This project explores early 1970s video art, especially its interventions in the body, media, and subject discourses of its time. Following Walter Benjamin, the study develops a practicable notion of the image and infers the “keen sense of that time and its signature” from the practices and discourses of video art.
In the early 1970s, shortly after video equipment became available for private use for the first time in history, the term “video art” already emerged onto the international scene. The proportion of female video artists taking up and influencing this development was conspicuously high. This research project focuses on selected works by a number of those artists, including Lynda Benglis (US), Lili Dujourie (BE), Hermine Freed (US), VALIE EXPORT (AT), Sanja Ivekovic (YU), Joan Jonas (US), Lisa Steele (CA) and Hannah Wilke (US). It analyses how these artists address the relationship between the body, image, language, gaze, and medium. Its main hypothesis is that these artists sought to forge a specific alliance between aesthetics and the politics of representation through the new medium and its specific technological resources. Following media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s well-known formula, this alliance might be called the feminist message of video as a medium. Associations with this medium which, unlike perceptions of film as a medium, emphasise an intimate, everyday, tactile, and immediate aesthetics; moreover, they are aimed at the cyclical moment of the live mode and repeatability characteristic of video and exhibit a significant overlap with supposedly feminine characteristics. Contrary to the presumed “natural” femininity, however, these artists’ affinity with video as a technical medium reveals a different approach: the strategic occupation of a fledging field in art history on the one hand, and critical reflection on the media-based constitution of one’s self-image and body image on the other. The latter in particular demonstrates the proximity to contemporaneous approaches within feminist theory and the critique of cinematic representation. The dialogue with the medium (Eleanor Antin) engaged in by these artists served the aesthetic reflection of everyday practices and stagings of identity. Their reflections on video as a medium – especially in relation to television – became significant on account of the intersection of formal and media-theoretical questions on the one hand, and their concrete, political questioning of the lifeworld on the other. Thus, OPERATION VIDEO illustrates the manifold interrelations between body discourse, political stance, and mediality in the early 70s through a detailed study of video as a medium. It considers these early video works to be symptomatic of an artistic attempt to re-orientate the discourse on the body and subject at the time. Which technical innovation did the electronic image give rise to? How was this reflected in the formal aesthetics of the emerging works? How might be the large number of such works in the early 70s, in which artists made themselves or rather their image the subject, be explained? Does the considerable number of female artists in the early years of video art suggest a specific use of the new medium, which, among others, contributed to the analysis of power, representation, and gender and traced the bodily intersections of the private and the political in a particular way? Supervised by Prof Dr Sigrid Schade (Head of the ICS/ZHdK), OPERATION VIDEO is also Sigrid Adorf’s PhD project at the University of Bremen.
Dissertation
Adorf, Sigrid, Operation Video. Eine Technik des Nahsehens und ihr spezifisches Subjekt: die Videokünstlerin der 1970er Jahre, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2008
Publications
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Operative Bilder. Repräsentationskritische Eingriffe von Videokünstlerinnen der 1970er Jahre. In: Imesch, Kornelia; Jennifer John; Daniela Mondini; Sigrid Schade [Eds.]: Inscriptions/Transgressions. Akten der Lausanner Tagung, Bern: Peter Lang 2007.
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Prekäre Präsenz I. Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973). In: Sigrid Adorf; Sabine Gebhardt Fink; Sigrid Schade; Steffen Schmidt [Eds.]: Is it now? - Gegenwart in den Künsten. Zürich: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich 2007, pp. 96-109.
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Eine Frage der Geste? Der Akt, das Bild, seine Sprache und ihre Bewegung in der Body Art der 70er Jahre. In: Schmutz, Hemma; Tanja Widmann [Eds.]: Dass die Körper sprechen, auch das wissen wir seit langem. Kat. der Ausst., Generali Foundation, Wien 2004, pp. 21-37.
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Entspiegelungen. Un/Sichtbare Körper in der Reflexion feministischer Kunst(wissenschaft). In: Heinz, Kathrin; Barbara Thiessen [Eds.]: Feministische Forschung - Nachhaltige Einsprüche. Opladen: Leske und Budrich 2003, pp. 277-305.
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Zwischen den Zeichen gelesen. VALIE EXPORTs Schnittechniken im Medienverbund Körper-Bild-Sprache-Apparat. In: VALIE EXPORT. Mediale Anagramme, Kat. der Ausst., NGBK Berlin, Berlin 2003, pp. 91-98.
- Narzisstische Splitter. Video als feministische Botschaft in den 70er Jahren. In: Falkenhausen, Susanne von; Silke Förschler; Ingeborg Reichle; Bettina Uppenkamp [Hg.]: Medien der Kunst. Geschlecht, Metapher, Code. Beiträge der 7. Kunsthistorikerinnen-Tagung in Berlin 2002. Marburg: Jonas Verlag 2004, S. 72 ff.