back
Monument to Yesterday
color video, 7 min. 46 sec.
2008
courtesy of Christine Koenig Gallery Vienna
Our culture is dominated by vision and has been proclaimed occulocentric. More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters, it sets and maintains a distance. One of the most disputed aspects of sight is projected in the phenomenon of striptease. It constructs an elusive object of male desire.
Monument to Yesterday is a recording of a striptease number performed by a middle-aged common woman. The viewer is invited to read what is presented - a perverse assemblage of an older woman on the background of an autumn wallpaper that can produce something more complex, troubling, and multilayered than an expected striptease scene. With amateurish clumsiness the showing undermines the very nature of this spectacle, its illusoriness and its potentiality to seduce.
This scene is supplemented with the futurist Manifesto of Lust, a vehement hymn to desire and lust, written in 1911 by the French poet, playwright, and performance artist Valentine de Saint-Point. The form in which the manifesto is presented - as subtitles - evokes a narrator present in absence, inviting to confrontation of darker, more complicated considerations of our predicament.
Lust is a Force.
back