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COPYRIGHT 2003 Duke University Press
>From 1972 to 1980, the New York Women's Video Festival was the primary showcase for work by American women videomakers. A landmark annual event founded by Steina Vasulka in 1972 to address the dearth of work by women in a video art show she had organized at the Kitchen Center for Video and Music in New York earlier that year, the festival was coordinated for the duration of its run by Susan Milano, who traveled with it to various national and international venues in Buffalo, San Francisco, Tampa, France, and Belgium. (1)
An expression of the burgeoning feminism of the 1970s and proof of the increasing availability and popularity of low-cost video technology, the festival is uniquely situated at the intersection of two histories, video's and feminism's, and yet it has received no critical attention from either, despite the fact that, as Milano has pointed out, "portable video and the women's movement sprang up together." (2) This essay seeks to remedy this troubling double absence, examining the festival's genesis, orientation, transformation, and reception in the mainstream and feminist presses during its years of existence, and thereby to assess its legacy for our present historical moment.
There could not be a better time to undertake this task, for the legacies of both video and feminism are literally at peril. Videotapes made thirty years ago are not only rapidly disintegrating but are also expensive to restore, and women born into the "postfeminist" generation, if not disturbingly complacent in their sense of privilege, may be drawn to feminist concepts but afraid to identify themselves publicly as feminists. How and why feminism became the "f-word" has therefore become a hot topic, (3) one inseparable from the very jettisoning of feminism from institutional memory that troubled first-generation feminist scholars like Linda Nochlin, Eunice Lipton, Lucy Lippard, and Rozsika Parker. (4) Whether such jettisoning has never abated or has been renewed with a vengeance is open to question, but a recent situation at Cal Arts offers an instructive example of an all-too-familiar problem. There, in 1998, according to two graduates of the Feminist Art Program, Mira Schor and Faith Wilding, the history of that program was physically purged from the school's memory when catalogs for the collaborative environment Womanhouse (1972) were thrown out because there was no place to store them! (5)
It is obviously imperative that we prevent such losses by archiving key documents and artifacts and writing the histories that still remain unwritten, but it is equally important that we reconfigure feminism's relationship to newer technologies in light of the lessons offered by its relationship to an older technology like video. In a global culture radically reconstructed by interactive telecommunications and the accompanying "consolidation of pancapitalist power," as Faith Wilding puts it, what can the history of women and video teach us? 6 That collective events like the New York Women's Video Festival help put work by women on the map but that recognition suffers erasure without appropriate historicization, and that feminist incursions are now needed into the latest patriarchal province--what Wilding describes as the masculinist culture of the Internet (26). A feminism that embraces the sense of possibility found in the utopian rhetoric of the 1970s without placing blind faith in the idea that new technology is inherently liberating will be a feminism sufficiently revitalized to imagine empowering individual and collective uses of communications technologies.
To highlight lessons like these, this essay on the New York Women's Video Festival offers a preliminary introduction to a fascinating cultural phenomenon. It utilizes representative examples of tapes and installations exhibited throughout the festival's eight years, a decision determined in part by practical considerations, as well as by a personal interest in the festival--when it began to explore the issue of how videotapes should be viewed, when the work it exhibited was most varied in content and form, and when its significance for video history therefore seems most urgent. (7) After a general overview of the shape and scope of the festival, this essay focuses most closely on aspects of the 1975 and 1976 festivals when, under the auspices of the Women's Interart Center on West Fifty-second Street, the organizers created three thematically distinct viewing environments for tapes, and the festival incorporated interactive video "toys" (1975) and included three very different video installations (1976).
Charting the history of the New York Women's Video Festival thus affords a rare opportunity to revisit the recent past and rediscover the sheer exhilaration of the second wave of American feminism, as well as the related thrill of reclaiming a technology once solely in the hands of a commercial industry--the major aspiration of videomakers during what Martha Rosler has called video's "utopian moment." (8) For those who were children or adolescents in the 1970s and therefore too young to understand the specific cultural and historical forces shaping attitudes and perceptions at that time, investigating the New York Women's Video Festival also provides a chance to delve into the political and aesthetic climate that forged both history and psyche, and to experience, as many women did en masse thirty years ago, the shock of recognition signaling genuine self-discovery. As Linda Nochlin astutely remarked about her own daily revelations while assembling the first course in feminist art history at Vassar in 1969, there is nothing "more interesting, more poignant, and more difficult to seize than the intersection of the self and history." (9)
For many women in the early 1970s, video served as a unique conduit to heightened self-awareness and often functioned as an extension of the consciousness-raising process. By sharing individual life experiences and analyzing them collectively, women discovered their own subjectivity in consciousness-raising groups following the procedure outlined at the First National Women's Liberation Conference in Chicago in 1968: personal testimony leads to theory and action. (10) Emphasizing just how life-changing this process could be, Faith Wilding noted recently that many women "experienced [them]selves as subjects for the first time in CR [consciousness raising]." (11) Video likewise allowed women to explore their subjectivity, and the feminist political documentary (concerned with biography, characterized by structural simplicity, and eager to establish trust between the filmmaker and her subject) proved an especially flexible genre through which to do this. Well-represented in each New York Women's Video Festival, this genre was, in Julia Lesage's phrase, "the artistic analogue of the structure and function of the CR group." (12)
Because the critique of domestic space so central to the women's art movement developed simultaneously with the discipline of feminist art and film history pioneered by Nochlin, Lesage, and others, and because this essay ultimately considers the spatial and temporal form of video installation, Nochlin's use of a spatial metaphor to describe her sense of increasing illumination while conducting her first feminist research is especially resonant. On the threshold of a decade that would change and be changed by American women forever, Nochlin had what she has described as a "conversion experience." (13) She felt as though she "kept opening doors onto an endless series of bright rooms, each one opening off from the next, each providing a new revelation, each moving one forward from a known space to a larger, lighter, unknown one." (14)
Like Nochlin, I, too, am charting the unknown; and, also like her, I must start from scratch and do the gritty "spadework" of art history (132). Here, that history is shared by video and feminism, but the goal for both is one of recovery, and the stakes for each are equally high. As the initial frustration of finding yet another domain of female accomplishment written out of history ,gives way to the twin joys of excavation and restoration, dust begins to settle, key issues emerge, and the con tours of the past become unusually clear. If it seems strange to invoke such "dated" language after three decades of sustained feminist research, remember that video has only recently received any historiographic attention at all.
Revisiting video's past means returning to a moment when video was solicited in many different directions by all kinds of artists, and group shows like the New York Women's Video Festival reveled in the diversity and hybridity of the works they presented (documentaries, experimental pieces, performances, and installations). In this moment, the low cost, instantaneous transmission, and sense of intimacy offered by the medium seemed to forecast a revolution in image-making; access was of paramount importance, and controlling the technology was, for women, tremendously empowering.
Revisiting feminism's past, especially as it inflected and informed an event like the New York Women's Video Festival, reveals new ways that women approached the critique of domesticity (often by targeting the place of television within the home), as well as the pressing concerns of women's health and reproductive rights, rape, lesbianism, temporary separatism, and the process of socialization. Returning to the feminism of the 1970s also reminds one of how hard it is to name what has never been named, how rewarding it is to find one's own voice, and how utterly transformative it can be to cultivate one's own subjectivity and refuse institutionalized objectification. For women working in film and video, this shift from object to subject had special significance. If you were "young, beautiful and photogenic," (15) you could always get a job in front of the camera, as Milano noted (and as we all know the film and television industries have historically relegated women to acting roles), but with the rise of portable video and independent film women finally moved into positions of power behind the camera.
If these victories seem obvious or old hat by contemporary feminist standards, it must not be forgotten that thirty years ago they were brand new and hard won. The New York Women's Video Festival forces us to remember. It offers the latest generation of feminists nothing short of a crash course in Feminism 101 (and the rest of us an invaluable refresher), letting us each touch base with the movement's roots in what is arguably its watershed year: 1972. That this was the first year of the festival is certainly no coincidence. The festival was part of escalating feminist and artistic activity throughout the country that reached a peak in this year.
But first, a few words on method. The New York Women's Video Festival was an ephemeral event; investigating it therefore means examining an absence, an occurrence neither physically present nor open to bodily experience. Few of the tapes shown at the festival exist now in playable formats, the viewing environments are no longer extant, and the installations have been deinstalled or lost in storage. All of these things, not to mention the festival's overall gestalt as a social phenomenon, must therefore be imagined with the aid of documentation. Because many former festival participants are still alive, that documentation is for the most part in their possession, and their places of residence are "living archives" filled with photographs, flyers, posters, invitations, reviews, notebooks, correspondence, and other related materials. (16) These materials help counteract the impermanence of ephemeral media, and artists working in such media (or coordinators of events like Susan Milano) often diligently save every scrap of paper associated with each work or event so as...
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