To some extent, the impact of Reeves’ and Hatoum’s very personal accounts
of war depended on their contrast with television equivalents in the 1970s
and 1980s in which individual, non-professional voices were largely absent.
Up until the 1990s, television generally excluded the experiences of ordinary
soldiers or citizens and certainly had little truck with artists. The notion of
reality TV did not exist and such representations of humanity as reached the
screens took the form of celebrity personae or fictional characters reflecting
the experience, aspirations and desires of the white, heterosexual middle-class
males that ran the networks. Women, ethnic minorities, gays and ordinary
folk were reduced to stereotypes or simply did not appear. The liberation
movements of the 1960s and 1970s made what David Ross called ‘the personal
attitude’ a potent counter-cultural weapon. Ross observed that television, as an
institution and a grammar, was well established by the time artists got hold of
video cameras and contended that the personal attitude was the one thing that
artists could usefully contribute.
1
Video auto-portraiture, the artist’s individual
perceptions resisting the hegemony of broadcast television, found its natural
home in feminist video.
F E
M I N I S M – T H E P E R S O N A L I S P O L I T I C A L
Over the centuries, most western societies and virtually all third-world countries
have been patriarchal in structure, that is, organised around social and political
institutions dominated by men serving the interests of men. The ‘stronger’
sex has wielded power in the public arena while women’s sphere of influence
has been restricted to the domestic domain. In spite of the activities of the
Suffragettes early in the twentieth century and the advent of universal suffrage,
women in the 1960s and 1970s were still under-represented in almost all walks
of life, including the art world. Feminists now challenged the whole gamut of
gender inequalities that had persisted on the shaky grounds of sexual difference,
on men and women’s divergent procreative roles, on biology as destiny. Politics
in general and Patriarchy in particular were seen to have infiltrated, indeed
created, the private realm, a bounded territory where the majority of women
lived out their lives. The film-maker Sally Potter expressed it in these terms:
‘Ideology is not merely reflected but produced in the context of the family and
in personal relationships… political structures are not just “out there” but are
manifest in the most seemingly insignificant actions, words and conditions.’
2
In order to mobilise women to rise out of oppression and win equality in
public life, feminists employed a method that politicised women in the heart of
their domestic confinement, in the family home. From the 1960s to the 1980s,
consciousness-raising as a non-hierarchical process brought women together,
often in one anothers’ kitchens, to exchange stories of their lives and re-interpret
them, not as a product of their individual failings or neuroses, but as a function
D I S R U P T I N G T H E C O N T E N T • 3 9