a little review and bitch session of Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video Art, which closed Jan 14

The Broolyn Museum had an exhibit that just ended a few days ago: Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video Art. It was shown in The Elizabeth Sackler wing for feminist art and was in a small corridor next to the loud and in my opinion, over-rated The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I recently wrote a paper on this video art exhibit and have been talking about it for the last month. I was pretty impressed with the collection of works; the videos seemed to preserve a historical tradition of video art being simplistic and being a form of documentation and reflection. The works were all short and very few could be considered narrative, although they all did tell a story. They were all organic and each video represented the artist herself. Within these limitations of video art tradition, there was a large range of low-tech video techniques: black and white and color videos, soundtracks that included field recordings and cinematic music, minimal editing and cheesy graphics, performances for the audience versus videos that were captured as voyeuristic insights.

In particular, I really enjoyed Klara Liden's video, Bodies of Society(2006) and Cathy Begien's, Blackout(2004), which both playfully explored universal ideas of control, power, and relationships without being heavy handed.  Both artists use the medium of video to their advantage, using it as a tool to document and record as well as to communicate with a larger audience.  

 In Bodies of Society, Liden stands in an empty room with the sunlight lighting the room and performs a ritualistic act of smashing her bicycle with a long metal rod. The bicycle becomes a second presence in the room along with Liden. In the opening of the video, the bicycle is still while Liden walks around it, acting almost as a police officer, observing and evaluating the object while hitting the metal rod against her hand as a baton. As Liden begins to beat the bicycle she reacts to its movements and sound that is amplified over the soundtrack of circus like music, emphasizing the spectacle and cautiousness of this act. 

 Blackout documents Begien as she verbally recalls a night of partying while blindfolded.  As she tells the story, other characters walk around her visually describing her words and handing her props to enhance the story.  This duplicity of remembering while re-enacting creates a tension in the video.  Begien's physical activity is controlled by her friends' handing her drinks and cigarettes.  These actions though are controlled by Begien's narration of the story.  To add to this theme of power and control, Begien's story describe events in which she is powerless.  The title Blackout further describes this experience of a loss of control or an unawareness one is not in control of.  While there are tense themes being explored in this video, it is created with a sense of playfulness, the video ending in a Hollywood teen-movie like credit roll in which each actor dances to popular music.

The other exhibited artists(Kate Gilmore; Jen DeNike; Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn; Shannon Plumb; and K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood) also showed works which were playful, insightful, and simplistic in nature.  Unfortunately, by declaring these works to be feminists, the curators of this exhibit must have felt it necessary to justify this work as feminist, using wall text which explained the work to specifically be about women's issues and politics.  In relationship to Kara Liden's Bodies of Society, the text states that although Liden claims that this work was created in response to her bicycle being stolen, the work also is made to express her discontent of society in relationship to the way she is treated as a women.  This dismissal of the minimalism within the work is the weakest part of the entire exhibit.  Considering the purposefully simplistic nature of this work, the videos should speak for themselves.  What makes this exhibit so satisfying is its ambiguity of the word feminism.  The work in it is all relatable, straightforward, and free of art-world jargon.  If its curators had accepted this fact instead of trying to justify its presence in an art museum by over-analyzing the works' meanings, this would have been a stellar show, exhibiting honest and incomplex works by contemporary female artists.