Abstract
In the global attention economy, what might it mean to deploy “ugliness” to subversive ends? This chapter explores two feminist performance practices framed as strategic deployments of ugliness. The first is the performative practice and persona of contemporary musician Sia, who strategically denies visibility to her audience by refusing to reveal her face on stage. I will also explore a 2016 video installation created by Emma Sulkowicz, an artist and recent graduate of Columbia University who was raped on campus and famously constructed a senior thesis project and subsequent artworks around her experience. The chapter argues that both of these artists involve feminist deployments of “ugliness.” In the case of Sia’s work, they challenge contemporary regimes of visibility, fame, and self-branding. In the case of Sulkowicz’s, they disturb conventional protocol for navigating the interface between sexual fantasy, violence, cyberporn, embodiment, and political correctness. The chapter asks how both artists—by strategically withholding visibility or exploiting the voyeuristic potentials of the camera and making them available to an expanded audience online—rework the meanings of ugliness, embodiment, and community and in so doing, expand the boundaries of the political in the cyber age.
The face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled.
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
I often think of this image, the photo that was never taken—one that only I can see now, and of which I have never spoken. It is always there in the same silence, remarkable. It is the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.
—Marguerite Duras
The gap makes becoming possible.
—Maurice Blanchot
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the depiction of “invisible power” within early Christian imagery and its place within the evolution of fame, see Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 193–218.
- 2.
Andy Warhol, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Although the source of this quote is still disputed, it appeared in the program for a 1968 exhibition of Warhol’s work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.
- 3.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 41–57.
- 4.
See Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2–3: 126.
- 5.
Ibid., 126.
- 6.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” Intentions (London: Methuen and Co., 1913).
- 7.
Dave Eggers interview with Elizabeth Day, “We Tend to Look Everywhere But the Mirror,” The Guardian (January 26, 2013): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/26/dave-eggers-hologram-king-interview
- 8.
Ulises A. Mejias, “Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond,” The Fibreculture Journal FCJ-147 (2012): http://twenty.fibreculturejournal.org/2012/06/20/fcj-147-liberation-technology-and-the-arab-spring-from-utopia-to-atopia-and-beyond/
- 9.
See Guy Debord, La Societe du Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994, originally published 1967).
- 10.
Sia Furler, “My Anti-Fame Manifesto,” Billboard (October 25, 2013): http://www.billboard.com/articles/5770456/my-anti-fame-manifesto-by-sia-furler
- 11.
For more on “communicative capitalism,” see Mejias (2012).
- 12.
See Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, “Preface for the Second Edition,” The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974, originally published 1887), 34–5.
- 13.
Emma Sulkowicz, “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol” (June 2015): http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com
- 14.
Meg Barker, “Consent Is A Grey Area?: A Comparison of Understandings of Consent in Fifty Shades of Grey and on the BDSM Blogosphere,” Sexualities 16, no. 8.
- 15.
Sulkowicz “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol.”
- 16.
Chrissie Hynde, interview with David Greene, “I’m just Telling My Story,” NPR (6 October 2015): http://www.npr.org/2015/10/06/446083413/chrissie-hynde-im-just-telling-my-story
- 17.
Furler, “My Anti-Fame Manifesto.”
- 18.
Sia and Beyoncé, “Pretty Hurts.” See Helen Brown, “Sia Furler Has Blazed the Trail for a New Kind of Pop Star,” Telegraph (July 2, 2015): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/11714010/Sia-Furler-has-blazed-the-trail-for-a-new-kind-of-pop-star.html
- 19.
See Sam Sanders, “A Reluctant Star, Sia Deals with Fame on Her Own Terms,” NPR (July 8, 2014): http://www.npr.org/2014/07/08/329500971/a-re3luctant-star-sia-deals-with-fame-on-her-own-terms
- 20.
Michelle McGahan, “Sia Reveals the Mystery Behind Her Wigs and It’s For a Deeper Reason Than You Probably Expected,” Bustle (February 17, 2016): https://www.bustle.com/articles/142498-sia-reveals-the-mystery-behind-her-wigs-its-for-a-deeper-reason-than-you-probably
- 21.
Alexandra Pollard, “So Sia Hides Herself? So Do Daft Punk. The Only Difference Is She’s a Woman,” The Guardian, March 30, 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/mar/30/so-sia-hides-herself-so-do-daft-punk-the-only-difference-is-shes-a-woman
- 22.
See Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). See also Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
- 23.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 170–171.
- 24.
Ibid., 188–9.
- 25.
Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? trans. Aylmer Maude (Dublin: Roads, 2014), 63.
- 26.
Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers (New York: Random House, 2016).
- 27.
Sia Furler, “Chandelier.”
- 28.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Harper Collins, 2002).
- 29.
Kate Mossman, “Sia: Everyone in entertainment is insecure. We’ve been dancing our entire lives for your approval,” The Guardian (January 31, 2016): https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/31/sia-everyone-in-entertainment-is-insecure-observer-music-interview
- 30.
See Sam Sanders, “A Reluctant Star, Sia Deals with Fame on Her Own Terms,” NPR (July 8, 2014): http://www.npr.org/2014/07/08/329500971/a-re3luctant-star-sia-deals-with-fame-on-her-own-terms
- 31.
Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice (Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
- 32.
Nina Bouraoui, Forbidden Vision, trans. K. Marcus (New York: Station Hill Literary Editions, 1995).
- 33.
Amy Adler, “Performance Anxiety: Medusa, Sex, and the First Amendment,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 21, no. 2.
- 34.
Sia Furler quoted in Marjon Carlos, “The Real Reason Sia Wears a Wig,” Fusion (March 31, 2015): https://fusion.kinja.com/the-real-reason-sia-wears-a-wig-1793846761. For more on beauty bias, see Deborah Rhode, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Law and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 35.
Rebecca Sheehan, “Sia May Be the Face of Music’s Future,” The Conversation (July 7, 2014): http://theconversation.com/sia-may-be-the-face-of-musics-future-28862
- 36.
Carrie Battan, “Hidden Wonders,” The New Yorker (February 8 & 15, 2016).
- 37.
According to a recent study conducted by Female Pressure, an international collective of female artists, women comprise only 9.3% of artists listed on music label rosters. See Natalie Morin, “Sia Just Took a Huge Step Forward for Women in Music,” Mic (August 8, 2014): https://mic.com/articles/94824/sia-just-took-a-huge-step-forward-for-women-in-music#.SuYXIUhTG
- 38.
See, for example, Greg Kot, “Exile in Momville: Liz Phair Balances Family Life and the Push to Revive Her Dormant Career,” The Chicago Tribune (July 19, 1998): http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-07-19/news/9807190386_1_liz-phair-brad-wood-capitol-records-label/2
- 39.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109–113.
- 40.
For more on “pornographic seeing,” see Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 156–7. For a discussion of “productive looking,” see Kaja Silverman, On the Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), 181–184.
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Karakuş, K.E. (2018). The Ugly, the Uninvited, and the Unseen in the Work of Sia and Emma Sulkowicz. In: Rodrigues, S., Przybylo, E. (eds) On the Politics of Ugliness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76783-3_17
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