The theme of the relationship between art and technology runs through twentieth-century art and is expressed in the vision of fully mechanized bodies. The machine-woman, the female robot who is an object of desire as well as of anxiety, appears at the center of this problematic. For the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, the female automaton serves as a metaphor for an effort to rethink the creative act in an era marked by the crisis of traditional artistic forms. If every object can now be mass produced and is reproducible, the idea of the painter who creates a unique and original object with his own hands suddenly appears ill suited. As it emerges in the early twentieth century, the female automaton is thus expressive of problems relating to creativity, to reproduction, and to procreation in the industrial age and, consequently, helps to redefine the relationship between the original and the copy.(1)
        The various machine-like incarnations imagined in the course of the twentieth century refer back, in an ambivalent way, to the threat, but also to the innovative potential, of technology for the artist now confronted with the new conditions imposed by industrial capitalism and the expansion of technologies involving the reproduction of images. In this context, the machine-woman takes the form, in each instance, of a strange, menacing, desirable, and fetishized object, but also of a potentially subversive one.

Production and Reproduction

        In June 1915, Francis Picabia, just arrived in New York so that he could escape the war in France, published a drawing entitled Fille née sans mère (Daughter born without a mother) in the review 291.(2). It was an abstract drawing, the first in a series of “mechanomorphic” drawings in which the artist developed the theme of the artificial woman, born of the union between man and then-expanding technology.(3)
        The content of the drawing remains difficult to grasp in figurative terms. Fille née sans mère shows an interaction between mechanical elements and other, apparently more organic ones: a machine with geometrical forms seems to be expelling some round parts that suggest the image of a human body produced by a machine. In the round parts on the right side of the drawing, one might be able to identify some forms that are evocative of breasts and eyes, which seem almost propelled outward by a mechanism activated by a spring-loaded device on the left. Yet it is the title, above all, that leads to an anthropomorphic reading of these abstract forms as human forms expelled by a machine.
        The motif of the creation of a human being without the intervention of a woman has mythical origins. Present in Western culture since the Greek myth of the birth of Athena, who exits from the head of Zeus, it reappears in the Christian myth of the birth of Eve, who is modeled from Adam’s rib. Nonetheless, Fille née sans mère evokes more specifically the ancient myth of Pygmalion, which, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tells the story of the artist who completely fabricates a woman in perfect conformity with his desires.
        Fille née sans mère evokes this Pygmalion theme by transposing it onto modernity, for it is suggestive of a female creature produced by a machine manipulated by an artist. The same thing may be deduced from a text by Paul Haviland that was published in the following issue of 291: “We are living in the age of the machine. Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is his ‘daughter born without a mother.’ . . . Photography is one of the fine fruits of this union. The photographic print is one element of this new trinity: man, the creator, with thought and will; the machine, mother-action; and their product, the work accomplished.”(4)
        In adapting the ancient myth of the artist as demiurge to the new conditions imposed by the development of technology, Haviland makes reference to photography, that is to say, to a practice that itself is born of technology. In a quasi-incestuous relationship, photographic processing in some way makes the daughter of man also become his mistress in order to be able to engender the work. The machine, imagined as a daughter subject to the father’s authority and incapable of acting or producing alone, thus takes on, in a contradictory way, the role of a mother whose sexuality is controlled by man. In the same way, in the reconfiguration of the myth as proposed by Picabia, the mechanical and female elements are brought together, or rather superimposed, and the creative process becomes confused with that of (re)production. Production, procreation, and reproduction thus become metaphorically neighboring terms, all of them referring back to the problem of artistic creation in the age of technological reproduction. In this sense, the process of procreation envisioned in the creation of a female android refers back to the new modes of production and reproduction of images and to the loss of what Walter Benjamin described as the original character of the work, its here and now(5). To the original, the unique object produced by the artist’s hand, is now opposed mass-produced objects and images executed by mechanical processes. Recurrent use of the machine-woman theme in avant-garde movements thus serves as the vehicle for anxieties felt about these changes and becomes central to the search for a new artistic paradigm that would be capable of facing up to the crisis provoked by technological development and the resulting loss of aura of the work of art.
        Fille née sans mère established an explicit connection between procreation, industrial production, and artistic creation. The topos of the nature/culture opposition thus is detourned: woman, bound to nature, is now associated with technology, modernity, and artistic creation. As a hybrid, she is situated in an interval where the question of procreation refers back to technological reproduction: she is reproducible but cannot produce. Through this figure, technology establishes an ambivalent relationship between the work of art and its creator. The machine-woman is implicated in the production process--since it is with her help that the artist produces the work--but she also constitutes the artist’s object of desire and creativity. In this sense, Fille née sans mère refers back to the promises and threats of modernity for the artist.

Visual Technology

        In opposition to these compensatory fantasies in which the feminine functions as a--mythified and eroticized--mediating element between the artist and the new image technologies, in artistic practices informed by feminism the identification of the female body with technology produces a critical and deconstructive effect.
        Valie Export belongs to the generation that has chosen to use new media while rejecting the (implicitly masculine) tradition of painting. The choice to work with a technological medium thus fits into a feminist program where the question of gender in relation to technology is given new emotional investment in a provocative way(6). One of her best-known works, Tapp und Tastkino, executed in 1968 in collaboration with Peter Weibel, investigates the relationship between the female image, the viewer’s desire, and visual technologies. The action unfolds in the street, in Vienna, and belongs among the works the artist has executed in the framework of expanded cinema--that is to say, the extension of cinematographic forms to performative actions. Here, the body of the artist replaces both the cinema screen and the physical film. During the performance, Valie Export’s torso is literally contained within a sort of miniature theater, a box with curtains that conceals the body’s nudity. Weibel, the artist’s companion at the time, was at her side; using a megaphone, he invited passersby to slip their hands through the curtains and thereby touch her naked breasts. Substituting touch for sight, the female body is presented in its classic role of erotic object.
        The Tapp and Tastkino action is based on the analogy between the female body and cinema qua system and device, and it investigates, in an aggressive way, the voyeurist pleasure of the viewer. This viewer is in effect publicly invited to touch what in cinema can only be looked at: the woman’s body. The viewer’s desire, normally protected by the darkness of the theater, is here exposed to the public, while the cinematographic screen and the image are replaced by the real body. The critical dimension of this action resides in its unveiling of the mechanisms of voyeurism: its various components are deconstructed in the exposure of the viewer and the literal identification of the object of desire with the cinematographic apparatus. During the action, the artist regards the viewer with indifference while she times the act in an unrelenting manner. In this way, she detourns the relationship between viewer and viewed; from the status of woman-object, she transforms herself into the woman who is the possessor of the gaze and who exercises control through an implicit threat.
        In this process of identification of the real body with a visual-technology apparatus and of their superimposition, Valie Export takes up again the classical figure of the female automaton. This female automaton is the object of an impossible love, for her mechanical nature renders her indifferent to the desire she arouses.
        The subjective involvement with the technological apparatus and with the cinematographic image is nevertheless accompanied by an obvious element of risk. Despite the masculine presence of Weibel, the performance device is ambivalent because the artist appears exposed to the potentially aggressive desire of the viewer. In another connection, the identification of the subject with the artificiality of the automaton detourns the eroticism between the male artist and the object of his creation: the ancient myth of Pygmalion collapses in the superimposition of the two roles. The identification between body and image radicalizes the tensions between the statuses of subject and object, a tension in which the artist who uses her own body as artistic material inevitably finds herself imprisoned. And yet, what appears to be particularly traumatic in this performance is not only the involvement of the real body--we are far from metaphor--but also the aggressive impulses she sends out simultaneously against the viewer and against herself. The erotic tension and the power relationship she establishes demonstrate that Tapp und Tastkino contrasts with the “classical” feminist rhetoric concerning the liberation of woman’s body. The performance is explicitly ambivalent as to the liberatory potentialities of technology. It deals rather with the possibility of imagining anew the female body’s relation to technology and to images, within an accepted tension between desire and repression.

Seriality of the Female Body

        It might be assumed, from the example of Valie Export, that the resurgence of the theme of the female automaton within contemporary art would be tied to a feminist problematic. I would like, however, to introduce an example that might be described as postfeminist and that indicates in a troubling way the persistence of this female figure in an era marked by the forms of fetishism imposed by late capitalism. The performances that have made Vanessa Beecroft famous since the mid-1990s revive the figure of the female automaton.
        Far from Valie Export’s (nevertheless, as we saw, ambivalent) process of subjectivation and consciousness-raising, Beecroft’s performances appear to be nihilistic, anonymous, and pornographic. Young women, more or less in a state of undress, pose as silent presences in a given space, in most cases the empty room of a museum or a gallery. These young women are nearly the only artistic material employed by Beecroft(7), who orchestrates their presence through the staging and choreographing of bodies in the exhibition space. They do not interact either among themselves or with the audience, and they cannot be approached. These women display total indifference to the event their presence constitutes. They are the objects of one’s gaze but they themselves have no right, according to the instructions the artist has given them, to look at the viewers(8). Their expressions are to indicate, rather, absence, boredom, melancholy--a reference to the gaze in the classical representation of the female nude, who must not disturb the viewer’s voyeurism(9).
        These bodies appear to be inanimate, uniform, and anonymous. Their artificiality and that of the situation as a whole contrast with their nudity, an element that might however refer back to the body’s naturalness. Yet these women have nothing natural about them; despite their nudity, these bodies appear constructed, made-up, and standardized, staged like (not very) living statues. Performance VB46 (VB for Vanessa Beecroft), executed at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles in 2001, constructs a science-fiction-like atmosphere. In the White Cube of this American gallery, a bright light envelops a group of nude models who, with shaved pubis and standing in white high-heeled shoes, their hair cut short and colored white like their bodies, are arranged in concentric circles. Referring to this performance, Beecroft declared that her intention was to create a white monochrome effect(10), which harks back to the use of the female body as allegory and, simultaneously, as material for painting.
        Yet it is here that the model’s metamorphosis into an android becomes more explicit: in a dizzying seriality, the models appear to be reproducible like clones. The orderly and artificial white bodies of this performance evoke a technological-phantasy imagery suggestive of the reality of biotechnologies and the phantasy of the body’s reproduction not by a machine but through gene replication, through life itself. In a fashion similar to contemporary science fiction, this performance not only concerns the vision of a utopian future but also refers to the feeling of disorientation [dépaysement] with regard to a present that is caught up in the acceleration imposed by life’s instrumentalization in contemporary scientific and cultural practices.
        In Beecroft’s contrivances, there is repetition that is unending or, rather, without an original. The twofold fetishism in which the female bodies are caught is obvious: these bodies are not only reified but also displayed like commodities on supermarket shelves. Beecroft uses the serial form in a special way: all these bodies resemble one another without however being identical, but the elements of difference are so minimal that they end up validating their repetitive character(11). Thus, there is repetition of a female norm: the model’s body itself embodies the inextricable connection between the reproduction process and the commodity.

Notes