Sophie Serber Success Breeds Success, Or You Need To Be A Friend To Get A Friend

Recently, a professional theatre actor told me that he feels his job has more to do with sex work than with art. The actor doesn’t neces­sarily create, he said—he embodies the ideas, desires and dreams of others. But the actor wasn’t being dismis­sive of sex work. He was simply descri­bing his job as a service: an actor provides acts, after all. I’m not sure if acts of service are neces­sarily incom­patible with art. Surely art and sex work aren’t mutually exclusive. I think the actor was trying to make a point about the suppres­sion of self that acting requires: rather than ampli­fying an inner world through artistic produc­tion, the actor has to diminish that which charac­terizes them as an indivi­dual. The actor’s job requires versa­tility, and in order to be versatile, they have to be willing to trans­form—even if this means making the self unrecog­nizable.

The actor’s comment came to mind when I visited Sophie Serber’s show at bologna towers (an iteration of the project space bologna.cc), “Success Breeds Success, Or You Need To Be A Friend To Get A Friend”. The wordy title comes from the video work that forms the center­piece of the show (all works 2024). In it, the artist is seen perfor­ming in a variety of porno­graphic videos intended for online distri­bution, as is made evident by the water­marks that adorn the bottom corner of the clips. Serber worked in porno­graphy for a number of years, and did so sepa­rately from her art. The show’s epony­mous video is the first time Serber explicitly merged these two forms of labor (that is, porno­graphy and visual art). The predo­minant feature of the work, however, is the artist’s choice to crop all depictions of her own body from the video using data extra­ction software. As a result, the viewer sees a moving, black mass against the backdrop of non­descript hotel rooms and poolsides. Besides the video work, the show features fifteen paintings, two of which directly converse with the show’s titular video.

In the show’s accom­panying (and excellent) essay by Ivan Cheng, I read that Serber colla­borated with her husband to develop an algorithm that recognizes human shapes and “parts.” This algorithm was used to erase Serber’s body from the video, as well as those of her scene partners. The way the algorithm was trained, exactly, remains unspecified. But what becomes clear while watching Success Breeds Success, is that the algorithm has trouble recog­nizing physical devia­tions (bodies with many tattoos, mainly) or unusual presen­tations of the human body. I catch myself becoming excited when a tattooed shoulder escapes the algorithm’s clutch, or when a naked figure in a VR-scene is suffi­ciently warped by the fisheye lens that it’s not recog­nized as human by the software—though it’s evident to me that I’m looking at someone’s torso. I wonder what the artist desires of me as a viewer. Is she retro­actively condem­ning her career in porn, and is this video an attempt to erase it? And if so, should I feel guilty for wanting to watch? Or is this erasure actually a form of seduction, like a digital strip­tease, intended to make the viewer more cons­cious of porn as a perfor­mative medium that is layered, choreo­graphed, referen­tial and exag­gerated. In case of the latter (that is: erasure as seduction), I assume the artist wants the viewer to be curious as to what resides under the moving black shapes. Or perhaps the black shapes aren’t meant to conceal anything but are them­selves the point of the work: the void as a replace­ment for the actor. The absence of any recogni­zable actors—or acts—empha­sizes all the more the signifi­cance of their work, as porn videos without perfor­mers offer remar­kably little arousal. The redacted bodies in Serber’s video appear to “undo” the porno­graphic function of the source material. By masking the identi­fying features of the performers, it becomes impos­sible for the viewer to relate to the shapes they see on-screen, or to extract any erotic fulfil­lment from them.

Masks are an important motif in Serber’s show. Thirteen of the paintings in Success Breeds Success feature a clown face, superim­posed on an abstract conglo­meration of colors. Upon studying the paintings’ titles (Witches’ Sabbath; Saturn Devouring His Son, etc), the viewer learns that Serber is referencing Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. Goya produced his Black Paintings towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from depression as well as gradually losing his hearing, and regarded them as strictly private works, not intended for public exhibition. Serber repro­duced the primary color palettes of each Goya painting in her own works, but rather than recrea­ting Goya’s images, she abstra­cted them as a colorful backdrop for the clown faces in the paintings’ fore­ground. Each clown face is adorned with patterns Serber found in a children’s coloring book: ribbons, animals, instru­ments. Collec­tively, these cheerful images obscure the darker references that sit under­neath.

In a conver­sation with Cheng, Serber commented on the domi­nating presence of the clown vis-à-vis that of the unmasked, non-costumed and non-performing individual. “The clown is so visible it kills the human,” the artist says “[and] the problem with being unseen is that parts of us can die or become hidden behind the clown […]”. In other words, being—or acting like—a clown risks eclipsing the indivi­duality beneath the mask. In pairing a clown image with refe­rences to Goya’s dark, intros­pective pain­tings, Serber seems to issue a cautionary tale about proje­ction to the viewer: “the performer and the person are not the same.” As the artist’s clown paintings surround the video work in the center of the gallery space, Serber is clearly drawing a link between the figure of the clown and that of the porno­graphic actor. Both figures are expe­cted to cater to the viewer’s desire for enter­tainment, and both fulfill this need via an exag­gerated presen­tation of the human body: the grotesque features of the clown, and the sexual hyperbole of the porn actor. Though Serber’s paintings and video work clearly differ in terms of media and visual code, they’re both concerned with expressions of labor, and more specifically, the artist’s own labor. Consi­dered alongside each other, Serber’s works appear to inter­r­ogate the extent to which art is an expres­sion of “self,” or, rather, a perfor­mative service provided. Again I’m uneasy about my earlier desire to watch the porn, as I feel like I’ve fallen into the show’s intellec­tual trap: I, too, was eager to project my own needs onto the artist’s work, effectively mobili­zing it as an affective service.

However, it’s not wholly evident that Success Breeds Success seeks to call out the viewer for the desires they bring to the works in the show. It is clear that Serber is intere­sted in the affective relation­ship that porn asserts between viewer and actor, and while she appears to be critical of this relation­ship, she also doesn’t fully renounce it. If she does, though, it’s unclear why she kept the parts that the algorithm failed to censor in the video. One particularly explicit scene shows the insides of the artist’s vagina, made visible through the use of a speculum. The algorithm does not register the pink tissue as a body part, which is poignant in a way, not in the least because it shows the artist at her most bare, though without being parsed as “physical” or “human”. The most vulne­rable image of the artist becomes a mask in itself.

So far, I have not yet men­tioned the second key feature of the video work, namely Serber’s audio nar­ration. As the video progresses, Serber’s voice is heard reciting from personal emails, tweets and text mes­sages, all composed in the years that she worked as a porn actor. The material is mundane, yet entertaining: it covers the everyday practi­calities of working in the porn industry, which Serber relays in an emphatic, yet oddly stilted tone. Serber muses about potential remedies for a “sore cunt” after hours-long sessions with well-endowed scene partners, and contem­plates the benefits of cryo­therapy, beet juice and magnesium baths. There is vulnera­bility here, too, and not just because Serber is candid about her doubts and concerns. Some­times the artist stumbles over her words, misspeaks or restarts a sentence, and all of these “glitches” are kept in the recording unedited, similar to how the algorithm’s failures at erasure are kept in the video. Yet Serber’s overtly perfor­mative delivery also suggests the narration may serve as yet another mask. More explicitly mask-like, Serber’s voice is represen­ted in the video by a 3D sprite: a bulbous, oddly pustulent figure—made to resemble an apoptotic cell—that bobs across the screen. The sprite, or dying cell, evokes the idea of nuclear collapse and trans­formation, though the actual purpose of the apoptosis metaphor remains am­biguous. Does the cell embody “the parts of us that die” behind the image of the clown? But if this is the case, why does the voice that is repre­sented by the cell speak so candidly? The artist, it seems, is adamant about creating distance between herself and the viewer, yet the desire for this distance is compli­cated—or contra­dicted, perhaps—by the use of auto­bio­graphical material.

In this sense, “Success Breeds Success“ is a diffuse show. On the one hand, it wants to entice the viewer to take a closer look, beyond the mask of the artist, and to hold space for what they find there. On the other, though, it seems intent on pushing the viewer away through abstraction (the strictly implicit references to Goya; the self-erasure in the video work), and this sus­pends the viewer’s ability to get a firm grasp on the show and the story it wants to tell. This is not to say the show is unsuc­cessful, however. On the contrary, Serber’s works have a rich visual grammar that feels scin­tillating and alive. Both the video and the pain­tings demon­strate the artist’s ability to compress large, complex themes (visibility, the right to exist) into demar­cated signs (a clown mask, for instance), while at the same time resisting the temp­tation to make that sign the be-all-and-end-all of the work. Rather, the demar­cated sign appears to be a starting point for Serber, and that’s just one of the things that makes her work intellec­tually stimu­lating and pluriform—though it also risks beco­ming opaque. Then again, the opaque­ness of the work challen­ges the expec­tation that art should satisfy the viewer’s projec­tions. In “Success Breeds Success“, Serber attempts to resist the role of performer, and in doing so, asks the viewer to recon­sider the notion of art as an affec­tive service.