The "Female Identity in English Video Art" exhibit reminds that video has for a long time been an oasis and a liberating realm for marginal artists. In this show titled Sweetie, the concepts of 'submission,' 'shame', 'humility', which are as a matter of course injected to women's identity, explode back as 'revolt', 'fearlessness', and 'extroversion'.

With the sponsorship of the British Council, the works of women video artists during the 80's and the 90's will be shown at Dulcinea between September 1st and October 14th.

It is a massive responsibility to write an article based on this title. In an article she wrote about the exhibit, curator Cristiana Perella does not see a harm indicating that the 'Sweetie' title is a reference to Jane Campion's film made in 1989. She even suggests that the basic complementary and contradictory aspect of female identity as expressed in the exhibit, is based on Campion's sister characters, Kay and Sweetie, who 'form two asymmetric parts of the same complex female identity'.

This point seems to be problematic. The effort to compare Jane Campion's representations of women and the issues of identity, which come up in the videos of the 80's and the 90's, is a little farfetched. Given the conditions of production, distribution and spectatorship of cinema, it is difficult to compare the autonomy and the independence of cinema directors to that of video artists.

Since 1984, when I watched the work "Toilette" of Austrian woman artist Friederike Pezold, video art has been the most appropriate representation area not only for women, but also for all marginal identities to challenge the dominating discourse. Since the 1970's, video has been an oasis for many marginal artists who are rejected by, or reject the market, which uses the director as a subject and the model/actor as an object. This has been true for many artists from those influenced from the Fluxus movement to those who rely on Beuys' "everyone is an artist, life itself is a piece of art" concept, from Nam June Paik who brings experimentalism together with Zen Buddhism or technical perfection, or Wolf Vostel, who destroys television, to Abromovic/Ulay, who makes video art using the limits of her own voice and body. Video used its own technical visual means, to increase the variety of its representations. A generation raised with television forced video art into various trends. Video was influenced by MTV aesthetics; it took advantage of computer graphics and even started to earn money. As opposed to older generation artists, who were/wanted to be excluded, revolted, who buried television to the ground, the artists of the 80's started to use this 'abundance' of image and sound as a temple. With its images and its the monitor(s), video also was transformed into a piece of material for sculptures and installations. Gradually it was shifted into space and time designs, with audience participation. Performances were highly estimated again. So much so that in 1992, video artist Volker Schreiner, who took the first Marl Video Art prize years ago, said that 'Video art died.' Perhaps his words also implied that video art would now be presented in different situations.

The screen as indispensable for video

In a way, the replacement of the TV screen, the ground of video art, by the video projector, as in Sweetie, implies the slow death of this very art. For it is impossible to overlook the similarity between the TV screen's dimensions and the philosophy of video art. When we watch video images, we look through a window to see a box, the television screen, whereas the projection fixes our eyes to a wall and makes us flat.

The TV screen is an absolute necessity for video art - as long as the artist does not plan the opposite. For when we look at the close-up of a face, we realise that its dimensions are similar to our face. In cinema, the close-up of a face is fifteen times the enlargement of its real dimensions. Cinema does not allow the 'face to face' experience of video. While cinema is primarily a form of art, video is the domestication of science. Video art uses the television screen to base its design on this fact. Watching the works in the Sweetie exhibit, and it seems clear that the video artists, by the situation they use/choose, consciously deal with rerepresentation, thus positioning themselves in a conceptual ground. While media takes on the role of constructing, video art aims to de-construct this role.

The works from the 80's such as Tamara Krikorian's 'Unassembled Information' (1977) and from the 90's such as Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing, Georgina Starr's 'English Rose' (1996) are essays by women video artists, who are inspired by the slogans: 'the personal is political,' 'ideology is produced in the family and in personal relations,' 'the political can also exist in unimportant actions, words or situations.'

Krikorian turns her back to the screen to question the lazy reception of the image of a television speaker presenting hourly news. Instead of a common news text, he uses various conversations in irregular radio waves and musical partitions for sound. Tracey Emin and company barter little girls' hair buckles, pencil boxes, bags while they change places. 'I am you, you are me.' They play a game particular to women: 'Wearing each other's clothes/identities.'

Clio Barnard's work titled 'Hermaphrodite Bikini' (1995) tells the story of 'acid' coloured synthetic identities as products of 'laboratories and virtual reality' and as they go back and forth two separate worlds. This is a "virtual jungle" where in the kitchen the male character has to carry a bra all-year-round as if it were his organ and where post-human characters, hermaphrodite angels and insect-like worlds arouse erotic fantasies.

Verbs like 'undressing/stripping off/tearing apart' seem to be perfect descriptions of women's identities. Tina Keane, a renowned video artist of the 80's treats the identity issue as an entity full of layers. 'Many feel' that this identity can be decomposed when its layers are peeled off, realising later that this task is impossible and that the whole thing turns to a claustrophobic situation. In 1992, we had exhibited Tina Keane's video installation work titled 'x-ray' in the German Cultural Institution in Ankara. Keane participates to this exhibit with her work titled 'Faded Wallpaper' (1988). Inspired from a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore, this video work tells the story of the obsessive relationship of a woman with wallpaper. As the wallpaper is peeled off, the images become more and more sick and insisting. In a similar time length, the words and the sounds start to reach the conscious level. The spectator shares this silent struggle which we can describe as 'obsessive-compulsive.'

Obsessions related to the body

Victoria Odhem's work titles 'Sleepless' (1998) reflects this obsessive condition as directed to the artist's body. In the first plan we see the close-up head of a sleeping woman. With the sounds of ripping or tearing off, the woman starts to tear out her hair. The camera keeps the same image scales while it changes its angle until it reaches the bird's-eye view. When the sounds stop, the woman's winkling eyes, which we assume are waking up from sleep, look at us from a place in between dream and reality. We notice that two single hairs are left on her head. Some English women artists assure that the abjection felt to bodies and body secretions is 'minimised' by the means of detachment. Sarah Pucill's 'Backomb' (1995) shows how the woman artist starts to behave as a creature separated from her body. The hair slips off from its innocent and romantic boundaries and takes the threatening and damaging form of a phallic metaphor. Once again, with the methods of a 'pixillation' style animation and an endoscopic camera, the woman's watched body part becomes an 'alien', which causes 'nausea.'

By their national and cultural identities, the English women artists, who are selected for 'Sweetie', are not in the position of 'the other.' They are white, middle-class English women artists, yet as women, they identify with 'otherness.' In Sweetie, the concepts of 'submission,' 'shame', 'humility', which are invariably injected to women's identity explode back as 'revolt', 'fearlessness,' and 'extroversion.' Sweetie's women are insensitive to those who claim 'women's sensitivity' while praising the aesthetic of the personal.

Radikal, 25 September 2000
Prof.Dr.Deniz Derman