Tag: authenticity

re-reflecting on OnlyFans, nudity, superficial aesthetics, confused thoughts

I went back over my previous posts about OnlyFans so I could reflect on my past reflections.

I previously wrote: I’m often addressing ideas around performance of the self online within my work. It’s important to consider why this is still worth talking about, given that performing the self online is no longer as novel as it once was. We are completely saturated by it. I guess this saturation is what I’m interested in now. And using OnlyFans as an artistic medium is an opportunity to explore this. There is both a bleakness and a freedom in monetising your “self”. I like the idea of pushing this to the limits of superficiality or mundanity. Presenting and witnessing, presenting and witnessing, the ultimate freedom and the ultimate confinement. Monetising my self-portraits in this way is like… I’m just making money from existing in such a basic way. The self-portraits take time and work to make, yes. They take thought and time and energy and logistics and conceptualising and contemplation. But making this work is meaningful to me. And the images are just me, existing. I don’t have to speak, I don’t have to smile.

I used the words “superficiality and mundanity” above and I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea of superficiality in terms of an aesthetic. I’ve been reading a lot about nudity and nakedness in art and will write a post more dedicated to that. But for now I’ll say that I’m interested in perceptions and judgements of nudity and nakedness in art. There is this desire for “authenticity” online – in relation to human bodies. Of course, the mainstream conversations online around this only really ever revolve around women or “femaleness”. Women have to be both perfect and authentic (if authenticity assumes that perfection can’t exist). There is a lot of pressure to be perfect and also a lot of pressure to not pretend you’re perfect, because that makes you fake which is undesirable.

Women seem to have to bear a lot of pressure to not do things that are potentially harmful to other women – if we get lip filler and use filters on our photos we are setting unrealistic standards for other women about what a “real” woman looks like. But we also have to support all women and all their choices and be a girl’s girl. All of this is sort of a tangent that I’m actually not that interested in delving into in a really deep way in my work, I guess I’m just letting my mind wander as I think about ideas of being “superficial” in relation to creating images of myself. With my self-portraits, I’ve been intuitively drawn to a style or aesthetic that has a kind of unreality to it. I never digitally edit my actual body (I wouldn’t even know how to) but I am using and posing and contorting my body in very specific ways when I make the portraits. And I sometimes edit in basic ways to change the light or enhance a blurriness to create a glowing effect or something, like in the photo below.

What is authenticity and is that what I should be aiming for when I make an image of myself? In my portraits I’m showing myself how I want to show myself. So when someone looks at these photos, they are seeing something akin to my hope and my desire. Is that not authentic? I don’t know. Do I care about being authentic? I care about making the art I want to make. To me, that would be the ultimate authenticity, regardless of aesthetic.

Presenting my portraits on OnlyFans puts them into a context where the images are more likely to be sexualised, or rather, I am more likely to receive feedback from viewers who are looking at the images through that lens. You can always be sexualised by someone in any space, real or virtual, whether you’re expecting or wanting that or not. I have experienced that many times, as have most women.

Does having an audience on OnlyFans mean that I am focused on trying to look sexually appealing in my portraits? And if so, is that bad? I started taking self-portraits in this style before I started using OnlyFans. When I started using OF I recognised that the style of my work would potentially be interesting to share in that space because while they are not highly explicit they have a kind of sexual/sensual tone and some contain partial nudity. My point is, I started making work in this style because I wanted to explore certain concepts and aesthetics. Now that I am presenting them on OF, I am still creating the work according to my own standards and set of conceptual/aesthetic guidelines, I’m just sharing it in this particular way that maybe adds another layer to how it could be perceived.

But am I trying to look appealing? Yes. Because I’m exploring ideas of fantasy. I am not trying to create or present or perform a “real world’. But I’m also trying to raise questions about the slippage between fantasy and reality. That’s what I’m very interested in. I’m interested in superficiality and recognition of superficiality. I’m interested in elevating something to a state of hyperreality. I like raising questions about levels of performance in everyday life and in art. These topics mean a lot to me and it makes it kind of hard to write about, I’m getting a headache right now. Because I have so much I want to say that I feel I can’t articulate,

I was talking to someone I know from Instagram about it, here is some of our conversation. I’m referencing The Naked Nude by Frances Borzello, the book I’m reading at the moment which I will write a separate post about.

(He is saying that yes he understands and he likes the phrase about the nude becoming naked again.)

(He’s asking why nudity is more comfortable than nakedness and if my photos represent both things.)

(He says he likes that I said this and that it makes sense.)

why do I like self-portraits

I’m drawn to art that features people. Art that uses live bodies in some way. Especially self-portraits. I usually feel more emotional when I’m interacting with this kind of art. And I do want art to make me feel. I like art that makes me think too and the art I like most does both, makes me feel and think. But art that only makes me think is less compelling to me than that which also elicits an emotional response. Art that makes me feel something forces me to consider my soul.

I think all the time about the ways that people desperately try to connect with each other. I’m drawn to self-portraits that make me feel like the artist is trying to connect with themselves, or with me, maybe I’m having an experience of connection or attempted connection with the artist who is depicting themselves. They are wanting to be witnessed, I’m witnessing them, we are looking at each other.

A self-portrait automatically invites questions around crossovers of authenticity and performance, which is a key interest in all of my work. This tension is embedded in the form. Why are you capturing or creating an image of yourself to present to others. What choices are you making about how to present yourself and why. To what degree are you playing a character. Which version of yourself are you presenting and why. What level of awareness do you care to have about your own performativity. Are you creating self-portraits to try and discover something about yourself or have you discovered something about yourself that you want to share.

Some notes about artists I like for whom self-portraits have been an important part of their practice.

Francesa Woodman 1958 – 1981

I’m drawn to her photographs because they are mysterious and seem very personal but I don’t feel alienated by them. I like the way she used her body. The way she configured herself and her props. She both captured herself and captured herself capturing herself, or interacting with herself, like in the images in which she’s interacting with a mirror or the one where she has created an image of her own shadow on the ground while she sits in her chair. I also like to capture myself capturing myself. Many of her images contain a doubling up of her own self. A sense of confidence and defiance radiates from her work and I also view her as trying to figure something out about herself within the portraits. Like we are witnessing something active, we are witnessing her capturing herself in the act of trying to work something out about how she feels or what she wants. She seems to be curious about herself and she presents this curiosity boldly. Again this is something I relate to (maybe I’m just projecting the feelings I have when I make work onto her work). She seems to have a bold and playful vulnerability. There is a highly performative element to her photos, the scenarios and the use of props are very constructed and deliberate but at the same time she is able to infuse her images with an ethereal candidness.

Image source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francesca-woodman-10512/finding-francesca

Image source: https://gagosian.com/artists/francesca-woodman/

Image source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/young-artist-ghostly-muse

Petra Cortright 1986 –

I saw Petra’s self-portrait video Bridal Shower in a gallery a few years ago (I think it was in Amsterdam). This was the first time I had encountered her work and I was captivated. I felt disarmed and a sense of strong desire. I related to the figure in the video but I don’t know why, I just seemed to recognise her. I wanted to be in that room with her and I wanted to be her and I wanted to be friends with her. Her movements and expressions in this video are very performative, it makes me think of a child putting on on article of clothing from a dress up box and pretending to be a character. But there’s also an ease to it, it doesn’t feel forced. It seems so moving and deceptively simple.

Bunny Rogers 1990 –

Bunny’s work is so beautiful to me. She made a series of self-portraits called Self Portrait as clone of Jeanne D’Arc. The clone of Jeanne D’Arc is a character from a television series called Clone High which is populated by clones of historical figures. Bunny made these self-portraits depicting herself as different iterations of the clone of Jeanne D’Arc. I love the layers of self-representation, they are not self-portraits in the most straightforward sense. Rather, she presents herself as different versions of a fictionalised clone of a real person. In this series she confronts the layers and complications of presenting the self.

Image source: https://societeberlin.com/artists/bunny-rogers/