Are We the Gods of Our Own Image? Notes on the Virtual Beauty Exhibition (Somerset House 2025) Part 2 (Sections V-VIII)

 

Qualeasha Wood: It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024) [a]

Arvida Byström: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022) [b] 

 

Photos taken by Maria Thanassa on her i-Phone at the 

Virtual Beauty exhibition (2025): somersethouse.org.uk

 

'We used to check our reflections in bathroom mirrors. Now, we check them in selfies ... on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. 

A flick of the screen shows our face, but a little smoother, a little more symmetrical, with a glow. 

In this world, we don’t just see ourselves. We edit ourselves. We curate.' - Matthilde Friis

 

Part One of this post (sections I - IV) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

V.

 

One of the curators of the Somerset House summer exhibition - Virtual Beauty (23 July - 28 September 2025) - Mathilde Friis, has written a short essay in which she argues that at the heart of the show is a political question; not whether "beauty is liberating or constraining, but how we use it, and who gets to decide" [c].

 

It's almost as if she substitutes the word beauty for another word; one beginning with 'p' that many of those exploring issues around visual culture, sexuality, gender and identity from a post-feminist and post-Foucauldian perspective still insist is the great clue to everything: power.   

 

The problem with this is it's easy to become entangled within a discursive network of power and easy to conceive of the latter in a rather old-fashioned (overly simplistic) manner that fails to recognise its simulated nature and its ultimate dissolution into a realm of seduction and signs without referents (as Baudrillard would say) [d]. 

 

Power is not an underlying structure; nor is it a thing that one can possess and wield. The minute you use the word power in all sincerity you have failed to grasp that it's a kind of convenient fiction and, whether you intend to or not, you reify power as a static entity or object that can be analysed. 

 

And so, if we are to become the playful "makers of our own image" [e], as Friis suggests, let it be in the name of something else other than power/knowledge (one is almost tempted to suggest impotence and forgetfulness).  

 

VI.

 

The strange thing with the Virtual Beauty exhibition is just how indebted to the past it felt at times: a sneaky reference to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (1985) here; a little bit of Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth (1990) hinted at there. 

 

Matthilde Friis mentions both authors and both books in her essay. Admitting the limitations of cyberfeminism - techno-utopias tend to always bump against the limits of physical reality - she also wonders if the digital world really offers endless opportunities for reinvention and liberation, or just the same old bullshit repackaged and recycled; "are we escaping the beauty myth, or just rewriting its code?" [f].   

 

Probably the latter: 

 

"The internet didn't erase gender or racial boundaries. It replicated them. Platforms that promised liberation were embedded with old biases. While the medium was new, the pressures remained the same." [g]

 

Thus, whilst beauty in 2025 may no longer just be about makeup, fashion, and hairstyle - but also "pixels, data, and code" [h] - old standards and stereotypes persist and old concerns to do with sexual objectification, for example, or how beauty still plays upon certain racial characteristics, return to trouble us anew. 

 

And so we come to the two works I wish to briefly discuss here: firstly, Qualeasha Wood's It’s All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024); and, secondly, Arvida Byström's A Daughter Without A Mother (2022) ... 

 

 

VII.

 

Some readers might be wondering if, as a straight white cis male, I'm qualified - or even entitled - to comment on the work of black queer artist Qualeasha Wood. I understand the concern and admit that there's a racial and sexual history here which, as Mysia Anderson says, simply must be acknowledged and taken into account [i].   

 

Having said that, however, it would seem absurd to pretend I hadn't seen and didn't very much like Wood's contribution to the Virtual Beauty exhibition; a clever and amusing combination of traditional textile techniques and glitch aesthetics [j] that exposes (and critiques) how the femme body is shaped, commodified, and circulated online via popular social media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. 

 

Her tapestry cleverly reclaims her own image and, fabricated as it is in woven jacquard (embroidered with glass seed beads), it constitutes a form of defiance to (and subversion of) the relentless digital age and its beloved glass screens.  

 

The medium is the message, as everyone used to say ... [k]

 

  

VIII. 

 

I will always have time for works which involve the use of dolls; some readers may recall my fascination with Amber Hawk Swanson's Amber Doll project (2007-10), for example, that I posted about back in 2013 and which the artist details on her website here. 

 

And so I was naturally drawn to the work of Arvida Byström, a young Swedish artist and photographer who, according to a recent press release, "travels in an aesthetic universe of disobedient bodies, fruits in lingerie, tulips and AI sex dolls" [l].

 

A Daughter Without A Mother (2022) is a mixed media installation that, on the one hand, critically examines how even AI can be used to replicate sexual stereotypes and thus collaborate in the pornification of the female body (and, indeed, the entire culture), whilst, on the other hand, inviting viewers to "contemplate the complexities of identity and intimacy" [m] associated with realistic looking sex dolls.     

 

I wouldn't say it's a great work: or even her best work. But it does return us to a question she has raised before concerning female fantasy figures who lack mothers and might best be described as the daughters of men (i.e., born of the pornographic imagination and styled according to male desires, values, and ideas; Eve, Aphrodite, Galatea, Maria ... et al). 

 

Another theme that Byström's work in the exhibition touches on is the question of why human beings have always dreamed of creating perfect copies of themselves whilst, at the same time, they possess a deep-rooted fear - automatonophobia - of replicants; be they dolls, cyborgs, or clones.     

      

Perhaps that's why, in the end, she seems to get such relief from having ripped off the head of poor Harmony ...

 

 

 

Arvida Byström:  

A Daughter Without a Mother (2022)

Notes

 

[a] Qualeasha Wood: It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024): woven jacquard, glass seed beads, and machine embroidery. The exhibition label informs us: 

      "Using webcam self-portraits, the artist reclaims visibility, challenging systems of control while highlighting the tension between self-expression and the pervasive influence of socia media and digital technologies." 

 

[b] Arvida Bystrom: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022): mixed media installation, including a short film (36 secs). The exhibition label informs us:  

      "Originally conceived as a performance piece [...] the work critically examines how AI is used to replicate beauty standards, perpetuating the sexualisation of the female body and contributing to its objectification."

 

[c] Matthilde Friis, 'From the Selfie to the Avatar: Beauty, Bias, and the Digital Self' (2025). This essay written to accompany the Virtual Beauty exhibition is available on the Someret House website: click here.   

 

[d] See Jean Baudrillard's Forget Foucault, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Semiotext(e), 2007).

      In 1976, Baudrillard sent an essay with the title Oublier Foucault to the magazine Critique (where the latter worked as an editor). Published the following year, it made Baudrillard a notorious figure within philosophical figures; for not only did he pretty much sum up Foucault's work (on power and sexuality) as a mythic discourse, but he also ridiculed the revolutionary politics of desire being peddled at that time by Deleuze and Guattari.  

       Forget Foucault ecourages readers to move beyond Foucault's cratology, rather than become trapped by its logic and thus prevented from thinking the complex dynamics of contemporary culture in a manner more appropriate to the times.      

 

[e-h] Matthilde Friis, as cited and linked to in note [c] above. 

 

[i] Just for the record, I've been thinking through questions to do with racial fetishism, sexual objectification, the visual representation of female bodies, etc., since 1991: my MA dissertation was on the position and portrayal of women in Nazi Art and Society; my initial PhD proposal was on the figure of the prostitute and the construction of illicit female sexual identity; and there are many posts published on Torpedo the Ark dealing with these and related topics from a perspective informed by my reading of feminist and queer theory (go to labels and find them for yourself).    

 

[j] For my discussion of glitch aesthetics, see the post entitled 'Glitch: the Art of Error and Imperfection' (28 June 2023): click here.  

 

[k] I'm sure I don't need to remind readers that this phrase - 'the medium is the message' - was coined by the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan to suggest that how the message is relayed matters more than the actual content; it's the medium - such as TV or the internet - that ultimately shapes our understanding of the world and ourselves, and how we interact with others, etc.

      See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964). The phrase 'the medium is the message' is found in chapter one and suplies the chapter title.    

 

[l] The press release was for an exhibition featuring Byström's work entitled Abyss (26 June - 26 July 2025) at Galerie Kandlhofer (Vienna, Austria): click here.  

 

[m] Quoted from the Virtual Beauty exhibition label describing Arvida Byström's: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022).  

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Vs the Tin Man

 

Oliver Mellors portrayed by Jack O'Connell in Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022)

The Tin Man portrayed by Jack Haley in The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

 

 

 I. 

 

According to Oliver Mellors, the whole of mankind is not only becoming increasingly tame and sexless, but slowly transforming into what he calls tin people and what we might term today cyborgs (i.e. human beings who have been augmented and enhanced via the integration of artificial components or technology; the sort of bio-mechanical beings that Donna Haraway once encouraged us to embrace with open arms). 

 

One evening, before they both strip off their clothes and fuck like animals in the rain, Mellors informs his lover, Lady Chatterley, that there's no hope to be found in either the ruling class or the working class, nor in any of the coloured races - that all men have been dehumanised by industrialisation:  

 

"'Their spunk's gone dead - motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with indiarubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people!" [1]

 

 

II. 

 

I know for sure that Lawrence didn't see The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), as it was released nine years after his death. 

 

However, he might have read - and almost certainly would have been aware of - the children's novel by L. Frank Baum upon which the film is based, first published in 1900 (with illustrations by W. W. Denslow). And so it's quite possible that when he writes of tin people he was thinking not only of Rossum's Universal Robots [2] but also of Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman.

 

Of course, even Baum wasn't writing in a vacuum; in late 19th-century America, men made out of various tin pieces often featured in advertising and political cartoons and Baum was said to have been inspired by a figure built out of metal parts he had seen displayed in a shop window [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

In Baum's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy befriends the Tin Woodman after she finds him rusted in the rain; using his oil can to help free up his movements [4]. 

 

Axe in hand, he joins Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, accompanied by the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, headed for the Emerald City, where he hopes to be given a heart - although, funny enough, he already possesses the capacity for feeling and the display of various emotions (even for accidently crushed insects). 

This is explained by the fact that, unlike Tik-Tok the wind-up mechanical man that Dorothy meets in a later story, the Tin Woodman is still essentially human and alive. For Nick Chopper was not a robot, but rather a man who had his organic body replaced with artificial parts bit by bit [5], after self-mutilating with an accursed axe (don't ask). And, far from regretting his becoming-cyborg, he often delighted in his enhanced status. 

 

Unfortunately, the Wizard can only provide him with an artificial heart made of silk and filled with sawdust, although the Tin Woodman seems happy enough with this. And, after Dorothy returns home to Kansas, he becomes the ruler of Winkie Country and has his subjects construct a palace made entirely of tin. Even - and this would horrify Lawrence/Mellors still further - the flowers in the garden are made of metal. 

 

 

The Tin Woodman 

by W. W. Denslow (1900)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217.

 

[2] In 1920 Czech writer Karel Čapek published a science fiction play with the title R.U.R., an initialism standing for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. The play - which premiered on 2 January of the following year - was both popular and influential; by 1923 it had been translated into thirty languages and had introduced the word robot (from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour) into English.

      Lawrence used the word in his late poetry on the subject of evil, declaring: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving." See 'The Evil World-Soul', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 626.

 

[3] The mechanical man was a common feature in political cartoons and advertisements in the 1890s and various scholars have argued that the work of Baum and Denslow is derivative. That seems a little unfair to me; like most writers and artists, they were atuned to their times and happy to exploit whatever ideas and materials were available to them.

 

[4] The threat of rusting when exposed to rain, tears, or other forms of moisture was a constant concern for the Tin Woodman and so, in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) - the first of thirteen full-length sequels written by Baum to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - the character has himself nickel-plated. The Tin Woodman remains a central figure throughout the whole series of books; unfortunately, I do not have time here to explore his entire history, fascinating as it is.

 

[5] As the author of The Generalist Academy points out in a post entitled 'The Tin Woodman of Theseus' (5 Dec 2020), L. Frank Baum's character took a classic philosophical thought experiment in a novel direction: click here.