Feminism, Subversion, and Media Art - What’s Next?

From magazines, TV, and the internet, feminist new media artists have been subverting new technology to make statements about the female experience. But in a world where information and technology saturates the physical and digital realm, what is next?

In post-World War I Germany, Dadaist Hannah Höch addressed the newly nuanced feminine identity using photomontage. While the right to work and vote was secured for German Women, many issues still arose. Höch addressed the complex relationship between new forms of industrialization, subordination to men and publications, and the role of women in Germany.

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One of my favorite Höch pieces is entitled “The Beautiful Girl”. She cut out images from women’s magazines, newspapers, and journals, rearranging them into a collage. Mechanized elements like BMW logos, crankshafts, and gears are layered with wigs, slender female figures, and iconography of a woman with her eyes cut out. The sepia-toned, disjointedness of femininity and industry portray a new image of the modern 1920s German woman. Höch used reconstructive media to confront the image of the modern1920s woman, challenging how the feminine identity is mediated and putting the control of female identity production into her own hands, and not into large institutional publications.

As Höch deconstructed women's magazines to deconstruct womanhood, Méret Oppenheim used a tea set and fur to provoke the human mind. Made in 1936, “Object”consists of a teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in a layer of fur from a Chinese gazelle.

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A tea set, a typical feminine domestic object, paired with the eroticism of the fur, calls for explicit sexual reference.Additionally, the pairing makes the tea set absolutely useless, slightly bizarre, and nothing short of Surrealist(one of the reasons no man could deny it into the MoMA as the first work by a woman).

But the cup is also seething with sexuality and female power. It lacks function, subverts norms, and challenges gender construction. In the Surrealist art of Dali, Ernst, and Man Ray, women were often viewed as objects. Oppenheim broke through with her “Object” and became notable as a dominant Surrealist artist. Not only did Oppenheim break through gender conventions of Surrealist art, but her own art did the same, pointing towards sexual imagery, power, functionality, and identity.

Moving forward to the 70s, interactive media begins to come to fruition. Accessibility to cameras, TVs, and new digital technology means that artists can create using new forms of media. Artists like Joan Jonas, Lynn Hershmann Leeson, Howardina Pindell, Mona Hatoum, and Nil Yalter begin to use newly available forms technology to create new media art as a way to deconstruct and rebuild a new way of thinking about feminism.

Joan Jonas did specific video work using the Sony Porta Pak to create her own performance art in the 70s.“Vertical Roll”, filmed in 1972 consists of a closed-circuit video of Jonas on a TV, and she is “playing” with the common rolling bar glitch of older TVs. The rolling bar perccuses on screen as Jonas hits a spoon against the camera.

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Throughout, fragments of Jonas’ limbs come on and o screen. At the end, she slowly turns to face the camera, confronting the viewer face to face. In other works, Jonas is known to frequently use masks and other objects to hide her face or other parts of her body. Jonas uses her work as a way to showcase her worries about representation of women in media, and through her performance art, she is taking this identity mediation into her own hands.

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Lynn Hershmann Leeson did an interactive work entitled “Lorna” from 1979-83, where the viewer sits in a chair within a domestic living space, and uses a TV remote to make choices. The piece is centered around a woman named Lorna, who always watches TV, is afraid to leave her house, and is painfully lonely. In “Choose Your OwnAdventure” fashion, the storyline ends with Lorna either committing suicide, shooting her TV with a gun, or running away to Los Angeles.

You choose exactly what Lorna does, but you are constrained by three constructed endings. The illusion of choice, free will, and constraints are concepts that Leeson effectively plays with, especially regarding male domination and control and its prevalence with the 1970s housewife identity. Using the TV remote as a tool and interactivity as a medium, “Lorna” points out institutional constraints, places empowerment back into the hands of women, and creates a sense of liberation through interactive TV media.

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This idea of liberation through interactive TV media and the internet continued through the work of VNS Matrix, a cyber feminist art collective based from Australia. “ALL NEWGEN”, a CD-ROM game, told the story of a protagonist banding with a team of DNA sluts to down the Big Daddy Mainframe.

VNS Matrix believed the internet is a place to fluidly experiment, disrupt the“machismo” world of video games in a camp way, and explore new methods of collaboration. Other works of VNS matrix explore uses of coding, the internet, and other mediation of technology to explore how men control institution and structure, and how these cyber feminists can collectively subvert that.

In the information saturated world we live in, thousands more people have access to create and communicate. Even in the age of Facebook and Twitter, feminist media artists are still finding ways to reconstruct identity using new mediums. A prime example of this is the Instagram performance artwork of Amalia Ulman. She documents her life moving from Argentina to LA, transitioning from an artist to green juice health freak. She also documents getting a breast reduction, and captures the idea of the modern micro-influencer Instagram girl.

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In 2014, when she announced this was all a fabricated performance piece, not many believed her. The blurring between an artistic performance and her self expression onInstagram was confused. By capturing this satirical LA girl characterization on the medium of Instagram, Ulman brings to light how our identities are constructed in the digital sphere and in real life. What does it mean to be a woman not only in the real world, but in the addition of the metaverse? How can(?) women define themselves in the age of trends, feeds, stories, and is that construction authentic and true?

Today, artists like Sofia Braga and Charlotte Eifer both work to address feminism, representation, and new technologies in the world of hyper surveillance and political unrest. How will feminist work grow with and revolutionize art and technology next?

Today, that subversion may exist in NFTs. NFTs and cryptocurrency threaten to destroy our environment with the energy costs to mine and mint, with the constant distraction of crypto-trends hiding the real issue of large corporations exploiting natural resources and loopholes. Will feminist thought make its way into this male dominated field next? Or is it a fleeting trend in the greater art world?

Maybe the disruption will be from more extraneous plastic surgery and more social performance art, pointing to how people live their lives extraneously. Maybe it will come from reverse mass surveillance against large tech companies, revolution of some kind, or maybe politics as a form of performance.

Whatever comes next for abstract feminist art, it will stem from anti-institution, counter culture, and the existence of technocratic oppressive systems. Using technology as a tool for disruption, a future generation of feminist artists will find ways to create, innovate, and manifest their truths.