Detalj av omslaget av Video Theories.

Boken är utgiven vid Bloomsbury förlag och samlar författare från olika forskningsfält. Antologin är ett steg mot att börja fylla tomrummet av studier om video som akademiskt forskningsområde.

Redaktörer är Dieter Daniels och Jan Thoben.

Kapitlet av Malin Hedlin Hayden är en förkortad, delvis omskriven, version av kapitlet ”Compulsive Categorizations: Gender and Heritage” i hennes bok Video art historicized: traditions and negotiations, från 2015.

Abstract på engelska

In this chapter video art history is discussed from a critical perspective addressing the narrative operations implicit in defining particular artists as “women artists”. That is, how and why some artists and their work circulate seemingly ungendered while other artists are repeatedly categorized hence interpreted as specifically gendered practices. The often blurred distinction between gender and/or biological sex and ideology is problematized.

In the process of video art becoming an art form, which included the creation of its history, there were several obstacles, not least hesitations toward art history and its adjacent, normative concepts. In the early period of artists employing video as a technique for the production of art, video was understood as a yet uncanonized medium. It was perceived as outside of societal and cultural structures, ideologies, and practices that would tie it to the downside of (art) history: history as limitations and regulations. One of the circulating ideas was that as an entirely new medium, a new artistic material, video was somehow untouched by patriarchal structures. (…)

Video art came into being as an art form in the mid-1960s—historically juxtaposed with the second wave of the women’s movements. Yet it wasn’t until the 2000s that feminism/feminist artists started appearing in the historical narratives. There is a strong tendency in historical surveys on video art to use feminism as a frame for understanding and historically, hence narratively, situating video works solely produced by women as a method for thematic, in this context sex-biased, categorizations which operate on many levels of meaning production as well as monetary evaluations.

Malin Hedlin Haydens forskning