While the representation of women’s bodies has been a key concern in feminist theory, the 3 short manifestos in the first part of this lesson consider how to represent women’s bodies differently.
Each offer a set of propositions and some guiding principles for creating a feminist politics of the body (through which the authors/all artists supported a larger body of artworks).
Orlan’s Carnal Art Manifesto (2002) is a proposition which supported her practice at the time of writing. Her practice was a series of surgery-performances, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990-1993) and later digital self-portraits, Self-Hybridizations (1998-2007). Orlan’s many projects over a 40 year career have multiple dimensions to them: Carnal Art is just one of them.
Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle ‘Eco-Sex Manifesto’ (2011) summarise their stance in performance as “ecosexuals”, linking a sex-positive and lesbian sexuality with ecology, by performing environmentally themed wedding vows between the two of them in locations around the world (2004-2011). The seven weddings made use of the seven colours of the (Sanskrit) Chakras.
VNS Matrix’s ‘Bitch Mutant Manifesto’ was written by four women who came together to explore ironically and poetically techno-futurism in cyberfeminism. This is their second manifesto. The first was the ‘Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’ (1991). The relationship between body, sexuality and technology is the subject of this manifesto and why it is included here.
Second wave feminism began with a critique of the objectification of women’s bodies and their exploitation as “sex objects” in all forms of mass consumption from advertising to pornography and across mainstream media and the visual arts as well. How women routinely appeared as bodies, as objects, as projections of male desire and not as knowledgeable desiring conscious beings in and for themselves was central to feminist critique. Feminist critique led to feminist invention and re-invention of multiple and different ways of looking at women. Many of these representations creatively subverted or parodied existing representations of women in ways which challenged and questioned the dominant stereotyped, hackneyed and over-familiar images of women’s bodies and identities already visible and present in our cultures. As the content of these images has changed over the last 50 years, so have the ideas associated with women’s objectification. The constant has been that new forms of objectification of women’s bodies persist!
Feminists insist that when we think about the body, this body is always a gendered/sexed body with sexuality. Feminist understanding of how to think about the relationships between gender/ sex has changed dramatically over the 50 years of intensive feminist debate: from questions about sex-roles, sex-attributes, gender as a cultural-political difference, thinking in terms of sexual difference, or considering sexualities as innate (from birth), sexualities as learned, or sexuality in terms of cultural-political-social constructions that are socially maintained.
This is why what is known as or considered female/feminine, or male/masculine is in itself always fluid, dynamic and potentially malleable and has never been fixed or determined (in any decade, century or culture or across any particular community). The central idea pursued by feminism has been to change and transform the dominance of certain images of women where women’s identity is “reduced” to a body seen only through the lens of male desire. Women’s own identifications and projections of their own desire into the production of images of women and men has opened many new perspectives on how people look at images of women’s bodies.
The relationship between sex and gender has been discussed at length in feminist theory. (For an introduction to these debates, see Lesson 6, basic course). Understanding feminist ideas about sexuality, in terms of different forms of sexual identity/identifications or as a critique of compulsory heterosexuality as a norm and finding a way to understand the wide variety of sexual preferences/behaviours/lifestyles amongst human beings, in relation to questions regarding sex (not biology) and gender (not only social-cultural-historical, but also psychoanalytic) has added considerable complexity to these debates.
In the following manifestos, many forms of women’s representation are considered: the body as flesh, the body as an object of plastic surgery or changed by technology, the body as subject to transformation by human intervention, the body as part of the natural world, the body in cyberspace or the body as part-animal, part-human and part-machine. The representations produced subvert and challenge expectations of (Catholic) religious symbolism, ideas about marriage as only a heterosexual institution, the gendered aspects of debates about ecology and human nature, and the relationships between technology, gender and nature.
These imaginaries about women’s bodies (as a battleground) offer potential futures with an expanded set of possibilities as much as they demonstrate different kinds of refusals or resistances to the dominant culture (of heterosexuality and patriarchy).
These manifestos open broader questions about how to think about women’s bodies, their meaning and significance in cultural-political terms. Their ideas touch larger philosophical questions about how to think not just about the body (as a generic category or an object in art), but a body in feminist terms (as a signifying medium and mode of expression for particular forms of consciousness that have a particularity in flesh as physical organic matter and a psychoanalytic register as experiences, sensations and emotions that result from diverse ways of living, each with a specific temporal cultural-historical existence and actual corporeal presence).
These possibilities are accompanied by a subversion of stereotypes, irony as well as parody of cultural norms, as well as some humour, wit and originality !
Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1994) asks many important questions which are relevant to thinking about how these manifestos refuse and endorse different visions of body politics from a feminist perspective:
“What, ideally, would a feminist philosophy of the body avoid and what must it take into consideration? What criteria and goals should govern a feminist theoretical approach to concepts of the body?” (p.21)
How can we think beyond the body as an object of scientific enquiry; the body as an instrument, a tool or a desiring machine at the disposal of consciousness (with accompanying questions of ownership or rights attributed to it); or as a mode of transmission of ideas/expressions from inside to outside and as “a vehicle for the expression of an otherwise sealed and self-contained, incommunicable psyche” (p.9)?
Here are her six proposals for developing a sexed corporeality in feminist theory:-
1. A feminist philosophy must avoid dividing subjects into “mutually exclusive categories of mind and body” by refusing binary and dichotomous thinking, in which mind is prioritised over body (men over women) or the reduction found in Cartesian dualism where mind is reduced to body or the experience of the body to that of the mind. It should seek instead “an embodied subjectivity and psychical corporeality”: a materialism beyond physicalism that would open a space to question these logics and associations.
2. Corporeality would no longer be an association with one sex (or race) which then takes on the burden of Other’s corporeality. “Women can no longer take on the function of being THE body for men while men are left free to soar to the heights of theoretical reflection and cultural production. Blacks, slaves, immigrants, indigenous peoples can no longer function as the working body for white “citizens” leaving them free to create values, morality, knowledges.”…. “Sex is not merely a contingent, isolated or minor variation of an underlying humanity” (p.22)
3. Feminist theory should refuse “singular models, based on one type of body as the norm by which all others are judged” and pose instead a field of different body types with each recognised in their specificity, without any taking on a coercive role of singular norm or ideal for all others…for example, in terms of health or fitness or beauty and desire. And prioritise how this “field may be a discontinuous, nonhomogenous, nonsingular space, a space that admits of differences, incommensurability, intervals or gaps between types, a field, in short, that is established and regulated according to various perspectives and interests”.(p.23)
4. A corporeal feminism would avoid biologistic/essentialist accounts of the body – and make the body instead a site of social political, cultural and geographical inscriptions, production or constitution. The body is not opposed to culture, (a throwback to nature), it is a cultural product. So, it is necessary to explore how possible metaphors – as models – have assumed a mastery of and exteriority to the object of the body and bodies – and to seek other models that “implicate the subject in the object [and] render mastery and exteriority undesirable”.
5. Models must demonstrate an internal or constitutive articulation, or dis/articulation, through the psychical representation of the subject to their lived body as well as of relations between bodies, body gestures, posture and movement in the construction of processes of psychical representations which reconceptualise the body’s own conception of self.
6. Instead of participating in binary oppositions, the body should be seen as a threshold or borderline concept that hovers as: ‘neither – while also being both – the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instructive or learned, genetically or environmentally determined. In the face of social constructionism, the body’s tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be invoked – as a cultural practice’. New frameworks, in opposition to essentialism, biologism and naturalism, are now needed to convey these ideas of the body outside or in excess of binary pairs.
Can we test these propositions against the 3 manifestos in this part of the lesson?
What frameworks, binaries, models or views of women’s bodies are present in them as articulations/dis-articulations of ideas?
Orlan: Carnal Art
The manifesto is in the ebook and online at:
Orlan ‘Carnal Art Manifesto’ n.paradoxa vol 12 (Out of order) July 2003 p.44.*
http://www.orlan.eu/bibliography/carnal-art/
The artist’s website contains many photos of her work, gives her biography, and information about exhibitions and publications on her work.
Orlan offers this definition of Carnal Art:
‘Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense but made by means of today’s technology. It swings between defiguration and refiguration. Its inscription into the flesh is due to the new possibilities inherent to our age. The body has become a “modified ready-made,” no longer seen as the ideal it once represented, not ready enough to be adhered to and signed.’
The ‘inscription into the flesh’ was physical cosmetic surgery on the artist’s body, with the aim of transforming her appearance in particular ways. As she argues her body acts as a “ready-made” (a reference to Marcel Duchamp), and the actions of the surgeon, at her request and by mutual agreement, are both a “defiguration” and a “refiguration”. For example, she altered her brow by the insertion of plastic implants, she attempted to alter her nose by making it the largest that her face could support. None of the alterations were “cosmetic” in the sense usually understood by cosmetic surgeons to conform to ideals or conventions of beauty or the correction of physical attributes with which the patient can no longer live. These operations were not a “correction” to physical disfigurement by disease or the results of accidents or genetic/birth abnormalities and they were not life-saving.
Orlan was operated on several times in different performance-operations under the generic title The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990-1993). The operations were performance events, filmed and broadcast (as TV), and involved interactions with a remote audience (in the gallery) by phone and fax. Photographs were taken, before, during and after the event of her body and the process of her transformation. Throughout, Orlan was an active participant in the event, reading and talking, because the operation was performed under local anaesthetics. Omnipresence was the seventh operation of this kind, which ORLAN staged as a media event on November 21, 1993.
Orlan’s performance surgery made public, as an art event, operations which are usually conducted in closed and pre-determined circumstances with hospital procedures, gowns and protocols. Orlan disrupted this by staging the costumes, choreographing the procedures and by her own ritualising actions, for example, answering questions from her remote audience, while her face or body was operated on.
The manifesto was published 10 years after these events and while she was making a series of digital self-portraits Self-Hybridizations (1998-2007). In these portraits, she merged iconic images from different cultures into fused and hybrid self-portraits, using computer graphics (photoshop) and hi-resolution photography. The changes in textures and forms are still manipulations of the artists’ face as she re-imagines a future self.
Can you identify the imagery she is borrowing and reusing to form these Hybrid pictures?
Do you see her work in the surgery-performances as an “embodied subjectivity and psychical corporeality” or as a “model” of Grosz’s argument in point 5 above?
‘They say I want to be like the Mona Lisa or I want to look like Venus. Actually, I’m trying to do exactly the opposite by demonstrating the vanity and the madness of trying to adhere to certain standards of beauty. But my message gets completely bastardized by the popular press. I have these press conferences because today, after the art boom in the ’80s and then the crash of the art market in the ’90s, contemporary art has been completely discredited in the general public. So it’s really important for artists and curators and journalists to continue serving as a cultural bridge for ideas to the public. It’s very, very important that my message get out in the clearest possible fashion, because when it is distorted, it is distorted by the most reactionary rear guard forces who are actually trying to control all of the freedoms won by contemporary art.’ Orlan
‘I have written a manifesto called Carnal Art. I’m very interested in the fact that pain and suffering have been brought completely under control, and thus we are transcending the Biblical command, especially to women, that you will give birth in pain. In all of my operations I don’t suffer at all, and it’s really a necessary condition for me to undergo the operation. There must be no pain; there will be the proper anaesthetic, etc. So, this last operation is on the theme of pain, and actually the absence of pain. I intend to have myself cut completely open and to show the inside of my body. I would be lying smiling, absolutely conscious and just showing the inside of my body without any pain. And when you open up like that to the world, you are creating a wound which has also sexual and erotic connotations. This would be another stage, the stage of self-mirroring and the mirror brought up to the world. Then, after everybody will have looked into my body, I will simply have it closed back.’
Orlan in ‘Beauty and the I of the beholder: a conversation with Orlan [Out of Actions: Between Performance & the Object, 1949-1979]’ Robert Enright . Border Crossings; Winnipeg Vol. 17, Iss. 2, (May 1998): 44.
In an era predating the Internet and smartphones, ORLAN invited collective participation by broadcasting the performance live to a select audience and providing them with the opportunity to communicate with the artist via telephone or fax. The operating table thus became a stage as the scalpel cut into the flesh to pull off the skin. Carnal Art “swings between defiguration and refiguration,” states the accompanying manifesto. “Its inscription in the flesh is due to the new possibilities inherent to our age. The body has become a ‘modified ready-made’…” In the work the incision into the actual flesh serves as both a cut and an interface, a point at which the body subjugates itself to the image. Body and image are radically inverted – prefiguring a post-photographic age in which manipulation, modelling and self-promotion are becoming an unspectacular part of everyday routine.
Further Feminist essays and books about Orlan.
Jill C. O’Bryan Carnal art: Orlan’s refacing (University of Minnesota Press, l Minneapolis, 2005)
Kate Ince Orlan (London: Bloomsbury, 2000)
Peg Zeglin Brand ‘Orlan Revisited’ https://philarchive.org/rec/WEIORD
Blistene et al, (ed) Orlan: Carnal Art. (Paris: Editions Flammarion, Rizzoli, 2004)
Gabriela Cala‐Lesina ‘Orlan’s Self‐Hybridizations: Collective Utopia or Twenty‐First‐Century Primitivism?’ Third Text, Vol 25 2011 issue 2. pp. 177-189
An interview with Orlan can be found on the AWARE: Women Artists website: ORLAN, between artist and robot 24.03.2018 | Nathalie Ernoult and ORLAN
A recent interview on Art Net summarises her operations-performances from this period.
There is also a film-length documentary on her work: Orlan – Carnal Art (2001) Documentary.
Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle
Their ‘EcoSex Manifesto’ (2011) is in the ebook and on the artists’ website, Sexecology.org where they describe it:
‘In this manifesto, the female body is an object of lust and a subject of pleasure. The alignment of sexual pleasure with the fecundity of the earth takes a new twist to become the pleasure of the body echoed in the saving the planet, the joy in sex transforms into the growth and beauty of the earth. Replacing the known destructive values of pillage, theft and rape associated with negative sexual experiences and exploitation of the earth are reimagined orgasmically, potentially.’
These works were made as marriage between women only or between men only, and not civil partnerships, became legalised in different countries. While their wedding-performances can be seen as a protest for recognition of LGBTQI rights in marriage, the alliance with ecology and how sex and love can save the planet is distinctive. Placing joy in sex and lesbian sexuality at the heart of the work subverts many ideas about who can save the planet from its destruction by humanity.
More about their performances:
At the invitation of Linda Montano – creator of Fourteen Years of Living Art (1984-98)- self-proclaimed “ecosexuals” Sprinkle and Stephens have been aiming to merge sexuality with ecology by performing their environmentally themed wedding vows in locations around the world (including Santa Cruz, Zagreb and Venice) over the last seven years [2004-2011]. The pair considers these weddings symbolic gestures that “help to make the world a more tolerant, sustainable and peaceful place.” In accordance with Montano’s structure, each year’s wedding corresponds to a specific chakra. This is their final year, and it celebrates the crown chakra, which is represented by white or silver and associated with union and bliss. On March 26, 2011, Sprinkle and Stephens made their vows to each other – and to the snow – at Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts in Ottawa, in White Wedding to the Snow, a Galerie SAW Gallery collaboration with the La Petite Mort Gallery, the University of Ottawa, Venus Envy and Inside Out Ottawa-Gatineau LGBT Film and Video Festival.
‘ANNIE SPRINKLE ELIZABETH STEPHENS’ Anna Khimasia Canadian Art Vol. 28, Iss. 3, (Fall 2011): 174-175.
Green Wedding #4, (4 May 2008) was an extravagant affair that included twenty-one mini-performances, three large cakes, hors d’oeuvres, and a Green Dinner produced by Dogstar Catering. Dedicated to “love, compassion, earth, and environmentalism,” Green Wedding #4 was produced by Stephens’ and Sprinkle’s Love Art Laboratory. The colored weddings relate to Montano’s 14 Years of Living Art, a performance based on the seven chakras. For this piece, Montano wore the color of each chakra for an entire year, and then repeated the performance — for seven more years. She then bequeathed the work to other artists: Sprinkle and Stephens decided to make their love into art just as Montano has earlier blurred the lines between art and life by making herself a work of art. By proclaiming queer love as art, Sprinkle and Stephens performatively challenged love’s hetero-normative construction, which made legalized gay marriage a seemingly unattainable goal. If Out of Actions suggested that live art was no longer relevant, then Intervene! has reintroduced an optimistic belief that action/live art can make a difference.
Jennie Klein ‘INTERVENE! INTERRUPT! RETHINKING ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE’ Art Papers 32 no4 18-21 July/Aug 2008
In both of these quotes, Linda Montano’s work is cited as the “mentor” or model for Stephens’/Sprinkle’s work. 14 Years of Living Art is a performance cycle, the link here is to Video Data Bank’s preview of one small segment of this work.
This is the publisher’s view of the book: 14 Years of Living Art.
The ensemble of her [Montano’s] work is about living more spontaneously and fully, about locating internal balance and serenity, about centring attention, about finding a voice. Her “living art” manifesto not only proposes that “life can be art,” it also provides practical instruction on how to make “living art,” in order to achieve this state of focused intention and presence.
interview with Linda Montano in Ascent (2007)Love Art Lab’s play with the ‘normative symbology’ (as Elizabeth Freeman puts it) of romance, marriage, togetherness, monogamy all toy with the consolation of cliché. But if marriage and its normative behaviours and expectations might console by permitting access to the social resources and privileges conferred on the basis of marital status, as Kipnis writes, then we might also feel a certain consolation in the rituals of resistance. Geoffrey Hendricks was an officiant and regular at a number of the weddings, always offering his trademark yogic headstand – his head connected with the dirt in a symbolic upturning of the normalised order of things. This reconnection with the earth goes to the heart of the environmental emphasis of the weddings from 2008, when the first ecosexual event was staged. But, authorised transgression notwithstanding, the carnivalesque exuberance of the project took it beyond the consoling solidarity of romantic love and the associated critical problems of being hooked into the conditions of one’s own oppression, in Berlant’s formulation, towards the more utopian possibilities suggested by Muñoz.
Critical closeness, intimate distance: encounters in the Love Art Laboratory. By: Cairns, Jon, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 14702029, Jun-Nov 2017, Vol. 16, Issue 3
How do these weddings as performances subvert or challenge our understandings of marriage beyond the conventions of heterosexuality?
What do the invention of new rituals at these weddings mean for how we can develop different kinds of understanding of ecology and love?
Annie Sprinkle, Post Post Porn Modernist, performances, 1990-93
Annie Sprinkle’s earlier work on her own website, is associated with another manifesto, the Post-Porn Manifesto (1991), which was written by Vaginal Davis. This is because her earlier work in the 1980s and 1990s was a mixture of sex-(re)education, critique of the porn industry’s cliches and celebration of women’s sexuality.
A sex worker, Annie Sprinkle moved into the art world with her 1985 participation in Deep Inside Porn Stars, a performance at Franklin Furnace in New York. Since then, she has performed in art venues as a whore/performer turned art/performer, still with “clients” to seduce and pleasure; one of the effects of Sprinkle’s merging of “sex work” with “art work” is the collapsing of class distinctions (from lower-class whore/porn star to the cultural cachet of artist). She has also transformed her pornographic film career, moving into the production of self-help/”art”videos on female and transsexual pleasure. Sprinkle’s work is nothing if not about mediation. (Perhaps this is to be expected from someone who proffers her body regularly on the art and pornography markets; the body/self is most directly “given” and yet never really “there. “)
Sprinkle’s most incendiary performative act is part of her Post Post Porn Modernist performance; developed and performed over the last several years, the piece includes several different narrative segments. The most explosive moment occurs when Sprinkle displays her cervix to audience members: she opens her vaginal canal with a speculum and beckons audience members to file by and take a look, welcoming photography and videotaping. (It is, one senses, precisely through such acts of techno-voyeurism that Sprinkle can experience her own self-display.) Handing each spectator a flashlight to highlight the dark continent of the female sex, Sprinkle interacts with them as they file by.Amelia Jones “Presence” in absentia: Experiencing performance as documentation. Art Journal; New York Vol. 56, Iss. 4, (Winter 1997): 11-18.
VNS Matrix – Bitch Mutant Manifesto (1994)
The text of this manifesto is in the ebook.
It was also published online in n.paradoxa online issue 4, Aug 1997.
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt.
Their website is vnsmatrix.net
The page dedicated to this Manifesto highlights how it was written as an intervention for the Ars Electronica festival in April 1996. When I first published it in n.paradoxa, they gave me the date of writing as 1994.
Along with Sadie Plant, the group are credited with the invention of the term “cyberfeminism”.
One of their earliest projects was Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st century (1991), a poster/image/statement smuggled into various websites, placed in the printed advertisements of magazines and posted in public spaces, as well as broadcast over the radio and on television and online in various remix and broadcast forms. The text of this poster is available here or here.
In the manifesto, they use metaphors to turn the world of computing and the internet into a collision with orgasmic metaphors of female flesh. They code this in gendered and deliberately pornographic terms, because they are against the building of “big daddy mainframe” and visions of a new world of technology built only as a masculine and totalising fantasy of control. If it reminds you of dada poetry/manifestos or even the Vorticists, you should not be surprised.
In the early 1990s, the internet was used predominantly for two areas of work: discussions about coding and computing as well as the sale of computer components (geeks) and pornography. The consumers of these items were largely men and women’s bodies were highly visible as objects in these systems. The internet itself started as an idea for a secure communication channel for the military. Donna Haraway refers to this function of thinking in ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985) when she talks about a command, control, communication, information (C3I) view of the world.
The public vision of the World Wide Web (W3C) from Tim Berners Lee began in 1989 and it is only in the 1990s that “civil society”, Universities and other branches of government (including museums) started to develop their uses of the internet. Web 2.0 (a term coined in 1999) which led to social media is less than 20 years old. Facebook started only in 2004.
‘The romanticism of ’90s cyberculture, for example, can also be tremendously invigorating. It reminds us of how absolutely fucking remarkable our current era is. Just look at the excitement you find in authors like Sadie Plant, VNS Matrix and Sandy Stone when they talk about the instant availability of knowledge, the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the near total interconnectivity of the planet. It’s too easy to see the present as something banal or unremarkable.’
‘Feminisms of the Future, Now: Rethinking Technofeminism and the Manifesto Form’ Hogeveen, Esmé. C: International Contemporary Art; Toronto Issue 32 (Winter 2017): 20-27.
Another major project of VNS Matrix, «All New Gen» is found in a poster.
Female ‹cybersluts› and ‹guerrillas,› ‹anarcho cyber-terrorists› infiltrate cyberspace and hack into the controls and databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe, the Oedipal man. The aim of the game is to sow the seeds of the New World disorder to the databanks and in this way to end the rule of phallic power.
All New Gen refers to both new generations and genders. VNS Matrix plays with different sexualities and gendered roles, quotes from popular culture and cultural theory. Cyber-sluts resemble female action-dolls, and their well-designed interfaces acknowledge the role of gender technologies and made-up femininities.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/all-new-gen/
In their webpage, VNS Matrix, outline how this text is a collage of elements – “a mashing, a weaving”, readers are “catapulted” from element to element, in a “combative aesthetics”:
The writing is by turns ecstatic, ugly, coarse, brutal and gothic. The text was forged via heated debate around terminology, propriety and pathology. Maybe it comes as no surprise that this text has not spread as virally as the first manifesto. It’s longer, messier, less appealing to feminists of a certain stripe. There is no gesture towards academic discourse, and little care for poetic prettiness.
What are your reactions to the text? What are the images of the body in this text that you find striking, shocking or disruptive?
Further Reading
Verena Kuni, Cyborg—Communication—Code—Infection: ‘How Do Cyborgs Communicate?’ Re/Writing Cyberfeminism(s)
Third Text; September 2007, Vol. 21 Issue 5, p649-659, 11p
Zoë Sofia, Contested zones: futurity and technological art.
Leonardo; 1996, Vol. 29 Issue 1, p59-66, 8p
See Verena Kuni ‘Die Flanerin im Datennetz. Wege und Fragen zum Cyberfeminismus’ in Sigrid Schade-Tholen/Georg Christoph Tholen (eds.)Konfigurationen. Zwischen Kunst und Medien (Munich, 1999) pp. 467–485
Louise Mayhew ‘VNS Matrix: A case study of women-only collectivism and collaboration in Australia’ from her PhD ‘Female art collectives and collaborations in Australia c.1970-2010’ (University of New South Wales).
The group still work together.
You can read their own analysis of the 1991 manifesto, written in 2018:
https://vnsmatrix.net/essays/manifesto
Below is a video of a keynote lecture given recently. Just because the manifesto is from the mid-1990s, you should not think that the issues and ideas have gone away. They continue to reverberate in contemporary cyberculture theory, in debates about how we use the internet, and in what is built as the dominant culture within it.
DNL #2 CYBORG – Keynote “Hexing the Alien” with Francesca Da Rimini and Virginia Barratt 6 July 2015 as part of Disruption Network Lab.
VNS Matrix played an important role in the development of Cyberfeminism in media art, and is the precursor to many other cyberfeminist manifestos, including #Glitch feminism (2013), and the next two manifestos explored in Lesson 3, Gynecene Manifesto (2014) and Xenofeminism (2015). Here is Legacy Russell’s definition of #Glitch feminism which she allies to queer feminism.
There was a time when the word “queer” was confined solely to the realm of the pejorative. “Glitch” as a term within technocultures is also often placed within a similar category, steeped in negative connotations. The reclamation of queer is to material body politic as glitch is to digital corporeality; the two are, to use a term coined by Lauren Berlant, inherently “juxtapolitical” (Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint, 2008). Thus, glitch offers up a queering of constructions of the body within digital practice, carrying forward the torch lit by groups such as ACT UP or Gran Fury in respect to queerdom, or collectives like the Old Boys’ Network with their ‘100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism’ (see Lesson 1) the VNS Matrix, or SubRosa, as linked to cyberfeminist histories.
Legacy Russell ‘Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the Genesis of Glitch Body Politic, 12 March 2013’ https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/12/glitch-body-politic/
Orlan
CARNAL ART MANIFESTO/L’ART CHARNEL (2002)
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Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle
EcoSex Manifesto (2011)
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VNS Matrix
Bitch Mutant Manifesto (1994)
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Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea (2015, Bucharest, Bologna)
Manifesto for the Gynecene – Sketch of a New Geological Era
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Laboria Cuboniks (a collective of six women) Xeno-Feminism: A Politics for Alienation (2015) – also on the group’s website in several languages.
