The format of Hito Steyerlâs Lovely Andrea (29â43â, 2007), a short film commissioned for Documenta 12, ostensibly falls under the umbrella of the essay documentary genre. In that space, the work indeed documents an interview-based research process from the perspective of a tangible and bodied subjectivity, but it is perhaps better playfully described by one of its interview subjects, the editor of Sanwa Erotica, Matsumoto Yutaka, upon hearing the basic premise: âThatâs a nice mystery novel. Itâs mysterious, it sounds good.â In the film, Steyerl introduces her search for a published photo series of herself as a Shibari bondage S/M model taken in 1987 while studying as a film student in Tokyo. This central goal drives her research forward, but despite that apparent clarity and objective-based approach, the film both begins and ends with her as interview subject being asked âWhat is your film about?â The audience is repeatedly prodded to answer this question, arriving at a place that considers the broader paradigms of global power (reference appendix images A, B), through which bondage pornography might merely reveal some libidinal echoes of an underlying ideological infrastructure that bleeds out into global deployments of Imperialist Capitalism.
Steyerlâs archived images are the subject of the search, but the filmâs central figure is Asagi Ageha, Steyerlâs translator as the search moves from Germany to Japan and also a bondage performer with her performance partner, Osada Steve. Steyerl and Asagi follow a trail from fetish studio to fetish studio, connecting the dots between a seemingly small community of male ropemasters that were active in S/M publishing in the 80s, they slowly narrow down the possibilities of the photographer and magazine in which it might have appeared. In a twist on the typical role of âtranslator as invisible intermediary,â their search is repeatedly put on hold as Asagi is directly addressed by members of the studio. A studio assistant at their first destination, Sanwa Erotica, asks, âArenât you a model, Ageha?â The ropemaster offers, âIf you want a bondage picture of yourself, I will tie you up.â Asagi replies, âItâs maybe a good idea!â as the whole studio laughs. The film breaks into a montage of Asagi taking her shirt off and being bound by the ropemaster.
In the midst of the search, various editors describe the psychological space of S/M as it functions for both performer and studio. From one editor, Japanese S/M is described as being based on submissiveness, on offering the performer an opportunity to experience shame. Another German editor explains that some of his performers would tell you that they like to see rope marks on their skin, while others would say they enjoy the feeling of floating as they are suspended above the ground, âOnly when being roped I feel free.â This sentiment seems to be a motif in BDSM, and parallels a line from Pauline Reageâs 1954 Story of O, âThe chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself.â
Within these descriptions, Ropemaster Nureki Chimuo explains the relationship of these studios to the Japanese legislature while voicing over a photoshoot of a woman with her arms tied behind her back in chic business woman garb, âBack then there were lots of restrictions⊠It was best when [the police] were extremely bothersome.â Nureki explains that they ought to operate as if they always have these same restrictions but never quite clarifies if this is because those conditions forced the studios to be more creative in their operations, or if it was the illicit nature of the media that increased their audienceâs desire for the media. Something to note here: through the description of the studioâs relationship with the state, the audience finds the studio manager describing a power dynamic that becomes a direct projection of the internal dynamic that is roleplayed in front of the camera lens. In this echoed restriction, the studios enjoy being dominated by the police. Through that description, a fractal structure of power is constructed, submission echos from the micro to the macro with an implication of recursiveness ad infinitum. Within that structure, as Nureki says, âThe more restrictions the better.â (Reference appendix image C).
This theoretical fractal structure is reinforced with a series of playful associative video transitions that imply a much broader presence of explicit and implicit domination in a global setting. Inclusions of Depeche Modeâs 1984 single Master and Servant (one of many â70s and â80s punk and pop singles that populate Lovely Andreaâs soundtrack) leads to a chorus with corresponding title cards that exclaim, Letâs play master and servant; itâs a lot like life! This simple libidinal request becomes a central theme that is rearticulated throughout the film. In conversation, Asagi asks Ropemaster Osada to clarify a point about S/M, âYou mean in a normal society, everything is bondage?â Osada responds by describing the web that he imagines connecting and binding everyone in âsocietyâ before the audience returns to transitions between footage from the 1960s animated Spiderman and the 2002 live-action Spiderman with scenes which depict broad webs stretching between buildings and collecting various vehicles and people. With repeated insertions of pop media as soundtrack and transition, there is an implication that pop media of this sort may also be a function of domination in a global setting.
There are multiple threads that emerge at this point in the theoretical structure that Steyerl develops. With the inclusion of imagery from the 2002 Spiderman (reference appendix image E), she briefly sketches out a connection across forms of censorship, jumping between the censorship of bondage imagery in 1987 Japan and the censorship of Spiderman promotional images in 2001 that depicted a web capturing a helicopter between the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Between these images, is it just the visible knotting and harnessing that becomes illicit here? That visible knotting might remind the public of the quotidian power dynamics in which they play a part? With tongue planted firmly in cheek, it becomes unclear if censorship is caused by the visible inclusion of the web in both of these images, or, more likely, a distinctly moralist protection from pornography and a separate statist repression of imagery that reminds a public of a global political landscape.
When Steyerl and Asagi ultimately locate the images of Steyerl in the Fuzoku Shiryokan Sex Archive and are able to arrange a meeting with the photographer, Tanaka Kinichi, a description of the industry in the â80s complicates the research up that point. Tanaka notes the number of women that were lied to about the kind of shoot that would be happening and how in some cases, they wound up being paid in freedom rather than in the agreed upon sum of money. In this moment in which roleplay and real power blurs, a collapse occurs in the theoretical space that has been developed when a variety of scenes depicting Abu Ghraib bound victims, Guantanamo Bay prisoners, Terror Advisory Charts, and Spiderman are inserted into a monitor in the scene (reference appendix images A, F, G). At this point, Asagi clarifies to an interview subject that the name in âLovely Andreaâ that Steyerl used in 1987 was borrowed from her friend Andrea Wolf, who would later join the Kurdistan Workersâ Party (PKK) and, labeled a terrorist, be murdered by the Turkish State. (Reference appendix image D).
In adopting Andreaâs name, the photoset in the 1987 issue of S/M Sniper travels and disseminates in a manner not so different from the way Andrea Wolfâs actual image was reproduced and consecrated by fellow PKK insurgents after her death. Some differences: the 1987 image of âAndreaâ shows a bound, stripped woman, wrists tied together, bent over, with large, male hands directing her posture, printed in glossy color on cheap paper, bound between covers, while the image of Andrea in Turkey after her death features a soft, kind face looking away from the cameraâs gaze contentedly, and is printed in cheap black and white and is surrounded by a green laurel. The ambiguous relationship between these two image-based âAndreasâ raises a question: What exactly is the relationship between the images of the martyr Andrea and the images of the sex object âAndrea?â Thinking through the lives of images, do they coexist primarily through their distinction from the real lives of the two subjects that are imaged? Where the life of the martyr Andrea becomes completely isolated from her experience as an insurgent, and similarly for âAndrea,â the âsex slaveâ? Alternatively, does 1987 âAndreaâ function more purely as an icon for life in a neoliberal global landscape derived from the effects of colonialism? Perhaps the term âroleplayâ becomes key for thinking through the power dynamics inherent in that global landscape.
In one of the final scenes, Asagi explains that she no longer performs as a typical bondage model, but rather as a âself-suspension performerâ (reference appendix image H). This shift in terminology places Osada Steve in the assistant role as she binds her body and suspends herself through the use of a rope and pulley system. The distinction does not eliminate the role of being bound nor does it eliminate the imagery of bound bodies, but rather locates agency within that role. A montage of her performance plays as title cards alternate --- âWORK IS BONDAGEâ/âBONDAGE IS WORKâ --- and music plays as found footage of women working in a restaurant cuts in and out.
Strangely, it is in moments of such explicit attribution of meaning that make the inclusion of topics with ambiguous or multiple dimensions of relevance so generative in Lovely Andrea. With the ideological origins of the PKK in Marxism-Leninism, a reading of this associative collage through the filter of labor gestures towards Imperialist-Capitalist extraction of capital as ubiquitous bondage, a metaphor that becomes concretized when applied to the police tactics that strip bare the pop-culture surface of such systems.
But in returning to the repeated question pointed at Steyerl, âWhat is your film about?â, one final moment illuminates Steyerlâs sensibility of a feminist read. Noticing her image on the monitor, Steyerl exclaims, âI should get some Botox, I think.â Immediately, she is asked, âBut you consider yourself a feminist?â, to which she responds, âYes, definitely.â In this brief exchange, Steyerl foregrounds her own libidinal objectives and autonomy over self. In a familiar feminist read, the existence of cosmetic surgery as iconic symptom of feminine bondage to feminine body idealization is a problem, but her exclamation reads as sympathetic towards bondage and clarifies the ways in which that desire is not mutually exclusive with feminism. An adjacent text of Steyerlâs illuminates this thinking beyond the broad understanding of her and Asagiâs own autonomies, âThe feminist movement, until quite recently (and for a number of reasons), worked toward claiming autonomy and full subjecthood. But as the struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a different possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among other things?â The implications of such a claim towards an objecthood without subjecthood interfaces with Asagiâs notion of self-suspension neatly, but this also remains fairly theoretical in the way that her interest in Botox is not.
Katherine Behar addresses a similar question in her collection of texts, Object-Oriented Feminism, as she navigates the issue of the body-self-object in service of navigating a sound non-anthropocentric philosophy. In this work, implicating the self as object is sought in order to escape the anthropocentrist approach, which she describes as a liability in a variety of arenas, â[from] the ecological to the epistemological to the ethical.â Identifying the problem of animism in some supposedly non-anthropocentric philosophies as vivophilia, she advocates for necrophilia,
âIt is a question of perspective. Vivophilia says that most things in the world are, in some significant way, as alive as I am. Necrophilia says that I am, in some significant way, as dead as are most things in the world.â
Behar identifies this (very specific) notion of necrophilia as the generative central tenet of the feminist body-art that has developed since the 1960s. âDenouncing the fetishization of lively integrity in body objects, body art foregrounds the self not only as a deadly object to be killed off but also as the scene of the crime.â In this dialogue, Behar claims administration of Botox as an ideal method for achieving that objective on a more quotidian timeline, through the use of the same toxin found in botulism, OnabotulinumtoxinA, via direct injection.
Within this space, there is better ground for understanding how the more overt elements of this film (the unethical practices of the Japanese black market porn industry in the â80s vs. Asagiâs agency in self-suspension) fit with the more opaque elements (the relationship between Andrea and âAndreaâ as images, the role of censorship, the question of global power, how to reckon Botox ethics). The repetition of the line âWhat is your movie about?â remains useful because it gestures towards the simultaneity of mutual dependence that these threads rely upon for support.
In architecture, a âreciprocal frameâ is a class of self-supporting structure made of three or more beams which requires no center support to support roofs, bridges or similar structures (reference appendix image I). This model of the reciprocal frame provides a useful illustration for the way in which Steyerlâs threads seem to support each other: leaning on each other in a sort of pinwheel formation, without need for a central column to support the resulting structure. In that model as illustration, Steyerl and her relationship with Andrea becomes the absent center support; instead, the audience encounters Asagi as surrogate for a younger Steyerl, the images of Steyerl that circulated throughout Japan, the images of the real Andrea that circulated throughout Turkey, the censorship that occurs under any state government, the real tactics of domination that state governments impose on their citizens and on other countries, and the roleplay of sexualized objects. If an audience pulls out the threads of Steyerlâs criticality, bondage functions as a useful distillation of much broader power dynamics. Despite this analysis of âbondage as theatreâ/âbondage as businessâ/âwork as bondageâ, the brief reference to/absence of Andrea Wolfâs relationship to Steyerl and her images reveals that this work is founded in sentiment and a self-reflexive gaze in spite of such an ostensibly goal-oriented, critically-minded approach.
