The New Influencer: Aesthetics of Abjection

The life of an influencer is, ostensibly, a glamorous one. By now, it’s almost a cliche in popular culture. Lifestyles of the rich and famous are broadcast endlessly on our social media feeds, where flat tummy teas, waist trainers and pearly white teeth abound. 

Concocted by the media through which it is disseminated, visual culture has always had the uncanny ability to subconsciously shape our behaviours and perceptions. Much like Instagram bore the influencer, the camera similarly, bore the photographic smile, and since the dawn of the 20th century, we have been trained to grin for its shutter. Historian Christina Kotchemidova proposes the phenomenon as emanating from an increasingly sophisticated advertising culture focused on telling cheerful stories about commodities, a sensibility which draws many parallels with that of contemporary influencer culture. This tendency toward portraying positive moments in visual media for the purpose of selling commodities, in a sense, has extended toward our own self-representation on social media. This status quo, however, seems to have begun shifting.

There are those in the sphere of popular culture now who are actively opposing this resolutely positive aesthetic and cultural imposition. Artists and creatives alike on social media are increasingly experimenting with the aesthetics of abjection, curating online personas that flirt with the grotesque and awry in an absurdist satirization and rebellion against our obsession with aesthetic perfection.

Take Welsh conceptual drag queen Salvjiia whose distinct otherworldly digital persona confounds perceptions of beauty and gender, often morphing her face and body into impossibly distorted caricatures. Her post-digital presentation of the distorted body recalls the pathologized mutations of the self squeezed through digital networks.

Or photographer/makeup artist Pyro Muse, who combines a gothic sensibility with grainy distorted portraits of themselves which are both uncanny and arresting. In coalescing signifiers of past and present, the artist conveys the slippage of time and the warping of our perceptions of reality in the digital world. Her images, often uncomfortably zoomed-in depicting her mouth and face bound or gagged suggest a sense of masochistic claustrophobia.

Similarly, Spoooky.kid and Genesis fawn present certain unsettling lo-fi abjection in their digital personas, creating strange and unsettling candid moments that blur the line between reality and fiction. Spikes and bumps emanate from flesh, heads are shrunken, and facial features are distorted, provoking a sense of horror and unease. When scrolling through their feeds one gets the sense they’ve stumbled upon a world they were not supposed to see.

As digital life has become more and more firmly enmeshed in our conceptions of reality and identity, resulting in rising rates of mental illness, so too have these online abject digital personas begun to emerge, as not only personas but forms of satirization, rebellion, and catharsis. The phenomenon can be understood as a method through which to visualize the psyche of a generation, and upend our cultural fetishization of perfection.

The aesthetic is becoming more and more prevalent in popular culture. At Rick Owens FW19 show the designer tapped into the transgressive work of Salvia’s Instagram persona, hiring her to consult on the models’ makeup. At his SS20 show at longtime venue Palais de Tokyo, Salvia’s aesthetic again featured on the runway via models with bald caps and yellow contouring. Elsewhere, we see celebrities flirting with similar visuals and sensibilities. Billie Eilish famously cries tar-black tears in her video for When The Party’s Over, and swallows a tarantula in You Should See Me in a Crown.

Instead of pearly white teeth and sunset selfies, this new era of artists and influencers prefer malformed faces and tears of black tar, and their tendency toward abjection and distortion can be read as a rebellion, of sorts, against the power of visual media and capitalism to dictate how we portray and interpret our realities. Despite their surrealist influences, these influencers might just be portraying the semblance of a reality far more relatable and familiar than we’d care to admit.

Cody Rooney is a Glossi Mag contributor.

He is a photography aficionado, masters candidate, fashion enthusiast, avid Ariana Grande fan and lover of all things aesthetically pleasing.