♡ Girl Clutter ♡
Hey guys… welcome back to my blog ;) I initially wanted to use this place to post updates about my work, maybe something more like a newsletter but I’ve always had a hard time promoting the things that I do. Sometimes I think all I need to do is dump stuff online and that people will magically find it or stumble upon it, and while that can partially happen, most of the time it needs to be wrapped up and delivered. I’ve also been somewhat reluctant to write about my art, the thoughts around my art, my process, etc. This isn’t because I don’t want to share those things, but mostly because I hope I will get asked about it or that someone will see it and write about it for me - to me the greatest accomplishment as an artist is to have someone write about your work thoughtfully. Posting my work online is an exercise in giving up control. I like that my work resides in these ambiguous spaces and can be approached/interpreted in many different ways - writing about it feels like an attempt to control it, which makes me uncomfortable!!! So, in the least controlling way possible… I’m going to share and talk about some recent work.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on TikTok. YouTube has felt a little stale and all of the lifestyle content I crave has mostly migrated over there. For a few years now, I’ve been working through my thoughts about maintenance, routine, the loop, and the aestheticization of the mundane online. I’d become particularly interested in “Morning Routine” videos both on YouTube and TikTok. All of these routine videos have the same basic rhythm: wake up, drink ice water with lemon, make an expensive looking caffeinated beverage, work out, journal, do your skincare, eat a healthy breakfast, all before 8am. I recently wrote an essay for the Are.na Annual 2023 that unpacks the morning routine, what happens when we share the most boring aspects of our daily lives online, and how we perform our maintenance rituals for each other. This essay grew out of my Maintenance board on Are.na, an ongoing space for me to collect my thoughts on these subjects. I’m going to share an excerpt below:
These online routines all follow a similar rhythm; they have a cohesive aesthetic. They seamlessly blend into each other, showcasing the same products, home decor, clothing, food, and drink. The act of daily maintenance becomes a site of performance. Even the most basic tasks are mediated, refined, and aestheticized once they are shared online long enough. The everyday, mostly feminized labor of maintenance, beauty, and doing chores has a second element of labor embedded into it, the labor of making it beautiful, of making it something that others want to watch, relate to, or aspire to, of shooting, cutting up, editing, and uploading.
The highly aestheticized performance of routine online can also incite a different type of performance: the refusal. For every morning routine video, there is a response that rejects the ritual altogether. We see a woman on TikTok sitting in her bathtub, pouring vodka into a pint of ice cream. Another video shows a woman in bed at 2:30pm, there’s an open wine bottle on her nightstand, she’s eating cookies for breakfast, “but hey, they were gluten free.”
“The refusal” has been of particular interest to me lately. I’ve noticed a shift from the aspirational, “that girl” or “clean girl” productivity content, to girls online really leaning into or maybe even romanticizing chaos. That being said, there is something aspirational about this as well. Deep down, part of me is resistant to having a routine that prioritizes working out, eating well, and keeping a clean room, because I think it will make me less interesting. I brought up my TikTok consumption earlier because that’s where I’m seeing the movement toward the messy girl aesthetic or “girl clutter” as I saw it cleverly referred to on Tumblr recently - the rise in people using Tumblr again (am I imagining this?) probably has something to do with this as well. It’s mysterious! It’s chaotic! And most of all, it’s youthful!
I’ve been documenting and sharing my bedroom publicly online for the last 20 years. I’ve watched the bedroom transition from private space to a film set and have always been interested in this tension. I recently did a performance over on thing.tube an experimental live-streaming platform? Art project? idk, cooperatively run by myself, Sarah Rothberg, Christopher Clary, and Bhavik Singh, where I had viewers help “clean” my room by moving objects/trash/products around a virtual bedroom I designed. They were also encouraged to give me gifts (matcha, green juice, a candle, etc.), mimicking the gifting process on TikTok live streams. The little gifts would begin to litter the screen, interfering with the cleaning process.
In my most recent video, ROOM MAKEOVER! *MESSY GIRL AESTHETIC INSPIRED* GIRL CLUTTER, I walk the viewer through the process of me turning my bedroom into an instance of “the refusal” or better yet, a messy girl aesthetic inspired room. It’s done in the style of a YouTube clean with me video or bedroom transformation video, but instead of cleaning, I’m artfully placing and curating clutter.
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I have a long standing love for girl clutter. My digital work often incorporates mess, but I’ve only just introduced making intentional messes in my physical space. After filming, I laid in my bed, surrounded by piles of clean clothing and beauty products, scrolled on my phone for a few minutes, uploaded a video to TikTok, took a few pictures of the mess I had made to make sure I had enough content, and then promptly got up and cleaned my room.
Incredible
Amazing