License to Look: Evan Baden
Ever since the telephone started its long ascent to the apex of cultural commodities doubling as fashion accessories, its rise has been greeted with a mix of scorn and delight. In The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell relates a New England incident, in which Puritans fought to have the domestic location of the telephone legally restricted. Specifically, they sought to evict the telephone from the bedroom to reduce its potential use as “an instrument of seduction and entry” (104). Others were delighted precisely because of the unprecedented long-distance intimacy the telephone afforded its users. Today, the telephone, in its cellular incarnation, joins other contemporary technological tools in the public spotlight once again, evoking enthusiasm and anxiety as a new generation of digital natives re-shapes the old boundaries of intimate behavior and the public domain.
Clearly, the anxiety surrounding technological possibilities and sexuality is not new. What has changed, though, are the possibilities afforded by the Internet: the speed and accessibility of information, the increasingly early age of its users, and the degree of sexual explicitness involved. Evan Baden’s photographs are concerned with precisely this nexus of technology, sexuality, and adolescence. While each of Baden’s photographs is carefully staged to re-create an image gleaneProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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from the world of the web, he considers his work documentary, in the sense that his images re-enact a burgeoning cultural phenomenon: the world of sexting, sex per video-chat, and virtual self-promotion through sexually suggestive costumes and poses.
Wresting this imagery out of teenage cell phones and away from social networking sites, Baden gives his viewers license to look; after all, these re-enacted photographs now hang on a gallery wall, enshrouded in the aura of fine art rather than steamy teenage fantasy. Yet the implied voyeurism makes the work discomfiting, even more so because Baden withholds any explicitly didactic approach: does this cultural phenomenon simply reveal the changing terrain of intimacy, or does it represent a potentially dangerous slide into pornographic imagination honed by the accessibility of internet porn to impressionable young minds?
The youth of Baden’s subjects and of the generation engaged in these public re-enactments of perceived sexual appeal adds the problematic of adolescent sexuality to this photographic negotiation of private exposure in the virtual public domain of the web. For a culture whose publicly professed sexual mores are still deeply indebted to Puritan beliefs, adolescent sexuality presents a considerable challenge, which is further exacerbated by the casual sexualization of teenage celebrities and the relentless equation of popularity with sexual availability. Girls in particular are exposed to diametrically opposed messages, ranging from “abstinence only” to a constant, imperative sexiness. If exposure to this schizophrenic attitude to sexuality is combined with technological know-how, does the phenomenon Baden’s work explores really come as a surprise?
What does seem surprising, in the age of putative post-feminism, is the eagerness with which these young women—and it is impossible to ignore how gendered this phenomenon is—embrace their status as sexual objects. In fact, rather than trying to explode sexual objectification, these young women self-consciously seem to beg for objectification. The similarity of their poses vis-à-vis computer screens and camera phones is not coincidental: the point is not an assertion of individuality or difference but an iteration of sameness. In Lexi, a window sign says “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself,” a message that carries a certain irony when paired with the young woman’s generic pose. Despite occasional theatrical flourishes, as in Bethany, these re-enactments seem devoid of creative individuality.
Why does this adherence to a gendered stereotype appeal? One possible answer arises from the psychoanalytic observation that repetition serves as a route to mastery. In other words, by re-enacting porn-star poses, the young women in question are in fact imitating and hence learning a specific way to perform gender. This brand of femininity flirts with rebelliousness yet overlooks the ironic uniformity of its transgressions. Baden’s photographs invariably show his subjects in rooms, with gender specific decoration, that speak volumes about the privacy granted by a middle-class home. These are young women who can afford to indulge in narcissism, in rooms of their own. So are we witnessing another round of sexual revolution thanks to cyberspace? Or the coming-of-age of a generation of young women duped into thinking that their bodies are their greatest assets?
Baden’s photographs are effective in that they raise these questions and remind us that, in the 21st century, technology still has the power to seduce and to provide access to bedrooms in ways the Puritans never could have imagined. And yet, in a day and age in which television careers are built on the scandalous and utterly strategic “leaking” of sex tapes, how honest—or how hypocritical—are the fears, the scorn, the outrage of older generations in the face of the cultural phenomenon Baden’s work captures? The artist himself poses as the thoughtful agent provocateur whose primary concern is to foster dialogue. But given that the conversation under examination has already reached Oprah’s television couch and the national bestseller lists through Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked, Baden’s re-enactments capitalize on the controversial impact of the subject, ostentatiously granting us license to look but never telling us why we should.
Bibliography:
Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln, London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: Unhooked: how young women pursue sex, delay love, and lose at both. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau. “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions About Documentary Photography.” Photography at the Dock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 169—183.
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