LEAH SCHRAGER: THE EVOLUTION OF SELFIE FEMINISM

Leah Schrager: Yes! I sent you a message because I loved the article you wrote about Andy Kassier. More generally, I really appreciated your perspective and writing on art and Instagram. Then you responded and mentioned that you had already written about me!

And yes, I am still active on Instagram. Its visual layout has always made sense to me, so it's always been my favorite social platform. It is communicative, contemporary, and engages with people outside the art world. It's a unique way to experience art, and much of the impetus for my work comes from this framework. For instance, how can you post nudes on Instagram without breaking their rules? This inquiry led to the INFINITY SELFIE series. Or how do you create an actual story on social media? This question inspired the MAN HANDS project, a long-term performance. And how do you create a celebrity as an art project? That resulted in my 5 million followers on Instagram.

One of my favorite articles by you for Monopol Magazin really gets to the core questions of Instagram, performance, reality, and art.

LS: I would say that I’ve merged photography and performance art because of Instagram. My NAKED THERAPY project was my first major performance art and social practice work, and that was pre-Instagram. I think of INFINITY SELFIE as my signature series. It takes images of myself that cannot be shared on social media due to nudity and repeats each image an infinite number of times, thus effectively allowing the image to be shared. The goal of the ONA ARTIST project was to create a celebrity as an art practice so that I could appropriate my own image as a celebrity.

A few years in, with around 3 million Instagram followers, it became clear that my success on Instagram was making it impossible for my EP and album to get any attention. Since I had no budget, I focused on where the organically generated audience was, and that was Instagram. However, this male audience restricted me in other ways. So, when a producer approached me to create a female-friendly project centered around myself, I was ready to try.

MAN HANDS was a two-year project in which I shared and developed the narrative based on my relationship with this producer while continuing to explore what it means to be a celebrity today. It was really intense! But it was cut short by COVID, so in a way, I feel I still have to share some works to wrap it up.

LS: I am not affected by negative comments about my body. They really don’t bother or affect me at all! It took me some time to reach this point.

LS: I was really frustrated with the fact that being the model in my artwork meant that the work was dismissed on that basis. At that time, the best-known art dealer told me, "Selfies are embarrassing, unless you're Amalia Ulman," which made me mad!

I had started as a modern dancer but became frustrated in that arena because I didn’t own my own image—the choreographer or photographer did. So in 2010, I began making visual work, initially creating derivative pieces and then doing selfies in order to own the copyright to my image. This situation, where the model is also the artist, leads to a specific relationship between the model and the art. It's a more self-conscious, self-reflective, and self-critical relationship, fraught with new levels of intimacy and estrangement.

Then in 2014, I encountered a new frustration—I had achieved my goal of being both model and artist, but I was told again and again that this basically made my work "not art." My curatorial goal with BODY ANXIETY was to showcase artists who were both the model and the artist of their work. This tended to attract a web-interested crowd since the internet is such a fertile place to present, re-present, and interact. BODY ANXIETY brought to light a previously undiscussed topic, as evidenced by the incredible reception it received in the press.

LS: Yes! It was a complete surprise! I couldn’t believe I was talking to Artforum! Johanna Fateman interviewed me, and I was totally starstruck! The press loved that it was a real grassroots effort that captured a fresh and unique group of artists. Ann Hirsch’s quote is featured on the landing page and in the image of the show, and it is also the first sentence of the Artforum article: "Whenever you put your body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn." I love this closing paragraph of the Artforum article: "As skeptical inheritors of the third-wave pro-sex torch, they share no unified agenda, only a cultural predicament... [they] seem to pull off the paradoxical feat of taking back their images at the very moment of surrender."

I love all the works in the show, and as time goes on, I appreciate its existence as a marker in time.

LS: We were criticized for not being diverse enough. This criticism emerged at the beginning of what is now a very common consideration in curating. It effectively shut down the project and prevented us from continuing it as a series of shows.

LS: Haha, that’s a good question. I guess I’m over my frustration from 2014, as I’ve come to accept that it's the nature of institutional art! Right now, I’m really focused on creating visual work and just enjoying making art on my own.

My art changed a lot in 2022 when I moved out of NYC and had my first baby. I then took my longest break from making art—six months. When I returned to it, I was intrigued by AI, and all my art since then has incorporated AI. I've also been very excited about the NFT space, as my works have always been digital in origin.

Oh wait, I am frustrated with something... I’ve had a few instances where my AI work was taken down from platforms or not allowed because AI is involved in the process. I had thought I was creating more artistic—read: less controversial—work and that I’d no longer have to face censorship, but now I’m encountering it from a different angle. I love the possibilities of AI, but I’m learning that it will also take time for it to be institutionally accepted. I think it’s a bit like photography—at first, people thought it wasn't art and viewed it as a threat to traditional art, but it slowly gained acceptance and is now a very standard medium.

Gosh, that's a lot of frustration. It's interesting to look at my trajectory through that lens. I think, as a female performer, when I encounter prejudices, I instinctively push against them. Isn’t that an appropriate response for an artist?

LS: Yes! I think selfie feminism will continue to evolve with each generation, and artists will explore selfies in different ways as culture and the Internet progress. I believe that self-presentation by women still does not receive full respect in the art world. There's still much to explore on that frontier.

LS: I think this is still the case for the same reason it was before: a woman’s image needs to go through the hands of a man to be respected as art. If the woman is deemed attractive, her work is often dismissed as too commercial. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, if a woman is seen as using that attractiveness in the wrong way, then the commercial world won’t have her! So it’s a strange in-between, and selfie feminism is the primary space where this tension is being explored. There is now a bit more acceptance of certain kinds of female artists, but the "inappropriately attractive" ones are still unwelcome.

LS: I'm honestly not sure. My sense is that they're still pretty similar. My work is based on my biography and changes as I get older, so what I was creating when I was younger is different from what I'm making now. For example, Ona Artist is sexy! She’s a young woman on the web—single, forever young, and always available. That was the persona I was working with in my 30s, and it aligned with my real self as a young artist romping around NYC. But now it’s different. I have two kids and am in a different stage of life. My aesthetic explorations in ALIGNED WITH THE UNIVERSE reflect where I’m currently at—thinking about the body, motherhood, the land, and new possibilities.

Regarding how topics have changed, I'm curious what you think about this question.

LS: You express that perfectly. What happens to a woman’s image once it’s published? There are so many different places it can end up! It can go viral (with or without the model receiving credit), it can be censored (removed from a platform), it can infuriate, or it can inspire. Somehow, it often seems to be controversial or instigating in some way. We see this a lot in mainstream media, and I think it’s interesting to assess this in art: what does it mean? An image can be used to scam—I regularly encounter people taking my image and pretending to be me online. My PSA on such catfishing is: if the profile is not on the model’s official website, don’t send money to it!

I think I have a similar perspective as before regarding the things that frustrated me; I’m just a bit less concerned about them now. I’m more accepting; it’s just the way things are, and it will take time to change. I’m doing what I can to be a voice in the mix, but I can only do what I can do.

Yes, ALIGNED WITH THE UNIVERSE is very much about change. I think there are more questions in the images, less directness, and more room for interpretation. I actually feel that I am more invested in the internet now as a broadcasting and sharing space. When I lived in NYC, I often shared my work there, but now that I live on the side of a mountain in the Sonoran Desert, it’s even more important for me to connect with others via the internet. This is another reason why I’m excited to be releasing this series as NFTs—it feels like reaching out and represents my first big investment in the community, and it’s a relationship I’m already enjoying developing.

In the images in ALIGNED WITH THE UNIVERSE, I retain the majority of what could be read as AI mistakes, such as distorted hands, faces, and limbs. I keep them because I like them. They act as a marker of time—where AI is today. They also symbolize the untouched truth—the gritty and the messy. Hands are so important when holding babies. I appreciate that in these images, you can’t tell which universe the hands belong to. My main adjustment to the bodies was to extend or accentuate the lines or curves at times—to make the most of the movement in the figure.

LS: Haha, yes! That is one of the meanings. I like the ambiguity of the title. To me, it encompasses a mix of meanings: that things are not as they seem, that there is alignment in chaos, that the title is an absurd phrase, that we now live in the cloud, and perhaps, ultimately, that we all create our own alignment, whatever that may be.

LS: I’d like them to see beauty, fun, play, dance, the impossible, the possible, and love.

LS: No. I feel very strongly about this topic: I don’t think art has to have a message.

I once had a phone call with my father, and we were discussing my art. I agree with my father on many things, but not everything. I said my art does not have a political message. He insisted that it does, that no matter my intent, it does. I think he meant that if I could align my political message with what is correct, it would help the reception of my work. But I’ve just never felt comfortable presenting my work in a political way.

As mentioned earlier, I see my artwork as stemming from my own biography, and I hope there’s a truth there that cuts through any politics. What happens when a woman puts her body online? What is the reaction? What does this reveal about our society? I am not here to provide answers; I’m here to present the artwork to people so they can react and find their own answers.

LS: I did not know what to make of AI when I first heard about it. I think it came to my attention more during COVID, but I still didn’t understand it. It felt like a foreign entity using a different language.

LS: Yes, completely. I interviewed Margaret Murphy on my podcast, WOMEN AS/IN ART, and she spoke so eloquently about AI that it got me interested in exploring more. I started on my Mac laptop. On the first day, I downloaded Midjourney and uploaded an image of myself to use img2img (image to image). I was wearing a bikini, and Midjourney immediately flagged it as going against their rules and would not accept it. I was shocked! Censorship in AI? Apparently so. I did some further investigation and found Stable Diffusion. After trying DiffusionBee, I realized I loved it and did a local install of Stable Diffusion on my laptop. It was slow (Macs are much slower than Windows for AI), but I loved it so much that I bought a $6,000 Windows desktop with an NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics card two years ago. Since then, I’ve had such a blast learning and working with AI.

I saw the artistic potential right away with AI. Img2img allowed me to upload an image of myself as the base of the work. Using an image of myself as the base came directly from my prior artwork and is an important throughline for me. It’s an extension of the idea in the essay THE FEMALE PAINTER that I wrote for BODY ANXIETY. There, I discussed how men have used a blank canvas to paint on, while women are now using images of themselves.

Previously, I had used photographic images of myself to work with. With img2img, a new horizon has opened up—I can still use my image as the canvas, but it’s an incredibly versatile canvas! The next step is working with different Stable Diffusion models, settings, and text prompts to achieve the desired final image. It can be difficult to get the settings right, but once I do, the images just flow out!

LS: They are very different processes. I still use the camera to capture images that I then put through AI. AI has changed the way I use my camera; I am now more focused on composition, colors, and shapes.

LS: Kind of. I think the word 'selfie' can be used in a derogatory way. I still cringe a bit when I see it. But 'self-photography' feels too formal, so I don’t know if there’s a better phrase.

LS: Sometimes. It depends on who is using it and how they are using it! The art dealer from the story I shared earlier is an example of someone who is actively dismissive—I was doing selfies, so the images were dismissed as embarrassing. Maybe it’s like Duchamp’s urinal—it’s a cultural artifact placed in an artistic context that prompts people to discuss what that means. The urinal was a readymade; the selfie is a 'readyportrait.' However, other critics use the phrase in a non-dismissive way as a means to bring up and discuss important topics—such as yourself.

LS: I feel like we’re just at the start of a very exciting horizon. My prediction is that as AI artwork is further developed and discussed, it will bring more opportunities for female artists. It feels like we’re at the very beginning of an exciting frontier. What will it look like to align with the universe as this technology rapidly develops? I’m excited to see!