misrepresentation

ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH VS. THE MADONNA-WHORE COMPLEX

As VRAL current solo exhibition focuses on Georgie Roxby Smith’s new Blood Paintings series, we aim to illuminate her legacy of confrontational game-based art by examining a pivotal early work, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II, which re-cast the Tomb Raider heroine as a proto-tradwife in her most challenging mission.

The endlessly looping cries of gaming icon Lara Croft echo incongruously over household chores in Georgie Roxby Smith’s 2013 performance and Second Life intervention, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II. The female explorer’s torture screams punctuate mundane, uneventful acts like washing and ironing clothes. The superimposition of discordant feminine spheres spotlights the bias still dogging video games’ staunchest female characters today. Despite efforts celebrating Lara Croft’s emotional depth and resolve through various reboots and remakes, her graphic anguish feels all too familiarly pinned to outmoded visions of femininity from the franchises’ past.

Having already probed systemic dangers subtly encoded for female avatars through works like The Fall Girl in 2012, here Smith spotlights the lingering identity tensions constraining Lara Croft. The Tomb Raider icon embodies a discombobulating identity bifurcation: aspiring towards fierce, capable heroism on one hand while still confined as an ornament for the traditionally masculine demographic’s visual greed alone on the other. As Croft’s strained persona splits unevenly between feminist icon and fetishized pin-up, she exemplifies unreconciled contradictions of projecting strength while submitting to the objectifying male gaze. By confronting this demeaning binary — akin to the  dichotomy informing the Madonna-whore complex mapping women into mutually exclusive camps of saintly virtue or debased promiscuity — Smith indicts the media forces that tokenize liberatory gestures yet withhold full multidimensional womanhood under paternalistic pretense…


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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

George Roxby Smith, Fair Game [Run like a girl], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 13’ 56”), 2015.

Georgie Roxby Smith, Lara Croft, Domestic Goddess I & II, Lara Croft death noises from Tomb Raider (2013), 3D model, Second Life intervention, looped continuously for duration.

Georgie Roxby Smith, The Fall Girl, in-game performance and machinima (color, sound, 8’ 07”), 2012.

Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, digital video, color, sound, 15’, 2001.

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH AND THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE NPC RUNNER

As VRAL current solo exhibition focuses on Georgie Roxby Smith’s new Blood Paintings series, we aim to illuminate her legacy of confrontational game-based art by examining a pivotal early work, Fair Game [Run Like A Girl]. Our analysis centers on overlapping themes in Smith’s practice of visual confrontation around gaming’s ingrained normalization of violence towards feminine identity and representation...

In her 2015 performance Fair Game [Run Like A Girl], Georgie Roxby Smith hijacks the marginalized female non-playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V, stretching their flight animations into disturbing prey. As her sadistic avatar stalks and toys with these sexualized bots in the streets (and hills!) of Los Santos, their loops of cowering and screaming indict the misogyny hard-coded into this digital Californication. 

Before examining the work, the ominous title warrants exploration. As Emma Griffin explains in her monumental work, “fair game” historically traces back to the hunting fields of 19th century Britain, where it was used to denote legal and ethical parameters around which animals could be hunted during a given season. Anything deemed within the boundaries of “fair game” – open for sporting, capture, or killing – was considered unprotected prey. Already by the late 1800s however, the idiomatic implications had extended more broadly to refer to anything – or for that matter, anyone– that dominant powers or social forces considered appropriate targets for criticism, ridicule, sexualization or attack without fear of consequences or concern over consent. Victim blaming was implicit; in the cultural view, targets labeled “fair game” were themselves presumed to invite trouble or violence due to defiant or nonconforming attitudes, appearances, or behavior.

In choosing Fair Game as the title of her intervention, Smith knowingly evokes the historical associations of marking feminine bodies as vulnerable game ripe for one-sided, unethical hunting by more powerful and forceful antagonists. Her interrogation lays bare gaming ecosystems and cultures enabling the chasing and tormenting of women without consequences under the veneer of play and the pretext of fun. Let’s now concentrate on the second part of the title. The bracketed “run like a girl” also carries insidious coding limitations into culture. The phrase has history mocking supposedly inherent feminine weakness and first surfaced as a comment denouncing “inadequate masculinity”. Specifically, it critiqued women’s alleged lack of power, speed or coordination.. 

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith, Fair Game [Run like a girl], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 13’ 56”), 2015

Georgie Roxby Smith, 99 Problems [WASTED], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 4’ 45”), 2014

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024

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ARTICLE: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH, AVATAR MARTYR

VRAL is currently presenting Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings as a single channel video. To fully appreciate the significance of this series, we are exploring various artworks in her oeuvre. Our discussion continues with the 2014 in-game performance and machinima 99 Problems [WASTED], in which she lays bare the destructive ideological apparatus turning a woman from playable protagonist to disposable puppet. An apparatus revealed in all its banality through this avatar’s hopelessness before the blasé machinery of suicide.

A scantily clad, blood splattered female avatar takes position underneath a grimy Los Santos overpass, nonchalantly pressing a pistol barrel to her temple. Face impassive, she pulls the trigger without hesitation or emotion. As the crack of the gunshot fades, her body collapses limply to the ground. But the scene soon repeats in a different setting; the nameless woman reappears in different locations of an ersatz Los Angeles, apparently unscathed. She promptly turns the gun on herself once more. And then again. And again. Welcome to Georgie Roxby Smith’s 99 Problems [WASTED].

Rather than embrace the free-roaming escapades and rags-to-riches schemes promised by Rockstar Games, Smith pursues vicarious self-destruction via her avatar in order to critique the game’s normalization of disproportionate feminine victimization and sidelining. Each gunshot shrieks for recognition by game publishers and players alike of women’s ritualized vulnerability, marginalization, misrepresentation, and fleeting relevance in adventures coded around masculine power fantasies and patriarchal prerogatives.

The settings chosen by Smith for her suicide(s) add another layer of meaning through provocative juxtapositions. Her avatar enacts public immolation before storefronts boasting suggestive names such as “Heroin Chic” to “Hole”. Likewise, the protagonist’s ritualized demise unfolds around caricatures of consumerism and vanity, as selfie-snapping tourists remain oblivious next to the bloodshed. A rather explicit ad for “hamburger meat” near a bus stop functions as a background for another death. Boys toys, i.e., signifiers of masculinity, also frame some vignettes, as sports cars and firearms signifying power and control. Through these judiciously chosen environmental factors, Smith further implicates the saturating messages that enable the devaluing of women’s lives and identities across societies both real and virtual. 

The ceaseless repetition produces surprising effects: the initial shock of Smith’s female avatar brutally committing suicide soon gives way among viewers to contrasting feelings ranging from desensitized ennui to warped anticipation…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

George Roxby Smith, 99 Problems [WASTED], in-game performance, machinima (color, sound, 4’ 45”), 2014

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024

Brody Condon, Suicide Solution, DVD documentation of in-game performance, 19’, 2004

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