Feminist Video Art

How do the works of  Valie Export, Jill Scott and Frederike Pezold critique the mainstream media concepts of women? 

Or do they? 

The first generation of women video artists in Europe used the video medium to examine images of their own bodies from a decidedly feminism perspective. Export, Scoot and Pezold are famous for their artistic approaches to deconstruct normative poses of female bodies, which are supposed to express beauty and grace.

Honestly, Export's work Remote...Remote... (1973) was very disturbing, and I cannot look at the screen after suffering the imagery pains for 5 minutes. Valie Export conducted a psychological investigation, as well as a physical distortion of her body in this film performance. She tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. The film started from a picture of two young children. From the film statement, I found that the two children inside the picture were sexually abused by their parents. The film had some very close shots with the children's wild-open eyes. While the artist's eyes were always cold and unconcerned, even when she's hurting herself. The video challenged the views in an extreme way to show her cooly cutting her body with her indifferent attitude. That presented a very different female role from the traditional stereotype, which is soft, fragile, warmhearted, and sweet.

Frederike Pezold used female bodies as a new embodied sign language. By enlarging a certain part of the body, or putting different distorted parts together, she used women's psychical body as a sign, a language to express her thoughts. The body part no longer appears beautiful, grace, nor sexy in our mainstream media concepts of women bodies. The female body became a medium for Pezold.

In her work Inside Out (1978), Jill Scott created a basement outside on a pavement. She's staying inside the basement and can only look the world outside through the camera monitor, while people passing by can see her through the video camera. People on the street can actually be curious enough and go into the basement to see her doing. By this installation and experiment, Scott critique on the female images showed on the media monitors. People are seeing and understanding women by viewing the images on TV screens and took the manipulated roles as truth. And sometimes, housewives can also understand the world only by watching TV or computer monitor. But what actually inside the basement can only be known by entering that space. And the mice under the basement can be seen as the fears or daily stresses for females.