Friday, November 13, 2009
Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)
Martha Rosler
Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a video, installation, and performance artist. Her work has focused on different social concerns like women’s experiences, war, the environment, and media. In 1975 she produced a 7 minute black and white video, “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, in which she transformed a perfect motherhood suburbia kitchen into a “war zone”, making a statement about the depression and frustration of domestic slavery. In a performance in which the artist performs a violent cooking session, different kitchen utensils become weapons. Confronting the idea as of the kitchen as the center of the family life, the artist explores women’s identities, as well as making a clear reference to Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Marina Abramovic and Ulay Relation Work
Marina Abramovic/Ulay- Relation Work, 1976-1979: 14 Performances
In 1976 Abramovic and Ulay started to collaborate together as artists. Through performance, the two artists explored issues such as gender roles and the opposition inherent in the male and female body. The two artists created performances that put their physical and psychic selves to the extreme. Video was used as a medium to recollect all these performances. In the performance “Light and Dark” the two artists hit each other on the cheek, using a rhythmic action, in which the intensity of the hits increased. They used light as a way to hide the source of the aggravation so that they weren’t able to see the hit coming. With this performance the two artists were addressing issues like violence in relationships.
Joan Jonas Vertical Roll
Vertical Roll
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas
Born in New York, 1936
Jonas is a sculpture, performance and video artist; she started using video and monitors in 1972 in the performance “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy’, in which she included different materials like mirrors, masks, and other materials, as well as video to analyze female roles and identity.
In 1972, she also created the piece “Vertical Roll”, in which she used the horizontal malfunction in a television set creating a piece in which a technical malfunction became the visual solution. Without any editing, the artist appears on the screen slamming a table at the same time the horizontal line of the television set is moving up and down rhythmically. It seems like her video piece is controlling the television set. In a different part of the piece the artist performs different actions creating a synchrony with the banging rhythm as well as with her movements. In the end of the video the only part of the artist’s body in the monitor is the head, which appears being hit by the vertical line, creating a series of perceptual illusions.
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas
Born in New York, 1936
Jonas is a sculpture, performance and video artist; she started using video and monitors in 1972 in the performance “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy’, in which she included different materials like mirrors, masks, and other materials, as well as video to analyze female roles and identity.
In 1972, she also created the piece “Vertical Roll”, in which she used the horizontal malfunction in a television set creating a piece in which a technical malfunction became the visual solution. Without any editing, the artist appears on the screen slamming a table at the same time the horizontal line of the television set is moving up and down rhythmically. It seems like her video piece is controlling the television set. In a different part of the piece the artist performs different actions creating a synchrony with the banging rhythm as well as with her movements. In the end of the video the only part of the artist’s body in the monitor is the head, which appears being hit by the vertical line, creating a series of perceptual illusions.
Disrupting the Content Feminism by Catherine Elwes
Disrupting the Content
Feminism
Television, the alternative view
By Catherine Elwes
The author analyses the two different ways television has been analyzed and deconstructed, one is -----, the other one was regarding content. The author refers to the different networks, which more than inform in an impartial way, they represent and stand for the groups in power and their commercial interests. Then Elwes refers to the process of television and its relation to reality, magnifying the use of television for political propaganda and thus avoiding the representation of reality. She points to the example of Vietnam, as the first U.S. war broadcast directly into our homes, and the effects of the exposure of the war’s reality to the people, who questioned the justification of the war, and contradicted the official war position. Since then, television broadcast has been politically practical. The author points out that in order to neutralize the networks points of view about “reality”, artists used video as a medium to show their perception of reality, “their version of history”(p.38). In the 70’s and 80’s, television didn’t present real people; society was represented through the exposition of fictional figures, or celebrities that represented the white, heterosexual, middle class males who controlled these networks. The rest of the population, according to the author, was represented through stereotypes, or not at all.
Feminism – The personal is political
Throughout history, the most societies have been based on a patriarchal system with patriarchal institutions. Men were in control of the public sphere; meanwhile women were limited to the domestic sphere. In spite of the influence and earlier work of the suffragettes in the 20’s, by 1960 and 1970 women were underrepresented everywhere - including the art world. During this time, feminism began challenging and questioning issues like gender inequality, roles determined by sexual differences, different roles in procreation, as well as biological essentialism. Elwes states that the private sphere (women’s world) was “created by politics in general and patriarchy in particular” (p.39). The author refers to the filmmaker Sally Potter, who said, “. . . ideology is not merely reflected but produced in the context of the family and in personal relationships . . . ”(p.39). In order to break this cycle of oppression and fight to gain equal opportunities in public life, feminists used an instrument of communication inside the domestic sphere to create consciousness, exchange personal stories, and recreate them as a collective story of patriarchy oppression. The author presents the “personal as political” (p.40), a slogan that became a rallying cry for activists and artists.
The main focus of women artists was to raise consciousness about women’s private life: to render private life public. Feminist art had a political influence and help to make possible political initiatives such as abortion, measures against domestic violence and childcare. According to the author, feminist art was created to promote “political enlightenment” and to inspire women to participate in and make social changes. Feminist art based on oral history, stories shared by women, information passed from mothers to daughters, translated these exchange of information from an underground level to a public level through the visual arts, as well as video, where the analysis of personal identity become a main point. The author points out that feminism promoted activism, and at the same time analyzed femininity, focusing on representation. The different images or representations of women were narrowed to a dichotomy, in which the patriarchy created a classification of female stereotypes, as desirable or undesirable. It can be characterized as a virgin-whore dichotomy, in which an image of a woman as highly sexualized is contrasted with the image of a saint domestic mother which “society turned and reproduced”(p.40). Television was the medium through which the patriarchy spread stereotypical images of women, so logically video was the perfect medium to contrast these images and to begin to raise viewers’ consciousness. Video created the conditions for the exploration of “feminine experience,” as well as the exploration of the use of technology to search for identity.
Feminist Video – Instantaneity
Feminism as a political movement rose fast, after a long period of silence. Women had the urgent need to express themselves, as well as the need to be visible. Women artists chose performance for its confrontational nature, and video, for the ease with which the message is delivered. The author refers to the writer David Ross; he points out that video was formed by disciplines like film, theatre and television. However, according to the author, video and performance were “virgin territories for the exploration of the feminine” (p. 41). Video was attractive, because of its characteristics to mirror back the image of the artist to herself (p. 41). This medium was useful for artists dealing with issues like introspection; women were able to experiment with a certain autonomy. Another important feature of video was its possibility of “mass communication” (p. 42).
Domesticity and family relations
Domesticity and family life have been seen as a woman’s sphere and her near total identity. Family and family relationships were the main theme, in the beginning of feminism, of many women artist. The author refers to Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the kitchen (1975). In this video the artist performs a violent cooking session; she is behind a table in which she seems to be ready to cook, but instead, she creates a selective show of the kitchen tools like knife, fork, ice pick, etc and transforms these tools into weapons. She begins to use them to attack a non-existent entity in front of her. After this, the artist, uses a ladle to spill the contents of the pots making a disaster and with this the artist makes an statement about the destruction of the image of womanhood. The artist Vivienne Dick created a video It’s 3 a.m. in which the artist protests the role of women at home and her endless maternal and domestic activities. This period of early feminism was about the disappearance of women – in their roles as mothers and housewives - into endless activities of a domestic nature.
Fathers, Husbands, Lovers, Strangers
Women’s identity was attached to the identity of their male relatives. According to the author, along with the new idea to make the private life public, family relationship were a source of analysis. The abuse of women, inside in the house was exposed. Louise Forshaw’s video Hammer and Knife (1987) exposes her own sexual attack, and presents the artist sleeping with a hammer and a knife under the pillow. The exposition of violence against women was clear in the video Sari Red (1988) by artist Patibha Parmar. This video was made in the memory of Kalbinder Kaul Hayre, a young Indian woman killed in England for racist reasons. In the Ballad of Dan Peoples (1976) Lisa Steele sits with a photograph of a man. In the piece there is a transposition of adult and children voices as a way to recreate memories, and to find the identity, and relationship with the old man. The transposition of the voice from female to male is explored, as well by the Canadian artist Laurie Anderson, who presented a performance in which the artist switched her voice for a male voice and changing identity. Other women artists had been working in collaboration with male artist, and in some cases exchanging identities like in the case of Abramovic and Ulay.
Daughters and Sons
In this section the author refers to the work of diverse artists working about their children, showing different aspects of family dynamics ranging from parental influence to domestic violence. In some cases - like in the work of the artist Katharine Meynell –she collaborated with her daughter to create Hannah’s song (1986), a piece that explores the fusion of identities. The author refers to her own work There is a Myth (1984) in which she presents an image of her feeding her son and with this she tries to analyze the separation of male from the mother, and its social and political meaning.
The Body in Proximity
Feminist artists analyzed the way they were going to represent the female body to escape from the biological essentialism and from the male culture, as “reiterative patterns of sexual objectification” (p. 48). For English women artists, video was another tool objectifying women’s bodies. Peggy Phelan suggested using vanishing image as a way to “avoid patriarchal recuperation” (p.48). But, obviously this didn’t work for performance and video. In America, women artists were “resolving new forms of visibility” (p.48) and issues of proximity and “entitlement of the viewer” were explored. The author refers to Peggy Phelan, who suggested that is wa possible, with the use of extreme close-up, to “establish ownership by the woman who examines herself” (p.49). Nan Hoover explored close-up, and created videos in white and black about her own body, using the magnification of the image making indefinable the identity of it. Mona Hatoum in her piece Corps Etranger (1994) explores the inside of the body in order to escape all the political and social complexities that determine a woman’s outer appearance.
The Body Distant and Still
The different solutions feminist artists used to change or distort representation, according to the author, of “the most branded of all patriarchal products” (p.51) wasn’t as immediate in video as in film. The early quality of video gave a certain grade of distortion giving room for “subjective interpretations” (p.51). For some women artists, the limitation of the quality of video made this medium the perfect tool to become visible while avoiding confrontation with the audience. The author recalls the fact that the performance artist needs the audience to fulfill the act. She then refers to Lucy Lippard, who makes a really interesting observation that there is hardly any difference between a man’s use of the female body for sexual excitement and a “women’s use of women to expose that insult” (p.52).
Feminism
Television, the alternative view
By Catherine Elwes
The author analyses the two different ways television has been analyzed and deconstructed, one is -----, the other one was regarding content. The author refers to the different networks, which more than inform in an impartial way, they represent and stand for the groups in power and their commercial interests. Then Elwes refers to the process of television and its relation to reality, magnifying the use of television for political propaganda and thus avoiding the representation of reality. She points to the example of Vietnam, as the first U.S. war broadcast directly into our homes, and the effects of the exposure of the war’s reality to the people, who questioned the justification of the war, and contradicted the official war position. Since then, television broadcast has been politically practical. The author points out that in order to neutralize the networks points of view about “reality”, artists used video as a medium to show their perception of reality, “their version of history”(p.38). In the 70’s and 80’s, television didn’t present real people; society was represented through the exposition of fictional figures, or celebrities that represented the white, heterosexual, middle class males who controlled these networks. The rest of the population, according to the author, was represented through stereotypes, or not at all.
Feminism – The personal is political
Throughout history, the most societies have been based on a patriarchal system with patriarchal institutions. Men were in control of the public sphere; meanwhile women were limited to the domestic sphere. In spite of the influence and earlier work of the suffragettes in the 20’s, by 1960 and 1970 women were underrepresented everywhere - including the art world. During this time, feminism began challenging and questioning issues like gender inequality, roles determined by sexual differences, different roles in procreation, as well as biological essentialism. Elwes states that the private sphere (women’s world) was “created by politics in general and patriarchy in particular” (p.39). The author refers to the filmmaker Sally Potter, who said, “. . . ideology is not merely reflected but produced in the context of the family and in personal relationships . . . ”(p.39). In order to break this cycle of oppression and fight to gain equal opportunities in public life, feminists used an instrument of communication inside the domestic sphere to create consciousness, exchange personal stories, and recreate them as a collective story of patriarchy oppression. The author presents the “personal as political” (p.40), a slogan that became a rallying cry for activists and artists.
The main focus of women artists was to raise consciousness about women’s private life: to render private life public. Feminist art had a political influence and help to make possible political initiatives such as abortion, measures against domestic violence and childcare. According to the author, feminist art was created to promote “political enlightenment” and to inspire women to participate in and make social changes. Feminist art based on oral history, stories shared by women, information passed from mothers to daughters, translated these exchange of information from an underground level to a public level through the visual arts, as well as video, where the analysis of personal identity become a main point. The author points out that feminism promoted activism, and at the same time analyzed femininity, focusing on representation. The different images or representations of women were narrowed to a dichotomy, in which the patriarchy created a classification of female stereotypes, as desirable or undesirable. It can be characterized as a virgin-whore dichotomy, in which an image of a woman as highly sexualized is contrasted with the image of a saint domestic mother which “society turned and reproduced”(p.40). Television was the medium through which the patriarchy spread stereotypical images of women, so logically video was the perfect medium to contrast these images and to begin to raise viewers’ consciousness. Video created the conditions for the exploration of “feminine experience,” as well as the exploration of the use of technology to search for identity.
Feminist Video – Instantaneity
Feminism as a political movement rose fast, after a long period of silence. Women had the urgent need to express themselves, as well as the need to be visible. Women artists chose performance for its confrontational nature, and video, for the ease with which the message is delivered. The author refers to the writer David Ross; he points out that video was formed by disciplines like film, theatre and television. However, according to the author, video and performance were “virgin territories for the exploration of the feminine” (p. 41). Video was attractive, because of its characteristics to mirror back the image of the artist to herself (p. 41). This medium was useful for artists dealing with issues like introspection; women were able to experiment with a certain autonomy. Another important feature of video was its possibility of “mass communication” (p. 42).
Domesticity and family relations
Domesticity and family life have been seen as a woman’s sphere and her near total identity. Family and family relationships were the main theme, in the beginning of feminism, of many women artist. The author refers to Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the kitchen (1975). In this video the artist performs a violent cooking session; she is behind a table in which she seems to be ready to cook, but instead, she creates a selective show of the kitchen tools like knife, fork, ice pick, etc and transforms these tools into weapons. She begins to use them to attack a non-existent entity in front of her. After this, the artist, uses a ladle to spill the contents of the pots making a disaster and with this the artist makes an statement about the destruction of the image of womanhood. The artist Vivienne Dick created a video It’s 3 a.m. in which the artist protests the role of women at home and her endless maternal and domestic activities. This period of early feminism was about the disappearance of women – in their roles as mothers and housewives - into endless activities of a domestic nature.
Fathers, Husbands, Lovers, Strangers
Women’s identity was attached to the identity of their male relatives. According to the author, along with the new idea to make the private life public, family relationship were a source of analysis. The abuse of women, inside in the house was exposed. Louise Forshaw’s video Hammer and Knife (1987) exposes her own sexual attack, and presents the artist sleeping with a hammer and a knife under the pillow. The exposition of violence against women was clear in the video Sari Red (1988) by artist Patibha Parmar. This video was made in the memory of Kalbinder Kaul Hayre, a young Indian woman killed in England for racist reasons. In the Ballad of Dan Peoples (1976) Lisa Steele sits with a photograph of a man. In the piece there is a transposition of adult and children voices as a way to recreate memories, and to find the identity, and relationship with the old man. The transposition of the voice from female to male is explored, as well by the Canadian artist Laurie Anderson, who presented a performance in which the artist switched her voice for a male voice and changing identity. Other women artists had been working in collaboration with male artist, and in some cases exchanging identities like in the case of Abramovic and Ulay.
Daughters and Sons
In this section the author refers to the work of diverse artists working about their children, showing different aspects of family dynamics ranging from parental influence to domestic violence. In some cases - like in the work of the artist Katharine Meynell –she collaborated with her daughter to create Hannah’s song (1986), a piece that explores the fusion of identities. The author refers to her own work There is a Myth (1984) in which she presents an image of her feeding her son and with this she tries to analyze the separation of male from the mother, and its social and political meaning.
The Body in Proximity
Feminist artists analyzed the way they were going to represent the female body to escape from the biological essentialism and from the male culture, as “reiterative patterns of sexual objectification” (p. 48). For English women artists, video was another tool objectifying women’s bodies. Peggy Phelan suggested using vanishing image as a way to “avoid patriarchal recuperation” (p.48). But, obviously this didn’t work for performance and video. In America, women artists were “resolving new forms of visibility” (p.48) and issues of proximity and “entitlement of the viewer” were explored. The author refers to Peggy Phelan, who suggested that is wa possible, with the use of extreme close-up, to “establish ownership by the woman who examines herself” (p.49). Nan Hoover explored close-up, and created videos in white and black about her own body, using the magnification of the image making indefinable the identity of it. Mona Hatoum in her piece Corps Etranger (1994) explores the inside of the body in order to escape all the political and social complexities that determine a woman’s outer appearance.
The Body Distant and Still
The different solutions feminist artists used to change or distort representation, according to the author, of “the most branded of all patriarchal products” (p.51) wasn’t as immediate in video as in film. The early quality of video gave a certain grade of distortion giving room for “subjective interpretations” (p.51). For some women artists, the limitation of the quality of video made this medium the perfect tool to become visible while avoiding confrontation with the audience. The author recalls the fact that the performance artist needs the audience to fulfill the act. She then refers to Lucy Lippard, who makes a really interesting observation that there is hardly any difference between a man’s use of the female body for sexual excitement and a “women’s use of women to expose that insult” (p.52).
Friday, October 30, 2009
The Modernist Inheritance by Catherine Elwes
The Modernist Inheritance
The Modernist Inheritance
Tampering with Technology and Other Interferences
The author explores the context by which video art emerged. By the 1960’s video, a new moving images format, became one of the most interesting media for diverse artists to explore. Since the beginning, video was defined by “the modernist aesthetic concerns” (p.21) that characterized post-war American and European painting.
What happened to painting and sculpture?
Artists were beginning to have less interest in the “qualities” of traditional materials, and less interest in the transformation of painting. By the 1950’s a modernist emphasis emerged on “surface, texture and the optical effect” (p.21) and the “truth to material". The materials weren’t required to represent something other than itself; they were simply to show its essence and its transcendence. Modernist art promoted an inclination of pure thought connected with “self-contemplation”. American post-war artists in particular received recognition for the production of art pieces in which the pure material was the subject. For example, Carl Andre showed an installation of bricks forming a platform, Donald Judd created metal boxes, and Richard Serra made steel slab installations in public spaces. Outside of the pure essence of the material, any visible intervention of the artist was censured, and with this traditional fine arts showed its possible annihilation.
The pure essence of material, as a signifier, defined modernism at that time and was the frame in which video emerged. In the beginning there was a preoccupation with process, lighting, filming, developing, printing, editing, and finally projecting. All the processes of creating a video were present and were revealed in the image. Video was considered as non-representational-however artists like Nam June Paik worked with video as something that represented the material by creating machines that interfered with their own technical process. Artists didn’t have access to the image directly without destroying the camera and turning the signal off.
The author refers to Marcel Duchamp, and his success in convincing a1917 public that his urinal was art, as an antecedent in the linguistic research of conceptual art. Conceptual artists could focus on a representational system that put order in objects and people and defined its value. In addition, conceptual artists demonstrated how these classifications were translated to the sphere of art and showed a cultural classification of what was considered art or not. Through their own practice conceptual artists focused on the displacement of the relationship between material and meaning. However the author points out that some artists used an absurd juxtaposition of materials and refers to the work of Meret Oppenheim who in 1930 created a furry teacup, or the enormous Mickey Mouse created by the American Claes Oldenburg. According to the author in conceptual art language became the axis, replacing the art object by “complicated and incomprehensible theoretical propositions” (p.23).
The production of video represented an interaction with a set of processes and machines defined by the artist’s or producer’s concerns. The image was produced through different machines, at a distance, however, according to the author, early video technology offered different ways of intervention. Video artists were interested in the exploration of malfunction, and problems of the technology to expand its knowledge about the “medium’s expressive potential” (p.24).
The Specificities of the Medium
As an introduction to this section the author refers to the French artist Cesar who created a piece in which he placed a set of televisions on the top of a pedestal and threatened them with a gun, as the first “assault” on television and portable video. Little by little the understanding of television and video gave more opportunity for artists to intervene and alter the image at the point of reception. Other artists with more technical expertise were able to dissemble the camera to alter it or improve it.
Television
In the first television sets, the image was scanned in a “vidicom” tube, which was a glass tube containing phosphor. In this tube an image was scanned - in 525 lines in the United State, and 625 lines in Europe. The scanner was activated by an electron gun, which bombarded the phosphor with electrons in a controlled rhythm. To create an image in the monitor, first of all the electron beam scanned the image and then the rhythm of the lines in the monitor moving 24 frames per second.
The first television set was in black and white and had a mono system sound. In comparatively with its weakness, the television offered visual content capable of holding the collective attention of viewers. The social response to the television was important, and soon become the substitution for many family activities, establishing its new social role. This substitution of family interaction for “bland narratives and establishment views of broadcasters” was the first element of exploration for artist. The author refers to the German artist Wolf Vostell, who in 1962 proposed several actions like changing the channel so fast that was impossible to see it, or burying it or eating it for dinner. With these actions the artist tried to smash the negative narrative of television. In one Nam June Paik, the artist used magnets to distort the television image. He also pursued the John Cage’s same idea silence and chance, and in one piece exposed the audience to their own breathing sounds. June Paik reduced the image of the television as a simple line of light. In its installation “In Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965), the artist modified the scanner so that the light on the monitor was reduced as a simple circle imitating the shape of the moon. In further versions of this installation the artist used magnets to distort the shape of the circle. In each of the twelve monitors the moon was re-shaped to represent the different stages of the moon.
Since the beginning, artists have been interested in intervening technology in ways of improving it or in a ways of improvising it to obtain specific results. Since the 1950 artists like Ben Laposky produced visual abstractions, using the distortion of sound waves with a “deflector plates attached to an oscilloscope” (p.26). The oscilloscope used the same principles as the television, and was susceptible to magnetic interference. By 1963 Nam June Paik used the same technology to create a hybrid machine. He created this set by adapting the output of a radio into a television. The amount of light was controlled by the level of volume.
Camera
The camera was the subject to all kinds of interventions by artists. The curiosity and the immense interest to discover the inside of the medium, took an artist like Douglas Davis to bury, smash, and finally throw it out of the window filming its own process of destruction. According to the author this basic form of “torture” were signs of the understanding of the internal workings of a camera. In 1975 the artist Mary Lucier created the piece “Dawn Burn” in which the artist exposed the camera to the direct sun creating a nice work about sunrise, but as a consequence, destroying the camera. In 1975 the German artist Jochen Gerz created the piece “Prometheus”, in which he reflected direct sun light into the lens using a mirror. The image was consumed by burn marks made by the sun. The author points out that with the concentrated use of light, these pieces revel weak spots in the technology.
Camera to Monitor, Video Feedback
The author refers to artists like Bill and Louise Etra and Ben Tatti, as artists interested in video feedback. They pointed the camera directly to the monitor, creating a “closed-circuit manifestation of the video process” (p.28). The author defined this as an endless process of re-feeds itself with itself, a “self-contemplation” (p.28). The video feedback was defined as a deconstructive device, or a result of the hallucinations of the consumption of LSD. The feedback attracted interest for its “ability to dramatize the imaging function of the camera as well as the perceptual processes of the artist.” (p. 28)
Sound Feedback
To exemplify sound feedback the author refers to the artist Richard Serra, who created the piece “Boomerang” in 1974. In this piece he used a delay in the relation between speaking and the image of the woman speaking, at the same time, through headphones. For the participant, Nancy Holt, video was the source and destination of the speech. The speaker became conscious of the processes by which thoughts were formed. Holt described the experience, “I am surrounded by Me, my mind surrounds me, goes out into the world, then comes back inside me . . . no escape.”(p. 29)
Sync Sound
Richard Serra used the anti-synchronization of sound to represent the destruction of what should be an understandable communication system. The American artist Bruce Newman created a piece in which the face of the artist in the image is upside-down. He said the same term over and over until he finally caught the movement of the mouth, creating synchronization. By the end of the 1960’s it was technically possible to create these effects, thanks to small technical advances in Portapacks.
Years later, the American Artist Gary Hill, in his piece “Why do things get in a muddle? (1984) made the image run in the opposite direction to the sound, creating confusion, even when the movie was played backwards.
Further Malfunctions
One of the most famous modernist videos used a television technical problem, and used it as an important resource in this work. The television sets, in the beginning, presented a problem of losing the synchronization and moving from frame to frame. The vertical and horizontal buttons were really helpful in synchronizing the image again. The artist Joan Jonas adjusted the vertical button to create an effect. In 1972 she created, "Vertical Roll" a video about herself slamming, rhythmically, a table with her hand, and synchronizing it with the vertical line scrolling over the image. The action seemed that her hand was pushing the vertical line of the frame. It looked like the impossible was happening, reversing the immateriality of the video image by climbing inside the technology and touching a physical component.
The Modernist Inheritance
Tampering with Technology and Other Interferences
The author explores the context by which video art emerged. By the 1960’s video, a new moving images format, became one of the most interesting media for diverse artists to explore. Since the beginning, video was defined by “the modernist aesthetic concerns” (p.21) that characterized post-war American and European painting.
What happened to painting and sculpture?
Artists were beginning to have less interest in the “qualities” of traditional materials, and less interest in the transformation of painting. By the 1950’s a modernist emphasis emerged on “surface, texture and the optical effect” (p.21) and the “truth to material". The materials weren’t required to represent something other than itself; they were simply to show its essence and its transcendence. Modernist art promoted an inclination of pure thought connected with “self-contemplation”. American post-war artists in particular received recognition for the production of art pieces in which the pure material was the subject. For example, Carl Andre showed an installation of bricks forming a platform, Donald Judd created metal boxes, and Richard Serra made steel slab installations in public spaces. Outside of the pure essence of the material, any visible intervention of the artist was censured, and with this traditional fine arts showed its possible annihilation.
The pure essence of material, as a signifier, defined modernism at that time and was the frame in which video emerged. In the beginning there was a preoccupation with process, lighting, filming, developing, printing, editing, and finally projecting. All the processes of creating a video were present and were revealed in the image. Video was considered as non-representational-however artists like Nam June Paik worked with video as something that represented the material by creating machines that interfered with their own technical process. Artists didn’t have access to the image directly without destroying the camera and turning the signal off.
The author refers to Marcel Duchamp, and his success in convincing a1917 public that his urinal was art, as an antecedent in the linguistic research of conceptual art. Conceptual artists could focus on a representational system that put order in objects and people and defined its value. In addition, conceptual artists demonstrated how these classifications were translated to the sphere of art and showed a cultural classification of what was considered art or not. Through their own practice conceptual artists focused on the displacement of the relationship between material and meaning. However the author points out that some artists used an absurd juxtaposition of materials and refers to the work of Meret Oppenheim who in 1930 created a furry teacup, or the enormous Mickey Mouse created by the American Claes Oldenburg. According to the author in conceptual art language became the axis, replacing the art object by “complicated and incomprehensible theoretical propositions” (p.23).
The production of video represented an interaction with a set of processes and machines defined by the artist’s or producer’s concerns. The image was produced through different machines, at a distance, however, according to the author, early video technology offered different ways of intervention. Video artists were interested in the exploration of malfunction, and problems of the technology to expand its knowledge about the “medium’s expressive potential” (p.24).
The Specificities of the Medium
As an introduction to this section the author refers to the French artist Cesar who created a piece in which he placed a set of televisions on the top of a pedestal and threatened them with a gun, as the first “assault” on television and portable video. Little by little the understanding of television and video gave more opportunity for artists to intervene and alter the image at the point of reception. Other artists with more technical expertise were able to dissemble the camera to alter it or improve it.
Television
In the first television sets, the image was scanned in a “vidicom” tube, which was a glass tube containing phosphor. In this tube an image was scanned - in 525 lines in the United State, and 625 lines in Europe. The scanner was activated by an electron gun, which bombarded the phosphor with electrons in a controlled rhythm. To create an image in the monitor, first of all the electron beam scanned the image and then the rhythm of the lines in the monitor moving 24 frames per second.
The first television set was in black and white and had a mono system sound. In comparatively with its weakness, the television offered visual content capable of holding the collective attention of viewers. The social response to the television was important, and soon become the substitution for many family activities, establishing its new social role. This substitution of family interaction for “bland narratives and establishment views of broadcasters” was the first element of exploration for artist. The author refers to the German artist Wolf Vostell, who in 1962 proposed several actions like changing the channel so fast that was impossible to see it, or burying it or eating it for dinner. With these actions the artist tried to smash the negative narrative of television. In one Nam June Paik, the artist used magnets to distort the television image. He also pursued the John Cage’s same idea silence and chance, and in one piece exposed the audience to their own breathing sounds. June Paik reduced the image of the television as a simple line of light. In its installation “In Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965), the artist modified the scanner so that the light on the monitor was reduced as a simple circle imitating the shape of the moon. In further versions of this installation the artist used magnets to distort the shape of the circle. In each of the twelve monitors the moon was re-shaped to represent the different stages of the moon.
Since the beginning, artists have been interested in intervening technology in ways of improving it or in a ways of improvising it to obtain specific results. Since the 1950 artists like Ben Laposky produced visual abstractions, using the distortion of sound waves with a “deflector plates attached to an oscilloscope” (p.26). The oscilloscope used the same principles as the television, and was susceptible to magnetic interference. By 1963 Nam June Paik used the same technology to create a hybrid machine. He created this set by adapting the output of a radio into a television. The amount of light was controlled by the level of volume.
Camera
The camera was the subject to all kinds of interventions by artists. The curiosity and the immense interest to discover the inside of the medium, took an artist like Douglas Davis to bury, smash, and finally throw it out of the window filming its own process of destruction. According to the author this basic form of “torture” were signs of the understanding of the internal workings of a camera. In 1975 the artist Mary Lucier created the piece “Dawn Burn” in which the artist exposed the camera to the direct sun creating a nice work about sunrise, but as a consequence, destroying the camera. In 1975 the German artist Jochen Gerz created the piece “Prometheus”, in which he reflected direct sun light into the lens using a mirror. The image was consumed by burn marks made by the sun. The author points out that with the concentrated use of light, these pieces revel weak spots in the technology.
Camera to Monitor, Video Feedback
The author refers to artists like Bill and Louise Etra and Ben Tatti, as artists interested in video feedback. They pointed the camera directly to the monitor, creating a “closed-circuit manifestation of the video process” (p.28). The author defined this as an endless process of re-feeds itself with itself, a “self-contemplation” (p.28). The video feedback was defined as a deconstructive device, or a result of the hallucinations of the consumption of LSD. The feedback attracted interest for its “ability to dramatize the imaging function of the camera as well as the perceptual processes of the artist.” (p. 28)
Sound Feedback
To exemplify sound feedback the author refers to the artist Richard Serra, who created the piece “Boomerang” in 1974. In this piece he used a delay in the relation between speaking and the image of the woman speaking, at the same time, through headphones. For the participant, Nancy Holt, video was the source and destination of the speech. The speaker became conscious of the processes by which thoughts were formed. Holt described the experience, “I am surrounded by Me, my mind surrounds me, goes out into the world, then comes back inside me . . . no escape.”(p. 29)
Sync Sound
Richard Serra used the anti-synchronization of sound to represent the destruction of what should be an understandable communication system. The American artist Bruce Newman created a piece in which the face of the artist in the image is upside-down. He said the same term over and over until he finally caught the movement of the mouth, creating synchronization. By the end of the 1960’s it was technically possible to create these effects, thanks to small technical advances in Portapacks.
Years later, the American Artist Gary Hill, in his piece “Why do things get in a muddle? (1984) made the image run in the opposite direction to the sound, creating confusion, even when the movie was played backwards.
Further Malfunctions
One of the most famous modernist videos used a television technical problem, and used it as an important resource in this work. The television sets, in the beginning, presented a problem of losing the synchronization and moving from frame to frame. The vertical and horizontal buttons were really helpful in synchronizing the image again. The artist Joan Jonas adjusted the vertical button to create an effect. In 1972 she created, "Vertical Roll" a video about herself slamming, rhythmically, a table with her hand, and synchronizing it with the vertical line scrolling over the image. The action seemed that her hand was pushing the vertical line of the frame. It looked like the impossible was happening, reversing the immateriality of the video image by climbing inside the technology and touching a physical component.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Feminist Art Theory. Politics in Practice. Video Technology and the Feminine (1992)
Feminism-Art-Theory
Hilary Robinson
In the chapter Politics and Practice, section on Video Technology and the Feminine, Nell Tenhaaf describes how women artists, since the 60’s, have been using technology which was originally considered masculine, and how they have appropriated it for themselves to create their own space out of the sexism of art history and practices in which they were marginalized. The author states that the use of technology offers a great opportunity for women artists to develop a visual discourse.
Willing Machines/Bachelor Machines
The author refers to Friedrich Nietzsche’s postulation of the masculine will, which is the central force of technology in the modernist era. The will of power is wound together with concepts of duality, the machine as masculine, and submission as feminine. The author explores Nietzsche’s definition of will: as a guide for the body to a determined desire, the will to power. She then compares the will with the machine. “Will has replaced reason as the highest mental faculty…Modern thinking ego is characterized by the I-will and, I-can.” (p.378) This idea has created a metaphor of modernity in which the body as a source of desire is separate from the mind as defined as will. The philosophy of the will determines the male body as subject to technological power, and a focus in the future. The base of the will is the duality of masculine dominance and feminine submission, and this duality determines the technology arena. The strong gender differences, as well as the will to power, frames the male controlled progress through technology development.
The author compares the “bachelor machine” with “Nietzsche’s willing machine which determine by will and desire” (p.379). She defines the bachelor machine as the result of desire turning into it self, and refers to Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre, and explains that both represent masculine bachelors and feminine brides as opposites. The bachelor machine represents masculine desire through the machine or technology. Le Grand Verre represents, according to Robinson, the absence of the body and the feminine. The author refers to several cases through history in which the bachelor machine became a signifier for different interpretative systems like the Einsteinian clock. Michael Serres determines the bachelor machine as a representation of the history of machines, however now the bachelor machine has moved into the informational state. The authors refer to Jean-Francois Lyotard who declares that “the growth of power, and its self-legitimization, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operability of information.” (p. 380) The bachelor machine is delineating a ”mythical technological framework”(p.380) in which the male defines his self as the creator of it. The author refers to the difference between the bachelor machine and the willing machine, and she points out that the feminine is more present in the former.
Robinson states that both represent “male self-representation”(p.380), and they play the role of the god-creator. The product of these machines (literary machine, social machine, etc.) is going to be a part of the machine itself. As different from men, which has a presence as subject, a woman is not able to speak for herself; the feminine in the era of biotechnology is absent.
The author wonders “. . .how women can turn herself in the technological order,” (p.380) and refers to the proposition of Luce Irigaray of the creation of the autoeroticism engine in her interpretation of the female body parts. She states that autoeroticism is a site of empowerment for woman, and she explains that when a woman touches herself, she establishes a position in which she clams her soul, and the essence of herself. However, Irigaray brings up the fear of many for biological determinism, as well as sexuality as a definer of being female. Irigaray states that the theory about the body is important because “every part of the body confronts a set of social meanings” (p.381). Autoeroticism is presented as out of the context of the bachelor machine’s sexual frame.
Threshold
The author describes metaphorically the television monitor as something alive, as the frame of change from dark to light. She compares the cinema with the screen as the connector between the subject and the camera. This can be the bachelor machine - but an electronic one. The monitor is like a double-sided mirror: one side emits light and the other reflects an image. On one side we have the subject, which in the cinema is the spectator, and “the male gaze situating the subject within the dominance of the phallic”(p.383).
The author describes the insides of the television, as well as the video monitor. The electron bean hits a curve covered with phosphor. This action produces light, then with the shot of a negative electron from the back of the monitor, its passes through the neck to the tube faced by a positive voltage. Outside the images is discharged. Here the author brings a reference to Irrigaray.
Body Parts
The author points out the fact that many women artists developed her visual discourses using video, opening a space for the expression of female desire. The author then describes the video work of different artists, like Kate Craig’s Delicate Issues (1979), and she describes it as a powerful piece about body, technology and power. This is a piece about the female body, in which the use of in-focus, and out-of-focus, as well as the closeness of the camera, creates an effect of unidentifiable parts of the body. At certain moments, the work uses dramatic contrasts, and abrupt close focus on details like hair, skin, and eyes. The use of a breathing sound gives an effect of intimacy/closeness, and at the same time frames the different parts of the body expressing autoerotic pleasure.
Marshalore’s trop(e)isme (1980) shows the artist, again, as the subject. The artist puts her fingers into her vagina taking some menstrual blood out and then covers parts of her face with it. She then takes a cigarette and smokes it with satisfaction. In this piece the artist tries to state a taboo, and at the same time tries to break it. The use of video allows women artists to express an important part of the “absent subjectivity that characterizes postmodernism” (p.385). The author points out that this position has been an important point of attention for women artists working in the new media. “Women artist have been developing important work in the theorization and practice”(p.385)
The author writes that the use of technological media as a language of the female body is complicated because the body is absorbed by the ideology of the “idealized body”. The body’s fragmentation is questioned in the development of technology, when it can be replaced by the bionic body, and this shows how society has been controlled by the technological media.
By the end the author refers to the limitation imposed by the debate about essentialism, and according to her this debate doesn’t assert any difference. Here, she refers to women of color.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. Feminist Theory and the Body
Feminist Theory and the Body
Lynda Birke
In Linda Birke’s article “Bodies and Biology” she analyses the central point in theorizing about the body: the difference between sex (biology difference) and gender (social difference). However, some feminist disagree with the analysis of this differences. Birke states that the biological body is a problem in feminist theorizing.
Biology is a synonym for living organisms and its processes, in this way human biology resembles dualism, and this is s problem for feminist theory. Biological discourse tends to provoke gender division, as well as the definition of the social roles of women and men, and as a logical response, feminism has been against biological determinism. They stand for some kind of “social constructivism of gender”(p.43).
The body has become a main point of interest for feminists and non-feminists alike. Some theorists tend to emphasize sex-gender dualism, emphasizing the living body, and “transcend the mine/body dichotomy”(p.43). The body is the “signifying and signified”----- In this way the body is defined as something through which you can have social discourse.
The body is important for feminist theory, however the focus on the interior and its processes have been limited, as well as ‘the body development” (p.43). Feminist theorists have been deconstructing texts and images, although the analysis of inside the female body’s images had been ignored. The author exposes that the analysis of images in biology texts are important. The representation of the female body’s interior is evident in the work of two authors, Donna Haraway (1991), and Emily Martin (1994), who presented a work about images of the immune system, and how this is culturally defined. The author points out two aspects of these two texts, one is about the analysis of the “cultural understanding” (p.44), how through the images and the discourses the immune system is going to be understood. The second one is “the permeability of the body,” (P.44) according to Haraway, “the postmodern immune system” is part of a network of bodies, and these bodies, through its permeability, is harassed by the “discourses of science”(p.44).
The author describes how, even with great interest about the body, there is a lack of interest about the inside of the body, and these areas are out of the reach of philosophers of biology. The author considers that the body’s interiors need to be exposed to cultural criticism and be considered as something which is moving, changing, and not only as a medium to analyze cultural meaning. However, the experience or the perception of the inside of the body is affected by culture.
The author points out that although we can highlight “human development in terms of transformability” (p.46), fixity concepts of “the gene” is gaining attention. These kind of concepts reinforce the conservative ideas of “family, gender and race”(p.46). Contrary to feminist intention, these concepts are expanding into the culture through the discourse of “genes”.
The author refers to the permeability of the body, and she points out the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who talks about gender and the organism as something fluid and transformative; the author refers, as well to Haraway’s work “visions of the cyborg,” in which she also talks about fluidity. She talks about polymorphous information systems, and highlighting fluidity across boundaries. While these two authors argued for female fluidity, Birke agrees with the two authors, however argues that organisms have an entity itself. Haraway uses this metaphor of fluidity to argue about this western idea that organisms are determined by genetics.
Referring to this idea of transformation is the social idea that female bodies are devaluated, and this conversation about self determining or transformation is a way to get out of this simple self vs. the body. This section examines several scholars’ views about the self, using biology theory in different degrees to talk about the self.
Lynda Birke
In Linda Birke’s article “Bodies and Biology” she analyses the central point in theorizing about the body: the difference between sex (biology difference) and gender (social difference). However, some feminist disagree with the analysis of this differences. Birke states that the biological body is a problem in feminist theorizing.
Biology is a synonym for living organisms and its processes, in this way human biology resembles dualism, and this is s problem for feminist theory. Biological discourse tends to provoke gender division, as well as the definition of the social roles of women and men, and as a logical response, feminism has been against biological determinism. They stand for some kind of “social constructivism of gender”(p.43).
The body has become a main point of interest for feminists and non-feminists alike. Some theorists tend to emphasize sex-gender dualism, emphasizing the living body, and “transcend the mine/body dichotomy”(p.43). The body is the “signifying and signified”----- In this way the body is defined as something through which you can have social discourse.
The body is important for feminist theory, however the focus on the interior and its processes have been limited, as well as ‘the body development” (p.43). Feminist theorists have been deconstructing texts and images, although the analysis of inside the female body’s images had been ignored. The author exposes that the analysis of images in biology texts are important. The representation of the female body’s interior is evident in the work of two authors, Donna Haraway (1991), and Emily Martin (1994), who presented a work about images of the immune system, and how this is culturally defined. The author points out two aspects of these two texts, one is about the analysis of the “cultural understanding” (p.44), how through the images and the discourses the immune system is going to be understood. The second one is “the permeability of the body,” (P.44) according to Haraway, “the postmodern immune system” is part of a network of bodies, and these bodies, through its permeability, is harassed by the “discourses of science”(p.44).
The author describes how, even with great interest about the body, there is a lack of interest about the inside of the body, and these areas are out of the reach of philosophers of biology. The author considers that the body’s interiors need to be exposed to cultural criticism and be considered as something which is moving, changing, and not only as a medium to analyze cultural meaning. However, the experience or the perception of the inside of the body is affected by culture.
The author points out that although we can highlight “human development in terms of transformability” (p.46), fixity concepts of “the gene” is gaining attention. These kind of concepts reinforce the conservative ideas of “family, gender and race”(p.46). Contrary to feminist intention, these concepts are expanding into the culture through the discourse of “genes”.
The author refers to the permeability of the body, and she points out the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who talks about gender and the organism as something fluid and transformative; the author refers, as well to Haraway’s work “visions of the cyborg,” in which she also talks about fluidity. She talks about polymorphous information systems, and highlighting fluidity across boundaries. While these two authors argued for female fluidity, Birke agrees with the two authors, however argues that organisms have an entity itself. Haraway uses this metaphor of fluidity to argue about this western idea that organisms are determined by genetics.
Referring to this idea of transformation is the social idea that female bodies are devaluated, and this conversation about self determining or transformation is a way to get out of this simple self vs. the body. This section examines several scholars’ views about the self, using biology theory in different degrees to talk about the self.
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