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‘Public services are privatised and private life is public. Once, only the professional Hot Babe adorned all major media outlets; now social media makes of everyone a Hot Babe, should they be willing. What is private, secret, is not the detail of the life but the disappearance at its core.’ This is a paragraph from British artist and writer Hannah Black’s essay ‘Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Hot Babe’ published in New Inquiry, July 2013. It is not so much a straight critique of ‘Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl’ – by French philosopher collective Tiqqun from 1999 and which was translated into English by Ariana Reines in 2012 – as a fierce reconstitution of that text from the perspective of its icon. Black adopts the breezy, self-assured style of the original but makes significant and revealing alterations. She substitutes the original’s innocuous term Young-Girl for the more graphic and openly reductive Hot Babe. She updates the context of Young-Girl’s appearance in general media outlets to Hot Babe’s omnipotence in online social media, as Tiqqun’s original theory was penned pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram, pre-Snapchat, pre-Facebook, pre-iPhone, camera phone or tablet – pre all the means by which Hot Babe overpowers Young-Girl and proliferates. Images of her are taken and traded as a condition of participation in online social life, and that ‘open’ distribution is mediated and capitalised by global tech corporations.

And, perhaps most significantly, Black corrects the central paradox that ‘Young-Girl’ was a political ontology that could, according to its (male, white, middle-class) writers, be applied to any gender, race or class. Young-Girl, Tiqqun claimed, was a condition historically rather than biologically defined, a pacifying construct created as the newest embodiment of ‘biopower’: ‘“She” prizes “sincerity”, “good-heartedness”, “kindness”, “simplicity”, “frankness”, “modesty”, and in general all of the virtues that are synonymous with servitude … [she] lives in the illusion that liberty is found at the end of total submission to commodity.’ Black corrects this: ‘The Hot Babe is a gendered concept. She is a radical (non-)subjectivity, thrown out of the wage relation only to reappear at the market’s core. Those who look at her and see only a machine are the machine of her becoming.’ What Black sees is Hot Babe’s dark core, the cancer cell of her infinite image dividing and multiplying at pace, and the mechanisms allowing the disappearance of the female subject within her, in plain view.

ISOBEL HARBISON RECONSIDERS THE ISSUE OF OBJECTIFICATION IN THE ERA OF SOCIAL MEDIA Does the work of artists like Hannah Black, Cheryl Donegan, Frances Stark and Yvonne Rainer answer the question posed by Nancy Spector 20 years ago as to whether sex appeal can ever be considered a sign of female agency?

Hot Frances Stark My Best Thing 2011 video

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Writing about Cheryl Donegan’s work in Frieze in January 1995, Nancy Spector noted a general and unspoken aversion by artists to making or handling still or moving images of the female body ‘ever since gender attributes were assigned to the spectator’s gaze – the “look” being male and its object of vision, female’. She asked, ‘Can objectification ever truly be avoided in representation? Can sheer sex appeal ever be considered a sign of female agency?’ Skip forward almost 20 years and the context has ostensibly changed, but why, when image- maker or subject, object and spectator are no longer distinct, structured or guarded positions (in our lives online we frequently play out two or more of these roles at any one time), have

gendered roles of photographic or cinematic capture not also dissolved? Why are Spector’s questions still pertinent? When technocapitalism – within its global platforms like Google, Facebook and Instagram which trade on online information exchanges – is the largest growing global industry, fuelled by the scopic pleasures and appetites of the spectator (marked or objectified by the condition of the Hot Babe), what measures, strategies or choreographies can artists use to release the female or feminised body from its image-incarceration?

‘It is hard to think of another artist so nakedly present in his or her work’, Mark Godfrey writes about Frances Stark in a catalogue essay on My Best Thing, 2011, an animation where two Lego-like figures appear on either side of the frame dressed in their underpants. ‘It can seem staggering’, Godfrey continues, dismayed, ‘that [Stark] is so willing to disclose intimate details.’ But this observation is somewhat misleading. Stark’s script, voiced by an automaton over a ten-episode narrative, is based on transcriptions from the artist’s own encounters in her studio, her home and when meeting men online, and reveals the urges, frustrations and anxieties of her female character as she gets passed over by successive online partners. The parameters between artist biography and invented avatar, though, remain purposefully ambiguous.

The first episode, for example, begins with a staggered conversation. Lapses in dialogue imply that the two figures are otherwise engaged. A virtual sex act is taking place outside the picture. The protagonist announces to her male counterpart that she is going through a dancehall phase, fascinated by a dance move originating in the West Indies where aggressive sex between two partners is simulated on stage. A video of Beenie Man daggering is composited on the animation. This moving image of daggering is in strong juxtaposition to what Stark animates on screen: a Playmobil woman twists her rotund yellow barrel with brio. This is just one of the examples in this work where the image we are presented with supplants and obfuscates the physical or sexual activity intimated in the script. While the reality of the narrator’s experience is not exactly undermined, the image of the artist is so carefully reconstructed as to be, in a

sense, removed. This removal creates some doubt over the authenticity of the autobiographic aspect for us as spectators. So, while in one sense there is an outward display of intimacy via Stark’s confessional style of scripting and the exposure of her sexual propensities online, the artist is not as ‘nakedly present’ as Godfrey suggests.

In this work the artist is very controlled about the level of detail she is willing to disclose. We are never sure how much of what Stark is depicting is true, how sincere is her coquettishness. She has long mastered the art of writing a subject into being, depicting what Jenifer Papararo has described as her ‘multifaceted reverberating subject’ in a variety of media, whether that be in drawing or collage (Why should you not be able to assemble yourself and write, 2008), essay (‘The Architect and the Housewife’, 1999) or other cross-genre works (Unspeakable Compromise, 1998-2002). In My Best Thing, Stark brings to the work her own experience of writing her subject into online chat forums but substitutes her own sex-cam image for that of an absurd yellow figurine. Lego woman sometimes does sexy dances for Lego man, except of course it is not the kind of sexy we are anticipating from all this talk of

Yvonne Rainer The Man Who Envied Women 1985 film

Cheryl Donegan Head 1993 video opposite Helena Almeida Inhabited painting 1975

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daggering. Stark, as tentative female protagonist, is both in and out of the frame. She is subject and object and, as object, she is also its simultaneous evacuation. This is Stark’s real dance, not the clumsy gyrating of barrel-like Lego woman. In the partial opacity that Stark’s innovative animation provides, ‘sex appeal and female agency’ come rivetingly close.

So what is this tenacious two-step, this Janus-face dance move where artist and director thrusts forward while simultaneously removing herself from the frame? What is the purpose, politics and history of this phrasing, this freeing of oneself from photographic capture while not entirely escaping the body – her body – of its object? Yvonne Rainer (Interview AM379) looked with caution upon the curious relationship between the camera lens and the female body. This starts early on, in the ‘Duet’ section of the evening-length performance Terrain, 1963, danced by Rainer and Trisha Brown, both dressed in leggings and black bra, Rainer dancing a ballet adagio combination with Brown next to her performing a seductive burlesque number. In her quite brilliant analysis of the photography of Rainer’s work, Carrie Lambert notes in her Summer 1999 October essay ‘Moving Still’ that, ‘lest the audience miss the point that classical and peep hole dance are equally structured on the viewer’s visual pleasure, Rainer and Brown together ran through a series of still stances. Like pin-up girls flirting with the camera, the two avant-garde dancers preened and posed’. Lambert continued: ‘What Rainer would later denounce as the “narcissism, and disguised sexual exhibitionism of most dancing” was expressed in Duet by pin-up posing; that is, by literally “registering like a photograph.”’ From this work on, Rainer choreographed performances that systematically denied dance photography the ‘focal moments’ that traditional dance bestowed, levelling out the modulation and emphases, climaxes and stillness of traditional phrasing, replacing them with evenly paced, systematic and task-like movements.

One year later, between choreographing a 43-minute dance called Sextets and appearing oiled-up beside Robert Morris in his performance piece Waterman Switch at the Allbright Knox Museum in Buffalo – documentation of which appeared in LIFE magazine and became infamous as the ‘nude dancing pictures’ – Rainer wrote an essay which became known as her ‘No Manifesto’. Among other renunciations (including ‘no’ to spectacle, virtuosity and ‘the glamour and transcendence of the star image’), Rainer proposed ‘no trash images’. Exactly what did she

see in this particular phrase? Was she objecting to the ‘nude’ images taken of her body to publicise Morris’s performance, or the media industry that subsequently seized upon them and cheapened, in fact ignored, her own work? And did it foster in Rainer a general sense of uneasiness about the kind of posturing expected of women before the camera, a decade in advance of Laura Mulvey’s observations of narrative cinema’s gendered mechanisms of ‘visual pleasure’?

Rainer’s 16mm film The Man Who Envied Women, 1985, advances Mulvey’s concept that the male gaze is a productive mechanism inscribed in all aspects of cinematic production by erasing the female object of that gaze from shot. Rainer’s protagonist, Trisha, is at the centre of the piece; the narrative is based on a week of Trisha’s life during the break-up of her marriage to college professor Jack. Trisha, however, never appears before camera during this two-hour film, her non- appearance disturbing the normative relationship between spectator and (female) object. Trisha’s presence is evoked instead by her voice, providing a commentary to some of the diverse imagery Rainer puts before us, particularly footage of Jack pontificating. Here, cutting off his ‘a man is nothing without a woman’ speech, Trisha breaks from passive spectator within her own life to removed object and active spectator within the filmic space. Peggy Phelan, in her 1993 book Unmarked, comments, ‘In displacing Trisha from the visual field, Rainer forces the spectator to concentrate on the way the filmic frame both fills and limits the space of the film. She is attempting to elucidate how the given to be seen

Why, when image-maker or

subject, object and spectator

are no longer distinct,

structured or guarded

positions (in our lives online

we frequently play out two or

more of these roles at any one

time), have gendered roles

of photographic or cinematic

capture not also dissolved?

Lynn Hershman Leeson Roberta in an Adventure Riding Elevator 1978 photograph

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requires a strict prohibition on what and who remains unseen’. Rainer’s piece suggests that to be unseen but unequivocally present is something of a privilege, certainly more so than its opposite: seen but absent – like Hot Babe and other trash images.

While aesthetically Rainer and Stark’s moving-image works might seem worlds apart, their approaches as to skewing the depiction of their female protagonists align. In addition, their use of imaging technologies to distance the spectator from the object or material in which he or she might find themselves immersed is strategically very similar, too. Rainer uses video transfers to create frames within frames, imposing Super 8 onto the smoother surface of the 16mm film and excerpts from Hollywood movies to represent Jack’s inner world – Max Ophuls’s Caught from 1945, for instance. Phelan observes of this technique that ‘Rainer disallows the pleasurable illusion of a visually polished art piece and forces in its stead a reconfiguration of the traditional architecture of the frame.’ This might equally describe the texture of the free online software, Xtranormal, that Stark used to animate My Best Thing and the sequence of video compositing (including an excerpt of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2�) that begin to reflect moments of her own protagonist’s inner world of self-doubt. In ‘Some Ruminations’ from 1986, Rainer describes her attempt to break down the cinematic frame (although she might just as easily be describing the work of Stark) as being a ‘disruption of the glossy, unified surface of professional cinematography by means of optically degenerated shots within an otherwise seamlessly edited narrative sequence … I’m talking about films where in every scene you have to decide anew the priorities of looking and listening’. And this method of superimposition or montage, this ‘cut-up’, is echoed in the dramatisation of both artists’ characters. Rainer frequently quoted texts to inform soundtracks or scores (Jack’s script quotes much from Raymond Chandler). The previous year Rainer commented in More Kicking that, by making her characters quote, she is able to ‘foreground not only the production of narrative but its frustration and cancellation as well. Words are uttered but not possessed by performers as they operate within the filmic frame.’ While Stark’s female protagonist quite frequently quotes or paraphrases writers, philosophers or filmmakers in which ‘she’ is interested, it is her use of animated avatars that links her more closely to Rainer’s strategy of producing, frustrating and cancelling narrative – destroying any notion of the singular identity of its speaker.

There is a certain kind of choreography at play in Rainer’s work with – and against – trash images. It is not the kind of choreography that we might typically associate with the artist. It is a choreography where the camera represents one body in space and the female body the other. As director, Rainer sets out to test the limits of this relation: working on the parameters of its pictorial frame, manipulating its technological capacities and textures, and recalibrating normative narrative devices in order to pull-focus on the woman as a ‘multifaceted reverberating subject’. Rainer was not alone in performing this move. Many artists made themselves up in order to vanish before the camera. Helena Almeida stood before the camera and took a shot before painting herself out of the frame in Pintura Habitada, 1975-76, for instance, presenting a similarly refractory tête-à-tête to Rainer and Stark. Elsewhere, by using make-up, spoken word, elaborate costumes and familiar posturing, artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson (for example in the Roberta Brietmore performance phase, 1973-79), Cindy Sherman in her film stills and Julia Heyward in her outlandish vocal performances all adopted the familiar glitz and posturing of Glamorous Women – the 1970s prototype for this generation’s Hot Babe? – onto, into or upon their own bodies as a kind of camouflage through which they were able to perform the cinematic object, and let her overpower and therefore disguise their own bodies, their own subjecthood. They almost managed to disappear in plain sight.

New York-based Cheryl Donegan has been painting and making video since the 1990s, first recognised with the video Head, 1993, where the artist records herself ‘giving head’ to a lurid green milk carton sitting on a table. Repeatedly slurping its contents from a hole stabbed in the vessel, this white fluid spills over Donegan’s face and body before she finally takes a mouthful and splashes it against a paper sheet hanging behind (part DIY-porn, part Ab Ex lampoon). Here the artist has substituted her partner’s image rather than her own from the camera’s view, but, after the amusement fades, the effect is equally disturbing. This work implicates viewers in the same way Stark’s My Best Thing and Rainer’s Man Who, leaving our scopic desires unfulfilled and therefore removed from the object, alone and alert to our yearning of the trashy image we want that she is denying us. As spectators, we have been set up by the artist as subject. In 1994, Donegan commented, ‘At the centre of my investigation is a desire to reveal and a need to subterfuge; a will to expose and a wish to masquerade.’

In their works, Rainer, Donegan and Stark are exerting their own female agency by performing a particular kind of movement between female body and camera. It is a sophisticated way of working an image to solicit and return the spectator’s gaze. And while there was always a strong poignancy and feminist politics to the work when they produced it, there is even greater need for these tenacious two- steps now. In the new political economy of digital images, everyone is producing, seeking out various forms of visibility, proximity and access through the image, but, despite our new instinct for productivity, images of bodies proliferate, remain empty and unseen, the subjects within them invisible, distant and remote. Everyone is Hot Babe now. The trash images that so riled Rainer have proliferated, propagated and saturated a new human condition. And while Tiqqun argued that this condition is historically defined and without gender, it still frequently adopts and relays the contours of the female form. Exploring how human desire, sex appeal and scopic pleasure are not supplemental but fundamental to the image, and uncoupling those urges from normative depictions of sex or gender in a variety of different ways, is key to a better understanding of just how and why we continue to labour away as spectators in an industry growing around us, built upon us, freely and for free. Everyone is Hot Babe now, but only if you are willing. z

ISOBEL HARBISON is a critic, curator and part-time tutor based in London.

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