Identity (i-den’te-te’) n.

[on site] video program:
Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975 6 min. US
Sadie Benning me and ruby fruit, 1990 6 min US
Marlon Riggs Affirmation, 1990 10:15 US
Ho Tam 99 men, 1998 8 min US
Steve Reinke Echo Valley, 1998 7 min CA
Bjorn Melhus ich weiss nicht wer das ist, 1991 3 min DE
Paul McCarthy The Painter, 1997 50 min US

These works articulate societal re-structuring (feminism, racism etc.) as well as the creation of individual identities within society; the political is personal and the personal is political. Video was/is an accessible medium to communicate shifts in society from a personal perspective. Martha Rosler deals with early feminism (as well as referencing the inherent relationship of video to televison by placing the video in a cooking show context), Sadie Benning deals with her beginnings of understanding of herself as a lesbian, Marlon Riggs with homosexuality in the black community and Ho Tam with cultural identity: both within and outside that cultural community. Steve Reinke and Bjorn Melhus explore their own individual identities as part of (or outside of) society as Paul McCarthy looks at his own relationship to both the myth and the fact of the ‘art star’.-lhb

[BIOGRAPHIES OF (some of the) VIDEO ARTISTS]
Sadie Benning is a lesbian videomaker who began making videos when she was 15 years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turn playful seduction and painful honesty, Benning¹s floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to her intimate revelations, and as an accomplice in defining her evocative experimental form. Her work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult‹with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Her more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera and into animation and film.

Paul McCarthy http://www.papermag.com/paperdaily/paperclips/01paperclips/paul_mccarthy/

Steve Reinke is a video artist and writer currently living in Chicago and teaching at UIC. He received a BFA from York University and an MFA in Visual Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is the editor of the YYZ publications, Plague Years by Mike Hoolboom, Symbolization and Its Discontents by Jeanne Randolph, By the Skin of Their Tongues: Artist Video Scripts, co-edited with Nelson Henricks, and LUX: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video, co-edited with Tom Taylor.

The late Marlon Riggs was best known for making insightful and controversial documentary films confronting racism and homophobia that thrust him onto center stage in America's "cultural wars."

Martha Rosler Since the early 1970s, Martha Rosler has used photography, performance, writing, and video to deconstruct cultural reality. Describing her work, Rosler says, “The subject is the commonplace‹I am trying to use video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life. We accept the clash of public and private as natural, yet their separation is historical. The antagonism of the two spheres, which have in fact developed in tandem, is an ideological fiction‹a potent one. I want to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and culture under capitalism.” Avoiding a pedantic stance, Rosler characteristically lays out visual and verbal material in a manner that allows the contradictions to gradually emerge, so that the audience can discern these disjunctions for themselves. By making her ideas accessible, Rosler invites her audience to re-examine the dynamics and demands of ideology, urging critical consciousness of the individual compromises exacted by society, and opening the door to a radical re-thinking of how cultural “reality” is constructed for the economic and political benefit of a select group.