Fotocumbia* Amalia has described the images proliferating on fotocumbia as asses, cars and cumbia (which is a type of music). Her research into this, as a user of photo-sharing platforms, and the resulting essay, titled F/F, posits that this process is not so much exhibitionism but more a movement, a vessel for the moulding, the trading, appropriating and honing of the aesthetics of social groups, thus reinforcing divisions such as gender and class.
For Amalia, the idea of performing identity as a practice, in public, online, feels not so much an exhibitionism of herself or body, but a distribution of images, and performance, the performance being a new face, the cell, the facemask as a protective veil between self-exposure and acted out narrative. I’m know that questions raised in regard to this approach in an artists practice are often around the risk in using images that present the body, and how this is positioned within gender politics. For now I can say that for the artist, it is an approach that views the, ‘social constraints’ – as was put by Goffman – as divisions, objectifications, even amongst the opportunity to perform otherwise. And in fact the context reinforces constraints and affirms them, and by participating in them through an art practice, one highlights this. The act of recording publicly, which feeds into Amalia’s practice is what the successful elements of mass observation channeled – the idea that a collective history can be recorded immediately in the present, from many things, in many ways. That the idea of recording isn’t simply taking an image – it is also the words and interactions of people, or the responses of poets, artists etc. – essentially a much more holistic way of recording history as it happens. Specifically what is vital to thinking about Amalia Ulman’s work, is that these explorations into mediating images of herself across all sorts of networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Fotocumbia etc. is not the art object itself, more it is a part of weaving a performative narrative to act as the foundations for then reading her installation, sculpture and video work – These works do not feature her body image, but take the aesthetic language of the sectioned elements of society she has explored be that middle class lifestyle homeware, or fotocumbia body images.
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