Body and visual representation

Dear María,

I like letters because they allow us to say things at another pace. I feel that they foster greater concentration and nuances than those live and rushed chats where (for me at least) the restricted time and the instantaneity favours common places, those of us who are shy to hide, the most epidermal transit. In this correspondence upon which we are embarking, we are being invited to discuss ‘body and visual representation’, a link that is present not only in our work, but that might also be a corollary for our ‘bodiless’ relationship, normally mediated by screens.

that screen accustoms us to a world of ‘fleshless’

Although it may appear to be the case, when you really think about it, it is not so strange that, knowing each other as we have done from almost two decades, we have only seldom coincided ‘in the flesh’. Recently, in this part of the world, people rarely look each at other directly in the face: there is almost always a screen between us. And that screen accustoms us to a world of images, as Debray might put it, leaving behind that memory of when, with others, we also had to deal with the feel, smell and materiality of the world. In my case, I don’t miss it, due to the progressive decline and vulnerability of my body and my sickly eyes. Increasingly, I like to leave it in peace at home whilst I inhabit the ‘net. The screen is, there, a bionic eye that artificializes and gives contrast to a world that is, to me, gloomy and foggy.

La pusilánime (debajo, adentro) on Remedios Zafra, #Despacio, Caballo de Troya, Barcelona, 2012.

Inhabit? It’s a word you used in one of our first messages (back at the start of the century and the millennium) to refer to how we sensed our relationship might be described from then on. It was 2001 and you said to me something like lately, everyone’s inhabiting a dot com. This ‘inhabiting’ you alluded to was both a description and a prognosis for us, who remain on the ‘net with that sense of estrangement of those who (as artists or as thinkers, if indeed we can distinguish between such descriptions in our case) seek in images that quality which, for Barthes[2] made them subversive, not when they ‘frighten’, ‘upset’ or ‘stigmatise’, but when they make us thoughtful.

As feminists, the postponement of the body and its mediation via screens has been an issue that we have been dealing with since the ‘90s[3], giving rise to more than a few discourses on the potential, risks and possibilities of emancipation in the connected world. It is important because, traditionally, women have been preceded by a body image about which to opine and take sides pursuant to much more oppressive and often reductive canons and models. The traditional forms of power and their narratives have also kept us subordinated by controlling our bodies or restricting us to the body and to caring for bodies, such that, a priori, accepting its non-face-to-face or experiential basis wouldn’t be a problem for me.

What’s more, we now spend a lot of our time in a projected world of technological representation and mediations, such that to talk of bodies and visual representation is, in a way, to talk of our everyday life. The ‘framework of the imagination’ is no longer limited to artistic practice, nor even to clearly defined places or times. Today, the world and others almost always come to us interfaced by technology.

to what extent do the visual depictions we produce in this time allow us to repeat or imagine old and new identities stemming from and dealing with bodies?

And the questions always come with us. Because, to what extent do the visual depictions we produce in this time allow us to repeat or imagine old and new identities stemming from and dealing with bodies? What is political art capable of in those areas in which artists no longer have the prerogative of the image? In a world with a visual surfeit, there seems to have been an explosion in representations of the body, turning the subject into an exhibited product: nevertheless, where is the negativity and the narrative, the interior world, in a medium that prizes the cumulative and aestheticized, a ‘deinternalising’ of shallow and surface, which appears to obstruct the depth of the well in which social meanings take root and are transformed?

I get the feeling that the marvellous and terrifying artefact that is the Internet gives rise to a wide range of readings when dealing with representation and the body. In the first place, it has fostered the making public and sharing of the private world, even or especially when the private world has hid subjection and fear. It has also favoured the creating and sharing of links between peers, engaging with and knowing each other in different ways… but its edges are not smooth. Some are sharp, rough and liquid, they cut, they make us go unnoticed and they repeat us, whilst others help us build and imagine other ways of showing ourselves and being more emancipatory. For someone who, like me, speaks from a political standpoint, the issue would be to identify where and how these forms can help us to live more freely or, to a different degree, become symbolic oppressors.

Teclas, dedos, Laura Bey, 2019.

images of ourselves both sustain and hurt us , just as our hands hurt and protect us when we put them out to break our fall.

Let me begin with myself. With the break that writing can afford me, I stop to observe my body, peeling myself away for a second or two from the machine and noticing constructed patinas, hair, face, bodily adornments, clothes, perforations, makeup, lower down wounds, a spirit that is material, fingers that press, almost caress, the keys. A body that speaks or writes is always robed in a culture and a time. Cosmetics and clothing also form part of the body and help us to construct what, in theory, we have chosen to be, to the point where, as Barthes suggested in quoting Sartre, what we choose represents ‘what the others have chosen’ in our place. And it is here that an issue key to individual and collective representation comes into play: that images of ourselves both sustain and hurt us[6], just as our hands hurt and protect us when we put them out to break our fall.

Nevertheless, recently, it seems to me that the issue has been affected by a kind of anthropological discontinuity with regard to our own bodies and their images. I’m referring to how, far from protecting the subject’s privacy, what we nowadays seek in images is to ‘be seen’, ‘be seen to be seen’, how representation has given way to presence and exhibition on the ‘net or even, I would say, hyper-representation. The Internet is helping reinforce an imaginary of the subject repeatedly self-presented, exhibited and commercialised. That utopic deconstruction of stereotypes we called for back in the ‘90s, when the ‘net was just some kind of empty wasteland, and the works on pointed to the liberating power of the interface for creating the widest diversity of representations, less limited to what the body shows, is now but a distant memory. You and I both know that the world decided to take a completely different route.

Every image has a conflict in what it shows or, more frequently, in what it hides

However, I’m also struck by an issue that has interested both of us since we chose art and thought as our fields of work: I’m referring to what links representation with precariousness, not only in the proliferation of unmanageable and outmoded visual manifestations and ‘poor images’as Steyerl would put it, but also in the vital materialisation of forms of shelf life, speed and excess, which at some point turned ‘life into work’ and ‘the world into a screen’, i.e. reality into ‘a framed world’. To inhabit it is nowadays incentivised under the twin logics of quantification and simplification that surround online life. Logics marked by a visually surplus and falsely positive culture, one that encourages us to dispense with conflict and with empty times/spaces capable of restoring depth and narrative to representations.

Woman smiling with whool hat, iStock

Every image has a conflict in what it shows or, more frequently, in what it hides: even a stock photo like the one above, featuring a beautiful smiling woman posing. A photo much like many others that are chosen by Google’s search algorithms if you enter the word ‘woman’ hereabouts, or those included by default in those photo frames you can buy in shops. I know people who buy these frames[8] and keep the photos in them, seeing in them, symbolically, some family member with a certain formal resemblance with the woman in the frame, however small (skin tone or hair colour). For a long time, I have been one of them on my mother’s bedside table, as have my cousins, and we have also stood on the drinks cabinet of my great aunt, who, given the absence of any real printed photos, said she saw us in those nameless images, which she used as a versatile mould so as to be able to mentally place her relations.

I’m not at all surprised by this symbolic recourse that accompanies the apparent neutrality of images we regard as stereotypical, and which achieve a mild and gentle reaction, a peaceful reception of an identity compared with the singularity they represent. This posed photo, devoid apparently of either conflict or narrative, can be appropriated by anyone who lacks an image. It serves and replaces, it is a stereotype, it is the response to something that performatively repeats and sets a standard. It is an image of a culturally beautiful face and body that, in theory anyway, ‘does not disturb’. I say ‘in theory’ because, with so much seeking to represent, it does in fact disturb those who, in a culture so extremely aestheticized as our own, feel identified by their rejection of such images, precisely because they do not see themselves as so beautiful, so stable, so happy, so smooth and slim, so perfect. At least not until we have ceased depicting imperfect reality to project idealised images in the images we save and share.

There is no doubt that this is something new, such a richly and profusely visual universe as that of today, in which beings appear to define themselves as ‘seen beings’[9]. Never before had we humans been surrounded by so many images of both ourselves and others. On our technological devices and on social media networks, the bodies and faces habitually depicted seek, in the addictive edited self-portrait, to be beautiful images of beautiful lives: images of bodes that please and relax, that do not disturb, and which collect ‘likes’. I wonder whether, as Byung-Chul Han[10] warns us, In other words, because they are easily made docile, neutralise their poetry and cease depicting reality to project it. ‘We flee towards images to be better, more beautiful’, argues Han.

I don’t know how you see it, but I believe that the image of the body is a form of control and of displaying oneself, a form of self-control and neutralisation. The commercial drift favours it bio-politically and capitalises on the inertia of this context, this trend, this technology. The non-conformity of the bodies and their representations is an unfailing driving force. The (edited) exhibition prevails over its representation.

Photo from” Museum of Internet”, Facebook page

@findbergfrejas, en Arvida Bystrom & Molly Soda, Pics or it Didn’t Happen. Prestel, London, 2016.

It’s true that what I’m sharing with you is both a subjective attempt at description and a positioned critique. It’s enough to warn you that these images seeking to represent us or with which we seek to represent ourselves do not only affect us on an individual level. Insofar as they symbolically reiterate forms that turn us into equals, they allow us to define and create an identitary community, to bolster and solidify value systems, nowadays always quantified and objectified to facilitate their ranking and ordering. In my book Ojos y Capital[11] (Eyes and Capital), I reflect on how, in an online world that appears ever more complex and diverse, the forces mobilising representation as exhibition help strengthen more conservative models when supported by excess and speed as precarious categories. Amongst other things, because they commit the subject to his or her self-presentation and, making the pressure to project oneself invisible, normalise it as something falsely chosen.

Although I do believe that these pressures speak of trends, they don’t, I think, rule out either resistance or diversity. Because, nowadays, the online space also makes circular what is not canonical and what is regarded as culturally abject, even though this is in many cases beginning to be censored (like the images featured below). This would be the case of the many selfies of bodies or bits of bodies that have been rejected by the aesthetic and moral filters that nowadays set the standard for visibility on the ‘net.

The statement implicit in the displaying of the censored body is a clearly political one, but that does not mean that it is not also being commercialised

Irrespective of how they are frequently positioned as artistic offerings, they do feature, particularly, political and critical viewpoints that are also tired of a representational hegemony that had ignored any form of reality regarded as unaesthetic, vulnerable, imperfect, uncomfortable or hidden. A territory in which feminists and queers have played a clear leading role, denouncing the control over the depiction and meaning of their bodies, particularly when presented without the habitual veneers of intervention or filter. Examples include nudes with body hair, unposed, with their fluids and scars or with their disturbing symbolic wounds given material form in flesh and image.

The fact that their revealing of their breasts and nipples, their menstrual blood or simply how they breastfeed is being seen as a triumph lays bare the moral control and prejudice providing the foundations for representation in the online spaces we inhabit as if they were public ones. The way they are censored reminds us that

@petracollins, en Arvida Bystrom & Molly Soda, Pics or it Didn’t Happen. Prestel, London, 2016.

Arvida Byström (Photo: Instagram).

I remember an apparently innocent yet censored photo by the artist Petra Collins, who said of it: ‘I did nothing that violated the terms of use. No nudity, violence, pornography, unlawful, hateful, or infringing imagery. What I did have was an image of MY body that didn’t meet society’s standard of “femininity”’[12].

The statement implicit in the displaying of the censored body is a clearly political one, but that does not mean that it is not also being commercialised. Where the image is everything but where standardisation prevails, being different gives added value, and, on the Internet, work being censored can help to ‘get more hits’. On my online wanderings, I found a headline stating: ‘Arvida Byström: the artist who challenges censorship on Instagram and to which all brands want to sign’. The issue seems contradictory but that doesn’t mean that it is not interesting, because it’s complex, and if we talk about freedom, it is just as important to combat the censorship of ‘can’t’ as it is to confront new pressures to instrumentalise the body as entertainment or business (‘you have to display yourself’).

We know that feminism and queer activism have spearheaded all kinds of campaigns in support of freedom and to denounce prohibition, censorship or the belittling of the depiction of bodies when it is the subjects themselves who wish to represent them and when said gesture also involves a complaint or critique concerning the hegemonic forms of subordination and control that harm us. These pressures mean that networks such as Facebook removed some restrictions on women’s breasts (on some breasts), when they breastfed or when they had mastectomy scars, or when these images were works of art that depicted nude figures or just a woman’s vulva.

Gustave Courbet, El origen del mundo, 1866.

It spurs and motivates. I’m referring to the need to identify the powers that cast light or shadow on bodies/images and their meanings. I think of this and wish to establish a relationship between this online scenario and the precedent of recent decades, when a sizeable number of feminist artists turned their own bodies into the object and instrument of their representations.

Ana Mendieta, MeFail hair transplant, 1972

Ana Mendieta, Glass on Body, 1972.

I know you know a great deal about the matter and have thought long and hard about the work of artists such as Mendieta. And I think I see analogies and discontinuities. The clearest is how, now, the circulation of images is no longer restricted to the world of art: instead, they are disseminated across everyday online spaces. It is true that these distribution channels permit the infiltration of otherness into the space we ‘inhabit’ and, perhaps, a greater degree of democratisation of its cause, but I am concerned by the lack of narrative and conflict arising from current forms of political and aesthetic reception, that is, of the policies of looking.

Because what is not so clear to me is to what point there is symbolic efficacy in the predominant form of mobilisation on social media networks, with a preference for making an impression rather than providing insight, for the novelty of the dress over the policy of the flesh, the commercial value that minimises or hides the critical value. In other words, how far the logic of speed, excess and a short shelf life neutralises the digital medium as something, as Han puts it, ‘deinternalising’. The digital industries bring this appropriation into the realm of everyday life, but they do not problematise it, because that would create tension and negativity, the need for a narrative, for a pause, for a trance, when what predominates on the ‘net is additive and ‘accumulative’ in tone. Some do so, though: those activists or those with a critical and non-conformist spirit who do not restrict themselves to capitalising upon models, but who make them reflective, in pursuit of the world’s contagion and transformation, feeling in some way along the lines of what was suggested by Barthes when stating with regard to own images: ‘(i)t is my political right to be a subject that is what I have to defend’[13].

Looking forward to reading what you have to say and sharing impressions…

Yours,

Remedios Zafra

[1] ‘Our eye increasingly ignores the flesh of the world’, in Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image. Une histoire du regard en Occident, Paidós, Barcelona, 1995, p. 97.

[2] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Notes on Photography. Hill and Wang, 1981.

[3] Remedios Zafra, ‘Redes y (ciber)feminismos’, Digitos, Valencia, 2018.

[4] Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017).

[5] Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, University of California Press (July 25, 1990)

[6] Remedios Zafra, Ojos y capital, Consonni, Bilbao, 2015. 2018.

[7] Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux 10, New York: e-flux, Nov 2009.

[8] Remedios Zafra, ‘Fotos con marco’, Despacio, Caballo de Troya, Barcelona, 2012.

[9] Juan Martín Prada, El ver y las imágenes en el tiempo de Internet. Akal, Madrid, 2018, p. 6.

[10] ‘Today, images are not only copies, but also models. We flee towards images to be better, more beautiful, more alive’, in Byung-Chul Han, op. cit., p. 49. Author’s note: author’s own translation.

[11] Remedios Zafra, Ojos y capital, Consonni, Bilbao, 2015. 2018.

[12] Quoted by Juan Martín Prada (2018), op. cit., p. 163. (English original: http://www.petracollins.com/censorship-and-the-female-body/)

[13] Roland Barthes (2010), op. cit., p. 35.