Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based performance artist, conceptual artist, and writer. She is the author of multiple books including E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, one of the founding editors of the technological journal Gaga Stimata, curator of the Tumblr-based project Women as Objects, artist of the feminist performance piece Hello, Selfie!, and has many more leading roles in feminist projects. Her experience with a large variety of mediums has allowed her to become an engaging voice on important cultural phenomena such as the selfie, reality TV, and the female identity. By exploring contemporary and popular culture, she has become an icon within the art world.
Durbin has shown an interest in the expression of the “teenage girl identity” in pieces such as her Tumblr project Women as Objects.
“I was really fascinated by a variety of things that girls were doing in the space, and I felt like because it was teenage girls primarily who were creating that aesthetic and playing with that aesthetic, that the dominant culture would not, and did not, take interest other than to maybe steal from it or mock it. I wanted to archive it, I wanted to preserve it and I also think there’s a lot we can learn from laying things side by side and the process of accumulation…another thing I loved about Tumblr and [why I] thought it was so interesting [is] because in viewing the [Tumblr stream], you can actually kind of watch culture forming in front of your very eyes because people are taking one thing and reblogging, changing it a little bit, passing it on to the next person, almost like a hot potato or something and that was really interesting to me too, that you could watch that process visually, which is something you normally can’t do.”
This fascination with the female identity continued in Durbin’s passive-aggressive performance art titled Hello, Selfie!. In it, an army of female performers bear white sports bras, underwear, an array of hello kitty stickers, cell phones and girl gazes that epitomize the idea of narcissism itself. The performers take selfies for an hour straight. They are not to interact with the audience in any way other than through the selfies that are uploaded to social media in real time. Although the piece is meant to be left open to interpretation, Durbin addresses the misogyny behind the critique of teen girls’ involvement within selfie culture, saying “I also thought it was ridiculous because girls are objectified from the time they’re very young. They’re taught to be so aware of their appearance and how they look to others and yet, they’re being criticized for looking at themselves and being aware of themselves as objects.”
Music: Awake by Paula Pearson
