Časopis ARS 41 (2008) 2

Katarína RUSNÁKOVÁ

Politika tela v súčasnom videoumení na Slovensku
[Policy of a Body in Contemporary Video Art in Slovakia]

(Resumé)

The issue of identity, body and corporeality, and the reflection of gender issues have belonged among relevant subjects of contemporary video art in Slovakia since the 1990s. Contrary to the feminist art in the United States, which started to shape in the late 1960s within political struggle for emancipation of women, closely related to the struggle for equal opportunities for men and women that was, together with the promotion of equal civil rights and freedoms for black people and sexual minorities, part of student movements, any forms of art promoting the ideas of feminism in Slovakia before 1989 were inadmissible and regarded as imported from the West.

Only free conditions in democratic society, when the accompanying characteristics of mass culture, such as advertising industry, show business, expansion of private televisions, internet, billboards or a wide range of magazines and newspapers, started emerging and developing within the market economy, provided the artists with the possibility to open new themes responding to the current socio-cultural phenomena and social and political problems.

One of the most important themes of video art becomes the search for identity. It should be stressed that the identity in postmodernism is characterised in plural, unstable and performative nature. In this context it also necessary to emphasise that it was female artists who promptly responded to a number of new socio-cultural phenomena. Their entrance to the art scene in the 1990s belongs to the most important characteristics of media art in Slovakia. In addition to the examination of identity, they also dealt with a critical reflection of depiction of women by mass media and mass culture including the undermining of patriarchal stereotypes and conventional ideas of women and their social roles. This iconosphere also includes the themes related to the breaking of the taboo of sexuality and visual representation of eroticism from the viewpoint of women’s experi¬ence, as well as the views of intimate area in terms of a changed quality of partnership relations. Recently, many of the aforementioned motifs have also attracted the attention of artists.

A theoretical basis of male and female artists is created by the post-feminism that, contrary to radical feminism, is not based mainly on sexual differences of men and women. Post-feminism regards gender identity as a social and cultural construction the shaping of which is influenced not only by biological aspects, but also by broader social and cultural factors. In compliance with the elimination of binary oppositions, the heterosexual matrix of gender is relativized and increased by other sexual orientations – lesbian, gay, transsexual for which the common term queer is used. Post-feminism puts an emphasis on visuality, and deals with the gaze of a spectator, while drawing a line between the look and the gaze. The gaze is a fixed stare focused on a depicted object embodying sexual desire. The gaze often contains aspects of power and possessiveness. The terms “post-feminism” or “gender art” label the art of women and men focused on gender issues articulated with respect to the specifics of local context. In Slovakia, this concept of expressions of video art has emerged in the 1990s.

One of the key figures of video art in Slovakia can be considered Jana Želibská who, in her video installations, ironizes conventional male gaze at women as at beautiful, sexually attractive objects, and concurrently questions the simplifying patterns of perception of women in the society. They are supported by visual depiction of women by mass media, advertisements, TV or movies, as well as by the history of art, since women were always depicted as passive objects of artists’ sexual desire, not as equal partners. Želibská’s video installation in which she deconstructs male view of women’s bathroom scenes, and thus parodies male gaze and voyeurism is remarkable. In another video installation the artist interprets, with subtle irony, the adolescence of girls, and examines their identity in the phase of transition between the youth and the adulthood. In a free follow-up to the previous video installation, the artist is attentive to a problem related to the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, and points out how the forming of identity and related issues of image are closely related to the coping of young women with personal problems, which is conditioned by social and cultural aspects.

Pavlína Fichta Čierna focuses on the problems of her contemporaries; her penetrating works offer a probe into the social reality with the focus on a human being. The artist focuses on documentary video films in which she depicts interesting stories of people with ambiguous, complicated life stories. She finds protagonists of her works mostly on the periphery, among physically and mentally handicapped men and women and solitaires or outsiders living their life in a nonconformist manner that is out of the current consumerist lifestyle, ostracised by majority society and the media. In her authentic video documents she also deals with psychological, social and socio-cultural problems of the Romany minority. Besides, Čierna also focuses on the issue of diseased, medical body the apt illustration of which is her medical self-portrait based on visual self-reflection of own organism.

Young generation of female artists whose videos directly present irritating pictures of body and sexuality with the sense of provocation, focus on gender issues and negate any taboo, is represented by Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová. In their video works one can find not only the persiflage of pornography and ironic criticism of sexism, but also the deconstruction of conventional views of women. Eva Filová, in her occasional video works, declares the symbiosis of political and personal in art, which is not short on political and social criticism of current socio-cultural situation, such as the expression of her individual attitude to the prohibition of abortions. Experimental nature is typical of the video work of Dorota Sadovská, a painter, photographer and mixed media author. Two works can serve a model example: the video realized as a digital picture shown on LCD screen hanging on the wall the leitmotif of which is a body scrum of the fragments of hands and feet of men and women, and the video in which the artist makes use of the performative elements when creating the abstract drawings from her hair as a derivate of own body on the surface of a table. A special category within the issue under the focus is created by the art of Gabika and Erik Binder whose common video projects draw inspiration from partnership and family mythology when being ironical about patriarchal stereotypes. The models of queer art are interpreted in the videos of Anna Daučíková. A common feature of her video works can be considered the manipulation with the objects of everyday use, with fragments of her own body, with parts of dress or with profane materials, which she examines through ambivalent metaphors.

Peter Rónai, in the video works in which he often uses his photographic portraits from different periods of life, examines his identity and puts it through various ironical, even sarcastic procedures. The post-photographic pictures shown on small LCD monitors create the gist of artist’s video sculptures, video objects and video installations that are based on his individual mythology and self-ironical scepticism. Main principle of Rónai’s assemblages compiled from the objects of everyday use, and characterised by a fair amount of playfulness, is the creative use of avant-garde techniques and strategies, such as collage, photomontage, ready-mades and found footage films, combined with a digital picture. Another significant artist focusing largely on video installations and computer projects, and dealing with the issues of body, corporeality and cloning, as well as with the criticism of consumerism and mass culture, is Peter Meluzin. In his inter-textual video works he often focuses on the analysis of typical social, socio-cultural, sociological and political phenomena and problems of present life that he interprets with the sense of irony and sharp sarcasm. He is also interested in the phenomena of voyeurism, typical of the visual culture and of the world saturated with mass media where the border between the private and the public disappears. The strategy of appropriation is applied by a representative of young generation, Marek Kvetan, who deconstructs the appropriated websites with pornographic pictures of women in lascivious poses. Using the artist’s software, he turns them into innocent geometric-abstract computer prints or videos in the manner of minimalism, presented as a comparison of original pornographic photographs with their transformed visual image.

Common denominator of the major part of video works is the use of a computer and the respective software, which, in many cases, means the shift towards the cinematisation of video, which receives the form of video story, video document or experimental video film. This trend has been evident in Slovak media art since the mid-1990s.

English translation by J. Jurečková