Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas, and Valie Export are three import female artist in the history of video art. I think they can be grouped
together because all of them used video, video installation and video
performance as a media to deconstruct the traditional imagery of female body,
and then establish their own definition to the woman identity. They questioned
the adoption of the electronic media in the process of knowing and seeing a
female body. In their controls of imagery making approaches, they disassociated
the reflections of their own bodies from historically cultural defined woman
imagery. They used video as the live medium and its character of reflexiveness to execute a direct control in transforming, representing, recording, and
exhibiting of their redefined female roles, mostly in contrast to the mass
media portrait of women in female grace, soft hearted and natural beauty.
Ulrike Rosenbach,
Salto Mortale is a video of Ulrike Rosenbach’s live action
as a recording of her performance. With a camera in her hands, Rosenbach swings
from a two-meter-high trapeze while recording what comes into her lens. As the
way she’s holding the camera, the video appears in a constant moving mode,
recording a blurring and transparent imagery that combined by two different
pictures of women. One photo is a portrait of Leila Khaled, a famous female
Palestinian freedom fighter holding a machine gun. Below and opposite to this
photo is a picture of Madonna, which is mounted head down. The camera records
both portraits with a swinging motion. At the same time, this video can be seen
in a closed-circuit setup, on a monitor placed in the performance space.
As an
active feminism artist, Ulrike Rosenbach explores and investigates the media
image of women in this project. Based on a “mythical feminist standpoint” (Lucy
Lippard), she explores the changing roles of women throughout our history.
Instead of soft, sweet and fragile female roles portrayed in traditional visual
media, she visualizes and develops new female identity. By blurring past and
present, enhanced by the swinging movement, she shows the groundlessness of
women, the infinite energy and possibilities in female identity, suggesting her
deny on the stereotypes of women in mainstream media.
Valie Export
Touch Cinema is a performing art project commenting on female
identity and the impact of media. The live act was performed in ten European
cities from 1968 to 1971. In this revolutionary work, Valie Export was wearing
a monitor as a clothe around her naked top body, in away that her upper body
could not be seen by the public. However, there’s an open door for the
screen/monitor she’s wearing, and anyone can put their hands into the monitor
and touch inside the screen. She went into the street and invited men, women,
and children to come and touch her.
In Valie Export's performance, she was
criticizing the media’s portrait and metaphors on female body. Instead of
showing the actual body in a media platform, she invites people to go through
the screen to touch the body in person, as breaking the illusion and added implications
to the unity of female body. She used her live actions to demonstrate that the
female body should not be packaged and sold by male directors and producers,
but is controlled and offered freely by the woman herself, which is a concept
quite different from social rules and media stereotypes. Also, in Valie
Export's performance, the audience are not only feeling the work visually and
audibly, they can also have a very direct, tactile contact with the work piece
as well as the artist, which in a way that breaks down the boundary between
media and audience, content and responses.
Joan Jonas,
Vertical Roll: By putting fast speed passing images as
a cohesive short shots of a female body together, combined with extremely loud
metal beats, Joan Jonas used the technique of montage to create a theater for
her audience to view and respond to her perspective of female identity. In a
startling combination of form and content, this work deconstructed the
representation of female bodies under the media definition. Montage, or say,
the vertical roll, is the biggest interruption for audience to read the
imagery, which is an abstract collage of fragments of female body, compressing
tensions, and infinite energy and anger. The artist manipulates the form of
media illustration and then controls the physical and mental experience when
they watching the video. Patience is needed to finish watching the video or
trying to figure out the meaning of body pieces in those flashing frames. By
doing this, Joan Jonas deconstructs the original imagery of female body, and
reframes the expected audience perspectives, aiming to dislocate the space
between audience and media, and then fractures the reality. With the use of
electronic distortion, the artist creates a surreal and uncomfortable viewing
environment for her audience, in order to convey the messages of being anxious,
dizzy, uncontrolled, and even mad. Joan Jonas made her point on media portray
on women body strongly in this art piece, distorting, dividing, and destroying
the traditional and stereotype of female imagery from television and other
mainstream visual media.
The technique of montage is usually used for
condensing time and compressing spaces in a shorter sequence while providing
more information. However, in Vertical Roll, Jonas used montage as a way to
increase the reading time period, to enlarge the scale of female imagery, to
diagnose the weenie fragments, to augment the spaces within the media as well
as the distance between media and viewers.
