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Home Tape Revised

Lynda Benglis

1972 00:28:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video
Tags:
Family, Performance, Video History

Description

In Home Tape Revised, Benglis took a portable tape recorder with her when she visited her family in Louisiana. She saw most of the experience through the video camera, thus giving her a distance from an emotionally involving situation. The tapes were replayed and re-shot off a monitor and commented about by Benglis... It is a deeply personal tape about an emotionally involving situation, but it is precisely controlled. It makes use of the intimacy of video, of the one to one relationship between the viewer and the monitor which distinguishes video so much from film, resulting in the feeling of a shared experience, though the experience is not in the least dramatized... Besides using the intimacy of television and the instant replay capability of video in Home Tape, Benglis uses the fluidity of time with instant replay and the capability of carrying on a dialogue with oneself due to a combination of the characteristics of instant replay and intimacy."

— Bruce Kurtz, "Video is Being Invented", Arts Magazine (December 1973)  

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection. 

About Lynda Benglis

Sculptor Lynda Benglis executed a number of videos in the mid 1970s, continuing her exploration of female sexuality and identity—an overriding theme in her work. The interest in human form and presence in her process-oriented sculptural work finds its way into her self-reflexive, investigative videos. Benglis aggressively uses the properties of the video medium to expose the process and limitations of the form—for example, re-shooting footage on the monitor and technically manipulating the image on screen. In this way, Benglis negotiates a personal space for herself, maintaining a deliberate distance from the medium. Using her own body and creating multiples of her image, Benglis interrogates the relation of the self to the body—focusing on the interface between our inner and outer realities.

Linking art world practice to feminist discourse she produced Home Tape Revised, Female Sensibility, and How's Tricks—which together read as an anthropological study, each work forming a chapter in the "woman as nature/woman outside of culture" continuum. Within the context of feminist film theory of the gendered gaze, and contemporary theories of authorship, the importance of Benglis's video work emerges. Sensitive not only to debates of orginality and the construction of the artistic subject, Benglis's work consistently critiques what are believed to be video's "inherent" properties: the sense of "real" time, its supposedly immediate and truthful relationship to the world, and its privileged viewpoint in relation to events.

See also:

Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures