Women are money

We see it every day and everywhere.

Open the newspaper and they’re looking out at you. Walk past the magazine racks and their faces are there in the dozens. They’re on television every few minutes, they’re on the bus shelters, they’re on your computer, their giant faces peer down at you from the sides of buildings. Everywhere, images of women, used as instruments of barter and manipulation.

What do they sell? Everything. How? By offering fulfillment; the realization of fantasies of ecstasy, sex, glamour, and envy. But never power. At least not for women. And only if you give away your money.

It’s a lie, isn’t it? We all know that. Well then, why are we so complicit?

When the arena of public interaction, and discourse, is commerce — buying and selling, and when it becomes so much the norm that we don’t notice, the result is pornography — the offer of a fantasy that will never be realized and is perverse at heart. The predatory manipulations of the fashion/cosmetic industry are the most blatant and obvious example of women as currency. As insidious, and perhaps more dangerous, is that vague conglomeration called the Media, which attempts to exploit the production and dissemination of images into an official Culture that is indistinguishable from the entertainment/commerce nexus. And running through it all is that currency called Woman.

What to make of this woman, this E.V.E?

We keep waiting for her to reveal what she will sell, how she will be sold, but instead she convulses, grimaces, twists, turns, and rotates. She even disappears. She is sinister at times, strange and indecipherable. Is it even a woman? We have met Gunilla Josephson’s transgressive, de-idolized females before — her modern Joan of Arc re-interpreting history in the streets of Paris, her Hedda emptying and filling a room like a triumphant female anti-Sisyphus, her misbehaving twin princesses in the cow merde. Josephson always insists on an acknowledgment of those places that women occupy, those cracks and fissures, that have not been colonized by the dominant male hegemony that continues to hijack art.

E.V.E Absolute Matrix might be a portrait, but not of a lady. This is not the mannequin we are so comfortable with, that submissive, sexualized image that infects our visual landscape. Josephson insists that art’s gestures must be expansive and powerful. Necessity demands it. If a woman makes a spider, as Louise Bourgeois did, it must be large enough to devour the Tate Museum. If an artist makes a portrait, it must never be a seduction and always a threat.

Josephson states that video is a female medium. It is untainted by ‘old masters’ and is largely separated from the fantasy industry. Video is a medium that straddles the official art world, the entertainment industry, and the bumbling disclosures of the amateur. It is difficult to own, to control, or to co-opt. It is fundamentally subversive. And as such, it is life-affirming. It insists on true revelation and true beauty.

Sewil Otosed