University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk Faculty of Arts and Humanities School of Art, Design and Architecture 2019-04 Ewva European Women's Video Art in The 70sand 80s http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/16391 JOHN LIBBEY PUBLISHING All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. EWVA EuropeanPROOF Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s do not distribute PROOF do not distribute Cover image: Lydia Schouten, The lone ranger, lost in the jungle of erotic desire, 1981, still from video. Courtesy of the artist. EWVA European Women’s PROOF Video Art in the 70s and 80s Edited by do Laura Leuzzi, Elaine Shemiltnot and Stephen Partridge Proofreading and copyediting by Laura Leuzzi and Alexandra Ross Photo editing by Laura Leuzzi anddistribute Adam Lockhart EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s iv British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data EWVA European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780 86196 734 6 (Hardback) PROOF do not distribute Published by John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 205 Crescent Road, East Barnet, Herts EN4 8SB, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected]; web site: www.johnlibbey.com Distributed worldwide by Indiana University Press, Herman B Wells Library – 350, 1320 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. www.iupress.indiana.edu © 2019 Copyright John Libbey Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Unauthorised duplication contravenes applicable laws. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Contents Foreword Siegfried Zielinski vii PROOFPreface Laura Mulvey xi Introduction Laura Leuzzi 1 Chapter 1 Self/Portraits: The Mirror, The Self and The Other. Identity and Representation in Early Women’s Video Art in Europe Laura Leuzzido 7 Chapter 2 Natural Interruptions Adam Lockhart 25 Chapter 3 Desire for More not Cinzia Cremona 41 Chapter 4 On Women’s Video Art in the context of Yugoslavia, 1969–91 Jon Blackwooddistribute 55 Chapter 5 Slender Margins and Delicate Tensions: Projects by European Video Pioneers Stansfield/Hooykaas Malcolm Dickson 67 Chapter 6 Elaine Shemilt in-conversation with Sean Cubitt 83 Chapter 7 Concretising the illogical: Immaterial Identities in Early Women’s Video Art Emile Josef Shemilt 101 Chapter 8 Without a trace … ? Stephen Partridge 111 Chapter 9 With Child: Motherhood and women’s video in the 1980s Catherine Elwes 123 Chapter 10 Feminism, Ireland and Women’s Video Art in the 1980s Maeve Connolly 139 Chapter 11 Highly Limited Access: Women and Early Video Art in Poland Marika Kuzmiczï 157 EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s vi Chapter 12 Creating Crossroads: European Women’s Closed-Circuit Video Slavko Kacunko 177 Chapter 13PROOFEarly ‘Female’ Video Experiments in Nordic Countries in the 1970s and 1980s Lorella Scacco 195 Selected Bibliography 209 Biographies of the Contributors 211 Indexdo 217 not distribute Foreword Foreword Siegfried Zielinski hePROOF origin is a trap. Michel Fou- Basing their analyses on sources as cault, archaeologist of diverse as Plato’s critique of the im- sexuality, knowledge, and age in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’, T power, stressed this over and Husserl’s phenomenology, Lacan over again – following in the and Kristeva’s still incipient psycho- footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche. In analysis, and above all a Marxist- seeking the provenance of complex inflected critique of ideology, these phenomena, there is never only a sin-dotheorists made it unmistakably clear gle point, a single truth from which all that the dominant power relations else derives. Interdiscursive contexts, were inscribed in the apparatical such as video art made by women, or structurenot of cinema technologies feminist video art, likewise develop themselves and that film undergoes from a set of historical conditions. complex processes of encoding, from Women’s revolt against patriar- the recording of external reality to its chal relations in Europe after the Sec- projection ondistribute the screen. ond World War, aspirations to break Laura Mulvey concretised these the taboos regulating established perspectives on the cinema in 1975, gender norms, an invalidation of the with her critique of traditional film. Vis- legitimacy of male domination in the ual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema be- art market and in cultural institutions came the paradigmatic text of feminist since the latter half of the 1960s – media critique, with concepts such as these were decisive for those condi- ‘phallocentrism’, ‘scopophilic in- tions. But there was also another set stinct’, and ‘a woman’s to-be-looked- of impulses resulting from techno-so- at-ness’ evolving into analytical cial, techno-political, and medial fac- leitmotifs in progressive thought on tors. cinema. In the following years, Italian- In the early 1970s, the writings of American cultural theorist Teresa de so-called theorists of the apparatus in Lauretis and the Korean-American art- the Parisian journals Cahiers du ist and theorist Theresa Hak Kyung cinéma and Tel Quel (Jean-Louis Cha, who was raped and murdered in Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Marcelin lower Manhattan in 1982, helped to Pleynet) radically did away with the further develop the apparatus-heuris- naïve idea that the technologies of film tic into an important theoretical instru- and cinema were in any way neutral. ment for the women’s movement. EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s viii Enormous critical potential also Nauman, Nam June Paik, and Wolf unfolded in the immediate field of me- Vostell. Female artists discovered the dia technology itself. Laura Mulvey potential in this new aesthetic and po- and Peter Wollen’s critical-discursive litical instrument a little later, but with Riddles of the Sphynx was still, in greater energy and impact. The Men- 1977, produced on 16mm film (with struationsfilm that VALIE EXPORT music by the legendary Mike Ratledge made in 1967, now considered lost, of Soft Machine). At the same time, in was still filmed on 8mm cine film. The France and Switzerland with their joint provocative, now iconic projects in Ex- production company Son+Image, panded Cinema that VALIE EXPORT Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie and Peter Weibel made in the late Miéville had been working for several 1960s are not at all video works. Cut- PROOFyears already with the amateur’s ting (1968) was a multi-part perform- gadget – electronic video – which they ance using paper screen, slide preferred to cinematography because projectors, and a naked male actor of the lightness and flexibility of the (Weibel), whose body hair was medium. shaved with a razor into decorative Like this work, which was done in patterns by the director (EXPORT). the beginning with explicit reference EXPORT/Weibel’s Tap and Touch Cin- to the Russiando avant-garde artist ema (1969, German title: Tapp – und Dziga Vertov,1 the whole early period Tastkino) was an action piece that dis- of artistic engagement with the new pensed entirely with film as a medium; electronic medium was verynot explicitly that was the profound meaning of the political in character. The Raindance action, which understood itself to be Corporation, originating in the United above all a critique of the image- States but expanding to include other imaginary. The documentation that re- groups and cooperatives from otherdistributemains of another action featuring capitalist countries, understood video Peter Weibel reading through a mega- as a component part of social move- phone from an inflammatory text on ments and as a medium of interfer- the capitalist exploitation of sexuality ence: for a systematically decentral- in cinema while, among others, the ised television of many producers and filmmaker Werner Nekes is permitted for greater autonomy in possible cul- to stroke EXPORT’s breasts for a few tural expressions. This development seconds was also captured on cine had a techno-economic basis: the film. The confrontation between the new mobility of this video technology illusionary and the real was also the – its continuing reduction in size and guiding idea behind EXPORT’s Action price peaked with the Sony Portapak Pants: Genital Panic. But the originary introduced in Japan in 1967 and in the action is less well-known. Wearing US in 1968 – was what opened the jeans with a hole cut out at the geni- possibility of thinking a flexible, spon- tals, VALIE EXPORT squeezed her taneous, and autonomous applica- way through the rows of a movie thea- tion of the medium. ter, just prior to the start of a show, so There was already manifest artis- that the seated audience was pre- tic video work done in the second half sented with the object of male desire of the 1960s, by the likes of Bruce immediately at eye level. ix Foreword | EWVA An early exhibition of exclusively briefly and impressively, her 1972 video art, organised by Willoughby work Organic Honey’s Visual Telepa- Sharp in New York, in August/Septem- thy. Ulrike Rosenbach’s earliest black- ber 1970, included only men. Here and-white videos also date back to Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Dennis 1972. Friederike Pezold’s body-ana- Oppenheim, and others presented grammatical works first began ap- their first black-and-white tapes in pearing in 1973, following several half-inch reel format. videographic experiments in 1971. As Shigeko Kubota began assem- of 1973, VALIE EXPORT also turned to bling her Broken Diary videos film, and more intensively to the elec- (1972/73) in the Experimental Televi- tronic medium.