Posing as art: the ambiguities of feminist body art and the misclassification of Natacha Merritt’s pornographic photographs

Abstract

At the launch of the twenty-first century, the online pornographic photographs of Natacha Merritt, a young American woman (23 years old at the time), were categorised as art in two publications by art publisher Taschen, precipitating a critical acceptance of her work as such. This particular foray of pornography into an art context was briefly contested by one art critic; however, this relatively rare example of misclassification warrants further investigation in order to better understand the role played by what had, by the late twentieth century, become a pervasive post-feminist culture. Drawing on feminist media studies writing that analyses post-feminist modes of “self exploration,” and feminist art criticism on the ambiguities of feminist body art, this paper argues that Merritt’s “adult-oriented” online digital photographs are more persuasively situated within the increasingly prevalent online genres of the intimate blog and amateur porn. Acknowledging the risk of “collusion” inherent in feminist artworks that focus on the objectified female body, this paper concludes that a compelling critique of a post-feminist (pornified) culture resides in the reactivation of a politics of female sexual pleasure.

Keywords:

• Post-feminism
• pornography
• feminist art
• intimate blogs
• pornified culture

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank The Glasgow School of Art for providing Research Development Funding to present an earlier version of this paper at the Console-ing Passions 2015 conference. I would also like to thank Professor Karen Boyle and Sarah Neely from University of Stirling for their insightful comments on this paper as it developed.

Notes

1. www.natacha-merritt.com.

2. Examples of other books purchased include Eric Kroll (1994), Diane Hanson and Eric Kroll (2013) and Richard Prince (2011). Accessed July 7, 2015, Amazon.co.uk.

3. There are also a small number of promotional reviews and articles in publications as diverse as Playboy and The Guardian, details of which are included on Merritt’s website’s Press section (Natacha Merritt 2015b).

4. The term or category of “bad girl” art emerged from three major survey shows in the mid-1990s: Bad Girls, co-curated by Kate Bush and Emma Dexter at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1993 and two linked bi-coastal American survey shows in 1994, Bad Girls curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum and Bad Girls West curated by Marcia Tanner at UCLA’s Wight Gallery. Unifying the work included in these three shows was the use of humour as a subversive tool, for instance through visual punning or one-liners.

5. Other examples of artists who choose to use paint and other media to frustrate access to the pornographic image are Marlene Dumas (b.1953), Lisa Yuskavage (b.1962) and Wangechi Mutu (b.1972), to name a few.

6. Although it is beyond the scope of this discussion to fully explore this point here, as with Warhol’s film, Buxey’s sexual partner remains off-screen, which has the effect of moving beyond a heteronormative paradigm to invite queer looking pleasures.

7. Content on Merritt’s digitalgirly.com website has changed significantly over the years and it currently acts as a promotional site for her second book, Sexual Selection.

8. Body Anxiety is a group show by 21 media-savvy young artists, the vast majority of whom are women, who use a variety of performative strategies to examine self-representation online. The exhibition presents a range of critical works that harness various techniques of appropriation to challenge the enduring objectification of women and the insistence on heteronormativity in mainstream culture.