Between April and September 2014, the Argentine-born artist Amalia Ulman presented herself online as an ‘Instagram Girl’. Using popular hashtags from micro-celebrities on the social network, Ulman created a three-part performance work that explored how women present themselves online. Entitled Excellences & Perfections, the project saw Ulman take on the roles of ‘cute girl’, ‘sugar baby’ and ‘life goddess’, characters that were chosen, Ulman says, because ‘they seemed to be the most popular trends online (for women)’. By the final post of the project on 19 September 2014, Ulman had amassed 88,906 followers. At this point, Ulman revealed that the project had been a performance, rather than a record of real life, attracting criticism from individuals who had followed her account in good faith and posted messages of support in times of crisis. Feeling that they had in some way been lied to, these followers expressed what Ulman has described as a ‘glitch’ in social media: the concept of authenticity.

In this chapter, I want to consider the importance of authenticity as a category for mediating the construction of gendered identity online. In particular, I want to think about how this category relates to the notion of performativity and the significance of this relationship for recent feminist art practices that engage modes of technological, and specifically digital, mediation. Focusing on Ulman's Excellences & Perfections, I hope to argue that current engagements with social media generate a series of tensions between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, which are of long-standing and core concern within feminist art practice. Despite the fact that the discourses of social media from the last ten years have displaced the narrative that the Web offered a sphere of representation that is inherently detached from a material, physical or ‘real’ world, I do not wish to argue that platforms such as Facebook or Instagram now produce a friction-free relationship between on- and offline modes of representation. Instead, I hope to demonstrate that digital technologies continue to serve as a site of conflict, difficulty and ambiguity in relation to the question of representation.

PERFORMING AUTHENTICITY

Amalia Ulman's Instagram performance Excellences & Perfections (Figure 1) began on 19 April 2014 with an post that stated simply ‘Part 1’, and was captioned ‘Excellences & Perfections’.