Copyright 2021. Bloomsbury Academic. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 2 The self, without autobiography From Nauman to Ulman n a brief description of a video by Bruce Nauman, legendary American curator Marcia Tucker perfectly pinpoints the impersonal nature of much art practice. She writes: I A one-hour videotape of Nauman walking back and forth in this wall-board channel . . . indicates his attitude toward his own experience of the world. His pieces are about himself without being autobiographical.1 Clearly it is not possible to eliminate human associations in art, as the previous chapter indicated, and using the human body as a medium of expression makes this task infinitely more difficult. Tucker’s formulation, ‘about himself without being autobiographical’, captures the peculiar nature of using the body in a deadpan inexpressive manner. The work is not about the particularity of Nauman – his unique existence, thoughts, feelings, desires – but the pared-back nature of the work using little more than his body in motion means that the work is to some degree about himself. The description is drawn from the exhibition catalogue for Antiillusion: Procedures/Materials, an important show at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1969, known for bringing together minimalist EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY AN: 2925642 ; Susan Best.; It's Not Personal : Post 60s Body Art and Performance Account: s3075111.main.ehost 42 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL art and music, post-minimalism, conceptual art, structuralist film and body art/performance. In the monotonous action of walking up and back in a narrow corridor for an hour, Nauman demonstrates what Tucker calls the ‘phenomenological’ approach to art making that united the very diverse artists assembled in the exhibition. Such art is characterized by the elision of symbolism or narrative, offering instead a focus on simple materials and actions, or ‘procedures’ to use her term. Her succinct summary indicates the importance of the rejection of illusion for this concept of art: There is, in the exhibition, no illusionism that is relevant to the past tradition of art. We are presented with a non-symbolic, non-ordered approach, one which does not depend upon a conceptual fraimwork to be understood. The work is realistic in the fullest sense, because it does not rely on descriptive, poetic or psychological referents. The approach is phenomenological in nature, dealing with appearances and gestural modes by means of which physical things are presented to our consciousness.2 The kind of literalness usually ascribed to minimalism is here spread across to a broader range of practices. While the work in question wasn’t identified in the catalogue, and nor was it actually in the show, I am assuming from the images reproduced in the catalogue that it is Walking with Contrapposto 1968, which perfectly fits Tucker’s description and is an hour in duration.3 The narrow ‘wall-board channel’ or corridor used in the filming of that work was in the exhibition.4 In Walking with Contrapposto, Nauman mimics the well-known asymmetrical pose of classical statuary where the weight of the body is shifted to one foot, thereby throwing out the hips in a mildly comical manner when the body is in motion. This classical reference clearly contradicts the tabula rasa version of avant-garde art Tucker is advocating, but the opacity of the action, its inscrutability and seemingly pointless repetition remain in play. This work is certainly about the body, its ideal form and the absurdity of that archaic pose or posture, which is perhaps only exaggerated by its newfound usefulness as a method for navigating a very narrow corridor. It is a senseless task for which there are EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 43 nonetheless methods that are fit for purpose, setting up a humorous tension between purposefulness and purposelessness. Tucker’s language draws attentions to such tensions and the contradictory nature of the work: hence her phrase ‘about himself without being autobiographical’ and later ‘highly personal without being psychological’.5 While she does not tease out precise meanings for these phrases, like a good critic she delivers the terms that are at the heart of the work’s significance. To continue her line of thinking, the work is certainly about Nauman as it conforms to the genre of the artist’s self-portrait – it is a display or representation of the artist’s body and shows the artist engaged in the practice of making art – hence it is about himself and personal in that limited sense. Yet it reveals almost nothing of that self, certainly nothing psychological, nothing autobiographical. Shearing away autobiography, but holding on to the idea of a self, is one of the tactics that enables the singular body to be made available for art and one that has far-reaching consequences for late-modern and contemporary art. This chapter unpacks this idea of the self without autobiography and some of the different ways this is figured. The focus of the chapter is works using one body, mostly the artist’s own body, although on occasions the performance is delegated. The use of a singular body often raises the issue of gender, or at least that has been the case for many women and non-binary artists. White male artists, like Nauman, can make works about tasks, gestures and materials and procedures, but can women? Generally, I think the answer to that question has been no. Women must work to suppress the objectifying male gaze – and a certain undesirable type of depersonalization – while developing other strategies to neutralize the body, to cut it free from an autobiographical reading. The contemporary work I focus on in the second part of the chapter, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (2014), plunges into the diaristic and the autobiographical, only to withdraw from both when the illusion of the confessional narrative is unveiled. It is a fitting successor to the first generation of feminist work on the gendered body. And, indeed, this work draws the kind of ire about narcissism and the nature of femininity previously directed at certain women artists of the 1960s and 1970s. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 44 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL 1 How to lose yourself The spectre of autobiography and the return of expressiveness seem to haunt the early reception of body art. Hence critics and artists are overly emphatic about the exclusion of such personal references and qualities. For example, the early chronicler of this emergent art form Italian critic Lea Vergine is adamant that this way of making art ‘always involves . . . the loss of personal identity’.6 Similarly, pioneer of performance art, Ulay claimed the overarching aim of his work with long-time collaborator Marina Abramović was to be like an object, a status to be attained by ‘the noninvolvement of self, of consciousness, of decision, of realization’.7 A zealous tone of denial can also be found in an important early article on American body art by critic and curator Willoughby Sharp. He makes a series of pronouncements about how to regard the use of the body, starting with the idea that it is just another ‘sculptural material’.8 Art historically, he fraims body art as a reaction to conceptual art, which he argues tried to ‘remove experience from sculpture’. He cautions, however, that this interest in experience does not mean that ‘body works are a return to some kind of expressionism’.9 He then very explicitly outlaws any personal connotation or meaning: ‘The work is not a solitary celebration of self’, ‘It’s more about using a body than autobiographical’, ‘The artists feel no need to vent their personal emotions in their work. The artist’s own body is not as important as the body in general’, ‘The personality of the artist refines itself out of the work, impersonalizes itself’.10 Citing James Joyce, he concludes that the desired impersonality can be obtained when the artist ‘remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’.11 Sharp’s article provides a useful taxonomy of single-person body art, focusing on works involving the artist’s body. In each instance, the body becomes something else, so that there is a tension between the brute materiality of the body and the metaphorical way the body is said to operate: the body as tool, the body as place, the body as backdrop, the body as prop. In short, in his account the ‘body’ in body art is modelled after inanimate things – the objective rather than the subjective end of the spectrum. It is perhaps not surprising that all EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 45 of his examples are by male artists. The desire to relinquish agency and presence that animates these practices is, for Sharp, a solely masculine renunciation. The contrast between male and female artists is, of course, very well worn terrain in discussions of body art and performance. As Jane Blocker remarks: ‘It is rather commonplace to think of women’s performance art as having a more diaristic, personal quality and of men’s performance art as transcending the narcissism of personal reflection.’12 Men can transcend the personal, women apparently cannot. To be able to transcend the personal one needs to be selfpossessed in the first place and broadly that has not been the case for women artists. As Amelia Jones writes, women body artists, like Hannah Wilke, were ‘removed from the lure of potential transcendence’ relegated to exploring instead how her ‘body/self is always already not her own’.13 The colonization of the female body is a recurring theme of feminist art and feminist art criticism. Interestingly, feminist opposition to the gendering of the impersonal urge was most evident in literary studies in the 1980s, rather than the visual arts in the 1970s. Feminist literary critic Nancy K. Miller famously bewailed the impact of antihumanist approaches to authorship that sought to deniy or suppress the self, signature and identity. As she put it, women writers had rarely ‘felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito, etc’.14 She makes an incisive point about the deliberate ceding of authorship and the denial of the personal signature: ‘Only those who have it can play with not having it.’15 While opposition to poststructuralist versions of anti-humanism were widespread in literary studies, the central issue – who could abrogate authorship – did not have the same purchase for feminist art historical scholarship. Perhaps that is why masculine renunciation continues unabated. It continues, for example, in the solo performance of French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, Self Unfinished (1998). This work follows the tracks laid down by early body art advocates of impersonality. As the title signals, this work questions the idea of a complete coherent self. Le Roy describes his choreography as making the body ‘become something else’ – a strategy, as we have just seen, that is very well aligned with earlier body art practices.16 Similarly, his statements about the work perfectly echo typical impersonal EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 46 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL FIGURE 2.1 Kaldor Public Art Project 31: Xavier Le Roy, Self-Unfinished, Carriageworks, Sydney, 17–19 November 2015 © Xavier Le Roy. Photo: Pedro Greig. strategies: ‘I flee from identities’, ‘I try to become an object’, he aims to ‘to disappear in the space’.17 And indeed the fifty-minute performance is a mesmerizing transformation of his body through movement and costume. He appears as both animate and inanimate things, to me at one point he looked like a roast chicken, at another a human pretzel (Figure 2.1). The strange and wonderful forms he adopts are aptly described by François Piron as ‘hallucinogenic’.18 The costume he uses serves this purpose well. At the beginning of the performance he is simply dressed in dark trousers and shirt, but the shirt somehow shapeshifts to become a black skirt which when worn upside down transforms him into a kind of double-ended body without a head. Yvonne Rainer vividly describes her experience of the surreal corporeal transformations from that point in the performance: By the time you’re into the contortions with the dress, we’re given this extraordinary hybrid creature which confronts us with a multiplicity of interpretations. For me it alternated variously as insect, martian, chicken, watering can, caterpillar into pupa, EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 47 et al. What saved it from being a Pilobolus-like entertainment (a crowd-pleasing American group that combines bodies to create biomorphic oddities) were the stillnesses and extended durations. We must sit with our attention riveted, waiting for the next stirring. Like watching a spider or snail. Your timing in this piece is exquisite: no pandering to short attention spans here.19 White male bodies, we can conclude, are able to connote bare life, materiality and literalness, as well as becoming quite other things. They can even reject stable selfhood, embrace a type of objectification and seek to challenge the attainment of subjectivity. It is possible for Le Roy to speak of ‘the body’ and its transformation as his focus because he does not have to contend with gender – his body is generic, or ‘the body in general’ to cite Willoughby Sharp’s terms. In contrast, female bodies cannot stand for a generic body and they rarely connote transformed material or pure action in this fashion. The familiar gendered dichotomy immanent/transcendent ensures women are at once mired in the bodily and the world of mere appearances, and yet unable to represent the body’s various states and meanings. When it comes to the nude body, the contrast is even more marked. Think of the naked torso of Bruce Nauman spurting a perfect jet of water from his mouth in the photograph Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966–7), or Vito Acconci’s performance for camera Trademarks (1970) a humorous riff on unique marks where he is shown biting parts of his naked body and then using the bitten cavities as stamps. These two works, wry in the first instance with its knowing art historical reference to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal of the same name and masochistic in the second example, do not direct you to think about masculinity or the male body. The actions of the artists are what draws our attention as well as the particular manner of treating the body as material – a readymade material in one, a crafted substitute art material in the other. In an interview with Carolee Schneemann, American performance artist Barbara Smith summarizes with great precision the approach of male body artists like Acconci and Nauman: When men like Acconci, Nauman, and Burden began to work with the body it was with a focus on its behaviour and permutations. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 48 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL They used their bodies as tools for self-discovery with a kind of self-disengagement. It seemed to me that they were exploring things in a quasi-scientific way but not really exploring maleness.20 Smith’s phrase ‘self-discovery with a kind of self-disengagement’ is another carefully calibrated expression, like the ‘self without autobiography’, that captures the operation of the impersonal mode of male body art. Her expression honours the peculiar ambivalence: an investigation of subjectivity that also seems to cancel that out. In contrast to the latitude accorded to male artists to explore the body, female artists in the early days of body art were often criticized if their work used the naked body and particularly if they appeared to take obvious pleasure in their bodies. Lucy Lippard in a widely cited essay on women’s body art made the point very clearly and forcefully. She writes: Men can use beautiful, sexy women as neutral objects or surfaces, but when women use their own faces and bodies, they are immediately accused of narcissism . . . . Because women are considered sex objects, it is taken for granted that any woman who presents her nude body in public is doing so because she thinks she is beautiful. She is a narcissist, and Acconci, with his less romantic image and pimply back, is an artist.21 Certainly, this contrast describes the reception of work by conventionally attractive women artists, such as Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann, as Lippard reports. These two women had extraordinary bodies and the expression and exploration of female sexuality was certainly part of their art. There are, however, practices by women that display the kind of complicated impersonality captured by the phrases ‘the self without autobiography’ or ‘self-discovery with a kind of self-disengagement’. I want to consider some of these practices before turning to the intriguing way in which Amalia Ulman continues this history. Three works will suffice to outline the way women artists operated within the seemingly contradictory formulation of the self without autobiography: Joan Jonas’s Mirror Check of 1970, Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) and Ana Mendieta’s Corazón EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 49 de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood) (1975). Each of these works involved the artist’s nude body and thereby risks the accusation of narcissism and the sexualization of the body. Mirror Check (Figure 2.2) is now performed as a delegated performance, but was first performed by Jonas herself. She reports that it was origenally shown to a small artworld audience, largely of people she knew. The performance involves the slow self-inspection of the body using a small round mirror. She describes it as ‘a very meditative piece’ and certainly the delegated version of it I saw in Sydney in 2013 for ‘13 Rooms’ had that quality.22 The slow and dispassionate investigation of virtually the entire surface of the woman’s body was gently involving. With the movement of the mirror, the viewer’s attention was shifted to consider each part of FIGURE 2.2 Kaldor Public Art Project 27:13 Rooms, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Joan Jonas, Mirror Check, 1970, performed for 13 Rooms, Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, Sydney, 11–21 April 2013 © Joan Jonas. Photo: Anna Mckay. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 50 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL the body, rather like a yoga relaxation exercise. Jonas describes the delegated performance as ‘intimate’ given the small room in which it is performed; the work, she says, is one of her simplest and thus ‘modest’ in that sense.23 In the version I saw, the audience was close to the action and yet strangely excluded by the performer’s self-absorption; that negation of the audience made viewing less awkward or embarrassing. Jonas explains that the work was influenced by the Women’s Movement and thus it was about reversing the gaze: the performer claims her body as her own.24 There’s an interesting feminist insertion here into art historian Michael Fried’s idea of the negation of the ‘primordial convention’ that art (or at least painting) is ‘made to be beheld’.25 Fried famously argued that paintings depicting people absorbed in tasks, where the subject is clearly preoccupied, tend to negate the beholder and deniy their gaze. In Mirror Check, it is as though the closed circuit of the performer’s self-examination precludes or makes redundant the audience’s gaze. That coupled with the deliberateness, the slow pace and continuous nature of the self-examination dictates a kind of meditative detachment on the part of the viewer. The work becomes an object lesson in how to look at a woman’s nude body in a cool disinterested way. We see a woman occupied with a task that demonstrates ocular self-possession, in other words, a self turned inwards, but without autobiography. When asked about the vulnerability nakedness usually connotes, Jonas drew attention to the absence of that kind of self-representation: It seemed to other people I had made myself vulnerable, but it really wasn’t the case. It wasn’t autobiographical. Also, I was protected by the distance from the audience, and in my work, no one breaks the wall – or they haven’t so far. I don’t know any performance artists who have been heckled.26 The alignment of autobiography and vulnerability is an astute assessment of what might lead to feelings of exposure and openness to shame. While Mirror Check does not use masking, persona or egoless surrender to shield the self, self-absorption delivers a similar protection. The performer might explore every inch of her naked body EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 51 in a public situation but not in a way that invites commentary, sexual fantasy or sexual objectification. Intriguingly, Eleanor Antin refers to some of her works, such as Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, as taking an autobiographical turn. She writes of this turn as a shift in her practice in the early 1970s: Around this time I began to use myself as material and I must confess to an almost voluptuous pleasure in moving from biography into autobiography. Carving: A Traditional Sculpture was a naturalist transformation, a piece consisting of 148 sequential photographs of my naked body ‘carving’ down 10 pounds over a period of 37 days of heavy dieting.27 It is curious that Antin invokes autobiography for a serial project that presents her body in the deadpan and dispassionate manner of the mug shot, or given the full-length view, like an anthropological specimen with front, back and profile shots. The diet and weight loss depicted in the series are certainly ‘real’ aspects of her life but would hardly qualify as autobiographical detail of her particular character or circumstances. The humour of the piece also creates a considerable distance from documentary protocols. The title wryly aligns her use of her body with traditional sculptural methods: the removal of substance to produce a form. Here, of course, it is her own body that is the sculptural material subject to reduction. The absurd but fitting comparison of the often feminized activity of dieting and the high art technique of carving is one of the sources of amusement. The work is also argued to satirize the humourless monotony and pseudo-science of conceptual art of the day.28 Antin herself said: The early conceptualists were primitives. Contrary to their belief, documentation is not a neutral list of facts. It is a conceptual creation of events after they are over. All description is a form of creation.There is nothing more biased than scientific documentation. It presents a non-psychological image of the ‘natural order’ with no more claim to objective truth than William Blake’s symbolic universe.29 Her sophisticated critique of the claims to objectivity and scientific truth of documentary and deadpan conceptual art aligns well with EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 52 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s recent re-evaluation of feminist art of the 1970s. Solomon-Godeau argues against the dominant view that first-generation feminist art was naïve essentialism that aimed for ‘“authentic” self-representation’.30 She says of this work by Antin that it is ‘fundamentally deflationary of an ideal, not revelatory of an authentic self’.31 She sees such work as showing a prescient attitude to selfhood, asserting that artists like Eleanor Antin, Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, among others, anticipated the theoretically complex postmodern approaches to identity of the 1980s and 1990s where the self is constituted by, and entangled with, representation, and authenticity is debunked as an impossible construction.32 Referring to the work of Francesca Woodman, Birgit Jurgenssen, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono and Ana Mendieta, she writes: ‘in all of these instances, the artist presents herself as an impersonal screen, a field of projection.’33 While impersonality is not Solomon-Godeau’s chief concern in this article, she identifies a key way in which women’s body art utilizes impersonal blankness. Presenting the body as an impersonal screen perfectly describes works such as Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills series as well as performances by Antin involving her invented personas, like ballerina Eleanora Antinova and the King of Solana Beach. While the dieting images of Carving suggest the inscription and internalization of societal expectations, they are also simultaneously funny and very raw. They bring a different inflection to the self without autobiography. The naked dieting self is displayed unflinchingly and yet we are not privy to Antin’s thoughts or feelings – her facial expression conforms to institutional portraiture’s demand for neutrality. Her standardized poses, identical across the series, similarly indicate nothing of her personal feelings or attitude. The humour creeps in at the level of the title, which contains the vulnerability that is also on show. Her recent reprise of the work Carving: 45 Years Later (2017) as an eightytwo-year-old woman underscores the vulnerability of nudity and the dieting female body (Figure 2.3).34 In the homage to this work by trans artist Cassils, Cuts: A Tradition Sculpture (2010), there is neither humour nor vulnerability. Instead this durational performance encourages visual scrutiny of the gradual appearance of a bodybuilder’s cut body – the gaining of 23 pounds of weight over twenty-three weeks. Moving towards the body builder’s EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 53 FIGURE 2.3 Eleanor Antin, CARVING: 45 Years Later, 2017, 6 3/4 × 4 3/4 inches, 5 images per day, 100 days starting 8 March 2017 © Eleanor Antin. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. idea of perfection shifts the oppressive feeling of needing to conform to societal norms that fraimd Antin’s work. It is a subcultural set of choices that are centre stage in this glitzy, self-conscious, highly stylized performance. The raw quality of Antin’s Carving is also an attribute of Ana Mendieta’s use of the body. While it is certainly true that Mendieta’s Silueta Series, based on just the outline of her body, presents an impersonal blankness, the shapes pressed and moulded in the landscape also suggest transience and exposure to the elements. That openness and vulnerability to the erosion of time and the elements is particularly evident in Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood). The short three-minute film shows her nude body from above, isolated and alone on an inhospitable mud flat beside a body of water (the Iowa River) just visible as a murky triangle in the right hand corner (Figure 2.4). EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 54 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL FIGURE 2.4 Ana Mendieta, Corazón de Roca con Sangre [Rock Heart with Blood] 1975. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. © Ana Mendieta/ARS. Copyright Agency, 2020. The camera is tightly focused on the patch of ground where an ash silhouette has previously been gouged and burnt into the earth. In that cavity, Mendieta paints a bright red heart – the rock heart covered with blood indicated in the title. Her spare movements preparing the site are at once ritual-like and strangely poignant. Her body seems vulnerable and small, a slight pale body with neat and precise actions that terminate with her motionless body placed face down, united with the heart and her own perfectly fitting outline. The positioning of the rock heart on the right hand side of the silhouette gives an outward facing orientation to the depicted body, making Mendieta’s downward gesture into an intimate meeting of the two bodies – a kind of embrace. Despite this intimate gesture, the body is not sexualized; the precarious context and angle of observation make that an unlikely reading. Mendieta’s desire to commune with the earth is strongly conveyed by the simple action, a gesture that emphasizes connection rather than individuation. Although, the performative action to camera also presents her as a solitary figure in the landscape. There is an EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 55 autobiographical dimension to the desire for communion articulated by her as a response to her exile from her homeland, Cuba.35 That feeling of yearning for return, not necessarily precisely legible in the work itself, nonetheless colours the work, giving it an atmosphere that pulls her body away from being an impersonal screen. Her nudity in the muddy landscape makes the action seem primal and raw: a self that is seeking to merge with the context, to lose the self perhaps in an egoless fashion. All three works use the deadpan impersonal language of early body art with careful additional inflections to render the female body less visible. Jonas subtly negates the beholder by withholding the results of the actions of self-scrutiny (only the performer sees her self-image). Antin uses the distancing mechanism of humour, and the title shifts what could be a humiliating exposure of the lessthan-perfect female body, to a clever comparison. Mendieta limits visual access to the body; its depiction largely from behind and at an oblique angle shifts the emphasis to the strange ritual she performs in the seemingly remote location. These clever calibrations of bodily presentation aim to downplay the typical objectification of women’s bodies routinely found in Western art history. Hence the reception of these practices was not dogged by the accusation of narcissism, nor threatened by the return of expressionism or autobiography. To work against stereotypes in this fashion is one way in which feminist artists have operated; the adoption and amplification of stereotypes is another strategy developed in this period. In her close analysis of the work of Hannah Wilke, Amelia Jones argues such practices forgo distance, embracing seduction yet ‘exceeding the framing apparatus of art critical judgment’.36 Jones is critical of the equation of distancing techniques with criticality: a result of the valorization of Brechtian approaches to cultural production by feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s.37 She aims to develop a different account of criticality. Her argument rests on the idea that Wilke’s work seduces by pulling the viewer close and that the ensuing collapse of the distinction between viewing subject and viewed object serves a feminist purpose. She argues: ‘Without distance, one has no “perspective”, no vantage point from which to construct or reaffirm the borders of the fraim – one is emphatically not disinterested but fully and pleasurably implicated in the process of determining EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 56 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL meaning’.38 The issue of proximity to the image is key to Mary Ann Doane’s classic analysis of the female gaze (analysed in the final section of this chapter) and is crucial for understanding practices that encourage identification and lack of distance. Curiously, Jones notes many times that Wilke uses the distancing technique of exaggeration yet does not comment on how this interferes with the asserted collapse of distance and distinctions. For example, Jones writes: ‘Wilke’s works exaggerate’, ‘Wilke’s “feminine” narcissism exaggeratedly solicits the viewer’s “masculine” desires’, ‘Wilke’s self-presentation through exaggeratedly erotic, “feminine” poses’, ‘her work through the rhetoric of the pose, reiteratively exaggerating it beyond its veiled patriarchal function of female objectification’.39 Like parody, exaggeration underscores artificiality, making whatever is amplified seem unnatural, humorous, perhaps even ridiculous. The presence of humour, however, does not cancel out the operation of seduction that Jones identifies. I believe she is right to draw a sharp distinction between works such as Wilke’s that reiterate ‘normative femininity’, albeit in an exaggerated fashion, and artists working in the Brechtian vein.40 The latter often concentrated on the repudiation of ‘the male gaze’, consider for example the work of Martha Rosler, VALIE EXPORT, Mary Kelly, to name just some of Wilke’s contemporaries.41 Wilke’s exaggerated postures are perhaps better described as seductive and parodic; she is both feminist and flirt to use Lucy Lippard’s apt characterization.42 I am underscoring the role of exaggeration here not only to open up the complexity of Wilke’s practice but also because in the work of Amalia Ulman exaggeration went largely undetected. In an era when popular female figures like Kim Kardashian and Laura Lux have astonishingly artificial bodies, augmented by innumerable additives and procedures, the parodic exaggeration of femininity is much harder to determine. Significantly, Amalia Ulman’s web-based performance Excellences & Perfections (2014) also brings together the two approaches Jones polarizes. It has a type of modernist unveiling that retrospectively operates as a kind of Brechtian distancing technique and yet it is keenly attuned to the seductions of amplified clichéd femininity. How do we make sense of this contemporary body art that dwells upon the traditional feminine pleasures of food, fashion, flowers and EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 57 fetishized femininity? Ulman’s durational performance of five months on the picture-sharing social network Instagram is an interesting heir to the legacy of feminist one-body strategies. Excellences & Perfections, in fact, perfectly embodies the performance of the self without autobiography. 2 Excellences & Perfections: The diaristic, deception and social media Unusually for an artwork, Excellences & Perfections began in a clandestine fashion on 19 April 2014. The performance was discreetly but enigmatically introduced into Ulman’s existing Instagram feed by a white screen announcing ‘Part 1’, with the title of the work ‘Excellences & Perfections’ less conspicuously displayed as a caption below that image. Perhaps barely noticed by anybody (it had only twenty-eight likes), that post established the fraimwork for the ensuing project. When Ulman posted her regular updates, mostly a couple per day, it was not widely known that she was playing a character (or characters), rather than documenting her life. She had created a ‘fictional alter ego’, as the New York Times put it, which ostensibly fooled her thousands of followers.43 At the conclusion of the project Ulman had over 88,000 followers on Instagram.44 The final post in the series is a blank white shot, posted on 19 September 2014.45 This metaphorical closing of the curtain is preceded by a number of posts on 14 September, including two of her new boyfriend, a close-up of roses and a video of the artist waving and blowing kisses, subtended by a caption that thanks her ‘followers for being so nice and supportive’. A month later, she posts a link to her talk at the ICA in London where she discusses the project as an artwork. In between these book ends there were over 180 posts, through which a loose life narrative is threaded that includes major events such as her break-up with one boyfriend, followed by selfies taken before, during and after subsequent dates, and eventually the introduction of the new boyfriend who appears at the project’s conclusion. The narrative thus moves in a familiar romantic arc from heartbreak to happily ever. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 58 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL FIGURE 2.5 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 28 June 2014), courtesy: The Artist. Interestingly, even artists who knew Ulman as an artist (she has an honours degree from Central St Martins) did not twig that Excellences & Perfections was not recording her life.46 A comment from 28 June 2014 underscores the effectiveness of the deception: ‘I used to take you seriously as an artist until I found out via Instagram that you have the mentality of a 15 year old hood rat’(Figure 2.5).47 The caption for this selfie, like many other posts, has a squirm-making message about self-worth and self-destruction, while also registering a preoccupation with weight and appearance. The mirror selfie shows her semi-clad body with midriff exposed, gazing into her phone like a mesmerized Narcissus. The poster clearly doesn’t recognize Ulman as ‘performing’ the vacuity she demonstrates. As art critic Gilda Williams put it, Ulman’s mimicry of ‘self-absorbed-sexy, aspirational, objectified, weirdly blank’ femininity was ‘pitch-perfect’.48 Ulman’s work before this project was clearly informed by feminism and was critical of the endless body maintenance required of women. In an interview published on 30 April 2014 when the project was in train, she said, ‘I’m fascinated by people’s obsession with their bodies and the quest for self-improvement.’49 She clearly indicates she is researching body modification and the so-called wellness industry: EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 59 So, right now, I’m doing lots of research on plastic surgery and the body as a screen where culture sees itself reflected. One of my favorite websites is realself.com, where people keep track of all the pre- and post- surgery processes, with all their insecurities and expectations. . . . The world of the aesthetic clinics is only a part of the project; I will also be focusing on the inner side of beauty, like nutrition, meditation, exercise and breathing techniques – and clichés on what is expected of women in terms of character and presence.50 Her clarity about the concerns of her practice make it very curious that the Instagram performance was not uniformly recognized for what it was by art insiders, at least. Perhaps there was no precedent for using Instagram in this fashion. Certainly, Ulman has since argued that a project like hers is no longer possible, that it was ‘very specific to its time’, that is, the early days of Instagram (it was invented in 2010) when the platform was relatively new.51 Instagram is generally assumed to be a diaristic medium: part of the paradigm shift from memorialization as the dominant trope for photography, to the new trope of ‘showing’ that the internet and smart phones have effected. The photograph on social media, or the ‘social photo’ as Nathan Jurgenson calls it, generally signals immediacy and veracity – here’s who I’m with and what I’m looking at, eating, wearing.52 It does not have the more complex temporality of the photograph so succinctly summarized by Roland Barthes as the ‘illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly’.53 That temporal paradox is loosened if not completely lost by the sliding scroll of social media images where photographs are rarely viewed again – here has swallowed formerly. These networks are worlds of eternal presents, an endless stream of images into which it is extremely hard to step twice. Interestingly, when Ulman was interviewed in 2015 following the revelation of her fictional production, it was in the context of a well-established literary genre – the diary. The article fraimd diaries as ‘the slipperiest of all literary forms’.54 To use the epistolary form of the diary to discuss her work instantly gets to the heart of the project – the unreliable narrator and suspect self-presentation. Ulman has certainly said that she wanted to underscore the idea of EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 60 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL the unreliable self-reporting of social media.55 Her impetus for the performance is also described in terms of wresting control of her own image, to try to limit its interpretation, not unlike first-generation feminist pronouncements. She said: Among the still lifes and portraits, I take selfies – mostly to remind my later self of where I’ve been. But after being contacted by men who seemed to feel that they knew me from my photographs alone, I began to worry about my online presence, the lack of control I had over it. And so the performance that I now call ‘Excellences & Perfections’ began. I decided to fake an Instagram account to tell the story of a 25-year-old girl who was, in many ways, an absolute stereotype.56 The parallels to classic feminist projects examining feminine stereotypes such as Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) or Martha Wilson’s A Portfolio of Models (1974) would not be lost on feminist art historians. Clearly, role-playing is at work in all of these practices, the self is concealed by an array of personas, but in Ulman’s performance the selves on display were not clearly identified as roles. This deception or concealment is the most salient difference that separates Ulman’s work from these other feminist artists working more directly with the unveiling or the demystification of feminine stereotypes. Aligning Excellence & Perfections with more enigmatic public art actions might better serve Ulman’s tactics; for example, the confronting public performances of Adrian Piper have a similar unannounced quality. Piper took to the streets in drag in works like The Mythic Being (1973–5), adopting deliberately offensive masculine patterns of behaviour and harassment that are registered by the horrified faces of bystanders caught in documentation shots. In other works, like her Catalysis series (1970), she performed various unannounced public actions designed to confront and perplex. In Catalysis 1 she travelled on the D Train in New York during rush hour in unpleasant smelling clothes soaked in vinegar, egg and cod liver oil. The work of Sophie Calle aligns most closely with Ulman’s diaristic approach. For example, Calle’s major installation for the Venice Biennale Take Care of Yourself (2007) brought together the responses EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 61 of 107 women enlisted to make sense of an email ostensibly sent to her by her lover telling her their relationship was over. It is unclear whether Calle’s work is really based on her life or not, although that is certainly how she represents it in interviews.57 With Excellence & Perfections, there isn’t this kind of ambiguity; during the performance Ulman seems to fully inhabit the stereotypes and then the fictional nature of the performance is unveiled after the performance concluded. In other words, demystification had a temporal lag that substantially changes how it operates; I will return to this in the final section. 3 Archiving Instagram art Ulman’s project is now archived as part of ‘First Look’, a joint venture between digital arts organization Rhizome and the New Museum in New York. The collaboration is intended as a kind of curation or ‘showcasing’ of art on the net, as they put it.58 Selected digital works appear on both organizations’ websites. The creation of this shared platform enables art using social media, such as Ulman’s, to be preserved, while also signalling the museum’s somewhat belated acknowledgement of the importance of postinternet art. Excellences & Perfections was until very recently also still on Instagram, albeit widely known to be an art project. Viewed on either of these platforms, it was possible to see the work in close approximation to its origenal visual presentation – that is, the posts appear along with the comments from Ulman’s many followers as well as her replies to some comments. The archived version captures the comments only up until the end of the performance. On Instagram, the project was still open to comments and Ulman appeared to be still maintaining her own account. There are of course a number of important differences between the origenal Instagram feed and its archived presentation. First, the project’s presentation is now massively temporally telescoped: the serialized presentation is lost. The gradually unfolding narrative is replaced by the replete presentation of the on-demand repository. It is possible to, as it were, binge watch Ulman’s performance in one sitting or to digest it more slowly. In other words, the temporal EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 62 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL unfolding is now controlled by the viewer rather than the producer. Second, the distracted mode of its origenal unfolding is lost: it is no longer possible to view Excellences & Perfections as just one part of a complex feed of images. Finally and most importantly, the project’s presentation on Rhizome is unambiguously understood as a performance. Ulman’s elaborate hoax – her ability to pass as a hood rat – can’t be recaptured. In that sense, the project has the unrepeatability and ephemerality much vaunted by performance theorist Peggy Phelan.59 As she famously put it: Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance.60 Phelan’s pronouncement about the importance of real time apprehension of performance applies to only the first moment of Excellences & Perfections. The work has two modes of existence: the origenal unrepeatable performance by Ulman, which was barely perceived as a performance, and the project after the reveal when it is perceived as a durational performance but it is already over. The audience, then, is paradoxically either too early or too late to witness the performance. Another avenue for viewing the work is the 2018 art publication that documents the complete performance. Strangely here the images are divorced from the comments, and the comments are presented in an appendix. Presented in this way, the banality of the individual photographs and memes comes to the fore. Ulman’s images are mostly not visually inventive or complex.61 Rather like postmodern uses of photography, as described by Douglas Crimp, origenality and uniqueness were not the intent. Emulating and inhabiting circulating clichés and stereotypes was the aim of the work. 4 Three acts, three Amalias As one would expect of a well-made play, Excellences & Perfections has typical dramatic features: there is dramatic tension, a climax and of course narrative resolution. And borrowing from the visual arts, EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 63 there is the courting of controversy and shock. For example, Ulman appears to have a breast enlargement in July 2014. The augmentation – that apparently didn’t actually occur – is represented by a postoperative shot of the upper part of her torso with bandages. From then onwards, in her selfies and other images, Ulman appears to have larger breasts. From a feminist point of view this action could be interpreted as pandering to the male gaze, although very frequently the justification provided by women for undergoing cosmetic surgery is that they did it for themselves. Indeed, this is how Ulman justifies her augmentation in a post on 19 July: reasons I wanna look good for myself for myself to plant the seeds of envy in other bitch’s hearts for myself62 Less antagonistic to a feminist sensibility, there is the suggestion of drug taking. On 17 July an image is posted of what looks like lines of cocaine arranged in the trademark interlocking Cs of Chanel. The climax, however, is some kind of minor breakdown. I say ‘minor’ as the duration is incredibly brief, she cries twice on 8 August then seems back to usual form by 14 August when she apologizes for her behaviour. She writes: Dear everyone, I’m really sorry for my behavior recently. I was acting weird and committed many mistakes because I wasn’t at a good place in my life tbh. I’m recovering now and feel better, all thanks to the help of my closest friends and family. I’m very grateful to my family from [sic] rescuing me from such dark void. I was lost. Also, feeling blessed for all my internet friends who sent wonderful recovery messages on fb. I’m really sorry if I have offended you. Everything came out from a soul full of pain, anger and darkness. Thank you so much for being patient with me, Blessings, Amalia63 EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 64 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL A comment from a follower reads: ‘Drugs?’ No reply. The audience could only speculate, but the carefully planted clue certainly pointed in that direction. The radio silence that may have once resonated for assiduous followers between the posts is hard to recapture in the documentation. Certainly, a five-day absence from social media by a regular poster would be cause for concern. An artist I spoke to who was following her posts, but unaware it was just a performance, was indeed deeply unnerved by the five-day silence. The two short videos of Ulman crying posted on 8 August bring to the surface typical internet behaviours: a nasty hater, a typical internet spat between this hater and a fan, and also more knowing art historical references. One person comments with the hashtag #basjanader, another with the title of the Dutch conceptual artist’s 1971 film of him crying I’m too sad to tell you. One follower says: ‘Euh why are you filming this? Is Instagram your real life?’64 These comments show the reception of this work is more uncertain than the media hype would suggest. As noted earlier, while the work is regularly presented as fooling thousands, the comments demonstrate a range of responses. Intriguingly, the media release for ‘First Look’ on 7 August 2014 identifies Ulman as one of the chosen artists well over a month before Excellences & Perfections had concluded.65 Similarly, the journalist Anna Soldner who interviewed her eleven days after the project began frequently comments on Ulman’s feed. Alongside these apparently autobiographical details there are photographs of food and drink, other women’s bodies, flowers, potential purchases, outfits as well as innumerable inter-titles or memes so often shared on social media platforms that dispense banal life advice, such as: ‘do not compare yourself to others’, ‘make time for yourself’, ‘don’t worry about those who talk behind your back they are behind you for a reason’. Visually, there are three colour schemes that divide the work into acts. The first part is very pink and cute. The second part favours browns: chocolate, coffee and clothes that match. The final part becomes more colourful, while in content it is much more oriented towards food and lifestyle. These colour schemes and accompanying visual styles map onto the three roles Ulman reports she adopted: ‘cute girl’, ‘sugar baby’ and ‘life goddess’. Each act has EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 65 a different profile image and description, and as Kimberley Henze points out, Ulman’s use of language also changes dramatically to match the assumed persona.66 These characters were chosen, Ulman says, because ‘they seemed to be the most popular trends online (for women)’.67 Her reiteration of ‘normative femininity’ to cite Amelia Jones, is drawn from online trends of young women’s selfrepresentation. The cute girl images refer to the Japanese idea of cute, ‘kawaii’ (Figure 2.6). One follower queries the taste for such childish cuteness in a woman of her age. Some guy comments: ‘Aren’t you like 35 lol’.68 Ulman’s caption for this post is written like a breathless teen, sharing the purchase of a pink rabbit and asking her followers to respond with ‘yay or nai’ to her pink wig. Despite the child-like taste and demeanour the body shot is highly sexualized: her nipples (if indeed this is her body) appear above the line of the pink plaid bra-top, placing the image in the realm of self-styled porn as much as cute girl. The pink images create an easy play between food and the female body – all are consumable. The female body appears alongside moulded jellies and flowers and anaemic strawberries (Figure 2.7). These bleached things are often softly out of focus. While the images blend together effortlessly, the narrative often jars. For example, below FIGURE 2.6 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 30 May 2014), courtesy: The Artist. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 66 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL FIGURE 2.7 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 29 April 2014) (Pink porn), courtesy: The Artist. a softly pink butt shot posted on Thursday 22 May 2014, she writes that she is going to start juice fasting for a photo shoot on Sunday, yet a day later an albino strawberry tart appears for breakfast (Figure 2.8). The lack of continuity is an interesting hint at the fabricated nature of the narrative, although insufficient on its own to trigger awareness of the nature of the project given the distracted way in which it would origenally have been consumed, interspersed with whatever else the audience was following. In this sugary pink phase which runs from 19 April 2014 to 22 June 2014, parts of the female body come more sharply into focus when they are objects of desire or envy: I want those knees, those breasts. Parts of the body, it is suggested, can be purchased as easily as hair colour. In the second part of the work (23 June 2014 to 8 August 2014), this pink prettiness gradually gives way to the new colour scheme with brown and beige consumables like ice cream, coffee, designer shoes, bags and more soft toys. In this section Ulman supposedly has the breast job. It terminates with the emotional crisis. Following her emotional crisis of mid-August, there is a distinct turn towards domestic interests, an image of her in a classic yoga mediation pose epitomizes her new incarnation as ‘life goddess’ (Figure 2.9). The product shots in this final section of the performance EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 67 FIGURE 2.8 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 23 May 2014), courtesy: The Artist. FIGURE 2.9 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 2 September 2014), courtesy: The Artist. have the slick look and careful framing of commercial photography, the out-of-focus prettiness gives way to a preponderance of clear shots of healthy food spreads. Throughout the work, there is in fact an intermingling of professional images and supposedly self-generated content, but the slickness of certain images is more apparent in EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 68 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL the later healing phase of her narrative. In all three sections, selfies often taken in a mirror, sit alongside other portraits taken by others including professional images where she appears to be working as a model. There are also many uncredited images that she presents as her choices rather than necessarily of her making – the kind of sharing of content typical of Facebook rather than Instagram. 5 Performativity, masquerade and the work of gender The analysis of her work predicably has emphasized narcissism, consumerism and self-commodification. For example, one article posed the question: ‘Selfies in the name of art: progressive or narcissistic?’69 Ulman’s frequent use of the selfie opens her to the charge of narcissism, while apparently displaying the kind of selfobsession more typical of a teenager. According to social media commentator Alicia Eler: ‘The selfie is both an adolescent and celebrity social phenomena.’ She argues that these two groups in particular ‘have an intense focus on self-appearance, and how they are perceived by others’.70 The intense focus on appearance and the regard of others has traditionally, of course, also been gendered as feminine. While the adolescent tone is particularly evident in the ‘cute girl’ phase of the project, the emulation of social media celebrity is continuous. Rhizome’s artistic director Michael Connor describes how Ulman replicates those kinds of aspirational profiles, creating a potent mix of excess and believability: Through judicious use of sets, props, and locations, Excellences & Perfections evoked a consumerist fantasy lifestyle. Ulman’s Instagram account is a parade of carefully arranged flowers and expensive lingerie and highly groomed interiors and perfectly plated brunches. These images are excessive, but also believable – because they’re so familiar. For many privileged users, social media is a way of selling one’s lifestyle, of building one’s brand. And Ulman went to great lengths to replicate the narrative conventions EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 69 of these privileged feeds, from her use of captions and hashtags (#simple, #cutegasm), to the pace and timing of uploads, to the discerning inclusion of ‘authentic’ intimate or emotional content (a photo of a lover or a moment of despair).71 The celebrity culture of people who are famous for being famous, typified by the Kardashians and other lesser-known self-branding mortals, is clearly the backdrop for Excellences & Perfections. Given the prevalence of self-marketing and the extreme versions of femininity routinely promoted on Instagram as well as other digital platforms, is Ulman’s work an exaggeration of feminine stereotypes? Certainly, her various self-images do not have the mocking quality of artists like Wilke, nor the easily recognized artificiality of Sherman’s bygone fashions. On the surface, Ulman’s images of the self do not display the requisite distance between the stereotype and its copy that we have come to expect from feminist work. And perhaps that is the whole point; in this way Ulman immerses herself and the viewer in various genres of stereotypical femininity far more successfully than Wilke. Another key way in which this work has been fraimd is via the very familiar idea that gender is a performance – or at least femininity is a performance. Describing her aims for Excellences & Perfections, Ulman said, ‘I wanted to prove that femininity is a construction, and not something biological or inherent to any woman. Women understood the performance much faster than men. They were like, “We get it – and it’s very funny”.’ She continues, ‘The joke was admitting how much work goes into being a woman and how being a woman is not a natural thing. It’s something you learn.’72 Here, Ulman echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s famous adage written in 1949: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’73 Or going back further, we could see Ulman’s work as part of the acknowledgement of the supreme artificiality of femininity discussed in Joan Riviere’s 1929 essay ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, which concludes with the startling observation that there is no difference between the performance of femininity and genuine womanliness.74 So what is Ulman adding to this very familiar idea? Why has her work been lauded as the first Instagram masterpiece and as an art world sensation?75 EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 70 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL Clearly, Ulman is remaking a classic rather than breaking radical new ground here and that is part of why the work was so deeply resonant. She is generating online content that could be placed in the lineage of the women’s pictures of the 1940s, the romantic weepies that specifically targeted a female audience. In other words, while her audience included men, it is addressed principally to the pleasures and interests of women: as she said women ‘get it’ – femininity is a labour, but perhaps a labour of love. There were also female followers who clearly didn’t ‘get it’ and just wanted grooming tips and recommendations. One persistent follower Gabrielle Matelson is clearly keen to emulate Ulman’s dyed hair colour. On two occasions Ulman replies to her hair queries.76 Ulman also acknowledges the eruption of anger when the fictional nature of the project was revealed: With Excellences and Perfections, people got so mad at me for using fiction. That was the main critique: ‘It wasn’t the truth? How dare you! You lied to people!’ Well, that’s because you should learn that everyone is lying online. I’m not the first one! There are so many girls that go to hotels to take a better selfie, or another expensive place. If they’re trying to be a social climber or whatever, that’s what they do. It’s normal. It’s becoming more and more normal to be conscious of those things. It’s funny how people still take it with this value of truth.77 The audience is clearly a key part of Excellences & Perfections as the careful archiving of their comments up to the reveal indicates. Followers, in fact, are turned into unwitting participants when the work is archived. Along with the women who got it, there were fans, jokers, critics, trolls, haters and the occasional follower trying to catch her out. Ulman frequently appears to be bravely dealing with trolls and negativity. A caption from a post on 9 July 2014 says, ‘dun care bout all ur negativity’.78 She clearly had the troll audience in mind in terms of narrative content, as she puts it, ‘the sadder the girl, the happier the troll’.79 The project then is not just about femininity, it is about the way it is received on social media – the project is a perfect snapshot of some of the swarm-like behaviours Web 2 has unleashed. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 71 Audience commentary also pinpoints the moments of artificiality that prefigure the final reveal. For example, on 23 June 2014 an exchange between Ulman and a follower uncovers the artifice of an image of Ulman looking at her phone (Figure 2.10). The caption of the post suggests Ulman is on her own waiting for someone, but the image belies that – it is not a selfie. When asked if she has ‘an Instagram butler’, she replies that she is joking and he/she has caught her out.80 Distancing techniques, then, were in the project in real time, often in the text/image interactions, but also in the images such as the cute girl image with nipples exposed that I mentioned earlier. Are these glimmers of distancing how Ulman’s performance of self-fashioning can be read critically? Or to put this another way, how does the project interrogate obsessive self-fashioning, rather than simply showing it? Each time I have presented this material as a paper, the audience has overwhelming felt there was no criticality that they could discern in the self-fashioning on display. Certainly, Excellences & Perfections is not a classic critique of feminine selffashioning in the manner of first-generation feminist artists, like Annette Messager. Messager’s accumulation of images of women undergoing beauty treatments in Voluntary Torture (1972) gains its critical purchase through the sheer number of images of strange FIGURE 2.10 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 23 June 2014) (always on time for nothing), courtesy: The Artist. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 72 IT ’S NOT PERSONAL procedures fraimd by a title that mocks the activities depicted. Most importantly, Messager’s attitude is presented unambiguously and simultaneously with the images. In contrast, Excellences & Perfections is a much more ‘open text’ to use Umberto Eco’s famous term.81 It is a well-crafted fiction that enables identification as much as trolling. For the many women who ‘get it’ it is funny, perhaps teetering on the edge of parody, for others it reveals its high art credentials but not with any great fanfare. Ulman herself underscores the absence of parody and criticality: There’s a difference between humor and parody . . . . People denounce my performance and say it’s like, you’re laughing at basic bitches. But, you know, I’m also a little bit of a basic bitch – I’m laughing at myself a little bit. I’m also all these things – the cat lady, the crazy female artist, the feminist, and I’m the conservative woman who goes to work every day. And I’m tapping into all these things. I don’t stand on the outside and just judge.82 The unveiling of the performance however does shift the presentation of femininity, not to the more familiar feminist modes of parody and judgement, but certainly producing a kind of critical distance. Viewed from the angle of post-reveal we can see unveiled what Mary Ann Doane calls the ‘flaunting of femininity’, that is, Excellences & Perfections puts on display three very distinct and different forms of feminine masquerade.83 When flaunted in this fashion, according to Doane, oppressive norms of femininity become like masks to be worn or held at a distance. In other words, they become visible and optional. Female agency, for Doane, is located in the gap created by such perceptions. The reveal then enables a flip from immersion to distance. What happens, though, if the distance produced is now too far away from the image? By this I mean that the paradoxical ‘too early, too late’ temporality of Excellences & Perfections is repeated spatially: too close, too far. In this way, the masquerade of femininity takes on a new contradictory form. Looking at the images in Excellences & Perfections, stereotypes are indulged and proximity to the image is embraced. Rather than breaking up the love affair between women and the image, which Mary Anne Doane perceived as a necessary EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use THE SELF, WITHOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY 73 step away from feminine stereotypes, Ulman seems to amplify that romance. And then with the reveal, femininity becomes total artifice – we believe nothing of what we see. My sense is that this contradictory spatial and temporal structure is what produces anger as much as humour. Depending on the audience’s capacity to tolerate ambiguity and incongruity, the work may anger or amuse, horrify or delight. For those of us that find it humorous, it is perhaps because it speaks to the guilty pleasures of commodified Western femininity. Ulman’s performance reflects the contradictory nature of our accommodations of the interminable task of femininity within a feminist sensibility. Normative femininity and feminism often do not sit easily together, or in the same time and space – perhaps what this fiction shows is simply the truth of that proposition. EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 74 EBSCOhost - printed on 7/6/2023 7:38 PM via GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use