Who Am I Doing This For?: The Dirty Subjectivities of AnnaMaria Pinaka

Figure 1.

AnnaMaria Pinaka. Photo credit: Denis Shelby.

“It is 2014 and I’m anxious.” This is how omar kholeif starts his preamble to You Are Here: Art after the Internet, an anthology of critical responses to the production of art in the online age. The experience of time, kholeif argues, has radically changed since the incorporation of the internet within our everyday practices. Google calendars, Outlook calendars, and iPhone calendars produce a conglomeration of commitments “that have been scheduled, synched up, and fixed across multiple platforms that bind and enforce my daily life.” ¹ The internet makes time public, tangible, and multiparallel. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram turn personal engagements into public announcements and enable us to visit and revisit material bodies and experiences, past and present—our friends’ as well as our own—at all times. As a result, the virtual manifestations of our personal identities have become archives. To quote kholeif: “We have become narcissistic egos sharing, intertwining, interlacing, and interfacing.”² The internet may indeed confront us with new forms of ego-driven encounters, but I wonder to what degree it is fair to call these encounters narcissistic. Isn’t the amplification of the self so deeply encouraged by the social media-driven structures of the present, so integral to its existence, even, that there’s nothing unusual about it anymore? Has the cultural reproduction of narcissism not become a corporate technological and commercial function rather than the aggregate self-contemplation of millennial egos?

As a child of the digital age, I have always been interested in the extent to which the online world separates my sense of subjectivity from those of people who grew up in a world without the internet, without public profiles, without selfies. I was delighted, then, to discover the work of the Greek artist and scholar AnnaMaria Pinaka, whose work addresses the conditions of technonarcissism and their impact on our ideas of selfhood. Born in Thessaloniki in 1983, Pinaka studied video art, film, and photography in London and went on to complete a practice-based PhD at Roehampton University. An abridged version of her dissertation, titled Porno-Graphing: “Dirty” Subjectivities and Self-Objectification in Lens-Based Art, was published by the Dutch art publisher Onomatopee in late 2017. A book-length version of the dissertation is currently in the works.

Pinaka’s work is aligned with self-objectifying art practices of the digital age in that it explores the parameters and complexities of its own complicity in this trend. Pinaka’s artistic work and scholarly writing interrogate the extent to which the body that self-objectifies (the artist), the act of self-objectification (the artwork), and the witnessing of such self- objectifications (the spectator) are complicit in a game of perversion, or, as Pinaka puts it, the “dirty-ing” of the Self. In her performances, be it on a stage or pre-recorded on video, Pinaka grinds against walls, cross-dresses, masturbates, or dances around like a teenage girl would in her room. Her work addresses the porosity of posturing, the self-protective guises we put on when we leave the intimacy of our homes, and the potentially shameful, “dirty” desires and truths that lie underneath these same masks. Pinaka’s performances bring to mind the work of other contemporary artists whose work engages with posturing and self-performance in the age of the digital device—Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (2015) and Petra Cortright’s video work, most notably VVEBCAM (2007), come to mind. However, Pinaka’s work differentiates itself through its dependence on a unified practice: a practice that Pinaka terms “porno-graphing,” or the self-documentation of intimate acts for the sake of making art. Such an intimate act can be as graphically explicit as penetrative sex, but it can also be a conversation between mother and daughter, the consumption of a meal, or the application of lipstick. Porno-graphing is concerned with a technologically enabled shift from the realm of...