Fractured Mirror: Between Self and State in Global Women's Video Art

In her seminal 1976 essay, art historian Rosalind Krauss defined video’s condition as a psychological state of narcissism, a continual feedback loop which trapped the artist between camera and monitor. Favoring a formalist concern for medium specificity, Krauss’s characterization of the burgeoning technology disregards not only the volatile social conditions which marked video’s entrance into the market during the 1970s, but also its almost instantaneous use by women artists for political critique. This panel will bring together a series of essays which address the numerous ways in which women artists from the 1970s to the present have subverted and re-channeled the “mirroring” effect of video and audio technology to address political issues across geographic boundaries in a global context.

Potential topics include:

-How have women artists employed an aesthetics of reproducibility, indexicality and disruption to challenge global media’s simultaneous privatization and use by the state for surveillance?

-How did artists' projects address both the fantasy and fiction of a “borderless” global media network popularized by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and artists like Nam June Paik?

-How do these artists address issues of intersectionality, complicating a Western model of feminist politics and accommodating diverse engagements with the state?

-How have these artists employed techniques of performing for the camera to destabilize rigid norms of gender identity and undermine sexual objectification?