Marina Zurkow

New York based media artist Marina Zurkow has produced most of her work independently over the span of 17 years, but she has also collaborated with what seems like a regular group of artists from other disciplines sporadically on some of her projects. Zurkow’s early work resided in film and at the moment resides in animation, but she has worked her way through many different mediums over the years, including flash animation and print. In terms of defining Marina Zurkow’s role as author/auteur in her work, it is hard to justify placing her in the category as an author of her work or not, considering she has a sizable collection of work, and the art that she produced alongside her approach to art have changed to a notably large extent throughout her career. 

What’s interesting about Marina Zurkow is, that her early work experiments with representations of gender quite a bit. With works titled “Bachelor Machine” (1998), “Power at Play” (2002) “Pussy Weevil” (2003), and “Man Woman” (2003), one might assume that gynocriticism is at play here and she is indeed author/auteur. “Braingirl” (2000-2003) is a nine-episode animated series that many people took notice of. The description of Braingirl published to Zurkow’s website is, “a nine-episode animated series about a mutant-cute girl who wears her insides on the outside, literally. Braingirl and her hapless sidekick Bagboy live in a world of externalized emotion, where little is hidden yet nothing is what it appears to be….It explores how cartoons manifest our secret fears and desires upon the body – the instantaneous delight of accident and recovery available only in an animated world, where anything is physically possible,” (Zurkow). Braingirl might be ‘mutant-cute’ to some people, but she is undoubtedly odd in her illustrated form.

Braingirl production still. 2000-2003.

Her brain is exposed, she has no visible eyes but can somehow see, she has very blatantly drawn nipples and a curved line to represent her vagina. And yes, she is naked all of the time. The episodes are bizarre and comical, and a lot of the narrative includes the oddities of the female experience and directly refer to gender ideologies prescribed within American culture. For example, episode five’s plot is about Bag Boy’s secret infatuation with Braingirl. Bag Boy wants Braingirl to love him back, but instead of confessing his love he purchases ‘love potions’ for the both of them to drink. One potion is designed for females, and one for males. Bag Boy accidentally mixes the potions up and Braingirl grows a penis and Bag Boy grows some breasts as a result of drinking the potion. This story seems to be a commentary on how desperate people are for love and acceptance, the human body and how it might feel to swap genitalia with the opposite sex. In the last (ninth) episode, Bag Boy presses a ‘reset button’ installed on the back of  Braingirl’s brain, while they are waiting for a doctor in waiting room to remove Braingirl’s penis because she is disturbed by it. This reset button basically “fixes” Braingirl and somehow gets rid of her penis. Bag Boy is left with his breasts and exclaims that he unsure of what he really is at this point. 

In an interview with bitchmedia in 2000, Zurkow reveals that her approach to the creation of Braingirl somewhat of a random occurrence. She explains, “You wouldn't think that on a computer characters could spontaneously generate, but every once in a while, you just hit one right on its big, fat, exposed head. I went back through all my sketchbooks to look for doodles. Nothing. I did find early versions of her when I still called her "Brainboy"—she had no genitals at all but she did have the body, the nipples, and the brain” (Zurkow, bitchmedia). Zurkow also claims that Braingirl is a response to the phrase, “You and me baby we’re only mammals/o let’s do it like they do on the Discover Channel,” found in Bloodhound Gang’s song “The Bad Touch” because she’s, “playing with the idea that not everybody's destiny is to be sexualized. I know that might be taken as reactionary, and in part it is: I mean, it's great to be a sexual body, but to some extent it's become de rigeur for the liberated female to sexualize herself” (Zurkow, bitchmedia) It seems like Zurkow is the author/auteur of Braingirl in the feminist context that her gender and body has influenced her work greatly. Indeed, Zurkow created, directed and animated Braingirl, but credits several other people for other roles. When Zurkow is asked about how she came up with Braingirl’s growth of a penis, and she admits that, “One of the writers I work with came up with the idea of a gender switch. (He is a magnificent stoner who does not have access to a computer and only knew Braingirl from a napkin sketch. When he finally saw her on my computer, he said "Oooh! she's... kind of... hot”)” (Zurkow, bitchmedia) So, it was really a man’s idea for Braingirl to grow a penis, one of the most important/controversial parts of the show. Is Zurkow still the auteur in the feminist sense? Yes, because most of the work she produces are her own original ideas and are influenced by her experiences and gender, and she has a distinctive style throughout all of her work.

Mesocosm (Northumberland UK), production stills, 2011

Braingirl was well liked by for her gender bending persona and appearance, and the animated flash series created in macromedia flash was screened at several film festivals around the world between 2000-2002, and was named the Macromedia Site of the Day on August 28th, 2000, and won First Prize in the Flash Attack Award category at the BerlinBETA festival in 2000. Artbyte magazine featured a piece on Zurkow in 2002, and it read, “Zurkow has, has big, cult-heroine-like plans….She wants to bring her weird cybergirl characters into the fray. She’s sick of the “cyberbabe” drivelers and wide-eyed, powder-puff anime chicks” (Quart, 34). Zurkow has a large portfolio, some with gendered themes and some not, but fast-forward to around 2006, her work starts to look less gendered and quirky and a lot more serious. Her series of animations and installations, “Crossing the Waters,”(2006-2009), “Friends and Enemies” (2011 - Ongoing), and “Necrocracy” (2012) seem to be Zurkow trying to have a conversation with her audience about climate change and humanity’s obvious contribution. 

Her most recent bodies of work (2006-present) focus on human beings as ‘other’ in their relationship to planet earth, the looming dominant authority figure of all life forms. Zurkow’s describes her present approach to her work is one that aims to stimulate people into contriving intimate connections with non-human agents. By combining a variety of conventional objects or even animals that can be found in every day life with intangible and sometimes invisible materials, she constructs stunning visualizations of the interconnectedness between humans and global warming. While most of her art is animation based, some of her work includes food, software, clay, mycelium, and petrochemicals. Although most of her latest work is absent in overt gendered themes, there is one 147-hour software based animation that she produced in 2011, “Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK)” that mildly resembles her earlier work because of her choice to use a rather large, bald and nude male character. Zurkow included in her description of her work that this character is based on Lucian Freud’s painting of Leigh Bowery, the performance artist and drag queen, to act as a Green Man that lives outdoors in the country (Zurkow). The Green Man sits on a tree stump with his back to us and observes the animals run in and out of a landscape of changing weather conditions and cycles of seasons, frequently wandering in and out of the frame. The piece is quite complex and has more meaning to it than just this man walking around and in my opinion, I think it is beautiful and the piece received overall praise from critics. Without knowing that the Green Man was indeed based on a drag queen, one might not entirely pick up on how this is somewhat of a gendered piece. A reviewer Scapegoat magazine writes, 

        He allows various small creatures not only to climb on him and sit on him but 

        also to feed on him, producing the only specks of color—blood red—in the work. 

        This scandalous symbiosis, based on a novel intimacy, suggests a queered 

        updating of the ancient motif of the Green Man in the context of an anti-essentialist,

        relational ecology. The queer Green Man of Mesocosm contributes a personal and  

        artistic history that is deeply relevant to his role in this “expanded apprehension of what 

        constitutes nature, a history that makes him the ideal protagonist for a post-

        anthropocentric, post-picturesque theatre of species” (Chaudhuri, 8).

In conclusion, In 2011, Marina Zurkow is quite the successful artist who has in the past employed gendered themes in a somewhat lackluster yet extremely intelligent fashion, and she claimed back in 2000 that, “The work I make has nothing overt to impart. I am not a feminist or any other "ist" per se; I am a woman who addresses issues that concern me” (Zurkow, bitchmedia). Even today, she does not describe herself as an environmental-ist, she is still an artist that tackles complicated social issues. In the past she may have had less intention on doing so, and today it seems that her sole intention is to comment on the environment and people’s use of it. She is the recipient of many awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2011, The Rockefeller Foundation and Creative Capital.

Bibliography

Braingirl. Dir. Zurkow, Marina. Prod. Zurkow Marina. Perf. Twomey, E., Aniram, B., Portnoy, M., Veneziale, A., Nowacek, N.,Newmeyer, C., Dardy, D. Bitforms Gallery, 2000-2003. Web, DVD.

Chaudhuri, Una. "Queering the Green Man, Reframing the Garden: Marina Zurkow’s Mesocosm (Northumberland UK) and the Theatre of Species." Scapegoat, Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy.02, Maerialism (2012): 6-8. Print.

o-matic.com. "Marina Zurkow." Work. 2014.Web. <http://o-matic.com/play/index.html>.

Humm, Maggie. "Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film." Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Print.

Quart, Alissa. "Braingirlitude." ArtByte 2000: 32-4. Print.

Zurkow, Marina. "Bad(ass) Brains." Interview by Ruth Ozeki. Bitchmedia. Bitch Magazine, Jan. 2000. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. <http://bitchmagazine.org/article/bad-ass-brains>.