“Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video”

When Sony introduced the CV-2400 Video Rover, commonly know as the Portapak, as the first relatively cheap, easy-to-use video camera in 1967, female artists were among the first to embrace the nascent technology. The democratic, DIY nature of the system—anyone could use it—encouraged them to challenge conventional representations of women by turning the camera on themselves. As both subject and maker, such early video artists as Joan Jonas, Valie Export and Carolee Schneemann were able to explore the complexities of female subjectivity through personal narrative and the pioneering use of their bodies. These explorations, many believe, helped to launch the feminist revolution—or so “herstory” would have it.

Wherever one stands in the old-school-versus-new-school debate over who defines feminism, artists of the Second Wave (1960s–80s) certainly have a better claim than those of the Third Wave (1990s–present). Which is what makes the exhibition “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video,” organized by Lauren Ross at the Brooklyn Museum, so refreshing. The interim curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art smartly avoids the matter of legacy and influence. Outside a month-long screening of early key works (Martha Rosler’s iconic Semiotics of the Kitchen from 1975 and Susan Mogul’s rarely seen Dressing Up from 1973, among them), references to the past are deliberately loose and suggestive.

“Reflections on the Electric Mirror” aims to be youthful and hip. It features the work of nine emerging women artists, all born during the Second Wave, four of whom work as collaborative duos: Cathy Begien, Jen DeNike, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Kate Gilmore, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy, Klara Liden and Shannon Plumb. There’s even a rock star among the group (Greenwood of Tracy and the Plastics). All but one (Harry Dodge) appear before a stationary camera, aping the intimate immediacy of Second Wave video as well as its primitive aesthetic. A lo-fi, cozy atmosphere results, conveyed in everything from the short length of the works to the small, tented spaces we view them in (made out of soundproof blankets).

There are three subthemes Ross identifies in the work: the repetition of self-imposed tasks; the idea of acting out; and a parody of mass-media culture and formats—all definite echoes of the 1970s, as Kate Gilmore would likely agree. Her Blood from a Stone, made specifically for the exhibition, has the artist heaving 75-pound blocks of mortar from the floor to shelves on the wall. Remnants of the action remain, as do the blocks. Dressed inexplicably in high heels, which the accompanying video captures only through sound, Gilmore’s pointless exercise evokes the masochistic works of Gina Pane and Chris Burden, while also appearing to mock them.

Made between 2002 and 2009, most of the works are short, plotless vignettes. Klara Liden’s cathartic scenes of violent action depict the artist dancing frenetically on a Stockholm subway train (Paralyzed, from 2003), and beating a bicycle with a lead pipe (Bodies of Society, from 2006). Neither have any beginning or end, and both are fewer than five minutes long. Ross deliberately whittled the total viewing time here down to a manageable hour and a half—appealing, no doubt, to the limited attention span of contemporary audiences. And that’s a good thing. The longest work on view, Shannon Plumb’s slapstick series of fake ads for women’s products, Commercials (2002), runs just over 25 minutes, but her silent-film burlesque can still be watched in segments.

Some works are wistful in tone, like Jen DeNike’s Happy Endings (2006), a continuous loop of the artist in a bucolic setting holding up placards, one by one, that spell out the dismal phrase: THERE ARE NO HAPPY ENDINGS. Cathy Begien’s recollection of a drunken night, Black Out (2004), is also funny and sad. In it, she sits blindfolded on a chair, reenacting—with the help of friends—her unsuccessful attempts at hooking up with a girl. Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, the oldest in the bunch, present Whacker (2005), a weird, meandering piece in which Kahn, vamped up like Lana Turner, swivels a weed whacker back and forth across an empty lot.

Second Wavers might call this exhibition feminism lite, yet it goes a long way toward opening up the possibilities of feminist art. And if you’re looking for vaginas or odes to goddesses of the mythic past, there’s always Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party just down the hall.

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