Art & Authenticy

“THERE”, “ARE”, “NO”, “HAPPY”, “ENDINGS.” These words are shown repetitively in one of the videos in the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition, “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video.” As a representation of feminism, the sentence made little sense to me when I saw it ( and doesn’t make any more sense now), but managed to stay in my mind and be the first images to pop up in my head whenever I hear or think about feminism. Maybe it’s because of the absolute and strong message contained in the short, curt sentence. Maybe on some levels, I do agree with what is said. The feminist movements did bring more freedom to woman in some fields but also created new dilemmas for them in other areas. Women may have become more involved in the workplace, but glass ceilings still exist in many industries. Society have accepted the idea of women going to school and pursuing a career, but they are still often expected to spend the majority of their married life taking care of the house and the children.

In a sense, none of the feminist movements had a happy ending. But I do not believe that there are no happy ending, because I’d rather see the various feminist movements as parts of one continuing process that will gradually make the world a fairer place for woman even though the perfect world with total equality between the sexes do not exist.

This exhibit actually reminded me of our trip to the ICP. When you look at each piece individually it seems to have little coherence, but together it is an exhibition of freedom and equality. While some of the films made no impression, the overall significance was deep. I believe having many different videos playing was an effective tool because it showed the many sides and viewpoints of real life feminists. I was surprised that this exhibit came into existence. Many are still debating whether or not there is a third wave of feminism, if there is, this is a welcome addition and tool in the fight.

The use of videos and films as a means to reflect their views – now that’s way to reach a broad audience. I feel that through these means the female artists can be more free and liberal of the society’s limitations in expressing their beliefs. One of the most interesting and also the most “active” pieces was Paralyzed, by Klara Liden. In Paralyzed the artist dances in a public train in Stockholm, oblivious to the stares of the co passengers in the train. I believe that through this she was trying to experience freedom – carefree and wild- without any inhibition created by social customs and norms, especially for women.

What truly amazed me was the artist’s ability to perform such a task. It would have taken very strong self-confidence and guts to perform the way she did on a packed local train. It was brilliant!!!

As I walked around watching the videos in the Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video Exhibition, there seemed to be a lot of videos that were hard to understand and somewhat redundant and meaningless. Most of the videos seemed like the women were doing short, small actions that only took five seconds but repeated doing that action for five minutes. However, there was a meaning behind each one but it was just hard for me to grasp. The first video I watched was when the lady were putting up blocks onto a relatively high shelf attached to the wall. There wasn’t a description to this video or at least I didn’t find it but it seemed to me that the message she was trying to show was that no matter how heavy the blocks were and no matter how high the shelves were, she still took the time and effort to put the blocks on the shelves. However, it was a rather long process that seemed to make me lose interest after she put up the first two blocks. What I did not understand was where the paint came from and what was the purpose of it.

At first glance, one might look at this exhibit and dismiss it for another weird concoction of Modern Art.  I mean, you’re sitting (or standing, unlucky you) and watching seemingly unrelated videos of women doing wacky things over and over.

But if you squint your eyes a bit, you might catch a quick glimpse of a deeper meaning.

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I am what you would call a feminist. [However, I’m not the kind of feminist that Abushale often describes with his beautiful language as a “lesbian” with “unshaved legs and armpits”.] Since I’m a constant fighter for women equality, I found the Brooklyn Museum’s New Feminist Video to be closer to home than many other contemporary artwork on feminism.

Out of all of the short films at the Brooklyn Museum, Shannon Plump’s Commercials definitely caught my attention. She straightforwardly made fun of the “it girl” and the women’s thirst for running after physical materials to make them look better (but not necessarily feel better).

To me, Shanno Plump got exactly what feminism is about: having a thought of your own and having the guts to stick by it.

DISCLAIMER: Abushale wants be to add the word “jokingly” in front of the feminist comment. So instead, I will put it here.

In the grand scheme of life, Feminism is a fairly new concept. My first impression as I walked into the museum was that this was going to be another “girls can do anything guys can do” theme. I was both right and wrong.” As always and need be for Feminism that does need to be the theme but the way that it was gone about was very abstract, at least some of them.
The movie of the woman doing physical labor with boxes gave me that, “well this isn’t anything new”, feeling. In all honesty its not that woman can’t do everything men can, but if you took a very heavy box, many more men would be able to pick it up than women, its just how were born. So I was quite unimpressed by my first impression.
However as I went on the movie of the girl dropping signs that read, “There are no happy ending.” At first I was thinking, well now that’s just untrue, sometimes there are, and sometimes there not. I didn’t get the meaning, and after reading the description I understood more that everything isn’t always about happy endings, and a lot of the time this applies to women. I found this to be a nice change in how Feminism was represented.

In Brooklyn Museum‘s New Feminist Videos exhibition, feminists test their endurance or even torture themselves to make a point across, I understood most of their points, but they made me shiver a bit inside. The way that these women convey their ideas and express themselves is through a stationary camera. Without any edits, the videos are portrayed more realistically. One of my personal favorites is “Black Out” (2004), a video of the woman, dressed up as a man and has short hair, who was smoking blindfoldedly and “tortured” by her friends pouring alcohol onto her. At times, I could not tell whether she was crying or laughing. The artist and main actress in the video is Cathy Begien and she wanted to express how she felt about one of the nights when she was at a party. I really felt how crazy that night must’ve been for her after watching her torturing herself in her work.

“Whacker” by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, two American-born artists was seven minutes, seven seconds of constant repetition. It was a short film of a woman, wearing heels and a dress, pulling out weeds with a weed whacker. What an original title eh? Though the movie itself was a constant bore, its message was clearly defined. It showed that a woman is just as capable as a man of doing “manly” tasks (in this case, whacking weeds). I’m not saying this from a woman’s point of view, but it’s true. Even I was amazingly shocked to see this. It’s not the normal thing to see; we usually have big, brawny men taking care of the “nitty gritty work”, while women stay at home and look pretty. The change in the gallery was a pleasant surprise, though. It’s about time women got some credit!

The Brooklyn Museum goes into more detail here.

All the videos were supposed to represent some part of a woman’s role. I didn’t get the message. How is this feminist in any way? It was only after I read the descriptions of the videos that I understood what they were trying to convey. Maybe it was a bit too abstract for me to understand.

I liked the visual that the first video provided for the painted boxes on the shelves, but other than that I don’t really know what to say about the other videos.