Reckless Art Is The Only Art I Want: On Amalia Ulman's "Excellences & Perfections"

Excellences & Perfections was a “scripted performance” that took place on Amalia Ulman's Instagram feed over five months in the middle of 2014.

In an essay for The Financial Times, Amalia explained that she used specific codes (tropes familiar to Instagram users) to tell a simple story of a young woman's passage through the highs and lows of social media prestige. This young woman, according to Amalia, progressed through three distinct personas: cute ingenue, sugar baby, and post-rehab wellness freak. The images were carefully staged and included recognizable signposts. The ingenue posted images of her feet in gossamer stockings, decorative nails, Hello Kitty stickers, choreographed plates of food, lacy undergarments, stuffed animals, optimistic and platitudinous hashtags and captions, and lots of soft tones associated with purity and innocence, especially white and pink. The sugar baby emerged from the apparent collapse of a long-term relationship. She was all about gettin' paid, werk, money, bling, penthouse views, decadent desserts, not-so-subtle innuendo, crop tops and booty shots, expensive gifts, drugs, breast augmentation, co-opting hip hop culture and streetwear style, and not givin' a fuck what any of the haters say. Her provocative contortions eventually transitioned to dour close-ups and a pair of unnerving videos of her sobbing into the camera. The wellness freak begins with an apology to her followers for her behavior of late, which is to say the apparently reckless behavior of the sugar baby. She then proceeds to post uplifting messages, images of her meditating, plates of trendy superfoods, self-care consumerism, exotic travel destinations, effusive gratitude for the support of her followers, and finally a new relationship, which ends the performance and suggests a kind of resolution.

The question of how “real” the performance was is beside the point. Amalia herself has stated that the personas are more or less fictions and that she does not identify in her everyday life with conventional femininity. Indeed the performance was an interrogation of femininity—how it is defined, how its expectations warp individuals, and how its conventions are taken for granted as natural. Because the conventions and expectations of femininity are magnified on social media (to say nothing of traditional media), Amalia was able to use her performance to inhabit a kind of hyper-femininity—something she admits does not come natural to her but that she nonetheless is expected to conform to. In this sense, the “performance” of femininity was the most honest part of the overall performance. It mirrored the performance Amalia feels obligated to maintain in her everyday life. The obligation to perform femininity extends across cultures, nations, and different forms of mass media. It is burdensome and often humiliating. It props up the hegemony of the masculine/feminine binary, where the former term is privileged over the latter and both are strictly defined. Hegemony, by definition, demands performance. It solicits the complicity of all players, willing or unwilling, and extends to performances of all sorts, including the performance of masculinity. Excellences & Perfections is, among other things, a critique of hegemony by way of staged performance. Its staging reveals the real power dynamics underpinning it. The story of the young woman is relatable precisely because the terms of femininity have been so rigorously constructed and so widely accepted as the natural course of things.

Crucial to Amalia's critique is the way it brings the viewer-follower into the critical space. The performance of Excellences & Perfections was successful because it was convincing. The audience was ready, eager even, to take it at face value, consume it, and discard it. Performance art, and art in general, doesn’t typically conceal its purpose. It’s art. We know it’s art. We go to museums and theaters to look at and watch it; we admire public murals and sculptures; we toss coins into the hats of artists performing in public squares. Excellences & Perfections flirts—perhaps recklessly—with the idea of authenticity. It is committed to its performance until the very end. But the reveal doesn't just insinuate a critique of social media's shallowness and artificiality. After all, many of us have already come to accept these as conditions of the form. Instead, the performance points to a broader critique—of the performances we maintain in our everyday lives, the ones we take for granted, the ones we often feel compelled to defend and protect.

We are all too aware nowadays of the difference between our online personas and our IRL selves. We have become jaded with social media in this respect. We tacitly accept that social media is minimally artificial and frequently deluding. Images, the elementary content of Instagram, deceive almost by their very nature. The deception is not just in the difference between a Photoshopped image and a filtered image and an unfiltered image. Regardless of how or if the image is altered, the medium itself operates within definite boundaries. Every photograph, every image, frames reality. The frame is inescapable. We can’t pull back farther and farther until we capture all of reality. This is why photography is an art form and not simply a medium that reproduces reality, even as it seems to reproduce reality. The point is not that we are fooled by this artful deception; it's that we don’t care. We still want it.

There is an undeniable pleasure in immersing oneself in the proliferation of images online. There's also an undeniable anxiety and dread. Images seduce us. They are tiny pictures of the world. They let us believe, however briefly, that we really are seeing the world as it is. But the seduction subsides. To beat back the anxiety of confronting the deception in images, we resort to derision and scorn and hostility. The deception in images, online and elsewhere, is not inconsequential. Individuals respond in very real ways, sometimes as a matter of life or death. More often than not, though, we retreat to our everyday lives and to the reassurance that our IRL selves really are real. We take solace in knowing that our everyday lives, however dull or pathetic, are at least authentic. And that our IRL selves are more enlightened, more generous, more discerning, more capable of sifting through the bullshit. If this weren't the case—if we weren't able to find authenticity in our everyday lives—the implications would be terrifying.

In the film A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, philosopher Slavoj Zizek posits that “Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world—how we perceive each meaning and so on. We in a way enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology—it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.”

Excellences & Perfections is on its surface the story of a self-indulgent, reckless, troubled young woman who loses control of herself but is eventually redeemed. It’s a story we see repeated in various iterations, both fiction and nonfiction, in various media. Sometimes these stories play out in films and novels. Sometimes they are revealed in documentaries and in the back stories of contestants on shows like America’s Got Talent. Or in the countless real, non-performative Instagram feeds and Facebook posts of real users. The presumption that our online lives are mostly or entirely artificial gives us a certain amount of cover to accept the apparent reality of our everyday lives. The explicit performance of Excellences & Perfections wants to disturb this apparent reality. But it is not simply asking us to drop the charade of performances in our everyday lives so that we might finally access our real, unmediated, authentic selves. It is asking us instead to interrogate those performances, to unmask the hegemonies, to not take things for granted. To critique.

If we take seriously Zizek’s proposition (and you may very well not), then even our apparently spontaneous relationship to the world is mediated, colored by ideology. There is no space completely “outside ideology”, no pure space of authentic feeling and being. The individual always already exists within a social formation. The world ceaselessly interpellates us, compels us to respond. And our apparently spontaneous responses—as followers/viewers/actors in the world—are in fact informed by countless factors, large and small, that none of us can really account for from one moment to the next. We respond to the world in various meaningful ways—smugly confident in our authenticity but helplessly uncertain:

cleanse the pores, cleanse the soul; omg; muy interesante proyecto; you’re so incredibly perfect; fetid; pink porn; you should stick to food photography; drool all you want but this is not a real girl; Netherland Dwarf!!!; lovely!; Dayum; so sexy; You look so much better with blonde; Nips; Soooooo cute; you are gorgeous...ahhh; you are a genious; She so pretty; U so beautiful; i read about you online; nice butt; your Ex-dude is a fool. Git’em Kid; seems like you wanna be a noir stripper. You’re beautiful...but borderline boring; hate america; Faux Ghetto; shorty u on fire; are you referring to Gerhard Richter with this photo?; Great exhibit. Mimics the real world; Just a quick question...Did u really get ur tits done?; yayo yolo; i’m a dude and can twerk better; Fantastic Ass; put on a happy face; Guns are dumb; Until someone pulls a gun on you. Lol; & Yeah. This is all fake. So it is not touching at all; Thats right, cry. Im getting hott watching this; #crybitch; First you were like this pretty artist, and your leg hurt once. You pretended to clean toilets with no clothes on. Then you became lady from hip hop video with breast implants. Now, simple; she’s argentinian; you poor trolling fool. You don’t even know who Amalia Ulman is, do you?; What is real?; clean and pure; i love u. sorry for being a cunt; B.A.G. Basic American Girls. nos gusta tu trabajo muchooooo; fun fact: Fabienne is played by Maria de Medeiros, who’s actually portuguese; This is really impressive; changed my life; I don’t understand?

These are some of the user comments responding to Excellences & Perfections. Most of them coincided with the performance itself: some are praise from individuals who are familiar with Amalia’s work and who are privy to the performance; some are praise for the images taken at face value; some are scorn and sadistic abuse; a considerable number are overtly or implicitly misogynistic; some are likely trolls; more than a few are probably bots; some appear random either because they are random and senseless or because their references are too obscure for most to get.

The point here is not to separate the knowing connoisseurs of art from the unfortunate dupes from the AI. The point is to turn the critique back to the viewer-follower. Regardless of how any single viewer-follower responded to this particular performance, regardless of whether or not you have even heard of the performance or the artist, you almost certainly (as we all do) take things for granted in your everyday life. You tacitly accept the hidden presuppositions—sometimes to your benefit, sometimes to your detriment. And you do it most of the time not knowing that you're doing it: How do you and I and the rest of us collectively define gender, which is to say how do we define the boundaries of gender and enforce them in so many unspoken ways? How do we do this with respect to race, sexuality, class, disability? How do we coerce others into performing their expected roles in everyday life? To what extent are we ourselves performing roles in response to the expectations of hegemony? How many of our apparently free choices, our spontaneous relationship to the world, are mediated by ideology? And don’t we enjoy it, after all?

Excellences & Perfections is a critique of ideology. But it is not squarely focused on Instagram or social media, despite appearances to the contrary. Its critique extends to the myriad ideologies that permeate our everyday lives, the surreptitious ideologies, the assumptions we carry with us. This is the more painful critique, the one that hurts, the one we have to force ourselves to do. Excellences & Perfections pushes us toward that painful space. It hits us over the head with the excessive narcissism of social media; it allows us the easy and pleasurable critique of the form; it lets us revel in our assured enlightenment, in the certainty that we “get it,” that we're wise to the game. Excellences & Perfections lures us in because ultimately it hopes to turn the critique back to the viewer-follower, after we've exhausted our contempt for and derision of social media. Excellences & Perfections inflicts pain by prodding us into the critique that hurts, the one that implicates us all:

Who makes the world? Who props it up? Who tears it down with abandon?