Argentinian performance artist Amalia Ulman has hijacked Instagram as her creative narrative form of choice. In the conceptual performance she calls “Excellences and Perfections” she has fabricated an Instagram feed that tells the story of a woman who has just moved to L.A. to try and become a model. The feed of photos chronicles her slow arc into what Ulman calls “middle brow femininity.” This essentially constitutes girls commonly referred to as “basic” or average in their tastes which include, but are not limited to, working out, yoga, Starbucks, quinoa, etc.

This ties in with our work on autobiography and the tension between self-representation and identity construction. With Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, we have never before existed in a time with so much opportunity for this kind of hyperreal and relentless identity construction. Instagram can almost be likened to the many frames of the self like the comic book form afforded for Spiegelman in Maus. But once we construct something, does it cease to be true from the nature of constructing it?

By Ulman creating this account that “passed” as real, she is drawing attention to the manufactured nature of our social media “selves” as such. The ambiguity of “truth” makes us pause on our own tenuous identities. We are mutable, formable, and pictorial artifacts of ourselves. Thus, as Friedlander asks, how do we navigate the “dilemma of wanting to engage in the culture of self-representation online without creating a fallacious fantasy image?” But, my question is, isn’t self-representation always a fantasy image just by the very nature you you having to imagine it and construct it for yourself in the first place?

To-reimagine something and conjure up its memory, is an act of creation itself. As we have seen in Stories We Tell, the past is composed and manufactured upon  recall. Ulma’s project brings focus to the problem of “the real” assumed in autobiography. Even if we can never truly achieve a “true” account of “what happened,” how can we tell a story that is still important to tell?

The video today in class raised questions of representation. The argument being made was that the U.S. media was coming to Haiti to represent Haiti to the rest of the world but the Haitians didn’t really have a say in how they were being represented. The man from the video felt that they were misrepresenting Haiti and only showing “the bad.”

The idea of representation is a large part of our course and an important topic in contemporary culture. For example, misrepresentation perpetrated by the U.S. has been a large complaint coming from many Muslim communities. Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, in her TED talk “Art in Exile” talks about how she constantly has to fight how Iranian women are being portrayed in the U.S. media as powerless and oppressed. She works to find images of all the powerful, educated, and resilient Iranian women to show others in the Western world.

Jasbir Puar similarly discusses this concept in his essay “Homonationalism and Biopolitics.” He cites how the Revolutionary Association of Women from Afghanistan said that the Feminist Majority Foundation (from the U.S.) came to Afghanistan under the guise of “liberating” women but really came to spread and inculcate U.S. political and economic power in Afghanistan. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s “hegemonic, ego driven, and corporate feminism” came to position the U.S. as an “arbiter of appropriate ethics, human rights, and democratic behavior while exempting itself”  (Puar 8).

As we can see, the U.S. savior complex belies the assumption that because the U.S. is so “advanced,” it is their “responsibility” and “duty” to save the world from their “primitive” infrastructures. In both the Middle East and in Haiti, we see the U.S. media representing these places as below them, thus inciting a savior complex predicated on a false sense of superiority. The power of representation lies in the hands of who is doing the representing.

Works Cited

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.