Maybe disgust is the point. Maybe you’re meant to feel a little revolted when you look at Emma Stern’s paintings of hyper-exaggerated, ultra-idealised female rock stars.
The American artist uses the 3D tools of game design to play on ideas of female representation in the media, to toy aggressively with how women’s bodies are created and portrayed in digital environments, usually by male developers.
The result is ‘Penny and the Dimes’, a fictional all-girl rock band, created digitally and then meticulously painted on canvas. They are gleaming silver-bodied rock goddesses, they knee slide in front of amp stacks, hold the mic out to the crowd, straddle drum sets and stand on monitors. They’re passed out in hangover-hell hotel rooms, they’re clinking champagne glasses in the back of a limo.
They’re beautifully painted but very ugly paintings, they make you recoil and cringe
Everything about the band is perfect and extreme, a teenage boy’s wet dream of the female figure: big lips, big hair, big breasts, big everything. They’re incredibly well painted, all doused in a cybernetic palette of lilacs, pinks and blues. These are precision crafted, semi-pornographic, subversive visions of how women are seen. They’re beautifully painted but very ugly paintings, they make you recoil and cringe.
The digital versions on screens downstairs work less well, they just feel too close to what’s being satirised. Because it’s in the act of turning these figures from 3D models into paintings on canvas that Stern manages to do something more than just create a hot soft porn rock band, it’s how she manages to elicit discomfort.
The reason Stern’s paintings are good, despite being so ugly, is because the revulsion you feel is at the intentional, gleeful objectification, at the exaggeration, the sexualisation, at the realisation that this is how the female form is codified and celebrated in online and digital realms. You’re disgusted because all this perverted digital manipulation and idealised nasty sexuality, this uncanny valley of fictional horniness, is uncomfortably real. And in art terms. that rocks.