Body, sign and double: a parallel analysis of Elain Shemilt's "Doppelganger", Federica Marangoni's "The box of life", and Sanja Ivekovic's "Instructions no.1" and "Make up - make down".

Abstract

Body; identity; self-representation; sexuality; stereotypical images of women as portrayed by the society and the media; the condition of female professional artists: these themes were expressed and developed in several early video works in the 1970s and early 1980s, by women artists that had neither direct knowledge of nor contact between each other. The simultaneous appearance of such themes in their work is therefore an unusual phenomenon, which reveals common, contemporary sensibilities within both Europe and the USA. Early experimentation with video by many women artists in Europe and the USA have been marginalized for years, and most of the artworks have been lost or fallen into oblivion. Only recently have a few of them been shown at exhibitions and re-evaluated in publications. However, the contribution of women artists to video has not yet been fully recovered and reassessed. Several themes and topics shared by early women artists' video pieces have not yet been analyzed and contextualized in the wider European scene. This chapter explores some of these recurrent themes using specific examples of work by three different artists