Feministyczne re-konstrukcje kobiecości. Hannah Höch – Frances Leeming – Lynn Hershman Leeson

Abstract

Bodily images reflect transformations in the perception of a human being. The objects of my reflection are works of artists inspired by feminist thought. The works are devoted to constructions of corporeality and female identity. The selection of the artists is not coincidental – each of them deconstructs an imagined phantasm of femininity inscribing her works in the cultural discourse focused on the concept of the hybrid or a metaphorically understood cyborg figure. Reflection upon mechanization of consciousness and body are unveiled in Hannah Höch’s dadaist photomontages which deconstruct a modernistic, Weimar myth of the New Woman. Frances Leeming uses an avant-garde form of video art to preposterously depict the practice of genetic engineering, reproductive technology and pop-cultural mythologization of science. Teknolust, a film in High Definition aesthetics by Hershman Leeson, is a cyber-feminist story about relations between the female body and artificial forms of life, autonomy and reproduction, but it is also a reflection upon a self-referential function of the medium. Genetic replication might be analysed from the perspective of digital reproduction. The works by the three artists are thus characterized by a specific, autotelic type of utterance, a message which broadens the production of meanings by means of a complex surface aesthetics.