Martha Gever - The Feminism Factor: Video and its relation to Feminism
• based on "why are there no great women artists?" (Linda Nichlin) and "is there a feminist aesthetic" (Sylvia Bovenschen)
• Nochlin (70s) - at the heart of Western art = artistic genius/Great Artist
• Nchlin suggests "that feminist art historians and critics research and write histories of art institutions, not histories based on accounts of individual successes and unexamined concepts of what constitutes artistic success" (Gever in Hall and Fifer, 1990, 226)
• Q- isn't this linked to the notion of the "commons"?
• Bovenschen - do women possess a feminine sensibility? she favours materialist, historical methods in her analysis of the conditions within which art is produced
• Gever - looks to social institutions and debates about gender in culture
• relationship bw video, feminism and women artists
• accounts for policies regulating telecom and arts funding
• women's lib in the 70s and 80s - feminism "challenged by women of colour, lesbians and others" (Gever in Hall and Fifer, 1990, 228)
• feminism considered passé in academia and art world, prefer post-feminist
• psychoanalysis central in feminist theory bc "it recognizes the power of the unconscious processes that inform the formation of gender identity of individual subjects" (Gever in Hall and Fifer, 1990, 229) - femininity, feminine representation and female spectatorship
• psycho roots in Western white bourgeois models of psycho-sexual relations
• low cost video equipment came out at about the same time as feminism was reactivated in the US - cheaper and more easy to carry
• greater economy of videotape speaks to women - "since the collective economic status of women in this country has barely improved in this period in spite of increased participation by women in the waged and salaried work force" (Gever in Hall and Fifer, 1990, 230)
• video during women's lib and the 80s, not really about quality, but about counteracting descriptions of reality
• countering truth and the natural ** link to Raad's work
• against documentary "truths" - mediation implicit to process, perpetuates positivism,
• video's link to TV (its social role as conveyor of infotainment)
• problems of performance
• video art (Mendieta) - puts into question what is immutable from what is subject to change;
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Gever - Invisibility Made Visible
Title of Periodical: Art in America
Call Number: N 1 A54
Volume: Vol. 79
Issue: Issue 4
Date: Apr91
Title of Article: Invisibility made visible
Author of Article: Gever, M.
Pages: p57, 4p, 4bw;
• Dyer in Gever - "In terms of the politics of representation, fighting oppression is particularly difficult for gays because we are invisible" (Dyer in Gever, Art and America, "Invisibility Made Visible", 57)
• gays and lesbians need to counter the way they are represented (**like Gever's argument about feminist video)
• visbility as self-defined by gays and lesbians
• queer video challenges conventional oppressive representations
• as does video and film festivals
• actually, queer film fest almost always have a retrospective, a historical component
• dealing with visibility remains an explicit rationale
• visibility a function of both race and sexuality
• shifting debates about visibility ** link to paper
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Title of Periodical: Art in America
Call Number: N 1 A54
Volume: Vol. 75
Issue: Issue 7
Date: Jul87
Title of Article: Homosexual videos.
Author of Article: Gever, M.
Pages: p43, 7p;
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