Elwes
: Part 2
When one's gaze is ignored and the other person looks instead at one's eyes as objects, one's sense of being in a world in which one is recognised as a person disappears and one begins to feel that one cannot continue to be a person (John Shotter.1983)
In 1976 the psychologist E. Carpenter unleashed the forces of mechanical reproduction into the Sepik tribe of Papua, New Guinea by taking photographs of them. At first the people were fearful, convinced that he had stolen their souls, but they later lost their terror and began photographing each other enthusiastically, some even wearing the results on their foreheads. Returning some months later Carpenter found the tribe had changed dramatically: the Sepik had become Europeanised. Tribesmen were migrating to government settlements and discontent circulated among the people who were now 'torn from their tribal existence and transformed into detached individuals, lonely, frustrated, no longer at home anywhere'(1).
The ability of representation to isolate and objectify individuals is as powerful in the Western world as it was within the 'virgin' culture of the Sepik. Like Carpenter's camera, video technology can cut the subject off from the social interactions that make cultural agency possible. But like the Sepik tribesmen, artists have wanted to appropriate the instruments of their own alienation. In the context of contemporary video art practice this has meant an attempt to re-establish the autonomy of the individual ; and in the context of women's video, the reinstatement of the personal becomes a feminist strategy as well as an individual act of reclamation.
Although female and male artists alike have endeavoured to address the personal in their video work, both in fact frequently demonstrate the influence of feminist politics. Of course, men and women have different experiences of the world and their motivation will not always be the same. Nor will their art be identical either formally or at the level of content. Some male artists have gone so far as to interpret the personal as a license to make unprovoked attacks on the audience. However, I am concerned here with work which draws on the personal as it was articulated within feminist politics. In order to fully understand how British artists interpreted this initiative through the medium of video, it is first necessary to map out the broad political ideas that led women to proclaim the personal as political.
The experience of the Sepik mirrors the sense of rootlessness, of non-existence within the languages of representation that characterizes Western femininity. The difference is that we have lived with it since birth, since our fathers first snapped 'their' little girls and we learned that we existed as an image, as property. as a performance to camera whose prime objective was the excitation and satisfaction of men's desire. Within this scenario, the female gaze is denied and one does indeed lose one's most fundamental sense of self.
In the 1970s feminist theorists argued that this loss of 'personhood' also involves the loss of the right to an autonomous, independent existence with a recognised and valued role in the cultural and economic life of our Western tribe. Although the political struggles of feminism in law, education, ecology and the wider arena of party politics have played a crucial role in retrieving that right, the field of art - the battleground of representation - has played an equally important role by somewhat paradoxically drawing on the personal.
Throughout the history of Western art, the exclusion of the personal and the domestic from the subject matter of 'high' art has reinforced the marginalisation of both women themselves and women's art. Within the wider social formation women have traditionally been relegated to the private worlds of the personal, the domestic and child-rearing, while men and their cultural practices have tended to occupy the public arena. And this process of segregation has been supported by the notion that women, by virtue of their reproductive role, are 'naturally' suited to domestic life. Feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker have observed that characteristic 'women's concerns' rarely qualified to be subjects of paintings executed by men in the 'grand' manner. At the same time, only the more 'minor' practices of flower painting, small-scale portraiture, observations of domestic scenes and the like were deemed a suitable province for women artists. Indeed, it was these forms of marginalisation that helped identify the themes of 'high' art - religion, politics, military occasions, civic events etc. - as 'masculine' and therefore the exclusive domain of men (2).
Given the way in which biological determinism had polluted the personal, it is no great surprise to find artists like Mary Kelly and Lis Rhodes concentrating on the more academic task of analysing and deconstructing the structures of language and representation. However, the personal was in fact central to the strategies of early 'radical' feminist art anti, like the more pragmatic political initiatives, drew directly on the process of consciousness-raising. Broadly speaking, this involved small groups of women exchanging personal experiences which they had been led to believe were the result of individual pathology or innate weakness. The remarkable similarity of such testaments indicated that such experiences were the product of a common oppression under patriarchy. As Sally Potter stressed: 'ideology is not merely reflected but produced in the context of the family and in personal relationships ... political structures are not just "out there" but are manifest in the most seemingly insignificant actions, words and conditions.'(3) The slogan 'The Personal is Political' became firmly rooted in feminism and feminist art on both sides of the Atlantic. The personal was no longer relegated to the private world of domesticity, but was raised to the level of 'objective significance'. Within the context of art it challenged the hegemony of masculine signification which at the time was locked into an impersonal' formalism as exemplified by the coloul fields of Mark Rothko or the hard sculptural edges of Donald Judd. Furthermore, the interests of a white male minority were disguised under claims to universality, visual purity or truth to materials.
While most men were busy attempting to drain images of any meaning beyond the sign, early feminist artists excavated the stories of their own lives in an attempt to develop a new feminist aesthetic of the personal. In some cases this meant creating images that reclaimed the body as both personal territory and expressive medium. Although later works sought alternative representations, early initiatives took a diagnostic or deconstructive approach in which the colonization of women's bodies was exposed. Martha Rosler demonstrated the experience of the body as medical fodder in her video Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977). Every dimension of her body is noted by white-coated medical personnel - including the length of her vagina. Sexuality and the sexual objectification of women's bodies were also deconstructed as in Eleanor Antin's photographic work Carving, A Traditional Sculpture(1973). The artist documented the gradual reduction of her body contours through dieting until the 'ideal' shape was achieved. The brutal frontality of the images and the artist's refusal to take up a seductive feminine pose both highlights and denies the male expectations which drive women to undergo dramatic physical alterations to maintain their heterosexual appeal.
Other artists explored the body as the site of reproduction in its physical, cultural and religious aspects. The subject of myth and taboo for centuries, menstruation and parturition, the womb and its mysteries were now portrayed from the other side - from the perspective of the woman who inhabits the body. Monica Sjoo painted her God Giving Birth (1969) as a monumental standing mother releasing a child from her vulva. In her slide tape work Water into Wine (1980), Judith Higginbottom linked menstruation to the power of dreams and creativity and the inspirational symbolism of ancient matriarchies.
The personal was also understood as an effect of interpersonal relationships. Artists examined their experiences of fathers, lovers and mothers and often revived women's oral traditions to do so. In Tina Keane's video installation Playpen (1979) generations of mothers and daughters passed on their stories, creating an alternative cultural history. Women also observed their own children, the complexities of family life and the processes of early socialization. Kate Meynell's Hannah's Song (1986), for example, recorded her daughter's first encounter with her mirror image, while my own allegorical sequences in Winter (1984) charted my son's journey into the wintry landscape of a male world. The all too-common experiences of abortion, rape, poverty or death within the family also became the subject of women's art. In 1976, for instance, Linda Montana made a video tape called Mitchell's Death in which the artist's face was hung with acupuncture needles, like a contemporary 'mater dolorosa'. She chanted the story of her husband's suicide, combining the emotive power of plain chant with a banal, literal description of his death. At the same time, other artists examined the relationship of individual women to the history of art. The muse got up and spoke most famously in Hannah O'Shea's A Litany for Women Artists (1977). In performances lasting several hours, O'Shea chanted the names of every known woman artist, most of whom had been excluded from dominant histories of art.
From this brief synopsis of how the personal was addressed in feminist art it is apparent that the urgency of the feminist project and the need for effective communication led to a preference for more immediate forms of expression. Painting tended to be figurative; indeed Monica Sjoo once commented that she was at a loss to describe the pangs of childbirth in terms of the stripes and abstract daubs of her male colleagues(4). Speech was direct and subjective. Drawing on the personal testaments at the root of consciousness-raising, diaristic narratives appeared in book form, as adjuncts to graphic or photographic images, and most frequently in performances and installations. But it was in the form of audio, film and video recording that the personal found its most natural vehicle.
Video had a particular appeal since it offered an immediate image, either as live feedback relayed to a monitor or as instant replay of a pre-recorded performance to camera. As a result it could act as a mirror in which the artist could enter into a dialogue with the self she encountered everyday, and the potential selves she was seeking to uncover. It was possible to commit personal testaments to tape in any environment, however intimate, and in complete privacy. Furthermore, video recording equipment has always been relatively simple to operate and it is possible to work alone without the intrusive presence of the crews demanded by 16mm film-making. It was also easy and relatively cheap to record long monologues on tape, in contrast to the three-minute limitation of super 8 film. Artists had total control over what they chose to preserve or erase. But video was not only an introspective medium. It had the capacity to open up direct channels of communication between artist and spectator (video performance) and between spectator and spectator (interactive video systems).
However, once the image of woman was on the screen, there was some controversy as to how it was read by an audience. Work predicated on the personal as political assumed a one-to-one, woman-to-woman mode of address in an attempt to build a sense of community and locate individual experience within the complex social, political and economic realities of contemporary society. But the 1970s also gave rise to an area of feminist film theory which appeared to challenge the feasibility of this project. In particular, film-maker Laura Mulvey developed an analysis of the viewer's relationship to the image which characterized the female spectator as necessarily occupying the position of a homogenised male voyeur, regardless of actual gender, race or class. Furthermore, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey suggested that the image of woman, like language itself, was 'fixed', over-determined and incapable of representing anything other than male desire. Narrative was tarred with the same brush and was effectively rejected on account of its mainstream function as a vehicle for the dissemination of dominant ideologies (5). Although Mulvey's arguments were based on an analysis of classical Hollywood cinema, they nevertheless seemed to cast doubt upon the work of many radical feminists for whom the body and personal narrative were of fundamental importance. Many of them felt that the disappearance of the image of woman from women's art was counterproductive and only added to existing forms of censorship. However subsequent theoretical work has acknowledged that Mulvey's model of spectatorship was a methodological construct and that real audiences are made up of individuals with multiple histories and cultural experiences. No single effect can be attributed to an image, and the viewing context is all-important in the creation of meaning. It therefore becomes possible to reassert the ability of women's art to communicate within a flexible visual culture and address a heterogeneous audience with a significant proportion of spectators reading the work from the position of female subjectivity.
To this end. the direct address facilitated by video was deliberately harnessed to speak to specified female audiences, sometimes through women's groups or as in the Women's Arts Alliance in London, in the context of a women's gallery. Some works were directed at specific groups, such as young women, mature women, lesbians, mothers or daughters, black women, and working-class women. Difference was embraced as well as commonality, and an attempt was made to establish a non-hierarchical relationship with the viewer. In the same way that a contribution from an individual within a consciousness-raising group constituted an invitation to others to tell their own tale, feminist video contained an implied invitation to the viewer to reciprocate with an examination of her own experience. Indeed the personal as political was founded on reciprocity. It attempted a bi-directional mode of address that came as close to John Shotter's notion of handshake as an artefact can. He tells us that within a live encounter, and the mutual grasping of hands 'we do not simply constitute another person as an object of our own perception, but a social institution is established between us in which we both share, and in which self and other are operative as mutually constitutive polarities and experienced by one another as such'(6). It is possible to achieve this in the physical space of live performance or in the imaginative space of a video tape but such works should not be confused with the supposed interactivity of much contemporary computer art which simply gives the spectator more of the same choices of entertainment and rarely challenges the cultural hegemony of mainstream media.
There is a deeper significance to the feminist insistence on redefining communication between women - all too often dismissed as gossip - as cultural and political practice. Nancy Chodorow has demonstrated at a psychological level, women's identification with each other negates the Oedipal process by which women are supposed to transfer their desires from their mother to their father, henceforth characterizing their mother, and any other woman, as a rival for his affections. From this moment, a woman's sense of self, of personal worth, is determined by her ability to inspire and hold a man's desire (7). Many women videomakers have denied this process and returned to images of their mothers as a source of warmth, creative energy and pre-oedipal desire. Jayne Parker's tape Almost Out (1984) can be read as a symbolic re-birth through a return to the mother. Through verbal questioning and an unblinking scrutiny of her mother's nakedness, she moves closer to her mother and her own libidinal desire for the feminine. The generosity with which her mother gives of herself to facilitate her daughter's creativity - as she says in the tape, 'to help you with your work' - is a testament to the lived relationship behind the work and a refusal of any competition for the attention of a masculine presence.
Almost Out is an important tape for another reason. Martha Rosler once remarked that the formal concerns in women's art are obscured by the fact that we cannot get past the content (8). Yet Jayne Parker's tape uses a formal device which, although not original in the context of experimental video, when coupled with her chosen subject matter, highlights and subverts conventional readings of the female body. Almost Out is very long, almost 90 minutes when viewed in its entirety. At first, the juxtaposition of the aged body of Jayne's mother with her own youthful nakedness strikes us as grotesque and cruel. The cultural value attached to each degrades the mother and confirms the artist in her sexual desirability - her value as a woman at a premium. If the tape were to end there, it could hardly have been more retrogressive But it does not. Jayne does not cut off her mother's words, she allows her to speak, at length. Duration becomes the key to a fundamental shift in our reading of woman's body. As her words accumulate, we forget her wasted body, and her qualities as a human being override any degraded sexual reading. She is warm, intelligent, generous and dignified. Meanwhile, her daughter loses her initial sexual appeal as her own words reveal her to be petulant, manipulative and hostile. There is very little to arouse our lust by the end of the tape although our desire for the image of the mother stirs up ancient and deeply sensual longings that only a woman's body can evoke. This tape should always be seen in its entirety.
Superficially Almost Out might appear to resemble BBC's recent use of television with a video diary format, yet it is necessary to make a distinction between this new programming trend and the work of artists in the realm of the personal. The BBC's television diary packages the person into digestible chunks staged for the camera and the putative 30 second attention span of the 'average' viewer. Video diarists are sent on brief training courses which they are taught to shoot picturesque cutaways that will later be used disrupt the flow of their speech and atomise their individuality. The pressure produce television entertainment is so great that diarists are often unrecognisable to those who know them personally. As Chris Turnbull recently said to me of his friend, tele-diarist Benedict Allen: 'He's such a quiet chap, he would never have said all those things in normal conversation.' The pressure of entertainment thus destroys video's potential as a 'safe' space in which to say and do things that would normally be inhibited by an audience.
Notes
1. This story is told in John Shotter's chapter 'On Viewing
Videotape Records of Oneself and Others: A Hermeneutical Analysis' in P.W.
Dowrick (ed.) Using Video(Chichester: John Wiley Ltd. 1983)
2. Such distinctions can still be heard today. In November 1994, I
heard the 'revolutionary' films of Kurt Kren contrasted with Margaret
Tait's films made in her native Orkneys. These were Characterized as
verging on the home-movie with their 'informal gathering of images' while
Kren's misogynistic footage was said to represent a radical break from the
conventions of narrative and linearity.
3. Sally Potter, 'On Shows' in About Time, Video, Performance
and Installation by 21 Women Artists catalogue (London: ICA
publications, 1980) unpaginated.
4. Monica Sjoo was speaking at a slide talk she gave about her
work in 1978.
5. Laura Mulvey propounded this theory in her influential article
'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen 6 (3),1975, pp.
618, reprinted in L. Mulvey Visual and Other Pleasures
(Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989)
6. John Shotter, op. cit.
7. See Nancy J. Chodorow The Reproduction of Mothering
(Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1978)
8. Martha Rosler was speaking at a debate at London's Institute of
Contemporary Art (ICA), 'The Personal as Political Strategy in Women's
Art' which coincided with the trilogy of exhibitions Women's Images of
Men, About Time, and Issue: Social Strategies by Women
Artists staged consecutively in 1980.
Copyright © : Catherine Elwes,1996
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5, November 1997