Owing to overwhelming public demand, Taipei's Museum of Contemporary Art has extended Hello! Masters! -- the video art retrospective originally due to end last month -- indefinitely.
Among the feedback from viewers is the question: Why is there only one female artists [Steina Vasulka] in the series?
That's why this time around, MOCA organized Through Women's Eyes, (
"To let people know that female artists have made no less significant a contribution to the history of the art form, we decided that the follow-up to Hello! Masters! would have an all-female cast," said Liu Mei-lin (劉美玲), curator of the exhibition.
The four works, made from a female perspective, were to illustrate developments in the young art form.
The oldest work of the show is Semiotics of the Kitchen, multimedia artist and critic Martha Rosler's most celebrated work. The black-and-white performance-based video was made in 1976, a time when a large number of performance artists made use of the then novel medium to record their performances.
In Rosler's mock cooking demonstration, the deadpan artist picks up each of the various kitchen utensils in alphabetical order, announces its name and shows how to use it -- ?in ways other than how it's usually used. Referring to the celebrated chef in an Amrican TV food show, Rosler once explained her work: "An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated `meaning' of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration."
Mary Lucier's Ohio to Giverny: Memory of Light (1983) is an homage to Claude Monet showing alternating scenes of Ohio, the artist's birthplace, and Giverny, where the French impressionist made most of his later paintings.
What: Through women's eyes -- video art by Women Artists
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 39 Changan W. Rd., Taipei
When: Until May 19
The shots are made to resemble Monet's paintings. Moving the camera and adjusting its aperture to imitate the impressionist effect, Lucier proves that video can create something almost identical to painted images.
Pipilotti Rist's I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much, shown in a TV set hanging from the celling, is in the veins of TV sculpture, a concept put forward by Num June Paik, the first artist to take on the medium in the 1960s. Using static signals to interfere with the images of herself singing and dancing in an empty space, the Swiss artist integratd the TV set and what goes on its screen into the whole installation piece.
Made in 1986, when MTV flourished and easily accessible music videos were made for the audience's ever-shortening attention span, the work has all the appeal of popular music videos, while being an investigation into the stereotyping of women in the popular media.
The title plays on "She's not a girl who misses much," a line out of the Beatles' Happiness is a Warm Gun, written by John Lennon. Inspired by his lover, Japanese artist Yoko Ono, Lennon wrote the line to describe a really smart girl. By adopting the line and changing it from third-person to first-person, Rist shows how female artists see female images -- ?or her own image, as in this video -- as opposed to how male artists would present them.
Similarly, Kristin Lucas shows up in person in Testing_Results, a video diary about her stay in Tokyo in 1999. The generation X New Yorker documented in fragmented images what she saw in this country.
In this dazzling collage of American and Japanese cultures is a shot of a gremlin, the fantasy monster of American director Steven Spielberg's creation, blinking and mumbling against a TV screen of ever-switching Japanese channels, an expression of her sense of alienation in this foreign country.
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