Gender matters to Capital1
Yvonne Volkart on Ursula Biemann
‘I would like to share my future with a man who would understand me completely and help me in my life and my work.’
These hopeful words, placed by a Russian woman on a marriage agency’s website, end the twenty minute video Writing Desire, 2000 by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann.
A woman’s body presents itself to our gaze: blonde, slim, split evening dress and long legs. Her movements are abrupt and awkward because the QuickTime movie underlying this video recording is unable to translate its erotic gliding quality. Writing Desire is the attempt to trace the multiplicity of desire in the computer age. The first strand of the video explores theoretical reflections formulated by privileged culture-producers, like Biemann herself, about the genuine excerpts of erotic e-mail. Although this e-mail correspondence suggests a high degree of sublimation and reflection, there is a sense, as in the case of the Russian woman, that it is about romantic fantasies of unity and intimacy, even when motivation and articulation are so clearly irreconcilable. The voices of intellectual gender-theoreticians are overlaid – such as Rosi Braidotti who talks about the meaning of writing, desire and disembodiment. A second strand takes issue with the globalised bride market. We see the digital images or QuickTime movies of women from Thailand, the Philippines and Eastern Europe offered by agencies, such as china.doll or tigerlilies.com on the Internet. These women can get to know their future husband beforehand via e-mail and their dialogue follows a uniform pattern.
Biemann also shows that, in spite of the particular (intellectual, erotic, economic and subjective) interests characterising the North-South divide, the domain of computer and Internet harbours a media-produced mutuality which is constitutive of desire in the globalised world. Thus it is implicitly understood that a certain degree of education and Internet access is necessary in order to express wishes and fantasies electronically. A further mutuality exists in the complete de-contextualisation of the participants and the absorption into unrealistic dreams. These fantasies are heightened through the swiftness of transmission and the pseudo-proximity of the glaring screen with lead to a corresponding engagement with an undreamed-of intensity. ‘Suspended realities that simulate a permanent state of being in love. A fantasy forever unfulfilled in its enactments. A sense of always approaching but never reaching’ says the female voice off-camera. Accompanying this we see a desirable and desiring woman dressed in a black bra at the computer, typing. This is the artist herself who, unlike the Russian woman, does not need to make herself more attractive to marry but can lose herself in the script’s erotics and in the intimacy and physicality of this pleasure-orientated writing scenario.
Change and frontier crossing are inherent to new technologies, they write the body and its desire anew, but the commercialisation of the female body as a moveable, trans-national commodity has a history: the step from thick catalogues to ostensibly personal e-mail communication is merely gradual. The occupation of a country and its bodies is being perfected by means of cyberspace; and the images of sandy beaches with palm trees (which we also see in the video), are now even bluer, even more intense. Biemann considers these intensifications– the hopes and deceptions produced by the union of new technologies and global capitalism – implacably side by side. At the beginning of Writing Desire we hear an elderly feminist academic from Mexico speak about how she found a fantastic man, a US Marine Corps lieutenant, via the Internet. She says that she could hardly believe that she was able to fall in love with someone like that. But as she did not know who he was in ‘real life’, proximity was possible. This maxim offers more than just praise of romantic love. It rather shows that, with the aid of new technology, everything is becoming interconnected, that bodies and genders are becoming codes and that what happens in cyberspace has real consequences. These codes are against the dominant definitions, not immaterial but, on the contrary, highly fleshy and physical. We see the digitised photographs of the happy family; pure information streams in interchangeable (desire) economies.
These questions have already been raised in Biemann’s first video Performing the Border, 1999, about Mexico’s border with the US, and are now being further developed in her new video, on the trafficking of women, which is still in progress. One could read: what does the current cyborgisation of being a human – and respectively being a woman – mean for women? What kind of relationship is in force between trans-national capitalism and women’s work, especially sex work?
Seeing her newest video about the trafficking of women from developing countries, you reach the subtle conclusion that the trade in women has not only increased but has also become a significant factor of global capitalism. This video, like the two preceding it, is mainly based on interviews with women who are seen speaking in close-up. In this case we listen primarily to NGO women talking authoritatively about the historical and economic connections between trans-nationalism, colonialism and trafficking. Interspersed among the clips of women we see home-made or found material of brothels and clubs, US military bases, slums in Manila and streetwalkers in Mexico. As in Performing the Border and, as I see it, Writing Desire, we hear of touching stories, but always textualised, reflexively broken or mediated (for example a perfect American accent is overlaid with the image of a Filipino woman speaking).
Although Biemann deals with terrible and, in the latest video seemingly clichéd themes, she does not construct stereotypical images of victims. For her it is rather a matter of creating a theoretical distance, and of seeing immediate themes – such as the trade in women or women working in Mexico’s Maquiladoras – as symptoms of a new capitalisation , in which gender plays not only a constitutional role but also has identity-changing effects. She stages this through a highly reflexive, sympathetic documentary, theoretically speculative and artificial aesthetic. This seems, on the one hand, to relate to a politically engaged ‘Docuaesthetic’ but, on the other hand, she is not afraid of ‘beautiful’, monumentalising, sometimes almost epic, images. For example, with an easy listening soundtrack we see girls of breathtaking beauty racing on Vespas through the streets of Chiang Mai (North Thailand). We can enjoy this perspective as the camera dwells on it, we can delight in these ‘icons’ of Asian beauty and freedom. Or, instead, we can criticise this representation, as a female artist does in the next shot. With this integration of critique Biemann does not destroy her representation, but opens it for discussion. She uses this as a vehicle to expound the question of how to produce ‘different’ images, which possibly do not exist yet and therefore can only emerge through re-coding. Yet, in order to be able to re-decode and subvert and not just simply to affirm the existing, she supplies a broad range of information and ‘enlightenment’ material. Through her hybrid strategy of ‘mimetic traversing’ (Luce Irigaray), Biemann shows how the economisation, culturalisation and sexualization of ‘exotic’ women affects everybody: her camera gaze also is gendered and racialised. An offensive approach could also thereby lead to an emptying and remodelling of codes.
Biemann’s last three videos have to be understood as articulation of an artistic aesthetic which tries to unite theory and engagement. Her approach is a way of performing theory in the field of art and to extend it via video. This cannot always succeed without speculation, yet it is, today when the aesthetical and the political need to be thought out anew, a fruitful and still largely untravelled way.
1. This sentence appears as a caption in Ursula Biemann’s video Performing the Border and emphasises the sexist tendencies of multinational companies in the global South.
Yvonne Volkart is currently writing a PhD about gender, new media, and fantasies of the posthuman. Please note her newly published book Ursula Biemann: Been there and back to nowhere. Gender in transnational spaces. Postproduction documents, 1988-2000. (Berlin, 2000). Order: http://beenthere.bbooksz.de
Translated by Tatjana Gretschmann
This text has been written for make. The magazine of women's art, London, March-May 2001.