Review: “Virtual Beauty” at Somerset House in London

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

My earliest lessons in art history were about the subjective and constructed ideals of beauty. Growing up in the 1990s of Kate Moss and “Friends,” I remember an early visit to a museum where I learned that in earlier eras, women would prefer to be depicted with fuller body types. These standards suggested a wealthy, well-fed quality and were no more realistic than anything you see on Instagram today. We don’t know who sat for Titian’s Portrait of Isabella d’Este (c. 1530), but we do know that she wanted to complement her turban with a jawline that was rounder than a beach ball.

The proclivities of personal aesthetics are still stranger today, of course, and a host of artists examining them have been brought together in “Virtual Beauty” at London’s Somerset House, which features the work of Anan Fries, Andrew Thomas Huang, Angelfire, Amalia Ulman, Aleksander Nærbø, Ben Cullen Williams and Isamaya Ffrench, Bunny Kinney, Frederik Heyman, Harriet Davey, Hyungkoo Lee, Ines Alpha, Minne Atairu, ORLAN, Sin Wai Kin, Arvida Byström, M.C. Abbott, María Buey González and Carl Olsson, Filip Ćustić, Michael Wallinger and Qualeasha Wood.

Also included in the mix is Lil Miquela, the A.I. influencer who becomes less gimmicky when viewed through the lens of art rather than hand-wringing think pieces about what she means for society—aren’t all influencers artificial anyway? This was the point of Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (2014), one of the most important artworks of the decade, which saw her perform a variety of Instagram-friendly personas across four months, going from virgin to sugar baby and finally (post-rehab) health and wellness guru who spouts koans of dubious spiritual value. I watched this as it was happening and was stunned by its subtlety. If you didn’t know that she was an artist, your only clue would have been that four months is a period of time just a tad too short for that many online identities. Ulman has said: “Most of the people who got the performance and were attracted to it were women… while men were like, ‘What? I don’t get it, she just looks hot!’”

Kin’s videos take the opposite approach, cranking up the language of drag and mixing it with the lessons of speculative fiction until their characters feel like living mannequins with deep lore, totems to artifice that dare you to doubt their veracity. The virtual realm allows for this attitude even better. Heyman’s Virtual Embalming (2018) saw the artist create digital tombs for Isabelle Huppert, Kim Peers and Michèle Lamy, capturing their 3D images but modifying them so that their bodies are as they would like them to be. Peers’ tomb takes the form of an abandoned hotel in Asia, her avatar suspended naked over the marble bedsheets in S&M leather straps. Would you care to tell her that she should, instead, be represented as an old woman? Neither version decays or represents a lasting self.

ORLAN’s Omniprésence (1992) saw her live-stream her plastic surgery to galleries worldwide, but stranger still are the CGI creations of Angelfire, who creates bodies that never could exist in the real world. The diversity on display in this show makes a convincing case for the self as the final frontier.

“Virtual Beauty” is on view at Somerset House through September 28th.