Real Bodies: Video in the 1990s

This article discusses the recent work of three artists, Gary Hill, Mona Hatoum and Maureen Connor, to address the meaning of the aesthetic shift in video art of the 1990s and its implications for thinking about the body as a site of identification and identity. Engaging (and reformulating) the Lacanian notion of the Real, it explores the effects of the new kind of corpo‐reality proposed by these video installations on the ways in which we imagine our relation to our own bodies as mediated by visual culture. In so far as it raises the spectre of flesh as a culturally inassimilable remnant, the aesthetic concern with the Real may be seen as a response to a certain conceptual impasse in thinking about identity as an effect of cultural construction. This is not, however, a matter of retreating into essentialist positions, strategically useful as such positions may be. To imagine the ‘lived body’ as Real – as the work of these artists suggests – is to explore the idea of unfinishedness of the self as a specific body, and to envision the instability of the internal psychic boundaries as a concrete embodied experience. Video as a medium is particularly well suited to address such issues as one of the technologies that have contributed to the transformation of contemporary reality into, predominantly, visuality. Focusing on each artist's different mode of involvement with the Real as a body, the article examines the attempts of these video installations to construct a new aesthetic of the subject in the era of screen.