We spoke to Nate Hill to find out a little more about his controversial Trophy Scarves project
“Some people are against objectifying women in any form even in satire. I don’t feel the same. I think it’s fine if it’s satire.” Nate Hill is an artist from New York City who tackles issues like racism and status in his work. Before his most recent project I had heard a little about Nate’s work - his Death Bear and White Ambassador projects both gained media attention – and he is no stranger to publicity. But when Trophy Scarves, his most recent project began to take off, it ruffled more than a few feathers.
A few weeks before I spoke to Nate I stumbled across an old podcast on my computer. In it, the narrator talks about his history with the internet and how back in 1994, he would get online at his parent’s house and talk to the other 20 or so people in his area using ‘the internet’. From day one the world wide web has been used to connect like-minded individuals, and it has now evolved into a host for millions of communities – millions of like-minded beehives. People who poke these beehives are sometimes trolls but sometimes, as with Nate the intention is not to troll, but instead to create debate and discussion within and between these communities.
Nate is an interesting guy – he uses words sparingly and doesn’t joke around when talking about his art, skipping over my more tongue-in-cheek questions. Throughout our conversations he’s upbeat and constantly coming up with new ideas, even directing me to one of the models who featured in the project so I can get a different perspective on the whole thing. He’s far from the archetypal, 20-something New York artist portrayed in movies and stories. In addition to creating his projects, Nate has a regular job that pays the bills – raising fruit flies at a research lab – and a wife who he attempts to keep separate from his art, and who he isn’t keen on speaking about. In fact, Nate doesn’t speak much about his personal life at all.
Trophy Scarves started off as a showcase to highlight what Nate sees as a ‘trend’ of black men getting famous and dating white women as a status symbol – he’s previously cited Kanye West and A$AP Rocky as examples of this. To make his point Nate started an Instagram account where he wore nude, white women as scarves around his neck, like an accessory. The project quickly gained momentum as it simultaneously poked the racist, misogynistic, and feminist internet beehives all at once. ”I received one email from a white woman who argued that her husband married her because of her godly spirit and their bond – not race. I wrote back saying that I believed her, and that the project was not about her and her husband specifically. Also, a video came out where a black man defends and examines his interest in white women, which was prompted by Trophy Scarves.” As the project grew, Trophy Scarves quickly morphed into more than a study about interracial relationships.
Comments like the one below became more frequent, something that Nate was not expecting:
“I did not anticipate the misogyny that would fester in the Trophy Scarves Instagram comments. Maybe I was perpetuating the very thing I was critiquing?” said Nate about the explosion of comments online. “On the other hand, many men came to see me as a hero for wearing these women because they thought it was just cool to wear naked women. It got messy.”
The project ended at the beginning of January and now that he’s no longer in the moment, Nate says he can step back and consider if the project was “even good or effective.” We talk about the fact that he had no problem at all finding volunteers to strip off and hop on to his shoulders. He even had return customers. Nate’s final participant speculated that the models volunteered, “partially because they wanted to degrade themselves because something bad had happened to them”, or they had been “objectified in the past.” Nate wonders aloud if he exploited these volunteers for his project, but then points out that art is up for interpretation and although he certainly had a point to prove when he set out, it’s not completely his fault for others viewing it in this negative way.
I spoke with one of the models who was featured in multiple Trophy Scarves posts, Eve Peyser-Sappol. She runs a similar online project exploring extreme objectification, self-objectification, hyper-femininity, narcissism and vulgarity under the pseudonym slutparty2007. Eve chased Nate down after he posted his phone number on Twitter looking for models, partly because she liked his previous work but also because she saw opportunity for her own art to get some publicity through Trophy Scarves. “I thought doing Trophy Scarves would be good for slutparty2007… It got me a lot of Instagram and Facebook attention. I like getting attention in a shameless sort of way and that’s part of what the slutparty project is about.”
However, Eve received some terrible comments on Instagram after her posts went up. “I think the project brought up a lot of good questions about how women are objectified on the internet, and blurred the line between objectification and self-objectification,” she tells me. Although she is glad that she participated in Trophy Scarves, Eve acknowledges the fact that the project changed the way she wants to be perceived online.
At the end of the Trophy Scarves there are six clips which have commentary from one of the model’s who participated – Nate recorded their conversation and then played it back over the short videos. In one of them she says she believes that we should forget about race in a project like this, but as Eve also pointed out this doesn’t seem right: “We can’t forget about race. That’s what the project is about. The project would be entirely despicable if a white man was doing it. I think that [the commentary] oversimplified the project,” and she’s right. Without the issues of race and status, the project would be meaningless.
In starting a project about these topics, Nate Hill drew the bees out of their hives and allowed the internet to expose its own misogynistic, racist, and exploitative culture. This art project seems to be about much more than the supposed ‘trend’ of black men using white women as a status symbol. Trophy Scarves took on many meanings, and demonstrates that one can never be sure how a piece of art will be interpreted. As Nate said: ”People pulled it in ways that they wanted and made it what they wanted it to mean. That’s how art goes sometimes.”
All images: Trophyscarves
The post ‘I think objectifying women is fine if it’s satire’: The man who wears women as scarves appeared first on Planet Ivy.