CANCELLED - Exposure: Online participation and the artist’s body

Event details

In recent years a young generation of artists have utilized social media platforms and other web-based technologies as a tool for self-representation. Picking up on longer histories of the self-image, particularly feminist histories, many of these artists do so in order to critique or contest normative modes of representation, particularly in the arena of gender. Yet a growing number have also called the self-image into question, problematizing its tendency to further privilege those artists whose bodies conform to idealized types through an online economy of likes and shares. Through the work of artists including Juliana Huxtable, Morag Keil and Jesse Darling - whose exhibition The Ballad of Saint Jerome is currently on show at Tate Britain – this paper maps out the ways that artists have responded to the specific operations of visibility online through strategies that appear to either use or refuse the image of the body. Central to this discussion is the category of the ‘amateur’ and the highly gendered life-meets-work paradigm of late capitalism.