[Update: A serendipitous encounter with a tattered billboard leads to a similarly serendipitous reencounter with a former student (not to mention a very interesting blog). Emily, good to hear from you! Also, thanks s0metim3s for the friendly nod.]
In Untitled: Will Fuck for Validation (2004), Alex McQuilkin poses in a blond wig, with teary cheeks and arms extended over her head. She is wearing a white “wife-beater” tank top, with green glittery lettering that reads “will fuck for validation.” The quiet pathos of the image appears simultaneously to reaffirm and subvert the self-denigrating message on the tank top. The irony of this quasi “self-portrait” (featuring McQuilkin using her own image to present a persona who, presumably, both is and is not herself) is reinforced by the fact that, as Ana Honigman observes, McQuilkin is deliberately troping here one of the quasi-self portraitive images from Cindy Sherman’s 1981 Artforum series of posed centerfold images (in which she uses her own body to act out the ways in which women are typically perceived by others, particularly men). (See, also, LeisureArts’ fascinating post on this and related topics).
Alex McQuilkin is a 26 year-old Brooklyn-based video and performance artist whose work comments on the pervasive commoditization of imagery of the female body in contemporary American culture. In Untitled, McQuilkin is not only referencing Cindy Sherman’s 1981 image, but also McQuilkin’s own debut work—a three minute DVD entitled Fucked (2000), in which she appears with her head and shoulders crowded close to the camera, valiantly attempting to apply makeup while (appearing to be) "fucked" violently from behind.
Fucked explores the notion of what Rebecca Schneider, in The Explicit Body in Performance, calls “commodity dreamgirls,” who function as “signifiers of sexual desire, forever promising, but never delivering sexual fulfillment.” Instead, the sexual desire embodied by these “dreamgirls,” Schneider argues, is displaced onto the commodity form, producing a paradox whereby women, in contemporary American culture, are both quintessential consumers as well as “emblematic insignia of commodity status.” Trapped between these poles of consumer and commodity, the “dreamgirl” is left with no alternative but to figuratively “consume herself.”
Both Fucked and Untitled play on conventions associated with the “commodity dreamgirl”—including prominent makeup, seductive poses, etc.—but at the same time present a deliberately dark view of the sex act which ostensibly underlies that idealized image. This juxtaposition of subjectivity and subjectivization, furthermore, is given another twist by the fact that McQuilkin (both as an artist, as well as in her status as the teenage figures she plays in her works) is taking this pattern of objectification of the female body, and deliberately using it as a foil for her own assertion of an autonomous subjectivity.
Some of the implications of McQuilkin’s thematization of the figurative “dreamgirl” as emblem of sexual desire which is then displaced onto the commodity form, in turn, are dramatically illustrated in a billboard advertisement for Visa near where I live. The original advertisement features a young boy sticking out his tongue to touch a frozen metal pole, and is framed by two captions: one, on the left, positing that “Life takes risks” and the other, on the right, answering “Life takes Visa.”
This rather perplexing advertisement (is it urging consumers, particularly young and impressionable ones like the boy in the picture, to take risks with their credit?) is made all the more curious by the fact that the portion containing the “Life takes risks” motto has peeled off, revealing another advertisement (several layers below) for HBO’s “Sex in the City.” The image—of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) lying sideways in a seductive pose—is, of course borrowed from the opening credit sequence of the series, in which the image in question appears on the side of a bus advertising Carrie’s “Sex and the City” column. In the clip (borrowed from episode six of the first season), Carrie and her girl friends (thought not, significantly, her new love interest, “Mr. Big” [Chris Roth]) are waiting expectantly for the bus to pass by on its maiden voyage. The sequence ends rather anticlimactically, as Carrie is splashed by a car just as the bus is passing by (in the actual scene from episode 6, there is a similar let-down, when Carrie and her friends find that someone has scrawled facial hair on the image) .
This billboard image, in turn, borrows the original bus advertisement to promote, not the HBO series, but rather the series’ subsequent syndication on TBS. Here, therefore, we find Carrie’s eroticized body (including her typically overly-made up face) embedded within a chain of signifying relationships: first used to advertise Carrie’s column, then to promote the HBO series, and then to announce the bowdlerized syndication of the series on network TV. The final link in this particular semiotic chain, meanwhile, is a purely fortuitous one—the accidental juxtaposition, on the peeling billboard, of the hypersexualized Carrie Bradshaw/Sarah Jessica Parker, and the young boy sticking out his tongue.
The resulting convergence of adult sexuality and childhood innocence in the tattered billboard, in turn, is reminiscent of a scene in Eileen Chang’s 张爱玲 celebrated 1943 war-time story “Shut-down” 封锁 This short piece revolves around two strangers aboard a Shanghai tram who strike up an improbable romance while the tram is stopped for an air raid. The ice-breaker occurs when the man (a banker) tells the young school teacher that he had watched her as she boarded the tram:
“You know what? I saw you getting on the tram. The advertisement on the glass at the front of the tram has a strip torn off it. I saw part of you through the tear, just the chin.” It was an ad for milk powder, with a baby’s plump face on it. And then suddenly, beneath the baby’s ear, a woman’s chin had appeared. Thinking back on it, it had actually been quite startling. “Then you bent your head to look for change in your purse and I got to see your eyes, your brows, your hair.” Taken part by part, she did have a kind of charm to her.
The deconstructive attitude toward female sexuality implied in this passage (wherein the woman is initially observed not as a unitary subject, but rather “part by part”) is starkly reinforced by the interweaving of the commoditized image of the “baby’s plump face” and the glimpse of the adult women behind it—thereby exaggeratedly reinforcing the all-too-common link between female sexuality and a perception of youthful innocence.
In the Visa billboard advertisement, meanwhile, we have a remarkably similar instance of a sexualized adult woman being glimpsed through an accidental tear in an advertisement featuring an image of a child. The resulting conjunction of innocence and sexual maturity not only inadvertently draws attention to the inherent oddity of the underlying advertisement (for the TBS syndication of "Sex and the City," in which all of the racy language and occasional nudity of this quintessentially racy show [including discussions of tongues traveling to regions far riskier than the boy’s frozen pole] had to be toned down dramatically in accordance with FCC regulations), but furthermore arguably brings out an element of transgenerational attraction which Eileen argues was present all along in the original show.
This tattered billboard, therefore brings together several intersecting dimensions of Carrie Bradshaw’s identity and significance: the youthful inflections of her adult female sexuality, the tendency to perceive her as the sum of her various hypersexualized body parts, the explicit commoditization (through her column) of her identity and reputation, together with her tendency to engage in impulsive (and risky) consumerism. At the same time, however, just as Alex McQuilkin is using her own image to reproduce, but also to critique, these sorts of attitudes toward female sexuality, we might similarly read Carrie (and "Sex and the City" as a whole) as simultaneously mimicking and undercutting these same tendencies.
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