Steina VASULKA Solo Performance

Steina VASULKA was born in Iceland in 1940. Having studied music in Czechoslovakia, she married Woody VASULKA in 1964 and emigrated to New York the following year. Since producing her first work on videotape in 1969, she has been active over a wide range of genres including videotape works, video installations and sound performances--truly a groundbreaking multimedia artist. In addition to her prolific career as a solo artist, she has of course collaborated with Woody, and in 1997 presented the installation <<Orka>> at the Iceland Pavilion in Most recently, in conjunction with July 17th opening of Woody's solo exhibition <<The Brotherhood>> at the ICC, on her first visit to Japan in a decade, she re-staged the solo sound-and-video performance <<Violin Power>> from the early '70s, as well as collaborating with Woody's latest installation <<The Maiden>>.

Playing a MIDI violin, Steina used MIDI signals to control laserdisc images real-time. Each string of the MIDI violin was given different tasks, from switching between audiovisual sources to fast-forward, rewind and replay speed, all tempered to the pitch of her playing.

Her visual images for the solo performance included dance performance footage and outtakes from her videotape <<In the Land of the Elevator Girls>>. Playing her violin, she switched instantaneously between sources, sending images ahead or freezing them altogether--less altering the visuals by means of her playing than modifying her playing so as to maintain visual control, a visually based act processed through sound.

Next came the main performance, a "duet" with <<The Maiden>>. First, a brief introduction to Woody's <<The Maiden>>: it's the latest addition--also known as <<Table 6>>--to his six-part series <<The Brotherhood>>. Various expanding and contracting parts added onto a gynecological examination table base and operated by means of pneumatic compressor control. Flanked left and right by upright fan-shaped objects that opened and closed, also pneumatically. Projected on these fans as well as on a large screen in the background is a man reciting a poem by Melody Carnahan depicting this piece of art. All the pressurized energy to mobilize the apparatus was controlled by valves connected to a MIDI-driven computer, allowing real-time motion of all moveable elements. As made clear by the name <<The Maiden>>, here was a mechanized "Venus" loosely modeled head, arms, waist and feet on the physical articulations and proportions of the human frame.

The various different parts respond according to MIDI pitch, which as an installation worked by having viewers make sounds into a microphone that were then translated into MIDI code. In Steina's performance, however, the violin was substituted for the microphone as input device. As Steina played, <<The Maiden>> delivered a dynamically animated performance, body writhing, head bobbing, all accompanied by pneumatic hissing. According to Steina, he--the male poetry-reader screened in the background--and she--<<The Maiden>>--were carrying a love dialogue = duet. The real-time counterpoint of pneumatics and poem-reciting voice seemed charged with a certain eroticism, playing out the classic drama of man and machine. Nonetheless, <<The Maiden>> in this performance hardly invoked a humanlike, that is to say robotlike image. Because for all her movements, she was still immobile. Glued in place on the dais, however freely she might contort her body, she was cursed to remain in situ as a "fixture."

Courting calls between the rigidly mounted <<The Maiden>> and a virtual man projected on a screen. The undismissible barren futility of it all resonated with the main subject matter of the male principle implicit in <<The Brotherhood>>, inviting visions of the specter of Eros so adulated in today's media.

[GOGOTA Hisanori]