Throughout Mika Rottenberg’s career, the artist has – as she puts it – rented the bodies of extraordinary women. By this she means that she has hired women with non-normative bodies who might be contortionists, body builders or specialise in squashing fetishists.1 These women, who Rottenberg calls her “talents”, elect to capitalise on fetishisations of their bodies, which exist in excess of normative beauty standards, and are considered disgusting to some but extremely desirable to others. For her video and installation Cheese (2008), Rottenberg hired six women with hair that fell well past their toes. This work was inspired by the Seven Sutherland Sisters, fin-de-siècle American women who both fascinated and disgusted people with their hair, which reached a collective length of 11 metres. The sisters made their debut as circus freaks, and later went on to create a “miracle” hair growth product that was primarily targeted at balding men. In Rottenberg’s video, however, the long haired women create cheese. Cheese is set on a goat farm and the sunlit “talents” are dressed in ankle-length white dresses. Their house looks handmade, cobbled together from scraps of wood, and in installations the video is often shown on monitors in structures that resemble their chicken coop-like dwelling. Rottenberg’s critics have regularly questioned her use of non-normative bodies, and a similar debate occurs among the women themselves, who ask whether capitalising on the fetishisation of such bodies is empowering or exploitative. And if one or the other, then how and in what ways?
By referencing the Seven Sutherland Sisters, Cheese points to long-held traditions of spectacle, of non-normative bodies displayed in freak shows, as well as to women’s practices of financial self-empowerment through the objectification and commodification of their own bodies. Cheese plants such traditions firmly in a media-saturated age; some of the women featured make money in the porn industry. Critics often bring up the questionable ethics of Rottenberg’s depictions of so-called “extraordinary” bodies and the power dynamics of her gaze, but to date the issue has only ever been raised as a question, and the artist has had the final word. When Merrily Kerr asked her in 2007 if she could “be accused of exploiting [her] characters”, she replied:
I’m always waiting for that question. In a way, I am using the actors almost as objects, which is supposed to be a bad thing to do. I’m not trying to be a saint, and I don’t think the artist’s part is to be the ‘good guy.’ I often feel uncomfortable in the position in which I put myself, but my connection with the actors runs like an experiment, a behavioral observation, or a motion study. You could argue that we have an equal and satisfying relationship serving each other’s needs as exhibitionist and voyeur.2
The gaze that non-normative bodies tend to receive is either a stare, or a turning away so as to avoid being perceived as staring. William Ian Miller describes this as an inherent property of disgust, writing that:
Deformity and ugliness are further unsettling because they are disordering; they undo the complacency that comes with disattendability; they force us to look and notice, or to suffer self-consciousness about not looking or not not looking.3
Although non-normative bodies have tended to elicit fascination, this fascination is often seen as undesirable: the urge to stare can prompt guilt and disgust in the starer. For Miller, this causes us to “impute to the disgusting a will to offend. The obese are thus fat because they are unwilling not to be.”4 Non-normative bodies threaten the agency of the starer by soliciting attention the starer does not want to give, which can unfairly cause resentment.
In her 2007 statement, Rottenberg implies that paying for and filming extraordinary bodies does not necessarily entail their objectification – instead, both watcher and watched are “serving each other’s needs”. There are certainly formal and narrative decisions that are more respectful than others, and the notion that to objectify necessarily means to rob of agency has been troubling to feminists and object-oriented ontologists alike.5 Yet although this early position embraced the ambiguous ethics of her practice, Rottenberg took a stronger stance in 2011:
I get offended when people ask me if the actors with whom I work and who I call talents are being exploited… they have a total self-awareness and an ideology behind their looks…. If you rent out your body as they do, you do on the one hand objectify yourself, you alienate certain features in order to commodify them; on the other hand, it is a method to regain control over an unruly body… if you see someone who is at ease with an extreme body, that is inspirational.6
There are inconsistencies in Rottenberg’s defences of her work that are conducive to understanding the uncomfortable questions that her work raises. Can consent ever neutralise the power dynamic at play between exhibitionist and voyeur, a question of sexual ethics rooted in the gaze and, by extension, in film? Furthermore, holding up stories of fat or disabled people as “inspirational” is often problematic, reinforcing ableist notions that it is miraculous for a fat person to have a positive body image, or for a wheelchair user to find love.7 Such notions are ignorant of disabled subjectivity and assume that non-normative bodies and minds cannot be happy, powerful, or successful, while reinforcing normative definitions of happiness, power, and success.8 This is not to say that long-haired, fat, or extremely muscular bodies are necessarily disabled. The social (as opposed to medical) model of disability serves as a useful framework for thinking about the ways in which non-normative bodies are socially abjected. While a medical model of disability describes people as disabled because of their own ‘impairments’ (which should be ‘treated’ medically, even when these differences are not harmful or unhealthy), the social model describes disability as the result of normative societal structures which privilege certain bodies. In the latter case, it is not the disabled body that needs ‘curing’, but it is the responsibility of society to remedy access and accommodation.9
Literary scholar Mary Russo opens her book The Female Grotesque by noting that the word grotesque evokes the cave – literally, ‘grotto-esque’ – which she interprets to reference “as bodily metaphor . . . the cavernous anatomical female body”.10 She does not claim this interpretation as the original nor only use of the word. Notably, her argument on the female grotesque is predicated on a lack, as what Lacan would have described as male fear of the daunting female void, positing absence as abject. The abject female bodies in Rottenberg’s work, however, are bodies in excess. Recall the Seven Sutherland Sisters: men flocked to see them because of their excessive hair, which represented what they lacked, and paid them in the hope that the Sisters could remedy their baldness. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud posited that because female bodies remind men of their castration anxiety, they fetishise something other than female genitals as a substitute for woman’s missing penis. The fetishisation of female excess explored in Rottenberg’s videos affirms his theory. In other words, according to Freud, one deals with what Russo terms the “female grotesque” by ignoring the lack and fixating on a replacement – in the case of long-haired women, an excess. This configuration flips penis envy on its head: the women have in excess what the men lack, rendering them simultaneously objects of fascination and disgust.
Disgust toward bodily excess is often based on capitalist logic: we are disgusted by that which is not productive. That which disgusts is also excessive in the sense that it does not obey norms, is overindulgent, and cannot be contained – in both aesthetic and moral terms. Fat bodies are often assumed to be unhealthy and not working hard enough – though one’s body type is actually determined by a variety of factors including class and genetics. Likewise, disabled bodies are often assumed to be unable to work. In the case of Rottenberg’s female bodybuilders, it’s a little different. Heather Foster, who Rottenberg worked with for Tropical Breeze, commented that, “People may not want to look like us, but at least they appreciate the hard work and discipline it takes to achieve this level of fitness and muscularity.”11 In other words, Foster’s excessive muscularity may be aversive to some – especially because she is a woman, and muscularity is considered masculine, rendering her body unfeminine, ‘unproductive’ in its perceived unsuitability for reproduction. Still, though her body may elicit aversion, she is at least respected as hard-working.
Rottenberg’s “talents” set out to retool disgust by turning their bodily excess/excretions into economically productive forces, both in her films and in their professions. Take Mary’s Cherries, in which women cut their extremely long, red, manicured fingernails and roll them into maraschino cherries. And in Dough, a woman sniffs flowers, which elicit an allergic reaction; the tears and snot that drip down her body become ingredients in the dough she produces. While in Cheese, Dough, and Mary’s Cherries women produce what resemble consumable substances, the videos focus on their production, not ingestion. In the end, the repulsive nature of the nail-clipping-cherries and snot-laced dough renders their production unproductive.12 As Hsuan L. Hsu put it in his Camera Obscura article on the artist, Rottenberg’s factories…
do not yield manufactured products so much as they yield agglomerations of excretions: tears, sweat, hair, sneezes, milk, faeces – not what bodies produce but what they consist of and secrete.13
Abject bodily parts and substances become ingestible goods, though ones likely to produce vomiting – a cyclical logic that parallels Marx’s description of capitalism, wherein capital is accrued and increased for capital’s sake and to no apparent end. In rendering the production line in the terms of abjection, Rottenberg reveals how disgusting this mentality is – once we have cast something off as abject, the idea of reingestion is often nauseating.
Mary’s Cherries, courtesy Sprüth Magers
The bodies Rottenberg depicts are those regularly cast as unproductive. Under capitalism, women’s bodies have been valued as reproductive forces while people deemed unfit for manual labor have often been seen as disabled – though as Lennard J. Davis argues, Marx’s own work was unfortunately bound to ideals about average workers and normalised bodies.14 Although the body types required for profitable labor have shifted over the course of the 20th-century, this has happened in unequal ways across racial and geopolitical lines. Rottenberg demonstrates this in Squeeze (2010), which highlights the metric by which some women’s bodies are deemed less economically valuable than others. Depicted are two uniformed white women with teased hair, enormous breasts, and manicured nails enjoying a break: one eats a white-bread sandwich for lunch, while another has a cigarette. Elsewhere, connected through Rottenberg’s absurdist mechanical production line, South American women labour in a field. When they reach into holes in the ground, the video cuts to Asian women manicuring their disembodied hands through the hole. The types of labor they perform stereotype their geopolitical region.
Bodies that are viewed as not working to maximise societal productivity – or worse, are viewed as holding productivity back by requiring additional accommodation – are abjected in myriad ways. The worship of productivity in capitalist culture not only works to marginalise non-normative bodies, but is also directed toward queerness and fetishistic: non-reproductive sex is considered perverse and, indeed has been at times pathologised. Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish has frequently been cited in short critical reviews of Rottenberg’s work, and given her regular use of both factory settings and fantasy workers, it is clear why the application of the concept to her work seems appropriate. For Marx, commodity fetishism is that which transforms economically and socially constructed value into the perceived intrinsic value found in the commodity itself. This perceived intrinsic value affirms what he describes as the alienation of workers from the commodities they produce and consume. But in Rottenberg’s videos commodities are abjected (or alienated, objectified) parts of workers’ own bodies. Milk exemplifies a substance cast off – sucked or squeezed – from a female body and turned into commodity. In Cheese, an analogy is revealed between selling one’s milk as a commodity and selling one’s image as the long-haired women do both in and outside of Rottenberg’s video. Instead of fetishising the commodity-product (milk), fetishes (long hair) are commodified. This encapsulates the entanglement of the commodification of everything and the objectification of women’s bodies. While it is the cast-off nature of a substance that renders it abject, this alienation is also precisely what renders it a commodity.
The long-haired women of Cheese elect to have long hair, which requires certain accommodations. On set, the six women went on strike when Rottenberg, with limited shooting time on location in Florida, initially refused them the 12 hours of hair washing time they demanded. To compromise, the artist allowed them to wash their hair in shifts so that production could continue.15 She was reluctant to adequately accommodate non-normative bodies, faced with pressure to instead maximise productivity. Yet in the logic of her videos, her subjects rule their self-contained worlds, and the production lines are shaped to their bodies. They are the norm and are productive. The videos, then, give form to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s imperative in The Biopolitics of Disability to consider how “alternative cognitions/corporealities allow us to inhabit the world as vulnerable, constrained, yet innovative embodied beings rather than merely as devalued social constructs or victims of oppression”, by quite literally mining the body’s material differences toward alternative conceptions of “productivity” (or, more accurately, parodying capitalists’ obsessions with productivity).16 On set, however, the accommodations her talents required in a world not built for them caused friction. Rottenberg has also noted that many of her “talents” regularly give her a discount because they believe in her work.17 But if the artist is arguing for renting bodies as a means of empowering them, then why wouldn’t she pay them the full price? There is another option. We can see the proffered discounts as affirming the notion that it is not simply currency that can turn bodily excess into power (wherein power equals capital), but that certain formal and narrative representations are more empowering than others. This attracts talents to her work, although this does not mean that her work is free from the baggage of a history of abusive representations. For instance, the talents are rarely given lines in Rottenberg’s videos – in Cheese the women do not speak. Accordingly, Eleanor Hartney commented that, “It’s not obvious if they are empowered or enslaved. They might be entrepreneurs, or they might be chained to sweatshops.”18
Although they almost never speak on-screen, the talents were given voices when interviewed by the artist in her most recent monograph. At times, the interviews read as efforts to absolve the artist of guilt, but they also highlight the talents’ fascinating lives. Many admit to having been skeptical about collaborating with Rottenberg. While the filming of non-normative bodies entails a complex power dynamic that is often linked to a history of abuse (as does the filming of women’s bodies), what if Rottenberg were to only use normative bodies, as artists and filmmakers so often do? When non-normative bodies are occasionally represented in media, they are often cast as oddities, or as unexpected heroes often played by abled actors.19
Dough (2006), courtesy Sprüth Magers
Queen Raqui, the protagonist of Rottenberg’s 2006 video Dough, is the most enthusiastic defender of Rottenberg’s formal and narrative devices. A size-positivity activist and a fantasy worker who specialises in squashings, Raqui specifically agreed to participate in Dough because she felt the project was not exploiting women of size as comic relief.20 The film showcases an all-women assembly line in which workers pull a rope of dough through a claustrophobic, Rube Goldberg-like system. The protagonist, played by Queen Raqui, is placed at the center, and when she sniffs flowers, her allergies trigger a chain reaction; her snot and tears become part of the recipe. She has RAQUI embroidered on her outfit, a detail that references her work and biography beyond Dough’s fictional narrative. In the real world, she uses the money she makes squashing to support her family as a single mother, and to fund her activist website www.LargeInCharge.com. She writes that “Queen Raqui was born out of necessity; Raqui of LargeInCharge was born out of dedication and determination.”21 The profits from an industry happy to equate women’s bodies with objects and thereby commodities are used to support her family and activist projects. Raqui expressed gratitude that Rottenberg’s depiction of her talents is not a mocking one, although it does have a humorous tone. She was, however, initially reluctant to collaborate with Rottenberg, always careful to avoid projects that are derogatory toward “persons of size.” Leona of Cheese likewise confessed that she was skeptical about working with Rottenberg because she has regularly been asked to participate in projects that do not actually exist, but are proffered as lure to meet under false pretenses.22 With her husband, Leona manages and stars in the porn website www.longhairdivas.com.23 Her site members have access to her live cam as well as pornographic photos of her and other long-haired women. She also creates custom DVDs on request. It’s clear that in the end, both Leona and Queen Raqui trusted and felt respected by Rottenberg despite their initial hesitation.24 It’s worth noting, however, that not everyone Rottenberg worked with was chosen to be interviewed. The voices of the women who declined to work with her are also absent. The long history of the abusive gaze is difficult to overcome; the power dynamic inherent in representing non-normative bodies tricky to negotiate. Visibility and representation, although at times empowering, are always accompanied by vulnerability.25
Squeeze (2010), courtesy Sprüth Magers
Rather than attempting to neatly resolve the ethical issues surrounding Rottenberg’s practice, I want to underscore the manner in which the works repeat and reflect existing ethical conundrums while making visible stories that are otherwise underrepresented in art and media. In making them visible, however, the artist is forced to contend with the power dynamics of the fetishist’s objectifying gaze, because the history of representing non-normative bodies – as with, yet more so than, the history of representing women’s bodies – is a history of abuse. The women she works with elect to self-objectify as a means of economic empowerment. The ethical ambiguity her work foregrounds is productive, belonging to the problems that attend efforts by feminists to reclaim images of women’s bodies from an abusive history. The gaze is female-on-female, but it involves the power dynamic of normative bodies on non-normative.26 I am not arguing that offensive artwork can be justified by claiming that it sparks a conversation, or that art is an excuse for abuse. Rather, the works reflect – and are even complicit with – rather than resolve, complex problems regarding subjectivity, empowerment, and representation. I am not fully convinced by the artist’s justifications for the hiring of extraordinary bodies. Such forms of objectification may be literally empowering in the short term, in that they turn abjection into capital, but they always simultaneously reinforce the extraordinary body’s status as both abject and object. Moreover, that empowerment exists largely under a capitalist logic wherein money equals power. In the world that the talents live in this is of course true – yet even if they actively consent to be imaged in this way, they cannot consent to capitalism, or the system under which they are pressured and rewarded for certain behavior. Rottenberg employs women who are already renting their bodies, and through her participation in this system, she gives visibility to and raises questions about these underrepresented women’s lives and stories. She writes that
some critics claim that my work is not truly political because I act like a capitalist, and I agree – I am not outside of the system. I am trying to have a better understanding of the situation by paradoxically being totally embedded into it.27
Her statement reflects the impossibility of critical distance under capitalism, where criticism itself is a commodity. This conundrum is not unlike the difficult task of shaking the history of abuse in representations of women’s bodies. Rottenberg addresses this inescapability further, defending her complicity:
I’ve always defined myself as a feminist. There is an aspect of misogyny in my work that is a response to the way society in general is. So I have to ask myself what it means to be a ‘good’ feminist. If I use people’s bodies and objectify them, then I’m a bad feminist, or I’m promoting the usual stereotypes. But since these are so common in daily life, it’s a way to negotiate or understand them and make them empowering. I keep questioning my own morality.28
The impossibility of being a ‘good’ feminist in a misogynist world or an ethical consumer under capitalism is what makes Rottenberg’s work perplexing and productive.29 It would be dangerous to never depict non-normative bodies, and impossible to do so without the attendant baggage.
According to Susan Sontag, this kind of necessary complicity is innate in art. Sontag writes in ‘On Style’ that, “a work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world”. This observation is useful for understanding how the enclosed worlds in Rottenberg’s videos offer compelling representations of the talents that boldly counter their typical representations in contexts ranging from freak shows to fetish porn, while also raising questions about power dynamics and the gaze.30 Sontag holds that works of art cannot create their own self-referential worlds, and this is even more true of film. The photographic medium depicts things (and often people) from the real world, and appropriates their image for an artwork. Rottenberg’s videos, while depicting fictional worlds, simultaneously nod aggressively to their talents off-screen biographies. For Sontag, it is up to philosophers to make arguments – the role of the artist is to reflect cultural problems, and “the greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality”.31 It seems that Rottenberg would agree. And yet, Rottenberg’s neutrality, or complicity, is not always experienced as “sublime”. Many will justly crave a stronger stance on the troubling ethical quandaries the works raise, yet the works, true to their absurdist logic, point only to an impossible reconciliation of the on and off-screen worlds.
1. This essay is adapted from a project titled ‘Pretty Gross: Aestheticized Abjection in Feminist Video Art, 1996-2009.’ My research is greatly indebted to my thesis committee members at MIT: Eugenie Brinkema, Caroline A. Jones, and Kristel Smentek. Additionally, Giuliana Bruno, Gabriel Cira, Connor Crable, Henriette Huldisch, Claire Lehmann, and Heather Paxson provided valuable comments throughout the research and writing progress. Laura Lupton and Aiden Simon at Andrea Rosen, New York generously helped me access important materials. 2. Mika Rottenberg interviewed by Merrily Kerr, ‘Mika Rottenberg: Long Hair Lover’, Flash Art International 40, July, September, 2007, p. 114. 3. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 82. 4. Ibid. p. 203. 5. See: Judith Halberstam, ‘Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Passivity’, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) 123-145. See also: Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs 28 no. 3 (Spring 2003): p. 801-831. 6. Mika Rottenberg in Mika Rottenberg ed. Ann Demeester, (New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co. in association with de Appel Arts Centre and Museum M, Leuven, 2011), p. 17. 7. Representations of disabled people as such have been termed ‘inspiration porn’. While ‘fat’ has long been used as an impolite word or insult, recent size-positivity activist and fat studies scholars have argued to reclaim the word, and I use it here accordingly. 8. See: Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). See also: Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 9. Today, most disability scholars agree that both models have some merit and are not neatly opposed. 10. Mary J. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 1. 11. Heather Foster in Mika Rottenberg ed. Ann Demeester, (New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co. in association with de Appel Arts Centre and Museum M, Leuven, 2011), p. 40. 12. Hsuan Hsu has noted that, ‘Rottenberg’s assembly lines yield products that are in turn used to sustain the health and productivity of workers,’ but you never actually see them ingest it. See: Hsu, ‘Mika Rottenberg’s Productive Bodies’, p. 60. 13. Hsuan L. Hsu, ‘Mika Rottenberg’s Productive Bodies’, Camera Obscura 25, no. 74 (2010): p. 57. 14. David, Lennard J. ‘Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. David, (New York: Routledge, 2006): 3-16. See also: Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract: A Warning From an Uppity Crip, 1998, Monroe, Me: Common Courage Press. 15. Mika Rottenberg, ‘MFA in Visual Arts Art Talks: Mika Rottenberg’ (lecture, Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, January 10, 2018). 16. David Mitchell with Sharon Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), p. 7. 17. Mika Rottenberg, MFA in Visual Arts Art Talks: Mika Rottenberg. 18. Mika Rottenberg interviewed by Eleanor Heartney, ‘Mika Rottenberg Putting the Body to Work’, Art-Press 377, April 2011, p. 49. 19. Dea H. Boster’s book on slavery and disability shows how a pair of conjoined, African American twins were able to free themselves from slavery by making money performing in freak shows. In other words, by objectifying their bodies in a different, comparatively more-humane, context. See: Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 20. Queen Raqui in Mika Rottenberg ed. Ann Demeester, (New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co. in association with de Appel Arts Centre and Museum M, Leuven, 2011), 82. 21. Ibid. footnote 20. p. 81. 22. Leona in Mika Rottenberg ed. Ann Demeester p. 144. 23.Visitors to her website must confirm they are 18 to enter. Similarly, websites such as www.longhaircommunity.com state explicitly that fetish videos are not to be discussed on their forums because minors can participate. The notion of minors and purity and disgust will be further explored in the conclusion. 24. This should not be taken as definitive evidence that Rottenberg is in the clear. Not only does ‘consent’ as the be all and end all require very particular conceptions of subjectivity, but also, it’s likely Leona and Raqui would feel uncomfortable telling Mika in an interview if they disagreed. It is also possible that other talents were asked to be interviewed and declined, and that talents invited to work with the artist declined invitations. 25. I am currently guest editing an issue of Art Papers on disability and the politics of visibility. 26. I assume Rottenberg’s body to be ìnormative, not only because of the way that she appears, for there are myriad invisible disabilities, but also because she readily admits to the work’s power dynamic. Some prefer the term ‘temporarily [or currently] abled/ able-bodied.’ 27. Mika Rottenberg in Mika Rottenberg ed. Ann Demeester, (New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co. in association with de Appel Arts Centre and Museum M, Leuven, 2011), p. 18. 28. Mika Rottenberg interviewed by Merrily Kerr. p. 114. 29. Laura Castigini has aptly applied Amelia Jones’s concept of parafeminism which, as I show in chapter one, she developed in response to Pipilotti Rist to describe the complicated power dynamics that Rottenberg sets up. Castagnini, Laura. 2015. ‘Mika Rottenberg’s Video Installation Mary’s Cherries: A Parafeminist ‘dissection’ of the Carnivalesque.’ Philament: An Online Journal Of The Arts & Culture no. 20: p. 11. 30. Susan Sontag, ‘On Style’ in Susan Sontag: Lessons of the 1960s and 70s ed. David Rieff, (New York, NY: The Library of America, 2013), p. 26. 31. Susan Sontag, ‘On Style’, p. 31.
Emily Watlington is an art critic and assistant editor at Art in America
This essay first appeared in Another Gaze 02. You can buy or subscribe to our print issues here. Another Gaze is unfunded. If you like what you read please consider donating.
