Contemporary Video Art - Essay Example

The Pursuit of the Personal in Contemporary Video Art Introduction There are many reasons why people might choose to take photographs today, including self-fulfillment to capture memories or explore artistic inclinations or for commercial purposes of various types. In general, there is a very positive attitude among those who opt to express themselves through the media of the personal camera. Although it has occasionally been considered narcissistic for artists to use the camera as a means of conducting self-portraits of various types, this is not necessarily the expression of too much self-love. Artists who use their own images within their work are typically striving to illustrate how photographs can capture a sense of the real or to search for definition within a familiar form. It is the nature of modern art to be self-reflective as it is the prevailing purpose of modern art to explore the deeply personal characteristics and attributes that make one unique. As such, they often present the impression that the artist is fragile or imperfect, hardly the profile of a narcissist. In addition, these artists, working with themselves as subject, have moved into the new age of video as a means of expression, particularly in terms of capturing a sense of the raw and immediate which is inherent in the very identity and form of video (Maziere, 1996). This trend demonstrates an attempt by the art world to re-establish the autonomy of the individual and reinstate the personal into a medium that has been seen to alienate. “Beginning with many influential single-channel video works from the 1960s and early 1970s including Andy Warhol’s Empire and Gilbert & George’s Singing Sculpture, making time traces time-based work through the present, juxtaposing these works against narrative works from the same timeframe” (Maziere, 1996). A review of artwork by Lynne Benglis and Sam Taylor-Wood will be used to help explain these concepts of the relationship between self-image and video work, while the work of Sadie Benning and Tracy Emin will help illustrate the personal experience expressed through these media. Considering Self as a Material Lynda Benglis (b.1941) Lynda Benglis is an eminent sculptor who produced many video presentations in the mid 1970s. Her main theme is female sexuality and identity. The interest and presence in her sculptural work using metaphorical, biomorphic shapes finds its way into her self-reflexive, investigative videos. The subject matter of 1970s feminist video was personal. ‘Benglis’s video work confronts issues raised by feminist theory, including the representation of women, the role of the spectator, and female sexuality. Benglis also engages the emergent practice of video in an incisive discourse on the production of the moving image.’ (source and date). The art of the process is thus captured within the work itself even as the question of self is investigated. ‘Benglis negotiates a personal space for herself, maintaining a deliberate distance from the medium. Using her own body and creating multiples of her images. She interrogates the relation of the self to the body—focusing on the interface between our inner and outer realities. With Benglis standing in front of a photograph of herself, which is then affixed to a monitor bearing her image, the notion of “original” is complicated. Benglis’s work takes on another layer of meaning.’ (source and date). Her video, Document (1972), suggests the impotence of media to accurately copy her, her image and herself. ‘She, as the object of our gaze, never allows a static full-face pose on the screen. Benglis’s use of the replicated image in photography and video, both in and on the TV, is a direct reveal of the constructed document. And yet, this gesture simultaneously creates its own reflecting pool of concentric frames, forming an allusion to a looking glass.’ (source and date). This is achieved through the use of a handheld camera that moves as the artist moves, remains stationary, scans the surrounding environment and focuses on the artist herself, presenting a confusing set of images that coalesce into a sudden realization. ‘The constant motion of Benglis’s hand-held camera (scanning her studio and two television sets) calls attention to the limits of the camera’s field of vision: the walls of the studio are the ultimate “enclosure” of the camera’s eye. The open window and the sound of children (from the street) seem to suggest release; yet the confines of the studio are never truly broken’ (Przybilla, 1991) Bengliss Now (1973) is the double effect of the performance for the monitor. In this video, Benglis films her own head in profile, which does its own performance in front a screen on which another tape of her doing the same actions in reverse profile is playing. This creates a mirror image of movement spanning a space of time that itself serves as a backdrop for other activity. ‘Through this spiral of infinite regress, as the face merges with the double and triple re-projections of itself merging with itself, Benglis’s voice is heard either issuing the command “Now!” or asking “Is it now?” Clearly, Benglis is using the word “now” to underline the ambiguity of temporal reference.’ (source and date). Throughout this video she makes faces and sounds. In Now, the images that are the result of real time video are identified as “Now” to help demonstrate the disparity between recorded and real. Sam Taylor-Wood (b. 1967) Sam Taylor-Wood says of her photographs, ‘They are punctuation marks within my work…having gone through a certain period of my life and having to place myself within it, and also within the history of my own work.’ (source and date). The interest in space is precisely a symptom of many woman artists’ programmatic withdrawal from the aesthetics of identity. The rink between personal space and subjectivity forfeit the predictable routes of gender. Sam Taylor-Wood is a photographer, film and video artist and she is one of the so-called Young British Artists (YBA). In Taylor-Wood’s work, she has expressed women and her relation to space and the main theme is the demand on the viewer’s ability to make associations. She produces cinematic photographs or video-like films that are reminiscent of the work of artists like Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. These individuals were introducing hybrid genres of media such as the film still which crossed photography and film. ‘Today that legacy has been extended in at least two directions: toward an increasing mannerism of the hybrid photographic image as its own form and toward analogous experiments at the limits of other media such as film and projected-image work, where cinema meets sculpture or video.’ (source and date). Taylor-Wood presents characters in situations of isolation and self-absorption, their familiar, even mundane surroundings and poses belying more or less hidden states of emotion crisis. She is interested in exploring the difficult distinctions between real life and theatre and the public and private. The main focus of Taylor-Wood’s work is multichannel projection work such as ‘Killing Time (1994)’ with a four-screen in which four people mimed an opera soundtrack. This work now resides at Tate Britain. ‘Killing Time’ shows isolated and vacant characters sitting at home smoking cigarettes and drinking tea over the Richard Strauss’s Elektra. She also uses time-based media and time as her method. In ‘Brontosaurus’ (1995), slow motion is used to be aware of time as an experience. Moreover she has used herself as her subject. She says she did this as a means of ‘trying to find where I fitted in, and, also realising that your work can be about who you are.’ (source and date). ‘Taylor-Wood’s early work had a conscious “in your face” style, and she has often used her own body to bring the personal to the fore.’ (source and date). Regarding this piece, Taylor-Wood said: “First I filmed a man who was dancing naked in his bedroom, to the rhythm of very fast techno-jungle music. Then I took away the music and projected the film in slow motion. While I was filming, his movements became almost alien, they made no sense, he went through all these motions and they ended up seeming clumsy. In slow motion they became very beautiful, but totally ungainly. Then I changed the music and introduced Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a melancholy excerpt…it became a eulogy to living, even if the person seems to be doing a dance of death, because it is so fragile, delicate and vulnerable.” Taylor-Wood’s film-based installation Third Party (1999) deals with an interior space. The scale of its representation is monumental. The video installation in which seven party scenes is about the tensions and erotic entanglements arising between persons in a closed environment shows the British rock star Marianne Faithful. ‘Watching her sit and smoke, though, you eventually realize that she too is watching, and you turn elsewhere to find out what she sees.’ (source and date). ‘Physical encounters, not only with the life-size actors in the video sequences, but also with the other viewers in the room, permit the viewer to become aware of her own role as an actor within the circular projection space, reminiscent of an arena.’ (source and date). Through her works, Taylor-Wood explodes space and time structures. Her work in photography and film is distinguished by an ironic and subversive use of these media, which centre on the creation of enigmatic situations replete with a latent but explosive energy; situations that could go any way and in which any number of things could happen. She explores the physical dimension of human experience as well as its more private, emotional side. Communion and Collision of Individual Experience Among video artists of the 1990s, there has been a return to the performance style of 1970s art scene characterized by placing the body in the personal and political realm. In the 1970s women were aware that a key to equality lay in controlling their reproductive rights. It was not really until the 1970s, when artists such as Sadie Benning (b. 1973) and Tracey Emin (b.1963) began to make a mark with work that dealt specifically with womens lives that the issues began taking center stage. Sadie Benning The North American artist Sadie Benning has a disregard for the traditional aesthetics and concern of video art. Benning’s personal and autobiographical work offers a teenage lesbian account of her phantasm life in Pixelvision . ‘In the early films, she appears as a fragmented character, floating elusively in and out of the frame. But Jollies (1990), shows her as an increasingly bold presence in her own work. In overdub she reads some lines describing her sexual awakening.’ Benning’s diaristic work keeps the improvisational spirit of early video alive in very personal narratives begun in the late 1980s. She began making videos at age sixteen and taped herself in her room by her self. Life outside is chaotic and painful as she recounts. Safe inside her home, though, she expresses the difference between lust and love in ‘It Wasn’t Love’ (1992). ‘It Wasn’t Love’ shows a lustful encounter with a bad girl through the gender posturing. According to Benning, ‘the most revolutionary thing is to just love yourself and love what you do. You cant do anything more than that.’ (source and date). ‘Combining defiance with a childlike innocence and vulnerability, Benning responds to a world that simultaneously ridicules and frightens her by retreating into the relative, but ultimately temporary, safety of her bedroom and a form of self-imposed exile.’ (source and date). Tracey Emin The London based artist Tracey Emin has also revolved around the question of autobiographical acts, probing the boundaries of life and art. Her life and art are inextricably entwined. ‘Feminist theorists of autobiography have argued that women have a complex relation to memory work, which differs from a tradition of masculine self-authorship as authoritative narrative.’ (source and date). Her autobiographical work is the film CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), in which Emin narrates her story from childhood in Margate, through her student years, abortions and destruction of her early work. CV Cunt Vernacular, in which her mother appears, as well as in etchings, quilts, sculpture and diaries, in ways which suggest a constant return to and refiguring of the past. ‘Emin has consistently used techniques and genres historically gendered (albeit not exclusively) as feminine, such as embroidery and patchwork quilts, handwritten diaries, self-portraiture and autobiography.’ (source and date). ‘Emin’s My Bed (1998) consisted of eight home videos, four miniature watercolour portraits, a wall of captioned drawings made during her adolescence, a quilt collage, and two assemblages, one of them evoking the memory of an uncle killed in an automobile crash.’ (source and date). At the centre was the installation, a rumpled bed with stained sheets surrounded by detritus of her intimate life. My Bed enacts autobiographical performances. The bed becomes a memory museum to a specific time and place in her past. Emin makes autobiographical work that unflinchingly and tenderly examines her own often-traumatic experiences. Her work exemplifies several controversies about autobiography at this cultural moment, and raises provocative questions for both visual and verbal autobiographical narratives. For artists such as Benning and Emin, ‘their sexuality provides a rich fund of autobiography. But for those of an earlier generation they simply had to struggle to be accepted on their merits despite a level of generosity and acceptance that existed within the modernist and liberal avant- garde circles in which they moved.’ Conclusion For the artists described above, the depiction of the self is not a narcissistic love affair aired publicly, but is instead an exploration into the nature of concepts that have become blurred in the new technology offerings of the 21st century. These include the idea of time as is shown in the work of Sam Taylor-Wood, the process of creation and independent thought as is seen in Lynda Benglis’ videos and the questions of the self and what makes us unique in the works of Sadie Benning and Tracey Emin. Although each of these artists used similar media constructions, combining photography, video and other media to capture various images of the self as subject, their final products are widely expressive and applicable to the postmodern experience. The images are not always pleasant and neat, for example Emin’s ‘My Bed’, but they are not aimed at beautification, idealization or popular approbation. It is this intensive search for the true self that drives them; it is with encouragement to others to perform similar self-evaluations, it is in hope that a concept of both our connections and our differences will emerge and it is with desire that these differences will help bring us together that artists such as those spoken of here have taken to new media and self as subject as a form of artistic expression. Read More