Me, Myself and I - How Many Bitches?

- Identity, art and gender in the age of technomanipulation

In the course of history women have been in the focus of artistic and
media attention, but not primarily as acting subjects and individuals.
Quite the opposite; the images of women's bodies have provided a surface
to project desire, they have provided an object for the male gaze, a
handy vehicle for signification. And a requiring, insatiable mirror of
ideals - for women to look at.

It is quite a recent phenomenon, and largely an effect of explicitly
feminist criticism and theory, that women have more consciously started
to create their own images: images in which women are agents, producers
of meaning. Images in which they are not only objects of the gaze, but
also active subjects of their own desires, which, I have to say, vary
greatly among human beings gendered as "women".

During the past twenty-five years or so women artists working in the
Western world have enthusiastically used the so called "new artforms"
for their purposes. This means that they have eagerly grabbed
photographic and video equipment for their use. They have created
performances using their own bodies. And they have combined all of these
means, often with fruitful results.

[…]

I see Marita Liulia's CD-rom Ambitious Bitch as a part in this continuum
of feminist work. From my point of view this specific artwork offers a
good possibility to reflect upon some crucial issues concerning the
different identities, mediated representations, and material, bodily
presences of women. And, of course, upon the relationship between art
and technology.

For starters I have to mention that in this particular text I am going
to speak, at least partly, in quite a subjective fashion; after all, I
have been posing as many of the bitches you are going to meet in
Liulia's work. My body forms the base for the "animated Bitch-doll" as
well as for many other images in the program. And I have to say that I
found the combination, the role of a model and a theoretical feminist
adviser extremely functional.

[…]

Ambitious bitch forms a time-consuming, not endless but massive
procession of images, texts and sounds interwoven into each other. As a
viewer, user and reader of this parade - and as a poser in it - I am
constantly reminded of the historically, culturally and socially
constructed naturalization of "female femininity".

Almost every picture - and there are many of them - speaks about this
problem through its own and obvious unnaturalness. Many of the figures
are distorted, the colors are intensified or changed completely. Even
the sounds are markedly techno-processed. And finally the contradictory
slogans connected to the images assure us that there is no Natural Woman
who would be Naturally Feminine. There is no single essential womanhood.
But there are multiple, contradictory characters, qualities, epiteths
which have been gendered. This gendering happens in a field of power
which surrounds us and brings forth women - and respectively men.

[…]

So Ambitious Bitch takes shameless advantage of the possibilities the
computer allows in the manipulation of images. And, without falling into
any kind of uncritical techo-hybris, I have to stress the metaphorical
opportunities that computer-aided manipulation gives in terms of
visually dismantling the stereotypical expectations focused on the image
of "The Woman".

[…]

Actually Ambitious Bitch is quite bitchy in its attitude, in its
"criticism". All kinds of different sources are quoted and mixed:
feminist thinkers and creators of fashion, anonymous women and anonymous
blonde jokes, tarot cards and Finnish fiction. No information is proved
"better" or more trustworthy than the other. It is the context,
connections and juxtapositions that build up the changes in atmosphere:
from matter-of-fact to irony.

[…]

To be or not to be a bitch /