Porno-graphing

: ‘dirty’ subjectivities & self-objectification in contemporary lens-based art

Abstract

Through my PhD thesis, ‘Porno-graphing: ‘dirty’ subjectivities & self-objectification in contemporary lens-based art’, I use the term ‘porno-graphing’ to group together and examine lens-based artworks where artists use as art-material sexual situations or sets of sexual dynamics present in their life independently of their art practice. I consider how artists act upon these sexual situations in order to make art out of them, the art-results they produce and their means of sharing them with audiences. I argue that the artists whose work I examine, use sexual situations that can potentially be perceived as ‘taboo’; for example Leigh Ledare involves incest-related dynamics in Pretend You Are Actually Alive and Kathy Acker with Alan Sondheim implicate child-sexual subjectivities in the Blue Tape. I argue that they choose and use these situations to self-submit into the ‘dirtiness’ of their sexual and artistic subjectivities and in doing so to negotiate how subjectivity is produced. To do so, they use visual vocabularies of autobiography to self-objectify into roles as both artists, e.g. assuming positions such as the white male pornographer-exploiter (the work of Ledare) and as sexual subjects, e.g. ‘perverted’ or hyper-sexual objects of desire (the work of Lo Liddell). In embracing these roles they create ‘intensified encounters’ (Edelman & Berlant, 2014) between the artist, the art-object and the viewer, to interrogate ‘normative’ and ‘antinormative’ patterns of meaning-making and value-attribution regarding subjectivity and art.

Date of Award	31 Oct 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Sponsors	Sophocles Achillopoulos Foundation
Supervisor	Joe Kelleher (Supervisor) & Nina Power (Supervisor)