Early this past June, the Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo announced, in an essay for the German quarterly Spike titled “The Nausea of Uploading,” his indefinite departure from the culture of online sharing. He positions himself in the piece as equal parts artist professionally tied to the digital, and young person having come of age with and on the Internet; recalling the more “pure” conditions under which he became involved in forums and social media networks, he says, “I was in the process of making a self. It gave me life.” His idealistic relationship to such platforms continued to develop as his career as an artist coincided with the rise of Jogging-era post-Internet aesthetics. “In 2011,” Pallasvuo writes, “I felt true online.” Now, with post-Internet bookended as a market phenomenon and a sense that his career had become quantifiable in re-posts and likes, Pallasvuo is seeking something else: “I want to make things that are unseen, by design,” he writes. “I want to insist on being a boring and generally insignificant operator.... ‘Deleting your Twitter account’ is the new ‘having a buzzworthy Twitter account.’ I want to whisper, and to lurk.”
Around the same time, Ann Hirsch—a peer of Pallasvuo’s, born two years earlier, in 1985—released a series of 30 short screen-grab videos, made between December 2014 and May 2015, in “It Is I, Ann Hirsch: horny lil feminist,” an online exhibition appearing on the New Museum’s website. The artist’s work in performance and video has previously examined the expression of female sexuality in a mediated or networked context: performing as a contestant on the VH1 dating show Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair and a camgirl on her YouTube channel Scandalishious, or revisiting pre-teen chat-room encounters in the script Playground. Here, our protagonist is Ann herself, the titular horny lil feminist, introduced in a Photo Booth video with a floral bedspread pulled up to her chin and a pinhead effect rendering her bespectacled eyes enormous. Ann is very funny, and often appears as a sort of character. In one video she adopts a hint of a Southern drawl as she explains her addiction to tweezing in My Strange Addiction; she takes on the calm tone of a lifestyle vlogger in dental hygiene haul and vaginal hygiene haul; in another, <3genesleeves<3 *valentines special*, she assumes the look of a love-stricken choir nerd as she sits under the aforementioned bedspread and gravely sings a rendition of “Greensleeves,” dedicated to her soon-to-be husband.
Humorous as her presentation may be, we also see a lot of the artist—her vagina, more than once (and in one instance in close-up wearing a pair of glasses), but also other weirdly intimate views, like a montage of awkward teen photos in The Body Complex Part 2, or email exchanges with her mother, and a private wedding-themed Pinterest board in My Little Skinny Jewish Wedding. The videos oscillate between performance and habitual self-surveillance or, at their most self-aware, a winking hybrid of the two. Their very DIY format, the screen-grab video, is key in fostering this strange intimacy. Hirsch captures herself facing the screen—watching and performing for herself as much as for an eventual audience. We also often see her navigate on her desktop, moving between browser tabs and applications, a process that, compared to a traditional montage effect, can feel clunky and even tiresome. But this technique is important in representing the relationship between a woman and her screen as something that ostensibly mediates her intra- and interpersonal connections.
The sarcastic tone of these videos presupposes an understanding of visibility itself as synonymous with inevitable violence and vulnerability—one that goes a few shades deeper than Pallasvuo’s concerns. Ayesha Siddiqi, editor in chief of The New Inquiry, spoke to such concerns in remarks given at the Superscript conference at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in May. “Visibility in a surveillance state is not power,” she noted, “and all the historical vulnerabilities that have existed for marginalized voices are simply migrating onto digital spaces. And all the exciting and vital work that people are doing to make their lives a little easier to bypass or lifehack all of the deficiency in their workplaces or classrooms or day-to-day experiences by connecting or communicating with each other exists in an ecosystem that’s primed for their continued exploitation, that remains in many ways hostile to them.” In a mediated context, reveling in one’s identity or revealing one’s body is never simply empowering.
Still, in Hirsch’s world, withdrawing from the Web’s inherent visibility doesn’t seem to be an option. There are shades of the desire to be seen in a way you are not, as a sexier or more poised feminine self; there are shades of compulsion, sharing behavior (particularly in its sexualized forms) echoing that addiction to tweezing in which, as she narrates, “what was formerly an extremely painful experience has now become an everyday common experience of me just reaching in and trying to grab the nose hairs.” There are, too, instances of participation in social media as a form of gendered care work, as succinctly theorized by Laura Portwood-Stacer in her 2014 piece “Care Work and the Stakes of Social Media Refusal,” which outlines how an ethical refusal to participate in social media on the grounds that it represents a form of unpaid labor is made complicated in the case of “social media users whose activity and subjectivity as both users and as people at large is directly linked to the work of care”—specifically, women, in a carryover from domestically rooted gender roles. In a stark and, again, tongue-in-cheek humorous change of tone, we see Ann go from gyrating half-nude with a bag on her head in Butterface to updating her wedding invitations and registry in My Little Skinny Jewish Wedding, the latter an old-school form of women’s work into which—despite her Andrea Dworkin-inflected, radically feminist perspective (which she has expressed formally, in her work and adjacent texts, and informally, via online platforms like Twitter and Instagram)—she seems inextricably tied. And in tweet anxiety, we watch her compose a tweet, a process that devolves into a 603-character inner monologue in which she agonizes over stifling the desire to shit talk: “I want to be a good person. I want to be a good social media user. I want to be better,” she writes.
Even amid more riotous or bizarre moments, the backbone of this series is the very sincere undercurrent of a woman figuring out how to be on the Internet—and how, or whether, experimenting with oppositional approaches to this being or becoming can actually create a path to agency. In some sense, control over one’s identity is also at the heart of Pallasvuo’s decision to embrace social media refusal. He laments the ways his artistic identity, in its uploaded form, became overdetermined, that of “more of a columnist than a prophet.” He implies that deciding to be less visible online is a way no longer to “feel insubstantial,” but what really seems at stake is less substance than the ability to self-determine.
For Hirsch, agency has little to do with producing a coherent self. The different personas that comprise her are rife with contradiction. In conclusion: the real ann hirsch, she moves quickly through videos of herself in various postures while explaining the project—first, a pulled-together version with pearl earrings and a sort of BBC accent, inviting viewers to feel “inspired to put a little piece of yourself on the Internet. So many of us are so afraid to just share a little piece of ourself”; then, reclining in a tube top, she relaxes into an exaggerated vocal fry, drawing the project back to her: “I mean, this was about getting over my shit.” She goes on to disidentify herself from the “horny” qualifier, to disavow the project’s feminist potential, and to claim that its real purpose is to document her body before it ages, every proclamation cut off right before it begins to feel definitive. Each “real” Ann seems tailored to respond to some wave within the inevitable wash of criticism that follows a project of this nature—selfie feminism, vagina art, whatever you want to call it.
What makes this project work, in large part, is a generosity toward the compulsions each performance represents, resulting in a sense of possibility mixed in with their many obvious limits. But despite its aesthetic overlap with more utopian Internet-based works that reach toward carving out female-identified or queer space online, the project’s smart deployment of what could be termed tactical visibility doesn’t hinge on optimism. Hirsch’s exploration of agency has more to do with seeking to express a series of contradictory desires and the culturally produced shame by which they are constantly tempered, making visible less some true or essential self than a messy network of female wanting that is simultaneously a product of, and an attempt to stake itself in opposition to, structural misogyny.
A version of this article appears in the October 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
