Syndicate: Marina Grzinic: Representation of the Body under 'Communism'

[grzinic@img.t-kougei.ac.jp (marina grzinic) (by way of Andreas Broeckmann)]

Marina GRZINIC, Tokyo/Ljubljana

THE REPRESENTATION OF THE BODY UNDER "COMMUNISM"1

 To understand the representation of the body in new media, the body
immersed in the specific totalitarian context of Eastern Europe's
Socialism and Communism, we must first of all decode the intersection of
cultural, political and theoretical strategies lying beneath such
representation. We can talk of the common heritage of totalitarianism, as
we talk of the common  platform of (European) democracy.  I propose to
reflect on Communism as an oppositional, differential setting, and to do
the same with the body.

In the beginning, nevertheless, we need to draw some clarifications which
are strategically important.  Today Communism is being commodified for
consumption and this is part of the process of circulation of cultural
stereotypes.  It seems that Communism was the 'lingua franca' and yet for
those of us coming from the 'so called' Eastern European context, it is
loosing it's status of 'lingua materna'. Ironically, Communism and it's
big brother Socialism were developed as clear patriarchal systems.

The body today is like nature,  a commonplace and powerful discursive
construction. The body is a topos and a tropos, a figure, construction,
artifact, movement,  displacement. So the question 'how to squeeze the body
and fill it with oil and blue vitriol?' is a not rhetorical, but strategic.
>From the answer we will see that how we fill the body, from where we insert
the blue vitriol in the image, we will get oppositional strategies from
it's reading. This reading, however, will be partly utopic as we are trying
to work on the concept of the 'so called' rudimentary body, which lived in
the Communist context.  Firstly as a political body, to trace out the
interference between the body and the Socialist / Communist system to focus
ourselves on the body as a topos of different deformations and usurpations.

Thesis


1. The aim of the new generation of video artists has been to investigate the
means by which a  subject and the body is produced and articulated in
electronic moving images. Especially, to investigate the ways of
visualization of  the 'so called' absent body, object or  history. To fulfil
this task many video artists developed alternatives to the dominant forms
of (post-)Communist visual strategies, by utilising different methods of
misrepresentation. The term -misrepresentation  derived from feminist
film practice and theory is, according to Griselda Pollock2, unlike some
expectant models of identification with a positive narrative or a heroic
character.   'Misrepresentation' seldom provides an anticipated pleasure of
identification. Instead, the aim of misrepresentation , according to Jo
Anna Issak,  is to  effect the "ruin of representation"3  precisely on the
grounds of what has been excluded, of the non-represented object.

This creates a significance out of absence, and in this
way investigates the means by which a subject and the body is produced.
Corporate systems of representation, however, are subject to radical
break-down or deconstruction.  This allows for new discursive practices,
which are able to function in-between forms of high culture and mass
culture.  Such counter narratives  are  resistant to the point that they
could no longer be  included within a philosophically, binary opposition,
but which however inhabit philosophical oppositions resisting and
disorganizing it without ever constituting a third therm (Jacques Derrida).
The achievement is thus the decentralization of
the subject to the point where instead of outside or inside there exists a
powerfully dynamic relation to both outside and inside, dependence and
independence, art and nature and, finally, to what is real and what is not.

On the other side when misrepresentation forms a fictitious  path,
(semantical and semiotic al opposite coinages) the video medium allows for a
mode of display and analysis of the manipulation and the duplication of
history  itself, as practised  by the Communist authorities.

2. The body is an artifact cobbled from other artifacts rather than from a
profound experience of life. In contrast to the mass media produced idea
that the body connected with new media achieves a natural totality,
processes of
post-Socialist visualization of the subject and of his/her body  in the
media underline this artificial, mediatized, constructed and  non-natural
human body and his/her thoughts and emotions.

The place where many of these video works were made is also a negative one.
It was not the place clearly visible in the structure of the social
system, it was the bedroom or bathroom of a private apartment.

Bodies that featured in the video works of East Europe are not only
mapped as  territories, not only producing a kind of intersection of outer
and inner space, nor our visibility and invisibility, but these bodies were
reconstructed and re-invented again and again in the video medium. From
them we tried to squeeze out monumental effects - to make them modern
relics, sexual fetishes, encrusted and filled with  substances such as
oil, blood and blue vitriol.  As metaphorical territories these bodies
condensed history and a strategy of suspense in that we wonder to which
history the faces belong to and to whom  these bodies were delivered. The
bodies were/are  chains of eternal replacement of  meaning in the same way
that history is itself articulated by partially readable faces and bodies!

3. At the end of the millennium the body has found itself in the chaos of
fear, pain and wars, being attacked and decentered. Above all it is a
fleeting physical-material fact. A credit-card sized processor has taken
our body materiality. By a single key we can plug into any high-tech
appliance. So our dreams of going somewhere far away, of escaping the
dimensions of ourselves as nothingness are realized here by reversals of
the body in time and space, and space in time. And you can see how a
tremendous impact can be achieved by technically reverting the linearity of
time. - Sometimes a backward move by the simplest video switch is the most
adequate measurement of our feelings and thoughts.

'Everything, everywhere, everybody' is the nineties slogan that results in
a confusion of bodies, concepts and strategies,  a type of out of joint
situation for the subject.  We find ourselves within all  medias, in all
bodies, in all  possible spaces at once. This puts into question some
fundamental arguments concerning art and culture. Operating in the new
mode, the positions of identity are also showing us other internal media
and social processes. We are faced with leaving  a historically defined
position, which imitates the natural world of our senses.  With new media
and technology we have the possibility of an artificial interface, which is
dominated by  non-identity or difference (Peter Weibel).  Instead of
producing a new identity, something more radical is produced: the total
loss of  identity. The subject is forced to assume that he or she is not
what he thought himself to be, but somebody-something else.




1 Cf. M. Grzinic text in the book of the ARTINTACT 4 CD-Rom edition series
by the ZKM,
Karlsruhe; see also the CD-Rom project by Grzinic and Smid TROUBLES WITH
SEX, THEORY AND
HISTORY in ARTINTACT 4 CD-Rom edition series by the ZKM 1997.

2 Cf. Griselda Pollock, 'Feminist Film Practice and Pleasure* A
Discussion', in 'Formations of Pleasure', London 1983, pp. 157.

3 Cf. Jo Anna Isaak, 'Women: The Ruin of Representation', in 'Afterimage',
April 1985, p. 6.