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.