Feminine Aesthetics as Feminist Critique in Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (2014)

Excellences & Perfections is an immersive art performance that was carried out on Instagram in 2014, in which the artist Amalia Ulman performed feminine tropes common to Instagram culture to assert a feminist critique about the constructedness of femininity. Approaching Excellences & Perfections through the framework of affect, performativity and cyborg theory, this thesis investigates the critical and empowering potential of feminine aesthetics, as well as the creative and entrepreneurial possibilities of using social media platforms to produce feminine subjectivities. Ulman is blurring the boundaries between character and self, artist and artwork, reality and fiction, and by interweaving aesthetic and narrative tropes of femininity, she produces a rich fabric for understanding the complexity of feminine representation in contemporary digital society. By examining the feminine tropes that Ulman embodies in the three episodes that make up the performance, I will argue that these tropes, which can easily be dismissed as reductive stereotypes that flatten the diversity of female experience into mere image, in fact can be read as multilayered critical commentary about the relations between the representations of young women, the logics of neoliberal consumer capitalism, and gendered embodiment in the contemporary contexts of social media. My analytical method involves relating the tropes evoked by Ulman’s characters to feminine stereotypes and symbolic figures that are conceptualized to represent certain themes and assert a specific critique about contemporary society. Through this relation, I provide a reading of Ulman’s characters as manifestations of those themes and criticisms, which allows me to explore how femininity is employed as a tool, both in the discourses of feminist internet art, and in the cultural and social contexts that produce ideals and pedagogies that shape women’s self-expressions. The aim of this thesis is to show that Excellences & Perfections embraces a double movement of feminist critique, one that foregrounds how these tropes are constructions that can easily be reconstructed, deconstructed and repurposed, while also giving existential legitimacy to the lived subjectivities that are made to emulate them. This way, I argue, the work critically subverts the feminine image and celebrates its feminist potential, without erasing the real experiences that are framed by it