CONSTRUCTING AI’S GAZE

It's one of her most famous quotes—a phrase that has been reproduced thousands of times on t-shirts, tote bags, and posters; beside or above her face; a face that is recognized in art history like no other: "I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best." This quote comes from Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist whose life was shaped by suffering and her love for a man in whose shadow she stood as an artist. Kahlo began painting when a serious accident left her bedridden. She painted self-portraits out of loneliness and, as she said, because she knew herself best. Today, her work stands for the assertiveness of a woman in a male-dominated art world, in which women could only make a name for themselves if they were the muse of a male artist.

Dora Maar, for example, went down in art history as "the weeping woman" in Picasso's paintings. Few people know that she was a painter and photographer herself before their paths crossed. "She was everything you wanted—a dog, a mouse, a bird, a thought, a thunderstorm. That's a big advantage when you fall in love", Picasso is said to have said. And Maar was quoted later, after they broke up, "he used me until he felt that there was nothing left of me. All the hundred pictures he painted of me... His portraits of me are all lies anyway. They are all Picassos; not one of them is Dora Maar."

The list of women who have inspired male artists is long. But the list of women who later surpassed the artist they inspired is impossibly short: In 2021, a self-portrait by Kahlo sold at Sotheby's for $34.9 million, up from a previous record of $8 million. Rivera's auction record is just under $10 million.

In the 2010s, social media opened up new channels for female artists to distribute their art independently. In addition to the much-discussed male gaze, there was a new version of the female gaze emerging, predominantly shaped by selfie culture. Women could finally photograph and show themselves as they wanted to be seen and were no longer just the object in front of a male photographer's camera. But people still complained that women were photographing themselves in lascivious poses, with a sexy look, reproducing the male gaze and stereotypical ideals of beauty.

When women photograph other women, or themselves, the expectation is that they will not produce the same images that a male photographer would. Why though? These days, when young women campaign for a non-standard ideal of beauty, things get very uncomfortable on social media. For example, when the Swedish artist Arvida Byström shared a photo of herself with hair on her legs as part of an Adidas campaign in 2017, there was great outrage. In fact, that's a bit of an understatement, as she was threatened with rape, verbally abused, and more than 20,000 negative comments rained down. The general consensus was that the hair on her legs was disgusting. And one wonders why women prefer to smile sweetly into the camera and reproduce stereotypes.

The British film critic Laura Mulvey defined the male gaze in an essay in 1975: The film assumes a male viewer. Men are active, they look. Women are passive, they are looked at. The man is the bearer of the gaze, the woman endures the gaze of the man.

Canadian photographer Petra Collins, who rose to international fame through Tumblr and Instagram, shaped the female gaze of her generation. In 2016, The New Yorker ran a story on her with the headline: "The Female Gaze of Petra Collins". Her imagery is hyper-feminine and cute, her models bathe in a shimmering world of pastel shades. Also in her work: underwear, a lot of bare skin, lascivious poses.

In the New Yorker article Collins says she buys vintage porn magazines, for example "Finger" and "Trucking with Dick." In her books ("Babe", "Coming of Age") she talks about how she found her visual language. During puberty, she learned through magazines, film, and television that she had to define herself as a woman through her appearance in order to get encouragement and attention from men. And since she grew up with these very images, her own work first reproduced them, i.e. the male gaze.

So how can women succeed in breaking away from the male gaze? Can artificial intelligence help with this? Do we actually expect artificial intelligence to create anything other than a reproduction of the male gaze?

With "The Muses", Danielle King tries to give the past and the future a face and a name at the same time. She writes in her artist statement, "This project reimagines the concept of the artist's muse by using source images and prompts from a diverse range of artists and designers, from the Renaissance era to now." In some cases, you think you can clearly see the role models: Frida Kahlo, Michelle Obama, and many more.

The women look at the viewer confidently; they are generally fully clothed (if the pictures were of men, this would not need to be highlighted as remarkable—we still have a long way to go). And the gaze? Again, would we expect AI to create anything other than a reproduction of the male gaze, or is there something different going on here?

As always, it depends on the source material. Of course, King didn't only reference images by male artists. The list of artists whose works prompted 'The Muses' is long and carefully balanced. Here are a few names: Gustav Klimt and Frida Kahlo, Cy Twombly and Alice Neel, René Magritte and Hilma af Klint, Virgil Abloh and Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs and Vivienne Westwood. Due to the generative nature of the collection, these artists and designers are assigned and combined randomly across the myriad outputs.

Taking 'The Muses' project as a whole—as the entire long-form collection, not just the individual works—and assuming that the "male gaze", the "female gaze", and the "male gaze reproduced by women" are all mashed up, almost remixed, across its 500 images, what does that tell us about the collection's overall meaning?

With artificial intelligence's help, can "The Muses" point the way to constructing a new type of "gaze", removed from gender assignment?

Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art. She is currently building EXPANDED.ART.

Anika collaborated with Operator on "Unsigned", with CIRCA on the first NFT drop by Marina Abramović, and with Quantum for Herbert W. Franke's NFT drop, "Math Art".

Her curated exhibitions include: "Art NFT Linz" at Francisco Carolinum in Linz; "In Touch. Art in the Age of Post-NFTism" (with Micol Ap), ART NFT Linz; "Tribute to Herbert W. Franke"; "The Artist Is Online", KÖNIG GALERIE and at KÖNIG in Decentraland (with Johann König); "Exercise in Hopeless Nostalgia. The World Wide Webb" by Thomas Webb at KÖNIG Digital.

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