Female Video Imagery: Deconstruct & Represent

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. 

Video Art and Forming Memories

In Woody Vasulkas' of Art of Memory, the artist integrated the documentary film and photography into flows of digital manipulated images. Black-and-white newsreel footages of cavalry and flaming buildings were processed into moving, multi-screen polyhedrons; the sky behind the figure suddenly crawls with geometric "rain". Then comes the voice of an important historical feature, on seeing the first explosion of the atomic bomb. Vasulka transformed the historical imagery and audio into new visual displays.

First of all, the obvious theme for this video is a critique on the use of historical recording imagery technology, photography and film. By transforming the footages and images of wars into fluid digital movement and ambiguous shapes, the artist concerned about the military-industrial use of such technology. He was questioning on the present and the preservative aspects of history and our memory about that. His point was to deconstruct the relationship between our memories about the history with those “historical” black and white events footages. By transferring the filmic records into other media and translated them into the state of an electronic pictoriality, he challenged the priority in human notions and entered into the private space of historical documents.

Secondly, the major theme for Vasulka’s work is to investigate the historical distance of the media used and point to the storage function of historical documentary imagery and sound. By transforming old records of images and sound into energetic and fluid electronic movements, he freed or activated those dead visual/audiovisual materials, and then translated them back from being a container of human memory into remembered history. He changed the critical distance in the display of imagery as memory. By making the war footages into waveforms surfaces in the new electronic pictoriality, Vasulka used his computer- generated forms proved how memory distorted the shape of events, and how permeable was the media imagery as a container of supposed truth influenced our understandings. By this, he demonstrated the self-reflexivity of video technology as a new medium. And then brought new notions to the aesthetic content in understanding the distance between the two levels of display, resulting in exploring the construction of our memory based on a picture world and the way to view our imagery cultural. 

Video Feedback

Video feedback is continual and processual series of digital images created by the electronic imagery itself. It is a process that starts and continues when a video camera is pointed at its playback on a video monitor. The image from the camera is delayed slightly in time as it travels through the extensive circuitry of the recording system and then is output to the video playback monitor. Video feedback is not invented; it is a digital phenomena as the form of a dynamic flow of imagery created by the digital world itself.

VanDerBeek gained great significance in his video feedback experiments. Good examples can be found in his work Poemfield NO.2, stared from 4:25. He's trying to create new graphic and new images by the corresponds between videos and movies. He explored the visual possibility of the mix of media, raising the question of what is the illusion? What is the reality? What is magic? He's testing the power of images created exclusively in the digital visual media. By creating a new combination of computer imagery and digital imagery, VanDerBeek expanded a new visual world and a new cultural environment. He explored the relationship between man and machines, and then investigated the video feedback as a new language form.
Also, in Euclidean Illusions, the video feedback started from 1:01. The beautiful image flows suggested the infinite spaces and times in the digital imagery. The unpredictable patterns grow inside the projected picture, creating an endless power box at the same time. The video feedback reminded viewers about the mysterious of digital creation, and its unpredictable power, and also the sense of uncontrollable. The infinite spaces brought up an infinite amount of energy to the media itself. Then let the audience to analyze the current relationship between human and the digital.
 

Manipulations

How special effects and video manipulation contribute to the video content?  Be able to tell what the video concept is the first step to find the right answer. 

Stan Brakhage made his work Dog Star Man from the first person perspective, letting the audience to see the action of seeing with the subject's own eye. The whole video is in a very fast speed of transitions. Everything is blurry and changing. Viewers can hardly see clearly anything but still feel the story. The person's perspective is very low in position, just like the view from a dog. With special effects, like multiply layers, shadows on sides, dark night views, the video can manipulate the seeing world of a dog or a dog-man. By using lots of mixed images, and digital flash effects, the artist created great tension and some fiction feelings in this video. Like those images that mixed with pictures of moon, skin, blood, and some microscope views, they are suggesting the plots of werewolf.  Another interesting effect is the use of red filter. There're many scenes that were edited into a dominated color of red. With showing some abstract patterns and lines in a quick motion, the red scenes can be interpreted as fire, energy, passion, blood, violence and tension, which are all connected to the later images of female body and woman's face, suggesting the possible sex, desire and violence even murder. 

Jonas Mekas's work, Walden (1969), is an example of his dairy form of film-making. The film is a honest portrait of the artist and his life in New York City. The use of texts or titles in his film is important. They work good as transitions for different scenes, and they certainly made the point of the poetic of this dairy film. There's no conversations and talking. Moving imagery plus beautiful written words make the film more peaceful and poetic. As a film diary, the footages recorded the artist direct reaction to the immediate reality, and his daily activities like having dinner, talking in Central Park. Some special effects were used in presenting the footages. For examples, some scenes were made into a faster speed and some shuts had blue or yellow filters. All these effects made the ordinary everyday life not boring but beautiful as memories. This poetic personal diary documented many life scenes, the changes of seasons, friendships and many normal but wonderful things happened in the artist world. All these poetic expression were just celebrating the joy of life, the simple and innocent moments of living, the beauty of nature and friendship.

Peter Kubelka's video about Schwechater beer  is nothing like traditional commercials. The rapid cuts and abstract shadows of negative like images made views very hard to see what exactly going on in that video. The repeated use of color filters and unexpected jump increased the "coolness" of this video and then made this commercial very innovatory. What it looks like to open a beer bottle and drink with friends is commonsense for everyone. Based on abstract shadows and certain movements, views can complete the beer images by themselves. The details of drinking Schwechater is not important. What matter is the coolness of doing so. 

"Crossings and Meetings", (1974), explores the visual and audio spaces in people's action of walking. In this video, Emshwiller implied many special effects to expand and enlarge the world of the images and sound in a simple movement. For example, fast-forward and rewind an action, multiple layers and keying in one frame, and also the heavy manipulation of audio. With all these effects, Emshwiller deconstructed the action of walking, and made the spaces between crossings and meetings infinite. There're complex elements, and numerous micro-movements, and lots of energies in those enlarged spaces and uncounted time periods.