Creating Crossroads: European Women's Closed-Circuit Video

Chapter 12 Creating Crossroads: European Women’s Closed-Circuit Video        $   Slavko Kacunko T he traditional art historical tendency to relate women primarily to women1 has been a favourite topic of critique within the field of visual culture studies over the past few decades. As such, the topic itself has become a tradition and a point of departure for building new theoretical and historiographical canons related to deconstruction, post-structuralism, and the post-feminist approach linked to the theorists’ positions being (allegedly) as complementary to those of Judith Butler and Susan Bordo. An obvious way to scrutinise both the interdependently grown art history and the visual culture traditions, with their respective views to sex and gender, is to set focus on their ex negativo communality – their distance to video art. The latter statement is not entirely true, but a discussion of the related theoretical positions sits far beyond the scope of this paper.2 Therefore, in what follows, the focus will be on closed-circuit video works in Europe, conceived of and made by women, but without disputing the theories to which the named protagonists (could) have been related. My hope is that this approach will at least avoid some theoretical and ideological pitfalls and conclusions which often emerge from the retro-analytic theorising of (video-) art history and (audio-) visual culture. French-speaking Realm The first manifestations of CC-video in Europe can be found in France in the field of experimental theatre (Jacques Polieri, 1964), which were followed by Martial Raysse and the neo-avantgarde-art context in 1967, and then by Fred Forest and the nexus of art sociologique and video in 1969.3 In fact, the beginnings of the artistic engagement with the medium of video in France can unequivocally be thought of as being linked to their quite extensive exploration of video as a sociological phenomenon. This context was already institutionalised through the founding of Collectif d’art Sociologique (1974) by Forest and Hervé Fischer and described in Fischer’s Théorie de l’art Sociologique (1977).4 Comparable with the situation in most of the countries in Western Europe EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s and North America, in France in the late 60s, video collectives were mostly short-lived and had political, often feminist, agendas and objectives, and were essentially characteristic of the first phase of video work in France; a period which Jean Paul Fargier referred to as the ‘major epoch of the militant video (1969–1978)’.5 Alongside video-pioneers like Jean-Christophe Averty, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Schaeffer and Alain Jacquier, who worked across the lines of experimental film, television and music, a number of female activists, actors, film authors and script writers as well as performers played significant roles from the very beginning. Carole Roussopoulos (1945– 2009) was well-known for pioneering early documentaries covering the women’s liberation movement in France from 1969. From 1970, she used a Sony Portapak camera and created a collective called Video Out together with her husband Paul. She documented both the work of homosexual authors, like her friend Jean Genet, and the first public gay rights parades in Paris in 1971 (Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire); these were followed by a further 150 documentaries. In 1976, together with Delphine Seyrig, Roussopoulos directed the SCUM Manifesto, a documentary on women’s rights written by Valerie Solana, and in 1982 she founded the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Centre. Anne Papillault had also been an activist video maker since the 1960s, becoming wellknown through her innovative scientific documentaries and her short-story narrative technique, realised mostly with her partner JeanFrancois Dars. They worked closely 178 with the pioneering filmmaker Chris Marker, taking part in the activist media collective SLON/Vidéo/ISKRA, created by Inger Servolin and Marker himself. Hélène Chatelain (playing a role in Marker’s famous La Jetée, 1962) belonged to the wider circle of early vidéastes, which includes the work of the Lefebvre, Paule and Gary Belkin and Patricia Moraz. The French term vidéastes, coined from vidéo and cinéaste, reflects particularly well the traditionally close relationship between the two media in France. Significant in this context is a number of male-female couples among the artists, a feature of the early female-made video work observed in other national contexts as well.6 To this sub-category to which female video artists belong, among others, included couples such as Schum-Wevers, EXPORT-Weibel, Rosenbach-vom Bruch, Ivekoviƒ-Martinis, Abramoviƒ-Ulay, Minkoff-Olesen, J. & O. D. Benet, Kubisch- Plessi, Beban-Horvatic, Ana Nusa & Sreco Dragan, and Woody & Steina Vasulka. It is important to remember though, that often this same relationship was more or less explicitly regarded as something of a (later theoretically heavily contested) gender ‘dichotomy’. The French artist of Italian origins Gina Pane (1939–1990) was the best known representative of another important context of female video usage of the time, the French Art corporel, which has found diverse parallels in video art and video activism throughout Europe. One of the most significant cultural events of the ensuing decade in France was the opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The oc- 179 casion gave the French artist Catherine Ikam (b. 1942) the opportunity to make a CC-video installation, which was, in several respects unique, namely Dispositif pour un parcours video [Device for a Video Route] (1980), divided into three individual parts: Identité I, Identité II and Identité III. The third part of the work formed the centrepiece of the installation. It presented itself to the visitor as an interior room opening up from the lefthand side into the exhibition room and ending in a corridor. A series of eight surveillance cameras grouped together and eleven large black and white monitors of various sizes (47 cm, 36 cm, 23 cm) awaited the visitor. In front of this arrangement, a chair was positioned at a specific spot in the room on which the visitor could sit. All of the cameras were set up in such a manner so that they could focus on one part of the visitor’s face, but from different angles. Thus, the visitor could see the various sections of her face scattered around on the different monitor screens. In the first two stations of the installation, the expressly stated subject of identity in the title was presented ‘physically askew’ with the visitor being deprived of her expected selfview, while in the last room, she was overwhelmed with details, but such details as allowed her only a fragmentary view of herself. The first description of Ikam’s installation comes from Nam June Paik: In the exhibition catalogue, he praised her highly and described the third room as ‘a historic breakthrough’ and ‘the first combination of video art and the art of cryptography’.7 Paik called the first room – the entrance – ‘the room of disinformation’, the second ‘the room of decep- Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA tion’ and the third ‘the room of decomposition’. Such (de)fragmentation of the live image within a CC-video installation is without doubt one of the most memorable of its kind; it also belongs to the art historical genealogy of the ‘virtual’, ‘augmented’ and ‘mixed reality’ avant la lettre. It is comparable both to the (partly less wellknown) CC-video installations by Peter Weibel, Richard Kriesche, Friederike Pezold, Shirley and Wendy Clarke, Susan Milano, David Cort, the so-called Electron Movers from the 1970s, and to those created in the early 1980s by Fabrizio Plessi, Gary Hill, Bernd Kracke, Franziska Megert, Daniel Poensgen or also Michel Jaffrenou, to name but a few. In Belgium, artists got the opportunity to realise their first video projects around 1970. Artists interested in video gathered in the Walloon city of Liège, which had a favourable geographical location, with important connections to both Paris and nearby Dusseldorf, where the first world-wide video-gallery had been established by Gerry Schum in April 1969. From 10 to 14 November 1971, the first real manifestation of ‘video art’ in Belgium and this part of Europe took place: Guy Jungblut, the founder of the gallery known today as Yellow Now in Liege, organised an international exhibition with the significant title: Propositions d’artistes pour circuit fermé de télévision [Artists’ Propositions for CCTV]. A 15-square-metre gallery space, which was to remain inaccessible to the public, served as a framework/exhibition set-up. A closed-circuit video camera was made available, supposedly to transfer footage of the respective installation or performance ensemble directly to a connected tele- EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s vision monitor outside the gallery. The total list of over sixty participants testifies to the decidedly international character of the exhibition, with a considerable number of major European and American artists; however, female artists like Gina Pane were still the exception rather than the rule at that point. Muriel Olesen (b. 1948) and Gérald Minkoff (1937–2009) belong to the first generation of artists experimenting with video as a medium in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and in Europe in general. They had already started collaborating artistically in 1967. From 1970 onwards, they realised CC-video installations, which seemed to be the most suitable for the disclosure of the ‘tautological’ nature of the medium.8 Playing with video palindromes and anagrams remained one of their preferred formalsemiotic means, implemented by Minkoff. At the same time, certain characteristic elements emerged in the individual work of Muriel Olesen as well. One of the most prominent was the swing motif, since the Rococo period a popular motif in paintings, which was linked with eroticising subject matter. However, in Olesen’s interpretation, the swing was connected to (maintaining one’s) balance in a wider sense as well, so offering a parallel to the medium-specific application of the extremely ‘unstable’ (‘female’) medium of video. The motif of Kythera, the ‘island of lovers’, which had also become very popular in French Rococo paintings since Watteau, was also implemented by Olesen on several occasions in their CC-video arrangements. Furthermore, their works were also characterised by the ‘game of cat and 180 mouse’ of the material, and ‘video-reality’, as demonstrated in Du bon usage de la technologie dans les rapports de force [On the Good Use of Technology in Power Relationships] (February 1977/1980) in a very humorous manner. The CC-video installation Cythère (1981) shows the simple functional-technical principle upon which the swing application mentioned above is based: A black and white wall-drawing of a swing (a female face and the outline of an ear) was recorded by a CC-video camera attached to a real swing. There was a screen on a pedestal under the camera, on which the video footage was transmitted, changing as it did according to the movement of the swing. This, together with some other works by Olesen dealing in a formal-functional manner with the balance of images and their relation to the correspondingly changing content, emphatically transported ‘subjectivity’ – highlighted by the repeated ‘je’ in the titles – i.e. the comparatively unstable relation between the subjective and the objective in the artistic fantasy congruent with the comparatively unstable video constructions and their media correlatives.9 Apart from the stated implications of the swing, reference to fertility rituals was also evident here as a completion of a complex network of equalisations and confrontations between the artist, her selfportraits, the medium, the changing images and the spectator.10 English-speaking Realm Under the title Sky TV, one of the first verifiable concepts for a CC-video installation in Europe originated in 1966, although it was not simultaneously 181 performed, and was first published in the exhibition catalogue: Yoko at Indica – Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono, Indica Gallery in London in November 1966. The following designation can be found there: ‘020: Sky TV, 1966 (Furniture Piece) A closed-circuit TV set up in the gallery for looking at the sky’. This installation is part of a series of Ono’s (b. 1933) works that deal with the sky; considering its form and technology, it must be clearly ascribed to the artist’s conceptualism, within which the ‘work’s’ realisation plays a secondary role.11 The rapidly growing video production by female artists in the following period actually generated proportionately fewer CC-video installations, but among them was the CCvideo installation/event Pray/Prayer by Susan Hiller, which had already been realised in 1969. As she described it: ‘The intention of this work was to create a situation where the use of video would modify participants’ social behaviour; this was done by “rewarding” people for actively participating in the group (e.g. talking to others) or alternatively rewarding them for passive behaviour (listening to others) or by randomly distributing the attention of the camera. I assumed that a positive value would be given to being “on camera” and a negative value to being “ignored” by the camera.’12 Power Game was the title of a CC-video installation and performance that the New York-born Liliane Lijn designed together with Alistair Mackintosh and was shown as part of the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile, organised by the Royal College of Art, on 24 October 1974. The entire event simulated the atmosphere of a Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA casino including such formalities as checking guests’ attire (jeans were not allowed) and the procedure of selling chips for the game. A TV monitor was positioned centrally so that the players, the audience and the organisers could all watch live footage of the two CC-video cameras recording the players of the ‘Power Game’ on the table. Lijn described it in the following manner: ‘We used the CC-video to allow people who were not permitted into the room to view the Game, much in the same way that TV allows us to see the workings of parliament, but we cannot actually participate as players.13 The role of the Drag Queens that acted as waitresses and croupiers was based on the idea that ‘those who serve power are never who they seem.’14 In the UK, the participants of the 1975 Serpentine Show, organised on the initiative of David Hall,15 set an important precedent, which was followed up the next year by the founding of London Video Arts (LVA: from 1988 to 1994; London Video Access; since 1994: London Electronic Arts, and later LUX). Video tapes, video performances and video installations formed part of the artistic practices that were specified in the first catalogue from 1978.16 In 1977, two video tapes made by Hall were presented at documenta 6 in Kassel, and video installations by Tamara Krikorian, Stuart Marshall and Stephen Partridge were shown in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in September of the same year. The international exhibition Video Art ’78 organised by Stephen Partridge in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry in May 1978 marks another important date in the UK’s exhibition history. This exhibition included EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s video installations, tapes and performances by numerous British and international artists.17 The exhibition About Time: Video, Performance and Installation by Women Artists, initiated by a group of feminist artists and organised by Catherine Elwes, Rose Garrard and Sandy Nairne from October to December 1980 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London and in the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, was the first event of its kind in the UK to follow up directly on its forerunners in the USA. The exhibition presented the works of Susan Hiller, Catherine Elwes, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Rose Garrard, Roberta Graham, Tina Keane, Alex Meigh, Marceline Mori and Jane Rigby. A visit to the UK by Dara Birnbaum in 1982 and the presentation of her new video tapes with the application of the ‘staccato’ cut technology had substantial influence on a whole generation of British video authors, representatives of the so-called ‘Scratch Video’.18 At the same time, this heralded a decline in CC-video installations, which would also be felt across the European continent during the 1980s. In a later retrospective, both Sean Cubitt and Julia Knight noted a devaluation of the media-specific potentials of the medium of video whilst reporting an increase in the development of more narrative tendencies. This tendency ran counter to the philosophy and strategy of the first generation of British video artists. Based on the ‘superficial resemblance to a number of other media’,19 it did not seem to be particularly beneficial to further research into the interactive possibilities of CC-video installations. The (somewhat delayed) recognition of multi-monitor arrangements that 182 came about after the 1978 Coventry exhibition20 supported this tendency, in the light of the frequent application of video quotes and ‘split information’; on the other hand, it paved the way for the artistic exploration of the ‘presence’, often immanent in CC-video installations. In this context, A. L. Rees cites the influence of Mary Kelly and Susan Hiller, and almost certainly Lacan’s ‘mirror phase’ too, on artists like Tamara Krikorian, Judith Goddard, Katharine Meynell, Mona Hatoum, Jeremy Welsh, Catherine Elwes or Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvatic as well as Tina Keane.21 The CC-video work of the trained artist and painter Tina Keane (b. 1946) has an important role at this point and will be presented here. Keane already began to work as a multimedia artist in the late 1960s, at first with light shows and light organs in the context of and influenced by Arts Lab in London. In the early 1970s, she became a member of the artistic community. The Women’s Workshop expanded the spectrum of her interests so that she became politically engaged, taking part in collective artistic projects, programmatically and chronologically parallel to the corresponding developments in the USA.22 Keane had already begun to work with video and other electronic media by 1975, integrating her young daughter Emily into her feminist works from the very beginning. This not only formed a ‘content-related component’ that offered a background for the frequent engagement with childhood, identity and play;23 but also, the (CC-video) performance became, in this context, one of the artist’s preferred means of expression, not least because ‘ “of the moment quality”, feedback properties 183 and the fact that performance “provided women with a significant tool for discovering the meanings of being a woman”’.24 Keane exhibited her first CC-video installation in the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1978: Swing/Alice through Reflection consisted of an iron construction with three swings, a hidden CC-video camera in front of the swing in the middle and three monitors. The participant stood in the middle and could control the running live image on all monitors.25 The parental experience, especially the childhood memories that the artist repeatedly re-experienced as a mother, also shaped the CC-video installation and performance Playpen from 1979, in which Keane showed video footage of girls and women aged between 6 months and 80 years giving their own performance in a playpen; visitors got involved using mirror camera manipulations. In the early 1980s, Keane began to work for the British Council alongside her performances and other artistic projects at St. Martin’s College of Art. Over the years, the artist modified her views on the range of feminism, not least due to its assimilation into the existing social structures, and continued her work with an enthusiastic exploration of ‘Cyberspace’, more or less parallel to the theoretical paradigm shift that Donna Haraway made with her Cyborg Manifesto. Keane’s later MA thesis about the concept of the post-human dealt, among other things, with the French artist Orlan. The technological development as a potentially liberating force also remained at a meta-level in Tina Keane’s art in the late 1980s (Escalator [1988]) and 1990s.26 Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA German spoken realm Austrian female artists played a pioneering role in the artistic exploration of CC-video as well. The inter-media artistic practices, including the socalled expanded cinema, proved to be fertile ground for later developments. On 10 and 11 April 1969, a group exhibition entitled Multi Media 1 was held in the gallery Junge Generation in Blutgasse in Vienna, where Peter Weibel realised his first closed-circuit video installation and performance, as well as his first videotape, entitled Audience as Exhibition, or Audience Exhibited, which was screened over two connected gallery spaces. In the first room, the artist interviewed visitors in front of a running video camera operated by his then-partner VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940). The video footage was broadcast simultaneously to a monitor in the second space, making the visitors themselves the ‘exhibits’ of the exhibition. In her evaluation of the situation in the 1960s, the artist VALIE EXPORT covers the causal gamut from expanded cinema to ‘virtual reality’.27 She describes the CC-video installations, demonstrations and performances as decisive, ‘almost paradigmatic constellation[s]’ because the simple setup aptly demonstrated the splitting of reality through media images […] This triangle of camera, visitor and monitor (closed-circuit) is an almost paradigmatic constellation of the early video projects, which create a media-generated perceptive space, a media space that can be seen as a wiring of spaces of perception, meaning and imagination and EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s which introduce a mode of representation in which the picture is not primarily the place of a representation, but rather a place where the media system (in this case, video) gets entangled with real space and real time, involving the viewer in this feedback effect.28 Since her public action Tapp – und Tastkino [Tapp and Touch Cinema] (1968, realised together with Peter Weibel), one of the outstanding examples of expanded cinema, VALIE EXPORT has developed a form of feminist actionism through her artistic and theoretical work. Besides her (CC-video) performances, VALIE EXPORT realised several CC-video installations between 1973 and 1978 with a mutual ‘demonstration character’, notwithstanding their different forms. This applies similarly to the CCvideo installations Triangel (1974), Inversion (Kreis-Linie) (1976), NegativPositivTransfinit (Ineinander Abbildung) (1977, with Peter Weibel) and to the group of four CC-video installations entitled Interrupted Movement – Zeitlücken – Raumspalten [Gaps in Time – Cracks in Space] (1973): Triangel demonstrated a perspective synthesis in the ‘video room’ as it occurred, for example, in Peter Weibel’s Epistemische Videologie (I) (1974) at the same time, with additional manipulation (the mirror-inverted monitor image), which had unexpected consequences for the visitors who wanted to ‘have their images displayed’. The tension field between the formal rigour and the engaged, ‘existential’ and allegedly ‘essentialist’ contents was thus analysed in a versatile manner. Vienna-born Friederike Pezold (b. 1943) made the female body her main subject, starting in the late 1960s. 184 From 1971, she recorded her actions with the video camera, examining particularly feminine body language as a system of almost abstract signs, which allows and demands concentrated and intensive consideration of the traits and changes of the corresponding (video) forms.29 Apart from the video installations, where she used previously recorded video tapes (from 1975), Pezold took it upon herself to change the media-political structures of television.30 Germany’s outstanding role and significance in our context becomes increasingly evident from the mid1970s onwards. One of the first German artists to consistently work with the medium of video was Ulrike Rosenbach (b. 1943). Although she did not realise any CC-video installations per se, her most famous works could neither have been planned nor realised without this technology; as such they serve as prime examples of the efficiency of its implementation. As a student in Joseph Beuys’ master class at the Düsseldorf Academy, she was encouraged to start working on her own with video after seeing the exhibition Project ’71 in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1971 which included several American video works. Her first videos were created in 1972. They were usually shorter pieces dealing intensively with her own role as a woman in society and should be understood as (partly ironic-sarcastic) self-portraits.31 During this brief but important autobiographic phrase, Rosenbach developed a critical and historic awareness, soon to be reflected in her video actions. It was above all the CC-video performances Glauben Sie nicht, dass ich eine Amazone bin [Don’t Think That I’m an 185 Amazon] (1975, 15 min.) and Reflexionen über die Geburt der Venus [Reflections on the Birth of Venus] (1976/78, 15 min.), both later re-designed for video tape,32 which brought her international acclaim. In the former work, Rosenbach is seen shooting fifteen arrows at a reproduction of Madonna im Rosenhang by Stefan Lochner. The artist’s face is also recorded with a second camera and is crossfaded so that the arrows also simultaneously ‘hit’ her on the video tape.33 The latter Venus video used a life-sized projection of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as a background in front of which the artist turns around on her own axis in a black and white leotard, at times merging visually with the artwork. The formal solution of the interlocking and crossfading of one’s own body with specifications and examples from art history is one of the means of film and video language that is continuously used by artists. The specific context of feminist art and the inherent work with the distribution of gender roles is also found at the same time in the works of, for example, VALIE EXPORT or the American Hermine Freed (b. 1940) (Art Herstory, 1974). The self-portrait, as probably the ‘most intensive image of society, in which it was produced’,34 became for Ulrike Rosenbach a radical concept of dealing critically with both history and the present. The consciously detailed and slow recording processes in her videos was also a reaction to the usual custom associated with the medium of television of rapid ‘information’ exchange and the accompanying deluge of images. During the 1980s, Barbara Hammann (b. 1945) explored in her video Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA installations the possibilities of mediated fragmentation of the body and materiality. The topic of voyeurism occupied the artist in several works as well, like for instance, in the CC-video installation and performance Dirty Eyes (1980). This consisted of a textile object with a monitor, which was exhibited on the first floor of the Kunstverein Munich. On the monitor, the audience could watch the live footage of what was happening on the second floor, where there was a CC-video camera positioned in a corner of the room, with a glass plate, flour and a light as well as the inscription ‘dirty eyes’ on the wall. In the CC-video installation Walking on Yourself (1984) Hammann staged a situation in which the observer had to step on her own live video image. Fig. 1. Hanna Frenzel, Under Pressure, 1983, photo of the performance. [Courtesy of the artist.] EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s Hanna Frenzel (b. 1957) realised several impressive and psychologically effective CC-video performances in Munich in the early 1980s by using semi-transparent elastic rubber membranes. The video performance Von Innen nach Außen [From the Inside to the Outside] was about a tangible demonstration of inner conditions and conflicts related to the immediate environment. Frenzel commented on it as follows: ‘I show in my own inner space, my images of constrictions, resistances and fears and I try to overcome them. I express my sensation in this space, at this moment, literally with my hands and feet’.35 In the CC-video performance Under Pressure (1983), again the artist used a transparent rubber membrane, this time as a trampoline and filmed using a CC-video camera and a projector. Christina Kubisch (b. 1948) studied music and composition before giving up a career as a flautist and interpreter in 1974 and turning to artistic work with other media. Kubisch realised a series of works in collaboration with the Venice-based artist Fabrizio Plessi. Born in 1940 in Italy, Plessi had been working almost exclusively with water since the early 1970s, achieving worldwide success with his elaborate video installations. The CCvideo installation and performance entitled Tam-Tam, designed collaboratively by Kubisch and Plessi and performed several times, was a commission from the Folkwang Museum Essen, and can be considered a real/medially presented dialogue between the two artists. It was enacted using two CC-video cameras and monitors and an elongated building construction. Kubisch and Plessi sat 186 on a long wooden table facing each other with a monitor in front on each side. Both artists’ actions, which focused on the challenge of mediated communication means, were transmitted directly onto the monitor, so that the audience could see and compare both artists and the video partners on their ‘duel table’. The audience had to keep turning their heads from side to side, like in a pingpong game. The video installation, the performance and the concert TamTam represented the characteristic mode of operation of the artistic duo, out of which emerges a clearly defined conception of the potential of video as a live transmission medium. Kubisch wrote: The video camera is an autonomous element for us and not a technical means serving only as a means of reproduction. We try to use the camera as if it were a third person acting as a filter to the audience and maintaining the tension between us. And so, the video becomes an integrated and indispensable part of our performance. It’s important to say here, by the way, that you can document a live event, but never repeat it.36 South-East European realm One of the most conspicuous peculiarities of the earliest inter-media and video scene in Italy was without a doubt its decentralised video production and documentation sites. The Galleria d’Arte del Cavallino in Venice was an important production site where projects were already using video equipment in the late 1960s. The release of the Sony Portapak on the Italian market in 1972 led to wide- 187 Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA Fig. 2a-b. Sanja Ivekoviƒ, Monument, 1976, stills from video. [Courtesy of the artist.] spread activity that was not just restricted to Italy, but also contributed to the realisation of early and important video projects in, among other places, neighbouring Yugoslavia. In Motovun, a historic town in Croatian Istria, an important meeting between Italian and Yugoslav artists entitled Identitet = Identità [Identity] took place in 1976, organised by the galleries of the City of Zagreb, the Ethnographic Museum of Istria from Pazin and the Gallery del Cavallino of Venice. The director of the Gallery del EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s Cavallino, Paolo Cardazzo, brought a Portapak camera, a monitor and video tapes, and these were used by local artists to create their first video works, along with those of the visiting Italian artists;37 in all, a total of twenty video works were produced. The local critics at that time, such as Vera Horvat-Pintariƒ, Ješa Denegri, and Marijan Susovski, saw the significant potential of the video medium being its suitability to mediate an ‘unmediated reality analysis’ and to provide a ‘check’ of reality. This conviction was due mainly to the related technology of direct audio-visual ‘Closed-Circuit’ transmissions. The early video works of Sanja Ivekoviƒ and Dalibor Martinis mainly involved the registering of their own actions, which were specially designed for video-recording. The lack of any editing equipment or sophisticated graphics or other special effects by no means proved to be a disadvantage – it became one of the features of the strong and widely acknowledged conceptualism in that part of Europe. In the CC-video performance Monument (realised in Motovun) Ivekoviƒ (b. 1949) reversed the traditional ‘male’ gazing at a woman and the woman being conceived as an ‘observed object’ in a symbolic and formal-technical manner by video-technically ‘scanning’ and recording her male partner (Martinis) from his toes to the top of his head in one slow CC-tracking shot. This live action was documented as a video tape, as were other actions of both artists. After studying at the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb from 1968 to 1971 and making her first videos in the first half of the 1970s, Ivekoviƒ contin- 188 ued her systematic exploration of the impact of modern (mass) media on the ‘official’ image of women and their day-to-day life. The continually created stereotypes emerging between the ‘private’ (the artist herself as the reference person) and public images (advertisements etc.) became for Ivekoviƒ, a projection screen for the engaged artistic elaboration of ‘socioideological implications of the mass media’, on the one hand, and ‘performative structures and social codes of cultural activities’, on the other.38 These became manifest in the mid1970s in a number of photo series (e.g. Double Life, 1975), before the artist moved into the medium of video, making an important statement with a successful site-specific confrontation of the private and the public in her CC-video performance Inter Nos (1977): the overall environment consisted of two connected rooms with a CC-video camera and a monitor (without sound), and an entrance area in which the direct video transmission for the audience took place. The artist was in one (inaccessible) room for about an hour, while the second room remained open to individual visitors. The artist (inter)acted with these visitors one-by-one, by, for example, kissing or stroking her/his live image on the screen, thereby putting into effect a range of non-verbal communicative possibilities. While both participants in the interaction only saw the other person, the audience on the outside could only see the video image of the individual visitor together with his/her (re)actions. Sanja Ivekoviƒ also designed numerous CC-video, CC-installation, CC-performance and CC-tape-concepts that remained unrealised. From 189 a formal-technical perspective, they are sometimes reminiscent of contemporary works by Michel Jaffrenou or earlier ones by Ernst Caramelle and Jacques Lizène, demonstrating Ivekoviƒ’s interest in the medium-specific investigation of communicative and gender-specific, as well as social, structures. Apart from the international exchange,39 it was the generation of conceptual artists in Yugoslavia in the 1970s whom especially favoured the introduction of new media technologies into the art context of the time and who determinedly promoted them. Their rebuttal of the modernist ‘puri(tani)sm’40 and their corresponding openness to hitherto untested artistic means of expression of a rather ‘immaterial’ and ‘unstable’ character can be compared to similar tendencies in the UK, Poland, Italy, Spain, Austria and other European countries. The art institutions in Eastern Europe gradually started to make up both the acute and chronic lack of available video technology from the second half of the 1970s onwards. In the former Yugoslavia of the seventies, there were very few (female) ‘Video Artists’ with their own video equipment. Even the major institutions like Studentski Kulturni Centar in Belgrade and Studentski Centar in Zagreb did not receive their first video cameras and recorders until 1973 or later.41 At the same time, due to the relatively open borders, on-going dialogue with artists and institutions from abroad led to a relatively early development of video concepts, including CC-video arrangements. In Serbia, the conceptual art scene of the 1970s included the internationally acclaimed Marina Abramoviƒ (b. 1946), who has lived in Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA the Netherlands since 1976 and who, in her early career, gave a series of art-historically significant (video) performances together with Frank Uwe Laysiepen, also known as Ulay (b. 1943). Abramoviƒ became a crucial figure of the second half of the 1970s, paving the way for an ’ “intermittent” history of video installations’42 in Serbia with her CC-video performances. In a similar way to how Trbuljak used Willoughby Sharp´s video equipment in Zagreb,43 in Belgrade, Marina Abramoviƒ used the Dutch group Video Heads’44 equipment during the group’s visit there in 1975, in order to realise and present her first video installation Freeing the Voice, in which the artist acted in front of a CC-video camera in one room, while her live image could be followed by the audience in another room. In Slovenia, the first genuine signs of artistic work with video may be found in the context of the conceptualist group OHO (1966–1971) and in the period after 1970 within the socalled ‘transcendental conceptualism’. The Slovene video pioneers like Ana Nuša Dragan (1943–2011) and Sre o Dragan (b. 1944) realised occasional CC-video installations, mostly after 1976. Ten years after completing their first video tape (1969), they realised their first CC-video performance and installation entitled MasculinFeminin for the exhibition Trigon in Graz. It was an installation which emerged out of an action consisting of the application of different pigments to their bodies. At the end, the pigments’ materiality was converted almost seamlessly into its media equivalent. The CC-video installation We’re Going into this Time, which the couple performed three years later, EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s used a similar ensemble, but consisting this time of graphics and photographs, a CC-video camera, and a monitor as well as a slogan written over the door – a ‘tautologic’ juxtaposition of real and media object levels demonstrating a media-critical approach.45 At this point, it is worth mentioning that the first artistic experiments with electronic cameras in an installation and performance context were being conducted in America in similar numbers and varieties and at around the same time as in Europe. The following digression will look at a few of the important and concrete links between women´s closed-circuit video art in Europe and the USA. Euro-American realm The Knokke Film Festival (KnokkeleZoute) in Belgium provided an important node for the early development of experimental film and video art in Europe in general, and in particular, the exhibition The experimental video 5 exhibit (26 December 1973 – 5 May 1974). It was the first group exhibition of Canadian and American video artists in Europe and was organised by Gerald O’Grady and hosted by Jacques Ledoux, the director of the Royal Belgian film archive. Participants included Nam June Paik, Shirley and Wendy Clarke, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Peter Campus and Woody and Steina Vasulka. At quite an early stage, Steina Vasulka (b. 1940) and Woody Vasulka (b. 1937) introduced their Northern and Eastern European contexts and competences to New York (State), to further develop both the infrastructures for the then young video art form 190 and the analogous electronic possibilities of image manipulation for the New York (State) video art scene, which was soon flourishing nicely. Together with Andres Mannik, Vasulkas opened The Electronic Kitchen in 1971 at the Broadway Central Hotel in New York, later The Kitchen Center for Video, Music And Dance. This initially formed part of the so-called Mercer Art Center, before the gallery moved to Broome Street and finally to Chelsea in West 19th Street. The Vasulkas’ move to Buffalo in 1976 brought a similarly fruitful and creative period for the two artists, who, in collaboration with Don MacArthur and later with Jeffrey Schier, developed the Digital Image Articulator, which allowed the digital generation and manipulation of video footage in real-time. Steina´s multiple CC-video installation, entitled Machine Vision (1976), a complex installation formation consisting of four individual installations with and without CC-video components, originates from this time. One particular installation, Allvision, represented the central element: with the help of a mirror ball and the two CC-video cameras aimed at each side, Allvision was able to maintain a permanent live video surveillance of the surrounding space. This ‘machine vision’ represented by the live video camera footage could be simultaneously watched by visitors via two connected monitors. Steina Vasulka explained her own vision of the piece: Allvision signifies the awareness of an intelligent, yet not human vision. The act of seeing, the image source, and the kinetic resources come from the installation itself, choreographed and programmed by the cyclical nature of its me- 191 Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA chanical performance [...] I wanted to create a vision that can see the whole space all the time [...] You are not in charge of the space; it is not your choice – it is somebody else’s. It was a challenge for me to create a space that would not deal with the idiosyncracies of human vision.46 Apart from her artistic work, Steina also participated in the inauguration of other early video-production, -distribution and -reception contexts in New York, which were relevant for her fellow women artists throughout the early 70s and for the further development of the women’s video networks in the United States. At the same time, the division of Europe into the eastern and western blocks remained a decisive political and economic factor in political as well as technological and infrastructural terms. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, European women’s closed-circuit video experiments created important crossroads for the future. Retrospectively can be safely concluded that they helped to increase and enrich the understanding of video’s potential for boosting an immense variety of its societal applications and open up new routes to future solutions for its sovereign and innovative usage in creative and everyday media praxis. Endnotes 1. Gisela Breitling, Die Spuren des Schiffs in den Wellen – eine autobiographische Suche nach den Frauen in der Kunstgesichte (Berlin: Oberbaum, 1980). 2. In Spring 2018, an extensive anthology of the women video art theorists in the German-spoken realm was issued, edited by the author of this chapter. – Vol. 1.: Slavko Kacunko (ed.), Theorien der Videokunst. Theoretikerinnen 1988–2003 (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2018), with 22 contributions from Edith Decker-Phillips, Inga Lemke, Karin Bruns, Claudia Richarz, Gerda Lampalzer, Christiane Fricke, Nicoletta Torcelli, Söke Dinkla, Annette Hünnekens, Claudia Rosiny, Ursula Frohne, Verena Kuni, Katharina Gsöllpointner, Yvonne Volkart, Barbara Engelbach, Barbara Büscher, Katja Albers, Lydia Haustein, Sabine Flach, Sabine Himmelsbach, Anja Osswald and Martina Dobbe. – Vol. 2.: Slavko Kacunko (ed.), Theorien der Videokunst. Theoretikerinnen 2004–2018 (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2018), with 19 contributions from Irene Schubiger, Änne Söll, Inke Arns, Katharina Gsöllpointner, Yvonne Spielmann, Katharina Ammann, Christiane Fricke, Sylvia Martin, Martina Dobbe, Sigrid Adorf, Stephanie Sarah Lauke, Kathrin Becker, Sabine Maria Schmidt, Katja Kwastek, Marion Thielebein, Anke Hervol, Tabea Lurk, Franziska Stöhr and Eva Wattolik. 3. Art sociologique. Video, Coll. 10/18, UGE Paris 1977. 4. Full text PDF in French is available online: http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/fischer_herve/theorie_art_ sociologique/theorie_art_sociologique.pdf (accessed 18 February 2017). 5. Jean-Paul Fargier, ‘Geschichte der Videokunst in Frankreich’, in Videofest 93 (Berlin: Medienoperative, 1993), p. 96. 6. Cf. Kunstforum International, v. 107, April–May 1990. 7. Nam June Paik, ‘Vidéocryptography’ in Pierre Restany (ed.), Catherine Ikam (Nimes: Chapelle des Jésuites, 1991). 8. See: Wulf Herzogenrath and Edith Decker (eds.), Video-Skulptur retrospektiv und aktuell 1963–1989 (Cologne: DuMont, 1989), p. 207; Jacques Monnier-Raball, ‘Video in Switzerland. Seeing to See’, in René Payant (ed.), Vidéo, International Video Conference (Montreal: Artextes, 1986), p. 107. 9. The subject of embarkment on Kythera was taken on again symbolically with grouped parts of trees in A Cythère [Pour Cythère], je l’aime, il m’en balance (1983), while La vidéo, je m’en balance (1984) represents a sort of ‘synthesis’ and culmination of this group of works by Muriel Olesen using eight swings, two slide projectors, four CC-video cameras and four monitors. 10. Cf. Herzogenrath and Decker, Video-Skulptur retrospektiv und aktuell 1963–1989, p. 226. 11. It is Ono’s only video installation that was – as far as is verifiable – set up in the Museet for Samtidskunst in EWVA | European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s 192 Roskilde in Denmark for the first time in 1992, catalogued as ‘Nr. 50: SKY TV, 1966’ (Yoko Ono: Color, Fly, Sky, Museet for Samtidskunst, Palaet Roskilde, 1992). A CC-video camera that was attached on a wall not far from a window of the gallery recorded the sky through the open window; the live image of the sky over Roskilde was transmitted on a monitor that was placed on a tripod in a corner of the exhibition room. C.f. statement by Ono: ‘I would like to see the sky machine on every corner of the street instead of the coke machine. We need more skies than coke’ (23 January 1966, Courtesy Archive Jon Hendricks, New York). Also included in her Grapefruit-art book (editions: 1964, 1970; 2013) is a Sky Event for John Lennon (Spring 1968), as well as other Sky Events; Sky TV is however not included. Apart from the aforementioned catalogue and Ono´s Notes for Indica Show, 1966 (Courtesy Archive Jon Hendricks, New York), the piece was not mentioned at the time; neither in the personal notebook of the artist for the Indica-Show nor in the newspaper-reviews then. This is why the following statement by Chrissie Iles may need revaluation: ‘In 1966, Yoko Ono exhibited Sky TV at the Indica Gallery in London. A video camera was placed outside the building, relaying a continuous live image of the sky onto a television set inside the gallery. The work also existed as a written instruction, or score.’ C.f. Chrissie Iles, ‘Between the Still and Moving Image’, in Into the Light (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 59. 12. Susan Hiller, e-mail to the author, 2002. 13. Liliane Lijn, e-mail to the author, 2002. 14. Ibidem. 15. Board included Roger Barnard, David Critchley, Brian Hoey, Tamara Krikorian, Pete Livingstone, Stuart Marshall, Stephen Partridge and Jonnie Turpie. 16. Julia Knight, ‘In Search of an Identity: Distribution, Exhibition and the “Process” of British Video Art’ in Julia Knight (ed.), Diverse Practices. A Critical Reader on British Video art (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996), p. 219. 17. British artists included Kevin Atherton, Roger Barnard, Lindsay Bryton, David Critchley, Keith Frake, David Hall, Brian Hoey, Tamara Krikorian, Stuart Marshall, Alex Meigh, Marceline Mori and Stephen Partridge; international artists included Marina Abramoviƒ, Nan Hoover, Friederike Pezold, Ulrike Rosenbach, Bill Viola and Peter Weibel. 18. C.f. Knight, ‘In Search of an Identity’, p. 361. 19. ‘Indeed, video has frequently been viewed as a poor relation of film’, in Ibidem, p. 221, footnote 13, p. 236. 20. Tamara Krikorian, ‘Video Installations in Britain’ in Tamara Krikorian, exhibition catalogue (London: London Video Arts, 1984). 21. Al Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video: From Canonical Avantgarde to Contemporary British Practice (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), p. 109. In the Tate Gallery in London, the travelling exhibition The Arts for Television and Revision took place in 1989 at the initiative of Dorine Mignot and Kathy Rae Huffman. They concentrated, above all, on the presence of video in television and of television in video art. In 1989, The Biennale of Video and Electronic Media Art was organised for the first time in Liverpool. 22. C.f. Michael O’Pray, ‘Tina Keane’, Performance, March 1988. 23. Since 1976; c.f. also similar inclusions in the work of Ulrike Rosenbach, Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly. 24. C.f. O’Pray, ‘Tina Keane’, p. 10. 25. The installation had a clear counterpart in Susan Milano’s CC-video installation of the same name, which manifested a clear parallel to the context of Women’s Interart Center as well as to the Women’s Video Festival organised in New York in 1974. A drawing was published in Studio International in 1976. 26. Lynn MacRitchie, ‘On Tina Keane. Transposition’, Mute. Digital Art Critique, Issue 4. Winter/Spring 1996. 27. ‘In Expanded Cinema, the system of cinema was dissected, deconstructed, destructed, and then reassembled in a different order, that is, with a shift in sign meaning. Expanded Cinema is the forerunner of electronic cinema, of virtual reality’. VALIE EXPORT, ‘Mediale Anagramme. Ein Gedanken. Und Bildervortrag. Frühe Arbeiten’, in Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), White Cube/Black Box (Vienna 1996), pp. 99–127, p. 119. Quoted here from Reinhard Braun, ‘Video. TV. Telecommunication – The Early Projects’, in Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), RE-PLAY, Anfänge internationaler Medienkunst in Österreich (Vienna: Generali Foundation; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1999), pp. 401–438, 407. 28. Braun, ‘Video. TV. Telecommunication – The Early Projects’, p. 408. 29. Under the title Die neue leibhaftige Zeichensprache nach den Gesetzen von Anatomie, Geometrie und Kinetik (1973–76) originated a cycle of video tapes, in which Pezold performed herself. She painted individual body parts in b/w, took respective detailed footage and documented the changes through the positions and movements. 30. Petzold’s video piece Madame Cucumatz from 1975 (not a CC-video installation) could be regarded as one of the early predecessors of the videographic fragmentations of the human figure, as known among others through Catherine Ikam. 193 Chapter 12 / Creating Crossroads | EWVA 31. C.f. video tapes Bindenmaske (1972, 12 min.), Der Muff und das Mädchen (1973, 12 min.), Zeichenhaube (1973, 5 min.), Mon Petit Chou (1973, 5 min.) as well as the pieces with the artist’s daughter (Einwicklung mit Julia, 6 min., Brennesseltape, 5 min., both 1972). 32. C.f. Gisela Jo Eckhardt in Video-Forum, Künstler-Tapes und Filme (Berlin: NBK – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein e. V., 1985), p. 114. 33. This action took place during the Biennale des Jeunes, 1975 in Paris. 34. Ruth Diehl in the leaflet to the exhibition Body and Soul in the Kunstmuseum in Bonn 1997. 35. Hanna Frenzel, e-mail to the author, 2002. 36. Kubisch in Kubisch & Plessi, exhibition catalogue (Aachen: Neue Galerie Sammlung; Ludwig/ Antwerpen: ICC, 1979), pp. 13–14. 37. The event included Luigi Viola, Claudio Ambrosini, Luciano Celli, Michele Sambin and Mario ‘Piccolo’ Sillani Djerrahain who met local artist-friends Dalibor Martinis, Sanja Ivekoviƒ and Goran Trbuljak in Motovun. 38. Silvia Eiblmayr, ‘Personal Cuts / Personal Cuts’ in Sanja Ivekoviƒ. Personal Cuts, exhibition catalogue (Vienna: Galerie im Taxipalais, 2001), p. 9. 39. Luciano Giaccari was a guest in Belgrade already in 1972, where he presented his early video tapes. About the same time, in 1971, Willoughby Sharp did the same in Zagreb. Jack Moore and Video Heads from Amsterdam belong, with their early visits in the former Yugoslavia, to the early supporters of the local video pioneers. 40. C.f. Dejan Sretenovi, Video Art in Serbia, 1999. http://www.dijafragma.com/projects/videoartins.html (accessed February 2017). 41. Ješa Denegri, ‘Video in Yugoslavia’, in René Payant (ed.), Vidéo. International Video Conference (Montreal: Artextes, 1986), p. 124. 42. Braco Dimitrijevi, 1999. http://www.dijafragma.com/projects/texts/videoart2.html (accessed 18 February 2017). 43. As early as 1972, Goran Trbuljak in Zagreb received a visit from Willoughby Sharp (the body-and video artist and editor of the legendary art magazine Parachute) and had the opportunity to realise his first video work Perimetral test of the artist’s visual field. In particular, the connections to Austria and Italy provided information about video for the first generation of Croatian video artists and their audience. C.f. Marijan Susovski, ‘Video u Jugoslaviji’, Spot, 10, 1977 and Slavko Kacunko, Closed Circuit Videoinstallationen. Ein Leitfaden zur Geschichte und Theorie der Medienkunst mit Bausteinen eines Künstlerlexikons, (Berlin: Logos, 2004). 44. Video Heads Theatre Troupe (Multi Media Arts Lab & Video Theater) gathered since 1970, an increasingly large group of dedicated artists and technicians to act as ‘a social video concentration for breaking through the anti-social home-centered effect of monolithic mass-communication’. The most prominent appearance of the group was carried out in 1972; it was the framework program of the Munich Olympics closed-circuit video installation/performance or a ‘Multimedia Theatre Piece’ using the Eidophor projector in the public, i.e. exactly the same technology as Jacques Polieri used in his first closed-circuit video installations in Europe. 45. Nadja Zgodnik, ‘Video Conquering Space’, in Videodokument. Video Art in Slovenia 1969–1998. (Ljubljana: SCCA, 1999), pp. 151–152. 46. Statement of the artist, facsimile. An extensive documentation of facsimiles can be found on http://vasulka.org/ (accessed 18 February 2017).