GIRLS OWN THE VOID
Around the mid ‘10s, the “hot girl” vein of post-internet art was trending enough to be a theme at @artbasel 2015. Rachel White wrote a @vice article about it -- “Hailed as the ‘Feminist Basel’, the annual art fair in Miami Beach was rife with strippers and nude selfies.” (Full article at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4xkzyj/hot-girl-art-turns-heads-at-art-basel-miami .) It concluded with, “Hot Girl Art at Miami Basel, and elsewhere, doesn't feel like defiance. Though, in an environment when ‘feminist’ has become so much of a buzzword to almost be rendered meaningless, maybe Hot Girl Art just reflects our cultural reality back at us.” I remember when the trend died out. Presumably because it was met with a lot of criticism along the lines of ‘how is showing us the same bodies that meet the beauty ideal, and dominate mass media, in any way institutionally critical?’ I was in dialogue with some of the artists making “hot girl art” back during the mid ‘10’s, (shoutout the @motherboardvice journalist who tried to interview me on this + cyberfeminism and then never followed up, lol). A lot of these artists wrote about how their art, typically involving their own bodies, was a kind of reclamation of the gaze—in a world where they were constantly objectified, to self-objectify felt like committing a kind of pre-emptive political Harakiri.
Leftist cultural values are somewhat in line with this kind of third wave rhetoric, but what is missing, and why, I think, this trend fell short, is objectification culture is innately intertwined with the desire to comply with the beauty ideal of our era. This however, does not mean that this kind of self-objectifying work is not valid, but rather that it reaches the apex of it’s ameliorative potential when 1) paired simultaneously with the active work of clearing our perceptual lens of the imprint of colonialist beauty and 2) while acknowledging the psychological trauma inherent in that state, that void, existing deep in the subconscious, that causes women to feel bludgeoned into acquiescence (see above, meme art work by #sadgirltheory artist #audreywollen) and also, the addictive nature of the objectification energy for giver + receiver (a vitalistic feeding frenzy! esoteric cannabalism!) These three things are key for the unabashed wielding of "hotness" as a part of emancipatory politics—without them, we’re showing one side of the story (the power of this kind of art and feminist theory lies in the combination of these aspects, presented in tandem with each other). Armed with them, the trend of work that reclaims female beauty from a patriarchal world that has taught us it cannot exist without being owned by their lens of violence and subjugation, is powerful. It exists as a medicine for a culture still living in a Christian puritanical hangover that both violently covets and demonizes beauty because of it’s potential power, and draws awareness to the notion of beauty as some kind of consolation prize for the absence of male intelligence. Resurrecting beauty from this ontological dimension is not only valid, but necessary, revolutionary, and critical to collective emancipation.
Image: 1. 'Controlled Response', single-channel video and found object installation, color, 00:28, 2016 2. Audrey Wollen
