Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2015

In this article, I explore the historical continuities and discontinuities between Alex Bag’s performances of femininity in her seminal video series Untitled Fall ’95 (1995) and Ann Hirsch’s Scandalishious (2008–2010), a series of webcam videos on YouTube in which she appears as a character called Caroline Benton. Rather than a simply using these works to compare and contrast decades of feminist-inspired art, my exploration is informed by my re-encountering of Bag’s work through the lens of Hirsch’s in the context of the ubiquity of self-confessional and performative video online. In bringing these artists’ works together, I consider the possibilities of resistance to dominant forms of mediatized femininity in neo-liberalism, especially in relation to these artists’ interventions in television. From 1994 to 1997 Bag, in collaboration with artist Patterson Beckwith, produced a cult series for cable TV called Cash from Chaos and later Unicorns and Rainbows, in which they enacted countercultural scenarios that ‘détourned’ mainstream culture. In Hirsch’s foray into reality TV in 2010, she inserted herself into a pre-existing production Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair. Using these two examples as exemplifying a shift in art critique from a strategy of seizing the means of production to a strategy of immersive mimicry, I ask whether femininity can be posed as a site of resistance or whether it is fully enmeshed within the neo-liberal production of subjectivity as aspirational and entrepreneurial?

This article discusses Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s video-essay Performing the Border (1999), a work that critically examines the feminization of low-skilled factory labour in the city of Ciudad Juárez in northern Mexico. Home to large assembly lines, known as maquiladoras, Juárez is often the place where large corporations send their electronic equipment and machinery to be produced and assembled. Whilst these technologies help speed up the processes of contemporary capitalism, the city’s infrastructure is so poor that it consumes most of the factory workers’ free time. These women have to spend long hours commuting to work and often live in homes with no electricity or running water. Locating Biemann’s work within other representations of factory labour, this article examines the aesthetic and critical strategies that she employs to highlight the economic and social imbalances created by the forces of neo-liberalism as they impact the lives of maquiladora workers.

This article explores the feminism of contemporary women’s film, video and installation art through an analysis of the documentary evidential and the imagined in works by Emma Hart, Hala Elkoussy and Sarah Turner. These works are not about feminist issues as such, but each figures a woman, or women, in ways that, I argue, engage questions of sexual difference. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s characterization of politics to understand feminism as a politics of sexual difference, but also an ethics in relation to living, that is, as being and doing as a woman. At the same time, feminism is an aesthetic project in relation to the understanding of, and intervening in, the representation of woman and her imagining, her difference, so what is involved here, as well, is the politics of aesthetics. In examining the feminist politics of aesthetics, this article also considers how art engages us cognitively as affect as well as the thought, and asks the question: how should we think the affectual?

Agnes Martin’s 1976 film Gabriel is frequently dismissed as an anomaly in the artist’s oeuvre, and thus has not to date received sustained scholarly attention. Certain difficulties arise in categorizing Gabriel within genres of experimental film, and even within Martin’s own practice. This article aims to reopen the debate around the film, especially in light of its recent restoration by the Museum of Modern Art and Pace Gallery. I seek to reassess the film within the wider context of experimental film of the era, as well as explore the dialogue Gabriel holds with Martin’s paintings. I argue that Martin uses the film to create a mode of vision grounded in the body, demanding a durational viewing that in turn allows us to look at the paintings anew. Using the work of French feminist writers I trace a kind of écriture féminine in Gabriel, as Martin cuts a path between the dominant modes of expression of an era largely occupied by male film-makers.

In this article, I argue that Doomed (2007), a ten-minute montage of appropriated disaster footage by Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, offers a unique response to the War on Terror. I compare Moffatt’s piece to the traditional critical readings attributed to artistic deployment of found footage, and consider Doomed in relation to art historian Rosalyn Deutsche’s enquiry into what artists can offer in a time of war. Deutsche uses feminist psychoanalysis to champion Silvia Kolbowski’s video After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2008) as an attempt to destabilize the ‘us versus them’ thinking that perpetuates war. In contrast, I focus on how Moffatt turns to Hollywood-produced action scenes as a way to highlight societal and individual compulsions toward repetition and urges to displace internal anxieties and fears onto others. By appropriating disaster footage, Moffatt creates an opportunity for viewers to consider the repeating patterns of this filmic collective unconscious and the futility of our historic attempts to fully repress the drives it satisfies. Doomed suggests that, rather than finding a way out of binary thinking, video art can highlight the fallacy of cinematic catharsis as a way of ‘working through’ these issues. Acknowledging that we may never be able to rid ourselves of aggressive impulses or fear of the other, Moffatt’s video encourages societal self-reflection and renewed awareness that these psychic forces may be at work when next we find ourselves on the brink of war.

This article examines the part played by four film and video artists as chroniclers as well as participants in the civic struggle against nuclear weapons, providing alternative documents of the women’s camp at Greenham Common to those of the official media record. For, as the article will discuss, the model of protest at Greenham was uniquely indebted to, and characterised by, the models of non-violent resistance developed through post-war feminism. As part of this, a strategy of creative resistance had an important role to play: through song and poems, through banners, paintings and drawings; by amateur and professional artists. However, the film and video documents of Greenham Common by Tina Keane, Joanna Davis and Lis Rhodes, and Annabel Nicolson, on which this article will focus, are not concerned solely with advocacy for anti-nuclear and political protest, but rather, Greenham proved inspirational for them on an individual basis, enabling them to meaningfully explore how feminist principles might be folded into their experimental practices.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1928 film Abwege/The Devious Path underscores psycho-sexual tensions prevalent in the social climate of 1920s Germany and Austria. Under Pabst’s direction, the actors in The Devious Path exaggerated their performances to amplify reality, playing to self-conscious character archetypes, such as the sexually frustrated bourgeois hausfrau. Pabst’s interest in physical types also echoes the early twentieth-century revival of physiognomy in the German-speaking world, wherein ethnic and class-based characteristics were increasingly categorized according to a taxonomic system. His use of physiognomy can be said to resemble Soviet typage due to his focus on pure physical appearance. However, unlike Eisenstein, Pabst cast well-known actors and actresses, such as Brigitte Helm who had starred in the film Metropolis the previous year. Helm’s exaggerated expressions and bodily contortions bring to life the archetype of the irrational hausfrau oscillating between lust and remorse. Her portrayal provides commentary on the emergence of the New Woman in the German-speaking world of the 1920s, but also suggests a satirical critique of bourgeois society’s complex, and perhaps hypocritical, relationship with the club-going subculture that existed in Weimar culture at that time.

This article traces the intersections and overlaps between women working in art, avant-garde film and cinema in the 1970s. I argue that the context of second-wave feminism connected individuals working in diverse practices through shared interrogations of form and content as well as the interdisciplinary infrastructure of the women’s movement. However, I also consider the impact of different contexts, communities and media on artwork, film and video by women artists to trace a complex field of political aesthetic practices influenced by feminism. My overarching argument is that collaboration, broadly conceived, provides a way to think through the formation of this alternative cultural scene.

The work of American film-maker Shirley Clarke has been largely ignored by feminist film history and criticism. Yet, the three feature films she completed between 1961 and 1967 are pioneering examples of the way feminist issues can be engaged with outside of the gender specific framework of feminist film theory. Her film The Cool World (1963) presents an examination of the construction and representation of black masculinity as determined by a racist normative patriarchal order. This article analyses the film’s exploration of the question of black masculinity in relationship to the Black Power Movement and the persistence of a phallocentric patriarchy that ultimately renders any attempt to subvert the racist determination of masculinity, a failure.

Ostfildern, Germany: Hadje Cantz Verlag, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-3-7757-3247-5, hardback, £45

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning Centre, London. 19 September – 2 November 2013.