THE SELF ONSCREEN

In this essay, curator Pavel Pyś reflects on the exhibition “The Body Electric”, exploring how artists have critically engaged with technology to raise questions about body representation, especially in terms of identity, embodiment, race, gender, sexuality, class, and belonging.

Trisha Baga, Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor, 2018. Installation view in “The Body Electric,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo: Bobby Rogers.

“The Body Electric”¹ was catalyzed by the frustration of seeing a group of artists of roughly the same age exhibited predominantly within the context of their own generation.² The majority were working with new technologies (such as 3D printing, motion capture, avatars, computer-generated animations), and many were grouped under the moniker “post-internet art,” that, by the time the exhibition had opened, had become an exhausted term with little currency.³ The impetus was to age these emerging and mid-career artists by creating an intergenerational family tree, elevating overlooked voices and demonstrating a healthy skepticism toward the novelty of technology. The through line connecting the artists on view was a shared engagement with the body and its mediated image, raising important questions about representation especially in terms of identity, embodiment, race, gender, sexuality, class, and belonging. Like Alice disappearing through the mirror, these artists nimbly cross the boundaries separating the physical world and its space on screen, blurring 2D and 3D, real and virtual, analog and digital. As these distinctions melt away, how are artists questioning the present and warning of what lies around the corner?

Time is a humbling force: yesterday’s proposals for tomorrow risk becoming today’s retro-futuristic relics. This essay dives into selected works from “The Body Electric,” each charged with a constellation of concerns of particular relevance today. While some vintage artworks now appear especially prescient in anticipating the present, those made today are still experimental reflections on the here and now, not yet tested by time’s relentless march. Reaching into the past while also celebrating artists of the present, “The Body Electric” asks how artworks gather renewed resonance and meaning given where we find ourselves today. It is entirely possible—in fact, probable—that a slew of artists excluded from the exhibition would warrant inclusion, should the exhibition (and, by extension, this essay) appear ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. As such, from the perch of 2021, this essay acknowledges the inevitable blind spots that I hope the future reader might forgive.

Martine Syms, Notes on Gesture, 2015. Video still. Single channel video (color, sound), 10:27 minutes, loop. Image copyright: Martine Syms. Courtesy of the artist, and Bridget Donahue, New York City.

Drawing upon the work of Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, and Bruce Nauman, Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976) posits that “self-encapsulation—the body or psyche as its own surround—is everywhere to be found in the corpus of video art.”⁴ While charting varying degrees of critical distance with which artists approached the then-nascent medium, Krauss nonetheless establishes video art as a “psychological situation” that, through mirroring, collapses the boundary between artists and their representation, the subject and the object.

BY EMBRACING THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN ONE’S OWN BODY AND ITS LIVE IMAGE ON THE TV MONITOR—REFERRED TO AS THE “ONGOING MIRROR” BY JOAN JONAS—THIS EARLY GENERATION OF VIDEO ARTISTS ESTABLISHED THE MOVING IMAGE AS A MEANS TO SPLINTER REALITY BY LAYERING SPACE AND TIME AND CONFLATING THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND ITS MULTIPLIED REPRESENTATIONS.

By embracing the interplay between one’s own body and its live image on the TV monitor—referred to as the “ongoing mirror” by Joan Jonas—this early generation of video artists established the moving image as a means to splinter reality by layering space and time and conflating the physical world and its multiplied representations.⁵ This blurring is felt even more acutely today: owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, daily screen time has shot up dramatically and most of our current interactions take place via social media.⁶ Confined in our homes like never before, we are negotiating the world via the screen, much like the artists brought together in the exhibition section ‘Performing for the Camera,’ who each turn the lens of the camera onto their own bodies to raise questions about race, nationality, sexuality, LGBTQIA+ identity, and femininity. Their self-portraits are kindred images to today’s omnipresent selfies, which in turn bring Krauss’s reflections on narcissism into sharp relief with a renewed relevance. Art mirrors life and vice versa and these works urge us to consider the conditions of our daily lives, especially in light of how social media fuels narcissistic and compulsive behavioral patterns of self-promotion and performativity.⁷

Within ‘Performing for the Camera,’ a cluster of works by Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Amalia Ulman offers a lens through which to examine how media shapes our understanding of beauty and femininity. Sherman’s Untitled (1981) and Simpson’s LA’57-NY’09 (2009) both subvert the language (and concomitant expectations) of the pinup image that typically caters to the pleasure of the male gaze. In Untitled—conceived as a spread for Artforum to mimic the centerfold format of men’s erotic magazines—we see Sherman in a disturbed emotional state. Spot-lit, she appears fearful and disheveled, the photograph communicating a sense of terror and foreboding rather than fulfilling a lustful, flirtatious promise. Simpson’s work blurs the real and the imagined by presenting side-by-side two sets of images: photos purchased on eBay that were taken in Los Angeles in 1957 featuring unidentified women (and occasionally men) modeling in the popular pinup style, alongside the artist’s self-portraits that faithfully replicate the setting and poses of the originals. Seen together, Simpson’s images reveal the means by which we carry ourselves and perform via choices in styling, clothing, and body language. In Excellences and Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman extends Simpson and Sherman’s concerns into the realm of the Internet and social media. During a five-month period across her Instagram and Facebook profiles, Ulman channeled the vacuous persona of a beauty blogger through a stream of carefully selected images of styled interiors, luxury products, and doe-eyed selfies. Tiptoeing a fine line between critique and wanton emulation, the series raises questions of (particularly white) privilege and the commodification of the self via lifestyle and branding choices. Those sympathetic to Ulman might read Excellences and Perfections via anthropologist Crystal Abidin’s notion of “subversive frivolity,” in which she perceives such online influencer behavior— purposefully cloaked behind a language of vacuity and conceit—as a generative and affirmative means.⁸ Others might side with curator and writer Legacy Russell’s take on Ulman’s work, which she sees as failing to critically engage with the very platform it harnesses and becoming merely “an unfortunate flaunting of privilege, haunted by a sort of socioeconomic ‘passing’ that went unquestioned by a public accustomed to the gourmandized consumption of the superrich.”⁹ Reflecting on selfies in 2012, critic Brian Droitcour wrote that the “aestheticization of everyday life in social media… has leeched the authority of image-making from mass media.”¹⁰ Seen together, these works by Sherman, Simpson, and Ulman challenge Droitcour’s statement that from today’s vantage point seems ruefully optimistic.

View of the exhibition “The Body Electric,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2019. Photo: Bobby Rogers

Many of the artists in the exhibition—Laurie Anderson, Ed Atkins, Zach Blas, Peter Campus, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Pierre Huyghe, Sondra Perry, and Ulrike Rosenbach— have explored the transference (or transcendence?) of the embodied self into the virtual realm through the use of avatars. Digital approximations of our likenesses have proliferated wildly in the last two years: in 2019 Apple released the Memoji feature, while in 2020 Facebook premiered the Avatars function, both of which generate customizable cartoonlike versions of their users. Avatars are increasingly common in our everyday lives—they communicate with us as virtual assistants via natural language-processing algorithms and even screen us at airports upon arrival.¹¹ We negotiate our mediations online (or lack thereof, as evidenced by the work of disability rights groups advocating for more diverse emojis),¹² and even our afterlives, as social media profiles of the deceased force us to confront new dimensions of grief and bereavement.¹³ The contours of what is real and virtual are shifting—“AFK” (“away from keyboard”) is becoming a more accurate description of the “real” than “IRL” (“in real life”)—as so much of our lives is negotiated in cyberspace. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw this shift in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), in which he perceived growing communication technologies as extensions not only of our bodies, but also our very selves: “In this electric age we see ourselves . . . moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”¹⁴ Yet what, then, of the body and its immediate physical surroundings? While the digital trades in the illusion of immateriality—the cloud as a mysterious metaphor for opaqueness and weightlessness—lurking behind the digital veil is, as writer and artist James Bridle describes in New Dark Age (2019), “a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions.”¹⁵ These two realms—on/offline, physical/virtual, here/there—are inextricably bound together and interdependent, and both are decidedly real. In the hands of artists, avatars offer a means to prod at the limits to which our bodies and minds are entangled within the tension of the real/virtual divide. Where does the embodied self end and the disembodied virtual being begin?

Ed Atkins, Happy Birthday!!, 2014. Video still. HD video, sound; 6:32 min. Courtesy of the artist; and Cabinet, London.

In Ed Atkins’s Happy Birthday!! (2014), we encounter a highly realistic CGI male character, who mumbles through a seemingly arbitrary list of years, days, and time codes, as if struggling to remember a significant past event. As he searches back in his “memories,” various images appear collaged—swirling CGI animations, the night sky, a bedroom—and set against pathetic heartrending music such as Elvis Presley crooning “Always on My Mind.” Atkins has described Happy Birthday!! as a work full of “terrible nostalgia,” an achingly melancholic meditation on memory and mortality.¹⁶ Hyperreal in its rendered appearance, the work’s protagonist is nonetheless rooted within the real world. He bears a direct connection to Atkins himself, who provides the avatar’s voice as well as facial movements that have been motion-captured from the artist “performing” in front of a camera. The character also takes its CGI likeness from a real-life person: a model who has been scanned into an avatar, which was then purchased by Atkins via TurboSquid, a website that supplies 3D stock models for use in computer games, adult entertainment, and architectural renderings. The uncanny encounter with Atkins’s confused and dazed protagonist forges the uneasy question: “Can you empathize with an avatar?” Or vice versa: could Agent K and his holographic girlfriend Joi of Bladerunner 2049 truly love one another? These are not farfetched or speculative notions—we are already developing relationships with AI companions. In 2016, the Japanese company Gatebox unveiled Azuma Hikari, the anime “comforting bride,”¹⁷ whose holographic likeness floats within a transparent container like a trapped Tinkerbell.¹⁸ Azuma might text you a flirty message while you’re at work, she can activate smart home appliances on your command, and offers a girlfriend’s companionship. While still a nascent industry, virtual companions such as Azuma force us to consider the emotive aspects of our relationships with artificially intelligent avatars, opening new dimensions of intimacy, empathy, and loneliness.

Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016. Installation view in “The Body Electric,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo: Bobby Rogers.

Sondra Perry employs avatars to addresses inherent bias within technology, specifically in relation to gender and race. Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016) consists of a modified exercise-bike workstation, a type of office furnishing that queasily reinforces the glorification of capitalist productivity: the workers not only perform their role but also work out and tone their fit bodies. Perry has affixed three screens to the bike, across which a story unfolds, narrated by the artist’s own avatar. She describes the limitations of the software that rendered her being: “It could not replicate her fatness . . . Sondra’s body type was not an accessible preexisting template.” Any humor inherent in the avatar’s deadpan delivery quickly dissipates upon considering the many problems that people of color face in relation to new technologies. Several recent studies have shown that facial recognition software used by police in the United States disproportionally singles out nonwhite individuals,¹⁹ while even mundane appliances such as automatic soap dispensers have been unable to recognize darker skin tones.

Technology mirrors the society that develops it, as we saw with the fiasco of Tay, an artificially intelligent chatter bot released by Microsoft on Twitter in 2016. Shut down shortly after its premier due to trolling, the bot quickly assimilated the hateful speech it was fed and began spewing racist and sexually charged tweets. The Tay scandal brings to the fore the question: “Whose worldview does technology really reflect?” In crafting our digital presence, we are confronted not only by the question of how we mediate our sense of self, but also our bodies online. In terms of race, these issues are manifested through activist groups such as the World White Web, a website that draws attention to the dominance of imagery of white bodies on the Internet; as well the work of those advocating for diverse emoji skin tones.

These questions—as with Azuma Hikari—gain even more complexity and ambiguity when we confront humanmade avatars that stand in for no real person. In 2016, the Los Angeles start-up Brud launched the Instagram influencer Lil Miquela, a corporate avatar that has since advertised major brands and also championed causes such as Black Lives Matter, DACA, and trans rights. Of a mixed-race and bicultural identity (half-Spanish, half-Brazilian) not reflective of her makers, Lil Miquela has come under fire for virtue signaling and embracing a racially ambiguous character that “gives brands the freedom to latch on to key woke messaging points about identity politics without having to deal with the often-messy reality that encompasses those difficult topics.”²⁰ Sondra Perry’s work wades into exactly this territory rife with unresolved dilemmas of how we negotiate markers of embodiment within digital technologies that often serve the ambiguous agendas of their capitalist makers.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, SECOND SEX WAR ZONE (detail), 2016. Courtesy of the artist; and Rodeo Gallery, London/Piraeus.

Citing the writings of Donna Haraway, theorist Paul B. Preciado reflected: “The twenty-first-century body is a technoliving system, the result of an irreversible implosion of modern binaries (female/male, animal/human, nature/culture).”²¹ Preciado’s contemplation of the human-machine divide forces us to ask: Where does our flesh end and technology begin? How have artists turned to prosthetics and artificial intelligence to traverse and marry this gap? In 1986, the performance artist Stelarc wrote: “Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality . . . technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.”²² While Stelarc’s statement had the ring of futurity at the time, it now announces a tomorrow just around the corner. While many wearables have failed to take off (such as Google Glass), other “skin technologies” (especially sports devices such as fitbits, as well as smart jewelry) are in high demand, blurring the boundary between body and device.

The work of Lynn Hershman Leeson and Sidsel Meineche Hansen offer a critical commentary of the membranes of the technoliving system, especially in relation to the female body and its commodification for consumption, pleasure, and sexual gratification. One of her first interactive installations, Leeson’s Deep Contact (1984–89) was originally installed with a surveillance camera that would detect the presence of a gallery visitor. “Touch me,” murmured Marion, the work’s protagonist, with whom we are invited to engage via a touchscreen television. Each body part triggers a different series of fifty-seven possible events: pressing Marion’s head, for example, activates brief accounts of how television shapes perceptions of women’s bodies. Yet, what does it mean to directing Marion? How, in this voyeuristic encounter, are the dimensions of power negotiated? What are the implications of the user (human)–servant (Marion) dynamic?

Similar questions fuel Hansen’s SECOND SEX WAR (2016), a body of work spurred by the 2014 ruling of the British Board of Film Classification that restricted the showing of a variety of acts (such as female ejaculation) in pornography produced in the UK. Responding to this decision, Hansen created DICKGIRL 3D(X) (2016), a work that features EVA v3.0, a royalty-free avatar that the artist sourced through TurboSquid. Experienced via Oculus Rift in virtual reality, the hypersexualized CGI animation shows the character fitted with genital props and fucking an amorphous blob. Just as Atkins’s avatars are borne of a real-life human being, so too are EVA v3.0’s movements, which were motion-captured from pornographic films. It was estimated that by 2020 the VR adult entertainment industry was to hit a US $1 billion value, driving—along with gaming—much of the technology’s innovation. Yet, just as systemic racism is made manifest online, so too are questions of how bodies are represented for pleasure.²³ How are entrenched heteronormative patriarchal perceptions of the attractive female body coded within this new technology? Hansen deliberately chose to generate DICKGIRL 3D(X) in VR to engage with “post-human porn production from within,” harnessing the very technology that the porn industry is currently most aggressively investing in.²⁴ Seen via a headset while reclining on a vegan leather beanbag, the work forces us to not only confront the status of its imagery but also the very hardware that facilitates the experience. In this way, Hansen’s work can also be read against the burgeoning teledildonics industry of interactive sex toys that sync couples online to facilitate touch at a distance via haptic technology. Yet another industry booming due to the pandemic—when not only our social, but, for many, sexual encounters are taking place online—these innovations force us to question the infrastructure that frames and supports these experiences.²⁵ In 2018, Ralph Russo and Christophe Ramstein, then leaders of the haptic sensor technology firm Novasentis, heralded the dawn of the “neo-sensory age,” which they saw as one “where previously lifeless electronic devices come alive through touch and touch feedback . . . that respond to human touch.”²⁶

Both Leeson and Hansen—drawing on the technologies available to each at the time—force us to renegotiate our understanding of touch, lust, and desire within these newly mediated environments, not only vis-à-vis one another but also in relation to the now-alive machine. It is worth returning to Haraway, whose cyborg theory posited that technology relies on “the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.”²⁷ Leeson and Hansen, along with many other voices in “The Body Electric”—especially those of Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Zach Blas, Sondra Perry, and Martine Syms—question the very means by which technology codes, asking “What are the possibilities of resisting perpetuated normative categories that result in control and domination?”

Carolyn Lazard, installation view of In Sickness and Study, (2015-present) in “The Body Electric,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo: Bobby Rogers.

While much of “The Body Electric” looks at the ways in which we define ourselves vis-à-vis the screen, the exhibition’s final section—‘The Malleable Body’—explores how the body becomes porous, fluid, and subject to transformation via internal or external forces. Many of the artists gathered here—especially Jes Fan, Josh Kline, Carolyn Lazard, Candice Lin, Marianna Simnett, Patrick Staff, and Anicka Yi—ask how invisible molecular substances, such as hormones or bacteria, become gendered, racialized, and charged with meaning.

Kline’s and Lazard’s work gained particularly pointed meaning during the pandemic, given their emphasis on health. Kline’s Share the Health (2011–ongoing) consists of now-ubiquitous hand sanitizer dispensers, each filled with a nutrient gel. Showing, literally, a landscape of unfolding decay—the very stuff our minds have been preoccupied with since March 2020—each dispenser grows bacteria-swabbed sites specified by the artist. His choice of cities in the exhibition’s tour was telling, each dispenser becoming a portrait rife with connotations of social class and belonging.²⁸ Denied their disinfectant purpose, the dispensers made visible the constant presence of the invisible viral pathogens that surround us, garnering renewed salience during COVID-19 when we are frantically seeking to protect our skin and immediate surroundings. Originally made for Instagram, In Sickness and Study (2015–ongoing) documents biweekly intravenous iron infusions that Lazard receives as treatment for their autoimmune disorders. Each image, taken in the hospital room, shows the artist’s hand holding up the cover of whichever book they are reading at the time. In many ways, In Sickness and Study is a fitting coda for “The Body Electric” in 2021. The work makes Lazard’s body visible to confront the social codes that inform our understanding of sickness and treatment. While once the hospital room might have been the main space of healing, COVID-19 has transformed our homes into places of convalescence where we are forced to self-isolate. It is impossible to look at the series today without being reminded of the pronounced inequalities of healthcare access, as well as the distrust that many communities of color have toward vaccinations, a disenfranchisement perpetuated by a systemically racist healthcare system. Finally, like much of “The Body Electric”, Lazard’s series reminds us that our lives are negotiated at the interstice of the here and now and the endless and timeless space of the screen. As technology mediates our lives in increasingly complex ways, the work of so many artists on view encapsulate the tension between two polarities we face every day—enthrallment with technology’s new possibilities and a skepticism of its often sinister and invisible agendas at play.