That Teenage Feeling:
Volatile Bodies and Fluid Identities in Contemporary Video Art
2015
for the screening That Teenage Feeling at VideoFag in Toronto on December 5th, 2014. Part of ///WADE IN: an international artist-share series of screenings and workshops.
For the millennial generation, which entered adolescence during the rise of mobile, networked technologies, the vernacular of online video became customary for exploring a new, augmented reality in tandem with navigating intense emotional and bodily changes. YouTube ballooned with bedroom cabaret and Twitter turned the notion of the diary inside out. And, while these exhibitionist tendencies on social media are often dismissed as little more than youth mirroring the spectacle society that raised them, their confessional character signals catharsis over carnival. As most will attest, the teenage condition is a potent mix of self-reflection and social anxiety. These sensations, challenging as they inherently are, are now also augmented (cybernetically) by the way that virtual communication allows one’s identity to be immediately visible and fragmented across spaces and times. Teenagers in the post-InternetThe term “post-Internet” refers to visual culture and sociological models that are based upon and inextricable from the context of the invention, commercialization and development of the Internet into a ubiquitous technology and ideological force that shapes contemporary perceptions of politics, economics, communication and reality, in general.[1] age are not only negotiating how to represent themselves in social groups IRL but also continuously re-presenting themselves through digital tools and online platforms. The myriad notion of self constructed through these behaviours illustrates the paramount quality of teenagehood: endless transformation.
The video works presented in this screening sketch a contour of this ‘teenage feeling,’ and evoke the liminality of constant transformation. Though disparate in their formal approaches, each work adds to an emerging lexicon in Canadian contemporary video art that speaks to this unstable, juvenile sense of identity and suggests (to varying extents) that merit lies in sustaining moments of fantasy and volatility in favour of a greater social mobility and fluidity of identity. This conceptual thread is complemented by a high level of production and, in many cases, digital manipulation made possible by nearly ubiquitous access to and knowledge of software for imaging and video editing. Accordingly, many works utilize assemblage, montage and glitches to convey the programmable nature of identity in the 21st century, as protocols of digital culture increasingly shape our perceptions.In fact, recent neurological research has shown that successive generations in general are emotionally maturing at a slower rate than their predecessors and that this may be linked to earlier exposure to mobile, networked technologies. See: Elmore, Tim. The Marks of Maturity. Psychology Today. Nov 14 2012. Psychologytoday.com. Accessed Jan 28 2015. «https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/artificial-maturity/201211/the-marks-maturity»[2]
In an effort to deconstruct this emergent and complex aesthetic, the program was split in three parts, Bodily Changes, Mirror Mirror, and Technical Difficulties, each one addressing a particular facet of that teenage feeling. While Bodily Changes focuses on the manipulation of anatomies (some human, some other) and allude to a conflicted if not violent coming of age for the female figure, Mirror Mirror references Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage—that decisive moment when the infant sees its own reflection for the first time and has to reconcile the reality of its external image with its internal self. Finally, Technical Difficulties includes four works that employ visual techniques based on intentional corruption of the image. Failure as a fundament of teenage angst and an inevitability of continual transformation is channeled through these works as expressive self-sabotage upon which one might tack the terse motto: “If you’re going to fuck it up, at least make it consistent.”
Bodily Changes
In This is the way they make us bend, Allison Hrabluik uses stop motion animation to create a surreal and tense dance between a pair of headless cut-paper bodies. They are nearly identical, joined at the neck and dressed in black leotards. As the ideally proportioned yet disfigured bodies somersault and tendu, a story of self-doubt and loss of control over the body manifests. The disturbing quality of this is heightened by the precision of the movements and the delicate pencil lines in the background that map the choreography of their constant struggle.
In Rug Hooker, Kailey Bryan presents us with a simple but provocative action—a close-up shot of hooking her own pubic hairs through a pair of pantyhose. Using an actual rug hook, a tool which has traditionally been relegated to the feminine realm of textile work, the literal and explicit nature of her action effaces notions of the female subject as controllable, decorative or demure. Instead we see a device of artifice (the pantyhose) punctuated by the reality below, and a performance of ecstatic puberty—the young girl ‘teasing’ out her womanhood.
Still Life by Marisa Hoicka is a perversion of Dutch master vanitas compositions in which we see white-gloved hands carving into an ambiguously shaped loaf of faux fur, only for the insides to erupt into a grotesque reservoir of meat, peanut butter and jelly. The absurdity of the juxtaposition and the visceral action capture the gaucheness of teenage bodies.
Mirror, Mirror
Peter Wilkin’s Whale (2014) is a brief but entrancing dance of a whale in the North Atlantic. Mirrored through digital effects, the twinning of this magnificent creature combined with the glimmer of the ocean’s surface evokes wonder and transcendence as it swims toward but never reaches its counterpart. The tension between the figures as well as their synchronous movements mimics the teenage quest for kinship and recognition.
Brianna Lowe’s PreTeen Dreams (2014), while different in its motif of girl power-era animé also recognizes the self in the image of an other. Created in the mid 1990s, at the peak of political correctness, each series and scene that Lowe has culled (Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Revolutionary Girl Utena) portrays “strong young women” as princesses in short skirts wielding magic wands. While the viewer is hypnotized by the kaleidoscopic mirroring of animated heroines flying through the air, a palpable dissonance is felt between the fantasy of empowered femininity and the crude realities of the struggle to achieve it.
Rounding out part two is Memorial (2013) by William Andrew Finlay Stewart, wherein the moviegoer’s perspective is reversed; the gaze of the camera set on the audience as film credits roll. Over the course of twelve minutes, the cast of characters whittles down to a curious few: a listless couple cast in shadow and the theatre attendant sweeping up the aisles. Inevitably the viewer conjures a narrative between them, but it is a forced one, based only on the anticipation and the comfort of being alone together.
Technical Difficulties
heart <br/> (2013) by Adrienne Crossman and Wrecking Miley (2014) by Josh Studham utilize a technique called data moshing in which the video file is intentionally damaged to produce glitches. In heart
we see this as a progressive dissolution of a beating human heart into an almost unrecognizable pattern of fluctuating pixels. In Wrecking Miley we see only a few seconds of footage from Miley Cyrus’ music video “Wrecking Ball” aggressively glitched, spliced and remixed to the point that may warrant the term “image abuse.” Both pieces, though distinct, encapsulate the fascination of a generation of artists with ‘breaking’ digital images and restoring materiality to video. This disregard for the continuity of the image foregrounds the potentiality of failure.
On the heels of this rebellious gesture, Conor McGarrigle’s Breaking Bad: the bitTorrent Edition (2013) appears to be the work of data moshing but is actually the visualization of collective peer-to-peer downloading. By partially torrenting the season finale of Breaking Bad upon its leak, the interrupted download is an index of the thousands of users who were simultaneously ‘seeding’ the data to one another’s computers. Consciously or not, the video is a collective document of anonymous participation and exchange, unified in its concept and incomplete in appearance.
Finishing the program is Peter Rahul's Modem Mantra [redux] (2014) which re-interprets one of the most iconic millennial memories: logging onto the Internet through a dial-up modem. However here the dial-up process is equated to transcendental meditation. A seated figure in lotus pose disassembles and reassembles, first into a crystalline form and eventually into a swirling menagerie of patterned light as the modem plays—a gloaming drone, slowed down thousands of times. The sound shrinks and grows with the discombobulated figure suggesting that wisdom can be achieved in limbo, in the waiting for change.
While obviously layered in its message, That Teenage Feeling is ultimately a time-based portrait of the teenager archetype. More than a developmental stage of our biology or even a key consumer market, the Teenager is the simultaneously hapless and heroic figure onto which society projects its fears and desires. In times of unrest—politically, economically, culturally—the ever-changing Teenager becomes the discursive site to direct collective hopes and public scrutiny. Much like the figure of the Nomad described by Gilles Deleuze, the teenage identity is suspect because it is in perpetual motion. As contemporary video art continues to blur once distinct mediums and disciplines, recognizing this fluidity is increasingly vital to understanding its relevance and its resonance.