recognize women in a similar way as we do objects, and women wearing bikinis are less likely to be viewed as human.49 Of course, not all online content on women, sexual content, or sexual interaction is about commercial sexual exchange or the objectification of women. There is a broad pursuit of many internet users that is aimed at sexual interest, and cyberspace proves to be a fertile ground for erotic connections. Next to these consensual, positive interactions however, the internet is engrained with objectifying content and (sexual) violence towards women. Recent research by the Guardian shows that female journalists have to deal with a continuous flow of aggressive responses to their articles, as well as ethnical and religious minorities that are confronted with a disproportionate amount of hurtful comments.50 Articles
about rape and feminism rate even higher in the number of vulgar and hostile responses. Many news organizations find themselves forced to close the comment section of their site because of this.
Catherine MacKinnon, renowned scholar and feminist, has hypothesized that sexual and racial harassment injures the receiver in a way that it carries the lived experience of those who are actually abused.51 Those words have the power to remind of and reference to actual physical violence, and thus become an act of subordination.
To find some explanations for said interactions, we just have to look at our offline world. As said before, sexual exchange is still a big commodity in our world, and the emphasis of this exchange lies strongly on the desires of the man. Men have sexualized hierarchy, making their dominance sexual. Using (nonconsensual) sexual exchange to emphasize the position of power of the man is just one symptom of patriarchy. Not only people who live outside of sex-gender relations will be at risk of assault, women everywhere, not matter their location, will have to live with a constant threat of violence, sexual violence being a big part of it. Rape, as is said by sexual violence theorists, is not merely physical violence but the “ultimate violation of self”, and it reaffirms the patriarchal social order.52 Translating the physical act of sexual violence into the digital space can be traced to porno sites providing videos of violent sexual acts, but also to
49 Bernard, P., Gervais, S., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2011). Integrating Sexual Objectification With Object Versus
Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science issue, 23(5), 469-471.
50 The Guardian. (2016, April 12). The dark side of Guardian comments. Retrieved June 16, 2016, from
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments
51 MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only Words (Cambridge, NY: Harvard University Press), 106.
52 Phiri, A., & Milatovic, M. (2014). Dis(re)membering bodies: disability and self-constitution in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
verbal, or textual violation of a person. It takes many forms. The world wide web has grown so expansively that it is impossible to say anything about the percentage that pornography sites takes up, but that a large amount of internet users frequently visit and pay these sites is a given.
Consumption of pornography in the US alone has resulted in an annual spending of eight billion dollars.53 Produced and run by mostly men, these porno sites show us mostly what men want and what provides the maximum amount of arousal for them. As MacKinnon (1993) states: women bound, women tortured, battered, humiliated and degraded, or at least sexually accessible women, wanting to be taken and used. While MacKinnon wrote this description on offline porn, one quick look at online pornographic material provides a same impression. Pornography constructs women as things for sexual use and it constructs the viewer to want women that crave for this humiliation and possession. Andrea Dworkin, a known anti-pornography radical feminist, states that this emphasis on aggression points to the major theme in pornography being male power.54
Ian Cook has researched a variety of porn sites and found that in these videos, the men are also presented in a less than three dimensional way. The men are represented as the hunter, next to the women being presented as objects who do not deserve any emotional attachment. The videos show the penis of the man being the sole bearer of pleasure for the woman, which translates into the “inextricably tying of the self-identity of men to their penises”.55 Cook even takes it as far as claiming feminism has increased male anxiety (of being “man enough”) and web porn has intensified it. That the porn industry does not only reinforce patriarchal power structures, but is also able to mirror interest into more open-minded views and desires, is illustrated by recent events in the US. In response to a new law that was passed on March 23 in North Carolina that effectively prevents cities and counties in the state from passing rules that protect LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans) rights, the owner of porn website “Xhamster.com” banned all computers from this state. Their spokesman clarified their actions by stating that they believe in equality for everyone, adding that users from North Carolina are obviously more open-minded about their porn choice then this new law might suggest.56
53 Amis, M. (2001, March 17). A rough trade. Retrieved May 25, 2016, from
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1
54 Dworkin, A. (1981). Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York, NY: Putnam), 24.
55 Cook, I. (2006). Western Heterosexual Masculinity, Anxiety, and Web Porn. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 14(1), 47-63 56 Moye, D. (2016, April 11). Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users Due To State’s Anti-LGBT Laws. Retrieved June 16, 2016,
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/porn-site-bans-north-carolina-users-due-to-states-anti-lgbt-laws_us_570bd057e4b0885fb50d9a92
Another driving force of the internet is the advertisement business. It is almost impossible to run any site without the income of advertisements. Newspaper sites, social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, almost all conceivable sites people visit on a daily basis are engrained with advertisements. Advertisements are never only about the product they are promoting, they are about how our culture is structured.57 They tempt someone to buy something, and by looking at who and what those someone’s and something’s are you can get quite an interesting view of how our world is structured. Online advertisements mainly rely on the use of images to convey a message to its audience. These images may “contain elements that can reinforce and reshape societal norms regarding gender equity and depiction of sexuality”.58 There is almost no research available on online advertisement, but the little research there is points to the finding that it follows the same stereotypical trends that print and TV advertisements use, entailing an
overrepresentation of women in decorative and traditional roles, often showing a distorted body image and as objects of sexual gratification.59 That these images can have an encouraging effect on attitudes supportive of sexual aggression towards women, has come up in multiple researches, say MacKay and Covell in their study titled “The Impact of Women in Advertisements on
Attitudes Toward Women”.60 It does, however also work the other way around, they emphasize. When shown more progressive images in advertising, both male and female participants of their study showed more acceptance of feminism and the woman’s movement. The multitude of non-progressive or sexual female imagery seems to continue the vicious circle of patriarchal sexual domination and the aggression that comes along with it. Disruption of this circle could lead to more positive attitudes towards women, though the way of disruption seems to be long and not without hurdles, as these two case studies will illustrate.
57 J Adams, C. (2015). The Pornography of Meat (New York, NY: Lantern Books), 10.
58 Plakoyiannaki, E., & Zotos, Y. (2009). Female role stereotypes in print advertising. European Journal of Marketing, 43(11),
1411-1434.
59 Stith, D. (2011). Homemaker to Seductress: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in Online Embedded Advertisements
(Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects). Retrieved from
http://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=etds
60 MacKay, N., & Covell, K. (1997). The Impact of Women in Advertisements on Attitudes Toward Women. Sex Roles, 36(9),
5.1 Case Study – Carolee Schneemann: Fuses (1965)
If not digitally, pornography and sexual advertising was already broadly available and present in the censorious America of the 1960s. This time also marks the abandonment of the Hollywood “Hays Code”, a code that was put in place in 1930 that said sex could only be implied and never depicted in Hollywood movies. Simultaneously, the sixties was the starting point of video performance art, enabled by the invention of the portable video camera. Carolee Schneemann, one of the pioneering feminist artists, is mostly known for her work on the body, sexuality and gender by the use of (video) performances.
In her video work Fuses [fig. 3], Schneemann responds to the anti-emotional quality of pornography, and questions the reposition of the man by filming any female experience such as giving birth. The video shows Schneemann making love with her partner James Tenney as if being observed by their cat, Kitch. The only actual participants were indeed just Schneemann herself, her partner and their cat, no cameraman. By filming herself, she becomes filmmaker as well as the object, and was thus able to re-create the intimate experience of lovemaking without the objectification of either body. The addition of distortions by staining and painting directly on the film, the video relinquishes any of the fetishization of the female or the reinforcement of male authority normally seen in a pornographic video. The setting for this early video art was very different from a traditional art viewing, as one has to watch it in a theatre like setting, in a dark room, seated. This black box creates an intimate space and immerses the viewer by blurring the self and the visual representation.61 Schneemann takes this added intimacy to her advantage. The beginning of the use of video during the second wave of feminism created a whole new audience for feminist activism and performance art.
Fuses could not be broadcast on TV, but the screenings in galleries and festivals made a huge impact. Challenging the tradition of the female nude in Western art as a passive object and breaking the taboo around the active female sexuality, Fuses was bound to receive a large amount of visceral responses. It was banned at the Moscow film festival, and labeled pornographic. This label was not so much given because it follows the pornographic code, as M Serra and Kathryn
61 Beil, R. (2001). Ausbruch aus der weißen Zelle: Die Freisetzung des Bildes in cinematisierten Räumen. In Black Box. Der
Ramey (2007) mention in the book Women Experimental Cinema.62 In conventional
pornography, one sees longer scenes with full body shots of a sex act that most often end in the ejaculation of a man. Fuses does not follow this code as it shows no such images or narrative, as it shows multiple female orgasms and ejaculations in a layered, scratched and painted way. It supposedly led to some frustration with the audience at a screening during Cannes film festival, where some men in the first rows got up and slash their seat with razors and knives. Susan Sontag, present at the screening, surmised it was impossible for the viewers to read the film for conventional pornographic pleasure, and thus it could not fulfill their pornographic
expectations.63
5.2 Case Study – Faith Holland: Lick Suck Screen (2014)
As we’ve seen before, the demand for pornography, and thus the amount of pornographic material has only increased since the 1960s. Also, we now spend some eight hours a day consuming media, internet accounting for almost thirty percent of that time.64 During that time, large amounts of (free) pornographic videos are consumed by a high percentage of Internet users, many even watching them from a very young age on. These statistics joined together with the dominantly present advertisement and its objectification of women does not paint the picture of a world that Schneemann and her contemporaries imagined.
Today’s artists are not left untouched by these developments though, as we again see artists employing performances to reclaim their bodies, now using the internet as a platform. Faith Holland, a net artist, approaches the discourse around sexuality and gender in the space of internet by using objects and subjects such as porn and found online imagery. Lick Suck Screen (2014) is a video Holland made for the series Porn Interventions [fig. 4]. In this work, placed and to be seen on the popular porn site Redtube, we see Holland taking off her shirt, tantalizingly slow, as she shyly smiles to the camera. The title of the video and the accompanying tags indicate
62 Ramey, K., & Serra, M. (2007). Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann. In R. Blaetz, Women’s
Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (London, UK: Duke University Press), 103-126.
63 Ramey, K., & Serra, M. (2007). Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann. In R. Blaetz, Women’s
Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (London, UK: Duke University Press), 103-126.
64 Time Spent Online (January - June 2015) Read more at
january-june-2015#IWiv3hpiCd0CMEbY.99. (2015, September 08). Retrieved from http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/time-spent-online-january-june-2015
that she will be performing a blowjob, yet instead she begins to lick the camera. The video then turns into a loop of tongue-colored abstractions while the hardcore GIFs around the edges of the screen keep on going.
By posting her video on a widely used porn site, she is able to intervene directly at the source. Her anticlimactic video disrupts the flow of homogenic pornography that is found online, aiming to create more awareness about the viewer’s pornographic expectations. Seeking out viewers of pornography in their private surrounding, rather than at an art gallery or art house cinema, affects these viewers in one of their most private and taboo activities. Also, it allows for a non-art audience, an audience where the biggest effect can occur in response to Holland’s work.
If Lick Suck Screen has left its male viewers as frustrated as the audience watching Schneemann’s work is only left to be pondered. During the correspondence I’ve had with the artist while writing this thesis, she shared that she received few responses, which only happened through private messages that she has not made public. In her own view, these responses were not interesting, as they all expressed sexually attraction to her work, and wanted to see more or to connect with her more privately. These responses may not say anything about the amount of confused or frustrated viewers as no one of them choose to interact with her. It does, however, show that the practice of performing online as an artist brings about some complexities that were not present around the performances of seventies artists.
6. Online spectatorship
What we see is that we, like the viewers of Holland’s work, often find ourselves in the position of the online “spectator”. Where the early days of the internet were more aimed at networked
communication, we now spend some time actively communicating with one another online, yet also we spend more time being a more or less passive spectator. Surely, we already were spectators before, of other screens such as our television and cinema screens. Screens that, according to film theorists like Laura Mulvey, reflected the belief system and desires of Western society. And as we saw before, this spectator of screens, the subject of the gaze, is male. We are, as spectators, not just a neutral pair of eyes. The images we view produce a particular way of seeing, reinforcing the already active system of beliefs and aesthetics. The man acts and the woman appears. What we see now, is a version of these views being incorporated on the internet. The omnipresence of imagery of women purely for erotic enjoyment is only one aspect of how the online world seems to mirror the offline world.
When it comes to the term spectator, it is not used often within the setting of the internet, as we see ourselves more as an active participator or user than a passive spectator. We are
inclined to accept internet conventions as “a given”. This implies, as Michele White theorizes, an idea of the computer and the internet as unmediated and animate.65 Online, we are often targeted with pronouns such as “you”, which additionally creates a sense that its text is created especially for the individual, and the sense that we are interacting with a living object. The imagery of advertisements and pornography, then, is not seen as a collection of information, created and compiled mostly by men, but as parts of a living system that has come into existence by itself. This creates a situation where we accept its settings as a given, which enforces its influence on our belief system.
This debate is not a new one, though, as it has been discussed in the online and offline world for years. Artist Barbara Kruger for example, who often played with declarative captions in her work, using pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I” and placing them over images coming from mainstream magazines, and by that revealing the appealing power of advertising and popular culture. In an interview in 2009, Kruger stated that
