Vexing videos
by Øystein Ustvedt
Jannicke Låker’s roots derive from the dynamic art scene of the 1990s characterised by openness towards and interest in alternative ways of producing art than conventional means, i.e. painting, sculpturing, drawing and engraving. Among other things, the sweeping video trend that advanced with the decade exerted a strong pull on young Norwegian artists. From working within a relatively marginal and sheltered environment where film, electronics, experimental video and art met, artists became increasingly enthusiastic. One explanation for this turn of events may lie in the mounting opposition to formalistic tendencies and traditional hierarchies – which gave pride of place to painting in particular. That said, the video medium itself had undergone a radical process of democratisation, making it far more practical and accessible. Now artists had been using video since classic Sixties’ neo-avant garde figures like Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Vito Acconci and Bruce Naumann gallivanted around, Sony Portable in tow, shooting their own performative selves in odd situations. But it was not until the early 1990s that the cameras became really affordable, maintained reasonable quality and were easy to handle. At which point the video medium entered the sphere of popular culture, becoming itself part of consumer society and everyday life. Over the course of the past ten– fifteen years, the medium has lost much of its technological complexity and with it the aura of exoticism that tends to accompany the new, expensive and difficult to use. Today, the required level of technological know-how that once used to shield the medium from the intrusion of all but the most nerdish and specialised, is no longer a barrier. The video camera can be used by practically anybody who has something to film or a story to tell. For contemporary artists, video is an handy tool for visual work, in line with the photo camera, clay, brush and palette. And it has exerted a particularly strong pull on a generation that grew up in an ever present and invasive TV and video-mediated reality.
Low tech Låker’s debut at the One Night Stand show at Kunstnernes Hus (The Artists’ House) in 1995 is symptomatic of her preoccupation with video, sexuality, gender and performative strategies. With the House brim full of more or less location-specific, processual art, the project was one of the alternative art scene’s briefest, but most energetic manifestations. Trained at the Trondheim Academy, Låker belonged to the first cohort of Norwegian artists for which the study video and advanced technology was offered as a viable part of their curriculum. This type of education was not available to the preceding generation of pioneers which included artists like Marianne Heske, Kjell Bjørgeengen, Morten Børresen and Ann-Lise P. Hyndøy. To a larger extent they learned their trade in specialised environments and video centres abroad. The Academy of Art at Trondheim was the first school to develop courses featuring an intermedial element, and under the leadership of Jeremy Welsh from the UK, emphasis in the Nineties was on video and new technologies. This forms the starting point for Låker’s work, but unlike Welsh’s aesthetically meticulous and technologically advanced works with their stress on the medium’s own tools and fluctuating messages, she deals with its more trivial, bad or everyday side. What she does have in common with Trondheim Academy artists like Tommy Olsson, Per Teljer and the group connected to Sunny Hearts videos is in her rejection of the high-tech approach that characterised a major part of the video art being produced at the time. She works instead from the mass media and popular culture end of the video scale, a strategy which seems to divest the medium of any particular claim on exclusiveness, connecting it rather to the level of the familiar and ordinary. Further evidence for Låker’s priorities can be found in Copenhagen, in the Nineties an immensely active centre of video art in Scandinavia. The Copenhagen Academy’s Mediaskole was renowned for its emphasis on media and technology-based art and on those aspects of film and video connected with visual art. The mounting interest in video among the younger artists found confirmation in the series of exhibitions arranged by the Danish national art museum – Statens Museum for Kunst – called Elektroniske understrømme (Electronic Undercurrents – 1996) and more ad-hoc-like video projects such as TimeSlice. For Time Slice, twenty-odd younger artists were invited to produce a three-minute video in the space of six days. A large number of the works presented at this exhibition (by among others Simone Aaberg Kærn, Annika Ström and Gitte Willesen) share with Låker’s later works an expressive clarity, conceptual control and a technologically uncomplicated production apparatus.
Låker’s combination of video, bodily action and theatre harks back to the pioneers of video art and to the body, happening and performance art of the 1960s and 70s. Video entered the art domain mainly thanks to its use as a means to record processual, transient projects. While Låker’s work may resemble those documentaries of happenings that took place over a limited time span and in a specific place, their objective is not the same. The stories she tells seem relatively straightforward and down-to-earth: they are realistic dramatisations or pre-arranged stunts for a filming, active camera. The artwork is the edited video, though, not the record of something that actually ‘happened’. From this angle, we could say that Låker is one of a younger generation drawn to approaches and strategies that echoed the avant garde generation’s institutional critique, but in a refashioned form to fit their own needs and fantasies. To the extent we can speak of a “creative mis-reading”, it is a mis-reading that is both strategic and deliberate. Låker has a background in film and theatre as well. She works with plot and script, setting out beforehand the structure of the unfolding story. She leaves herself, however, wide scope for improvisation, confrontation and spur-of-the-moment interventions.
Flat lighting, hand-held camera, inconsistent depth definition, amateur actors, selfdramatisation and varying picture quality. Låker’s language is part of a wider, anti-aesthetic field, where home movies, amateurism and role playing are key elements. Considered in relation to the preceding video generation’s preoccupation with the medium’s visual effects, technological possibilities and high tech finish, they indicate a different approach to the medium. The superficial impression of carelessness may be evocative of TV and trash, but its sensibility and approach as an artwork no longer centres on the medium itself, nor on transcending or criticising the constraints and conditions under which art institutions operate. It has more to do with a light, direct and no-nonsense way of communicating ideas, thoughts and attitudes. We find a related language in the documentary and performative strategies of artists like for instance Pipilotte Rist, Cheryl Donegan, Sadie Benning, Phyllis Baldino, Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin, Alison Murray, Gitte Willesen, Lotte Konow Lund and Elisabeth Mathisen, all contemporaries of Låker. The list suggests the area is dominated by female artists, and moreover in opposition to the more high tech orientation prevalent among many of the period’s male artists like Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Doug Aitken and others. The Museum of Modern Art addressed this topic as early as in 1997 when it mounted the exhibition Young and Restless. The exhibition focused eighteen female artists who used low tech and uncomplicated and jumpy filming technique (Cheryl Donegan, Kristin Lucas, Alix Pearlstein among others). On the other hand, the work of artists like Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Peter Land, Knut Åsdam, Tommy Olsson and Per Teljer contradict the notion of a gender-based tendency. It has more to do with the artists’ concern with the cultural enactment of physical expression, gender and gendered thinking. Such manifestations and conceptualisations are particularly evident in popular culture’s TV- filtered representations of reality. In this perspective Låker’s preoccupation with gender, the enactment of power and interpersonal manipulation merges seamlessly with the utilization of the trivial, mass cultural aspects of video practice. An additional point is that the low tech generation and its inexpensive gear, flexibility and direct idiom played a major part in bridging the gap between video as art and the art institution.
Unedited stunts The link to video pioneers like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, William Wegman and Joan Jonas is even more apparent in a series of unedited works: Spider Woman, From Between my legs and Spiderman (1998). They are uncomplicated, short videos with a rawer and more informal quality than their predecessors. Made from a single, uncut and unedited shot, they reflect an apparently scatterbrained and daft interaction with the camera, gender and physical acting out. A common feature is the juxtapositioning of camera and gender. In the first of these videos, Låker has mounted the camera on her stomach, thus framing the scene by pubic hairs and two naked legs which crawl frantically, like a giant spider. The insect association is probably not accidental. The crawling fleshiness of the séance manifests the frenetic and consuming power of desire, like the spider’s creepy mating ritual. There is an air of something solicitous, uncontrolled and an overwhelmingly feminine desire and sexuality in the display. This ambiance is pursued further in From Between my Legs where Låker again plays with the camera from the perspective of female sexuality. Standing on her feet this time, the action ends with the man literally in mortal danger of being devoured by the woman’s aggressive, persistent sexualised dramatisation. In a quite direct and polemical manner, Låker reverses the conventional gender codes common to the movie narrative. In his classic text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), theorist Laura Mulvey shows convincingly how the patriarchal society unconsciously provided the conditions for film plots, and how the male gaze has acted as a structuring principle underlying the representation of women. Scopophilia plays a key role in this, too, i.e. the pleasure of seeing others as erotic objects. This type of voyeurism is connected with unconscious fantasies of power and control, and Mulvey shows how established movie structures derive from the notion of men as possessors of the gaze and women as its passive objects. By extension, the camera acts as a phallic instrument of control and supremacy. The concept of ‘shooting’ a film carries, as is well known, connotations of male desire to penetrate the female. A number of female artists like Cindy Sherman have addressed and criticised this by dramatising or theatricalising themselves and the female body as the object of a male-structured gaze. Låker adopts an alternative approach, demonstratively reversing the relationship. Camera in hand, power now rests with the woman as she enacts a dominating, phallic, man-eating character. Spiderman ends the trilogy from the point of view of the male genitals. The quintessential symbol of phallic power and patriarchal domination is unmasked and exposed as a relatively flaccid and reluctant mate. Accompanying this demonstration of female power comes the threat of castration, impotence and paralysis! While the female phallus does not penetrate, it threatens to devour and envelope the object of its desire in an oceanic, endless embrace.
The viewer The triviality and baseness of these works is emphasised by showing them on TV screens. Instead of inspiring a state of devout contemplation, they cause a disconcerting sense of mortification. Possibly because of an intrusive physical enactment or because we as viewers are given a concurrent, answerable role to play. In some of the works, the perspective of the camera merges with that of one of the plot’s characters and our gaze becomes a governing factor in his or her playacting. In others, we get to play the interviewer or interviewee or we’re enrolled as voyeurs. There is a particularly unpleasant sensation about being drawn into intimate, private and sensational situations. Inasmuch as Låker displays a specially intense preoccupation with the vulgar, tasteless and embarrassing, we find ourselves confronting a situation we really would have preferred to avoid. When, for instance, the self-assured, cigarsmoking businessman in Beautiful People no. 1 sits and begins to mouth off about Arabian women, there is more to the story than an exposé of white people’s self-righteous prejudices and thinly veiled racism, it deals with what happens when a lively imagination spins out of control. The work plays on how a lively imagination suddenly can lay bare the human mind. It feels disarming, seeing people revealing themselves in this fashion.
In other works, Låker addresses us directly, demanding our presence while simultaneously giving a role of a fictive fantasy figure to play. An inquiry is directed at us, and although it’s all make-believe, there is nothing unbelievable or unstable about the level of reality involved. Is it just dramatised nonsense, or is it about real reactions? At one point or another, things seem to escape control in a way that undermines the very basis of the whole enterprise. A staged, constructed situation is overtaken by real feelings and real situations. Often, the plot is powered by aggressive, personal manipulation, which may descend into regular bullying and stigmatisation. When Låker’s works entertain and draw a smile, they do so in a pretty nasty, exploitative and malicious way. Like Beautiful People 1, the work is concerned with abuse or ridicule of others. The sense of aversion is magnified as the perspective of the viewer merges with that of the bully, the person authorised to control the situation. The works can seem offensive and repulsive, but they also have a self-confessional or self-revealing effect. And as with bullying and social stigmatisation in general, the compromising act has a boomerang effect. Attention returns to the bully or the instigator of the process. Sitting Duck (1997) is based on a personal interview Låker made with a young woman who is persuaded to talk about her love life. It’s not much of a life to be frank. With a flower in her hair and nervous appearance, she is made to look stupid, boring and, above all, easy prey. And the whole thing is directed with evident compassionless glee on the part of the interviewer. From her elevated, hidden position behind the camera, Låker sits exercising full control over the situation. The relationship’s balance of power is dramatised and caricatured. Låker brings into focus and derides the director’s or interviewer’s position of power and role. At the end of the day it is the interviewer who is exposed. As she forms a reality to suit her own purposes and in her own image, her character expands in parallel. In many of her works Låker gives herself the aggressive, dominating and authoritative role behind the camera. First she wins somebody over and gains their confidence, for example, only in the next second to poke fun of the person’s guilelessness or lack of sophistication by playing with them in a manipulative set-up where the viewer also becomes a victim of the medium’s seductive effects. But it’s not only the subject in front of the camera that’s laid bare, both the director behind and the viewer in front are targets for scorn and ridicule.
Gender, power and manipulation The gender–power issue is one of Låker’s leading concerns, and it is often expressed through the relationship of an active, female director to a passive, male role. In No 17 (1998) Låker invites an American male tourist she has picked up on the street (picked at random?) back home with her. The situation is characterised by a flirtatious, slightly insolent game of seduction with Låker making the moves from behind the camera. The man is asked in and given a bite to eat as she subjects him to a torrent of seductive compliments. He’s encouraged to strip to the waist, to dance, to show off his muscles etc. Låker’s requests become ever more urgent, and as they do so the man clearly becomes ever more embarrassed. When he finally puts his foot down she unceremoniously throws him out. Låker plays here the role of selfconfident bad girl, and with her strategic reversal of conventional gender roles, she shows them up and caricatures them, at the same time as the blatant demonstration of power causes us to sympathise with the stunned and humiliated male character.
In 9½ (1999–2000) we play the role of substitute or absent lover, an out-of-reach fictional character. Låker makes the most of her performance talent here, as she with disarming humour caricatures the emotions and actions of the betrayed wife. The camera substitutes for the absent husband, and whether he’s left her completely or just happens to be away is immaterial. Something has occurred, and although veiled racism breaks through, it is primarily the jealousy and the woman’s boundless emotional reactions that are elaborated, emotional reactions that discredit and denigrate their owner. The video opens on a sun drenched summer’s day, on a close-up of Låker confessing her innermost, overpowering love. I love you, darling, I love you. In the next scene we’re at home, sitting round a dining table already laid for an intimate dinner for two. The wine is ready and candles lit, and Chet Baker plays softly in the background. Opposite us a well-dressed Låker sits chatting about how enjoyable it’s going to be, and about how vital our relationship is. Again, the viewer’s perspective merges with the camera’s and the thoughts about somebody else. Soon, suspicion mounts and develops into jealous recriminations seasoned with racism. The whole thing ends in a carnival-like demonstration where Låker prances around half undressed, besmeared and made up as a primitive negro: This is what you wanted isn’t it? It’s what you want, uh? With Dionysian force, the work gives expression to Låker’s main concerns: gender, power and manipulation. Where an artist like Paul McCarty addresses the phallic status of the male and his use of power by drawing on his repressed, infantile and discredited sides, in Låker’s work the culprit is the woman. She has the power and is ready to use every ounce of it. The powerhungry, assertive female character turns up again with repulsive force in Home X Rated which caricatures the commercial porn movie by applying deliberately poor filming techniques and a lack of actual physical action. With no space for creative ideas emanating from the other character, the woman lords it over the man, commanding him to assume this position or make that gesture. Anti-aestheticism is taken to its extreme. Naturally, the video lacks the seductive lighting, the glamorous skins and fictional deception of the porn movie. But again, there is something intimate and reactive about the séance, as if we are being shown what is really a private sex game with video filming and role play as tantalising props. The whole thing is pretty smutty, and in the middle she even breaks off the shooting, clearly disenchanted with the miserable performance of the male character. It doesn’t take much to realise that seeing a work of this nature in the context of recent years’ neo-feminist revivification, driven by the ‘backlash’ debate (as contended by Susan Faludi among others) and phenomena like Fittstim (1999), Råtekst and Matriark. A new generation has put the critique of society’s gendered power structure and the struggle for equality back onto the agenda. Although they ironise over and berate conventional gender roles and positions of power, Låker’s works can not be understood simply within a context of patriarchal transgression and abuse of power. The most captivating and interesting aspect is rather that she seems to develop. In Låker’s work, the power is possessed and implemented by the woman. What happens when she becomes a phallic figure?
In Sketch for a Violent Scene (2003), Låker makes strategically more of the director’s role, a position which has generally been appropriated by men, fashioned by male priorities, and is synonymous with power and its use. This time, the plot is about a rape. We are in the middle of a film under production, the location is a small flat which is being redecorated. A young woman assures her mother over the telephone that everything’s OK. She’s left home and the following scenes relate what all mothers fear may happen to their daughters in similar circumstances. The scene is amateurish, banal and trivial. Amplified by the flat lighting, and the uninspired acting, Låker, the film’s director, tries to instil some life and authenticity into the cliché-ridden attack scene. Låker both is and plays the role of director, the person who makes the decisions and exercises control. This is dramatised by her insistence on a more empathic and authentic expression of aggression by the male character. His flaccid inertia robs the scene of its force, but then something snaps, and the whole enterprise threatens to veer out of control. Don’t you dare look at my camera! Don’t you dare look at me! Don’t you dare look at her! As the culprit, the male actor is himself a victim of the director’s emotional manipulation and abuse. The work ironises over the dominance and aesthetisisation of sex and violence in the mainstream movie industry. Again, the central elements are its anti-aesthetic stance and its reversal of conventional power roles. The work can be understood as a contemptuous critique of the conceptualisation in popular culture of the struggle for equality. At a deeper level, it seems, however, as if a femme fatale is on the loose in Låker’s work. The male figure seems threatened by the power hungry female character. In his eyes, Låker’s women are demonic, challenging but possibly also fatal. They control every move: dominating, obsessive and sexually perilous. If Freud was correct in positing a male castration anxiety, these works give it a run for its money if anything can. In the myth of Medusa, all men are turned into stone if they look at her and her snaky hairdo in the face. In Låker’s videos, the male is passive, anaemic, unable to fight, protest or act. He is paralysed when confronted by such a vagina dentata, and may resort to violence and extremities to regain the upper hand. Mythology depicts this dangerous female in versions and guides: there is the Gorgon, the Furies and, not least, the Sirens who tempt seafarers ashore only to destroy them, for instance. As Camille Paglia has pointed out in her discussion of these sexual archetypes in Western history that feminism has tended to disregard this ancient, dangerous female avatar. Feminism has seen the femme fatale as a stereotype and cliché created by the patriarchal social norms and rules. And if she had ever existed, she was a victim, too, a figure who because she lacked the power and prestige of the system, assumed a destructive femininity to protect herself. Låker’s work clearly possesses an aggressive, feminine expressiveness, but her women are not victims. The repeated though varied appearance of the femme fatale in her works may be emblematic of the return of the repressed. Femme Fatale contains many of the challenging, dangerous and threatening aspects of the woman rejected or suppressed by feminism.
Vexing videos (eng) by Øystein Ustvedt