Posing as Art: The Ambiguities of Feminist Body Art and the Misclassification of Natacha Merritt’s Pornographic Photographs

Abstract

At the launch of the twenty-first century, the online pornographic photographs of Natacha Merritt, a young American woman (twenty-three years old at the time), were categorised as art in two publications by art publisher Taschen, precipitating a critical acceptance of her work as such. This particular foray of pornography into an art context was briefly contested by one art critic (Mey, 2007), however, this relatively rare example of misclassification warrants further investigation in order to better understand the role played by what had, by the late twentieth century, become a pervasive postfeminist culture. Drawing on feminist media studies writing (Diane Negra, 2009; Angela McRobbie, 2007; Melanie Walters, 2007), that analyses postfeminist modes of ‘self exploration,’ and feminist art criticism (Lucy Lippard, 1976; Whitney Chadwick, 2013; Amelia Jones, 2010) on the ambiguities of feminist body art, this paper argues that Merritt’s ‘adult-oriented’ online digital photographs are more persuasively situated within the increasingly prevalent online genres of the intimate blog and amateur porn. Acknowledging the risk of ‘collusion’ inherent in feminist artworks that focus on the objectified female body, this paper concludes that a compelling critique of a post-feminist (pornified) culture resides in the reactivation of a politics of female sexual pleasure