_Lives in Vienna
Heldinnen
(Lotte, Ingrid, Christine), 1999
Video (color, no sound), each 4'3''
Courtesy of the artist
Lotte
view a sequence 1500 KB
Ingrid
view a sequence 1500 KB
Christine
view a sequence 1500 KB
Heldinnen
They talk about their work, how they began doing it, what they have to
do, for what companies they
work, who they are and what they think. All of their movements are documented
on video. Through the video image women can be observed laughing, talking
and listening. The video shows persons in action. It is actually an essential
quality of a person that he/she acts. To perform an action, the motive
of the action must at least in part reside in the person. She does this,
because she …, she says this, because she …
My heroines, however, have no control over themselves. The motive for
their actions does not reside in them. They do not move by themselves,
they are moved. Like heroes whose capabilities and talent are indebted
to a supra-natural power. This is also the reason why there are only heroes
on screens and in books. Heroes are on their way from subject to object.
Objects do not have a language, they are spoken by us, i.e., they describe
and explain. Do they offer resistance to this reification? If we were
to ask them, their answer would not count, since the motive for their
answer lies outside of them. This reification is something familiar for
us, we can observe it everyday. In advertisements, when animation and
video is mixed, in cartoons. Thus we are hardly ever aware of the uncanny
nature of this reification when subjects become objects. In order to elaborate
this aspect of reification I had to
destroy the traditional structure of video. However, it would not have
been enough to simply play the video slower and to thus destroy the temporal
structure. I first had to banish all motion from the video and turn it
into a photograph and then teach the photographs to move and to make them
into a video. From the subject of photography to the object of video.
(..)
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9209069
Please also
visit the archive of Basis-Wien at
http://www.basis-wien.at
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