marta.popivoda

THE LAW OF CAPITAL: HISTORIES OF OPPRESSION

Ana Vujanović: TEMPO OF CONSUMERISM: On the film composition Tempo by Marta Popivoda

Text published in:

REARTIKULACIJA #8, 2009, Ana Vujanović, Marta Popivoda, DE-LINKING FROM CAPITAL AND THE COLONIAL MATRIX OF POWER, The Law of Capital: Histories of Oppression

http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=638

Marta Popivoda, Tempo, 2006, video

The vocabulary of music denotes “tempo” (in Italian time) as the cadence in performing a music piece. Marta Popivoda’s short film “Tempo” (2006) employs the term on two levels. On the one hand, “Tempo” is – suggestively enough – one of the largest hypermarkets in Belgrade, coming to us with the transition following the “October 5 Revolution” in 2000. The “plot” (hyper-shopping sequence) is situated in the eponymous hypermarket, perceived as a paradigm of the new social era succeeding “Milošević’s Serbia.” On the other hand, the film/composition engages in a post-production processing of raw documentary footage, focusing on tempo as its basic element. Its documentarism is, accordingly, “spoiled,” and – in a Brechtian fashion – “estranged” in the post-produced speeding up and slowing down of the real-time narrative and action, bringing about artificiality which lays bare their respective ideological dimensions.

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The text is published in REARTIKULACIJA #9, 2009, Radical Critical Practice
http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=683

Abstract:

What I am currently engaged in – within the frameworks of ‘aRtivism’ – is a discussion of myth-building mechanisms pertaining to the figure of an Amazon woman and her gender role in contemporary culture.

The article looks at a concrete example: the exhibition Amazons; Re-construction of the Myth mounted in Belgrade in 2005, including my contribution Amazon Woman without a Body; Image and Consequences. In my opinion, construction of the Amazon myth currently implies a logically consequent, but nevertheless problematic order of its transfiguration. The first mechanism re-activates the myth in terms of emancipation of women in contemporary society, in accordance with the feminist and gender theories and respective activist practices. The figure of the Amazon woman was initially introduced in the contemporary social discourse to pursue emancipation of the woman as an independent subject, independent from the male subject, that is. The second mechanism re-produces the myth through popular culture. She, as a figure of emancipation, gratifies female desires for a possible transformation or, at least, a well done simulation. But, at the same time, her powerful and perfect media-produced female body gratifies men, being designed precisely for this purpose.

The question I am interested in here is: When/How did the figure of an Amazon woman become a market commodity? The answer or explanation I find the most accurate and critical is the following: presence of the figure of an Amazon woman in contemporary culture implies a logical, rather then chronological, sequence:

emancipation  >>>  transformation into a sex object.

Consequently, following the process of emancipation and introduction of the powerful and independent ‘business woman’ as a culturally acceptable gender role, the Amazon woman became an irritating threat to the overwhelming patriarchal social order which ultimately transformed her into a consumer-friendly mass-media product.

In broader terms, what I underline here is the question of social operation of aRtivist practices accomplished through an institutional system – the system of always-already established social order and its respective pre-scribed protocols of realization. It is, accordingly, a kind of warning, calling attention to the (media) materiality of aRtivist procedures and actions.

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