"How to squeeze the body
and fill it with oil and blue vitroil?"
- the body in the
East European video art
Marina Grzinic, Ljubljana 1995
If we consider video as the newest medium in the once so called Eastern European artistic, social and political context we have to say that video is not simply the eye of inspection, but also the eye of history. Through the density of instruments, and strategies of visualization and narration, video art constituted an autonomous paradigm within the East European (socialist or communist) context, a paradigm which can be defined and understood also as a new economy of sight. An economy which was incessantly speaking through bodies, (false) movements, gestures about our myths, our lives, our lies, our countries, our racism, our lost territories, and last but not least about our lost bodies.
Bodies that featured in the video works in East Europe especially within my own video productions, were ot only mapped as territories, producing a kind of intersection of outer and inner space, of our visibility and invisibility but these bodies were reconstructed and reinvented again and again in the video medium. From them we tried to squeeze out monumental effects - to make them modern relics, sexual fetishes, in-crusted and filled with substances such as oil, blood, blue vitriol. As metaphorical territories, bodies condensed history (in that we wonder to which history their faces belong) and a strategy of suspense (to whom are these bodies deli-vered). The bodies were a chain of eternal replacement of meaning in the same way that history is itself articulated by partially readable faces and bodies!