cursed images
on failing, being cringe, and the art that haunts me
I have no problem humiliating myself on the Internet. I’m sure plenty of people would describe my online presence as cringe, or get some form of second-hand embarrassment. There’s a sick fascination I have with poking at the thing that makes me feel embarrassed and exposing it. That being said, I’m not immune to hiding, editing, and deleting. I do come to regret these attempts at control eventually, wishing I had never futzed with it in the first place.
When writing my most recent post about Smule, I took a detour and started watching old karaoke-style videos I would make for live performances. One in particular, a video I toured with in 2016—it’s funny, I don’t even want to share what it’s called for fear that people will go and watch it—made me feel so uncomfortable. Instead of burying it, which is what everything in my body told me to do while watching it, I’m taking the stick out and poking at it.
The video, titled Force Quit, was my first foray into creating work that would accompany a live performance. Essentially, it was a video that would be projected behind me as I read along with it, karaoke style, in front of an audience. I was inspired by private karaoke room videos and their use of stock footage, which I then combined with personal webcam footage of me doing things like looking in the mirror, laying on the ground, or dancing on my bed. Visually, I’m into the piece. Where I hit a snag lies in the actual text.
I’m writing poems. Something I’ve done on occasion, but do less now that my art practice feels more focused. Like most things, poetry goes in and out of fashion (readings are currently cool again). I’ve never considered myself a poet, but there was a condensed period of my life where I was writing and reading publicly. I’d often be met with, “Your poems are so raw” after a reading, which is code for “it was bad.” I’m not here to clown on my experiments with poetry. If anything, I want to get to the meat of it.
Perhaps what makes me so uncomfortable is the openness of it all. My longing to be desired, noticed, looked at, is laid bare. I write about insecurities surrounding my body, fantasies of my crush showing up at my door unannounced, something petty about a guy I used to date, not being like other girls, whatever. It’s painful because my feelings have changed. I know how the story ends, or at least how it continues to play out, beyond the confines of the text. My ugliness isn’t that interesting. I’m not one of those writers that can take a pretty mundane universal experience and turn it into something profound, something beautiful. I’m just a girl who maybe should have kept a diary.
A few years ago, I put .pdf versions of all of my zines up on my website. I made the choice not to include any of my more text-heavy zines in the archive, simply because I found them embarrassing. While I may not be rushing to make them publicly accessible any time soon, I’d like to get to a place where I don’t feel the need for distance from them, and in turn, myself.
In 2015, I published a zine titled “ur so emo about boys.” I made a public, online version of it on the now defunct platform NewHive titled Should I Send This? The zine is consists of lo-res semi-nude iPhone selfies and small snippets of text about wanting to be loved, or touched, or noticed, or whatever. I’m not sure I’d be looking back at this particular piece had it not had such an outsized public reaction.
Dazed published an article about the zine titled The Cyber Feminist Leaking Her Own Nudes, which framed the piece as a sort of emancipatory act of taking control of one’s own body and image by making it public. At the time, I agreed with that. Now, I’m not sure I think it’s that deep or radical, and I’m appreciative that we’ve moved past the point of anyone giving a shit about armpit hair. 2015-1026 was a tough time to be a girl making art online, with all of the selfie feminism discourse. I’ll have to save that for a deeper dive into selfie feminism and my relationship to it, how it got packaged and sold and turned against.
When the article was published, it received so much attention and backlash that Dazed published a follow-up interview: Molly Soda Silences the Haters. Generally, the backlash stemmed from whether the zine was feminist or not, whether I was attractive, and whether it was art. The most interesting thing about the piece ended up being the comments.
Annabelle Dupras: Not relevant, not feminist, not art, and mostly: yawn-inducing. What the fuck, really!
Basia Szkutnicka: Crappy narcissistic photos
Giovanni Paolo: Okay this girl needs to pick up that room, instead of taking nude selfies. Cochina! DISGUSTING!
Richter Belmont: I should take dick pics with toy lenses and open an exhibit called "My Dick: A Journey Through The Mouths And Vaginas Of Sluts, Also Time" That would be more artistic than this.
Nicole Opyem Weber: Everyone takes nudes, everyone has nudes. It's about as much of a piece of art, as a crushed sprite can in a bin. Dumbfucks.
Nikita Blavko: No it is not. Very ugly body
I’ve never sold more copies of a zine than I have this one. For a while, I felt like I couldn’t escape this particular piece. It’s funny because the piece is enriched by the reaction, but it felt extra annoying for it to have so much attached to it. Was I going to go down in art history for having essentially posted a thirst trap? For having asked for attention and gotten what I wanted, sort of? For having one moment of longing that could have been cured by a few messages and some likes turned into a spectacle?
Maybe that’s what makes both of these pieces a little difficult for me to stomach: a fleeting feeling being cemented. It’s also what drives my work: putting it out there, letting go of control, or at least trying to. Sometimes I wish I could be articulate and fully formed and have every idea be good, but most of the time I’m just trying something out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
I’d like to get to a place where I look at myself and my bad art—maybe even stop calling it bad—and see the humanity in it. Someone who hasn’t worked everything out, who asks for attention and changes her mind, who fails and refreshes.