The Show Must Go Home: Senior Thesis Exhibition Spring 2020

Blake Hilton

@GLITTRRR
Blake Hilton

It begins and ends like this: Beauty equates to Desire. Desire equates to Sex. Sex equates to Love. Love equates to Happiness. What would you do if you could have all of this and more for only $7.99 at Target? Buy it, of course! Buy the damn razor and make yourself complete! Be the Venus and the Fire and the Desire! This chain of transitive property is precisely what so many companies use to target female consumers. The pixels on the screen manifest to resemble slender, bright-eyed, youthful women - they are effortlessly gorgeous, excruciatingly cool, and hypnotizingly powerful. We know little more about them than this - they are, in essence, beautifully primed canvases for which the consumer projects themselves, their wishes, and their insecurities onto. With anti-consumerist activism recently becoming a popular topic to preach on twitter, in conversation, and in academia - these archetypes are sometimes subject to ridicule and scrutiny. Subjects and objects of both love and hate, desire, and detest. Is anyone truly above it all? Emancipated from the iron grip of capitalist manipulation? Even as I sit here in isolation pontificating on the woes of consumerist gas-lighting, I don a pretty dress from Zara and wear several cosmetic products. It is easy to resent the poster children of consumerist beauty and label them as shallow, unintelligent, bimbos. It is difficult to realize that maybe we are the poster children too. It is dizzying to grapple with the idea that we sometimes may enjoy it.  

            @GLITTRRR is a performance piece mediated through Instagram that wrestles with several conflicting ideas. It critiques advertisements and products that manipulate women into feeling inferior while also engaging in an earnest play with them. It calls out the western ideal of beauty these products promise to create while developing an intelligent, thoughtful, and humorous personality for the archetype. The character, @GLITTRRR, is always changing. She begins her online presence with interest in beauty, lifestyle, and vlogging. As time progresses, she moves away from that and becomes engaged with art, philosophy, music, literature, language, and any other topic that intrigues her. Her eyes are encrusted with delicately placed rhinestones that sit atop her eyelids - at once unblinking and closed. @GLITTRRR’s appearance changes a few times during the duration of the performance - her role fulfilled by multiple women. The videos and photographs that she posts are well contained but have a level of imperfection and absurdity to them. A cat eye tutorial begins the way one would expect but proceeds to take over her face. A video where @GLITTRRR talks about Clement Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch while getting ready maintains an earnest review on the essay while blindly applying Abstract Expressionist inspired makeup. An Instagram live stream where @GLITTRRR is showing her viewers how she puts on her rhinestone eyes is interrupted by the camera falling forward so that only the floor is in view. @GLITTRRR's online presence is not intimidating or pathetic, but rather genuine, insightful, and curious.

@GLITTRRR, at one point, discovers Jean Baudrillard's philosophy of the hyperreal, which significantly impacts her perspective and has a lot to do with how I think about this project. @GLITTRRR herself is hyperreal. She is a caricature of the idealized woman according to western beauty standards. Today, there are so many different ways femininity enters the realm of hyperreality. Lip fillers, cosmetic surgery, eyelash extensions, hair extensions, diet pills, colored contacts, laser hair removal - all of these products and services create the hyperreal vision of Woman. They accentuate or eliminate; they are Realer than the Real. @GLITTRRR's discovery of this concept causes her to question her role in the world and consider how companies may be manipulating her. This epiphany creates an internal conflict in @GLITTRRR as she genuinely loves being a part of the beauty community but is fearful about its implications. She has a hard time digesting that everything she engages with is hyperreal and finds herself despairing over the inescapable nature of it all.
Another philosopher that I am looking at in regards to this project is Jaques Lacan and the mirror-phase. 

The mirror phase lays out how we perceive ourselves and looks at the ways we try to attain the "idealized self." With this project, I am looking at how certain advertisements aim to make women feel inadequate and incomplete so that we will buy products we don't need. They do this by creating an arbitrary relationship between product and abstract concept. For instance, in a Venus razor ad, there might be a slender, white woman gazing out at a picturesque beach with the caption, "Reveal the Goddess in You." 

This ad communicates that a pink plastic razor is equal to beauty and power (via sex). It also implies that there is something the consumer lacks that must be revealed. Even the name itself references the Roman goddess of love, sex, and fertility. Why not the Athena - the Greek goddess of wisdom and war? I aim to gently point that out and reveal how ludicrous yet incredibly effective this tactic is. @GLITTRRR's main product that she advertises is a rhinestoned razor from a company called Super Sexy Razor Company. When she promotes this company on her Instagram, the viewer may click the handle and will end up at their Instagram page, but find that it is almost empty. The website link doesn't work, and they have no posts. Their bio indicates that they have a sister store, and the viewer may follow these links until they end up back at Super Sexy Razor Company's page, illustrating the circular and inescapable nature of this insecurity based consumerist manipulation.

The awkwardness of @GLITTRRR's videos is because of the performer's inability to see. The caricature of @GLITTRRR is a thin shell of femininity that all women dip their toes into every day but is rarely a perfect fit. @GLITTRRR’s role is performed by multiple women because almost all of us are all implicated in this patriarchy imposed archetype. I see this caricature as a visibility standard that women are held to. What type of woman is awarded a platform and an audience to speak? What must she talk about to be heard? What hoops must she jump through to be seen and taken seriously? It is clear that conventional beauty is a form of social and economic currency - if you have that people will listen to you. @GLITTRRR’s rhinestone-encrusted eyes are a metaphor for the blindness archetypal femininity imposes. @GLITTRRR may think that these eyes help her  “see so much better”, but in reality, they are completely limiting. She has been made to feel as though she needs these eyes when she could be freer without them. There is a degree of ignorance in Instagram influencers or celebrities when it comes to their social media presence. They have no idea who is watching them, or how their content may affect their viewers - positively or negatively. In cases like Kendall Jenner or Bella Hadid - these Instagram supermodels make a lot of money off of making women feel insecure. Do I think these women are inherently evil because of this? No, but I do think they are willfully blind to the potential harm they cause. I find it hard to condemn them because while it is easy to place blame on the individual, the larger problem is the patriarchal systems that cultivate these beauty standards and reward people who look a certain way. The products and props @GLITTRRR uses are covered in glitter and rhinestones to illustrate the useless nature of the objects. Rhinestones are a simulacrum of precious gems that are symbolic of wealth and class. The advertisements for beauty products promise power, love, and happiness. In reality, both are just plastic and have no relation to the thing they represent. They may be pretty, but they’re largely worthless. 
Artists that I am looking at in regards to this project are Liza Lou, Mickalene Thomas, and Martha Rosler. Other literary and online influences include Judith Butler's Gender Troubles, Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp, Rosalind Krauss' The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, and the CGI Instagram personality @lilmiquela. I am interested in the materiality of Liza Lou's beaded Kitchen and Mickalene Thomas's glitter paintings. The tedious nature of applying glitter and rhinestones to surfaces is an action that contains both pain and love - another contradiction within the scope of the work. Martha Rosler's critiques on the patriarchy and male gaze resonate strongly with me and Semiotics of the Kitchen is one of the first art performance videos I ever saw. The other writings I mentioned before have informed the way I consider gender, performativity, camp versus drag, and the exclusionary standards of the modernist avant-garde. @lilmiquela is an uncanny, hyperreal Instagram personality that I have drawn inspiration from, but I believe to be the antithesis of this project. 
What I hope the viewer will take away from this project is not a condemnation of beauty products and women who engage with them, but rather a critical ambiguity with them. While companies indeed rely on consumers feeling insecure and incomplete to sell their products, @GLITTRRR herself is undeniably whole and complex. She also happens to love shiny things and beauty products. She suffers from insecurity and self-doubt like everyone else. It is not her fault, nor is it the fault of any other woman if we are socialized to love some of the patriarchal structures that pervade every facet of our society. It is possible to enjoy things like makeup, perfume, high heels, or fashion while also being critical of them. Whether we like it or not, most of us are dipping our toes into consumerist femininity already. So, while we are here, we may as well allow ourselves to have some play with it - @GLITTRRR is a manifestation of that.

To learn more about Blake's work visit:
https://blakehilton.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTnV7yN7xJxRHCJ510X8-0A?app=desktop
https://www.instagram.com/glittrrr/?igshid=x63q6p9bnngg​​​​​​​
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