Personal Cuts
/5
- Personal Cuts
- Osobni rezovi
- 1982
- video, color, sound
- 3min, 36sec
In the video "Personal Cuts", the protagonist (the artist) appears before her audience with a black stocking over her head. The “terrorist act” that Iveković links to this image takes place in the field of seeing, in the association of the real violence represented by the cutting of the mask with the structural violence represented by the relationship between the individual and the television medium, which in its broadest sense is a political power. Iveković, with only her head and her hands visible in the image, cuts one hole after another into the mask, each time revealing a section of her face for a short moment. This glimpse is quickly replaced by a sequence taken from a Yugoslavian state television report, which could be said to fill in the hole, the empty space. Iveković carries out her assault on the observer’s perceptual habits using a paradox gesture: the artist’s face, that which is expected and is unveiled in the manner of a “striptease”, is replaced by a cliche, by official images of the past produced by the state for the purpose of molding political identity. Their mixture of nostalgia and ideology production depicts a part of the artist’s own history. In an aggressive game of seeing and being seen, Iveković makes herself into a projection screen for the fictions of the everyday and subverts the agreement between the self and the other by causing two ideological figures to structurally merge into one another: the discursive space of the television medium and the discursive space of official history writing. S.E.