Jon Mikel Euba. Notes for two video pieces.

Text: Arantza Santesteban

May 1968 marked a turning point in the proliferation of film practices, urging image making by workers’ collectives, trade unions, feminist groups and neighbourhood associations, among others. In many cases, they defended the use of video as a kind of militant aesthetic, given its capacity for instant reproduction, synchronised sound and the lightness of its equipment. But they also defended video’s low-quality, “anti-aesthetic” image as a way of rejecting what they perceived as the aesthetics and politics of the film medium, in many cases aligned between the tradition of auteur cinema, commercial cinema and the popular rise of television.

Many artists embraced the medium of video as a way of experimenting with the audiovisual format in the decades that followed. According to Yvonne Spielmann (2005): “Video is the first truly audiovisual medium that, in contrast to film, does not generate images as a unit and does not display the materiality of a film strip”. As such, electronic video, alongside certain forms of militant cinema, was for some people performative and encapsulated the possibility within it of creative intervention. Video was understood as a technology and medium that could be altered and manipulated, drawing on the potential of a kind of pictorial condition in progress that conceived of the image as already manipulated in its transformation.

In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma in 1979, Nam June Paik argued that “because there is no image on a video tape (unlike film, which Godard famously characterises […] as ‘truth 24 times a second’), there is no video ‘truth’.”

Perhaps as a way of challenging the notion of truth, Jon Mikel Euba created these two pieces at different times in the 1990s and 2000s. In Pandamask 2 (1998-2000), a car parked in a secluded lot acts as a catalyst for a series of movements by a body that multiplies its presence through accentuated loops. Euba works inwards towards the image, and everything happens simultaneously within a frame that supports the entirety of the actions. As spectators, we witness the frustration of our expectations, which seek conclusive meanings and narratives in this chain of unproductive gestures that only lead us to suspect something is about to happen.

In 2003, Euba produced the work Neska (2003), a piece originating from a recording of a group of artists during the development of a practical exercise. The sculptural fact bursts into this recording, which shows the docility of a body subjected to the desires of others. An accumulation of commands and executions subtly modify the postures of a young woman who agrees to the reproduction of a heroic gesture, a raised fist, an offensive stance, a body in struggle. It is recorded against the light, with a dirty lens, as part of an attempted recording that suggests a sketch, the rehearsal of something, but in no way an exercise in exemplary stylistics. The sculptures of heroic figures from the last century are thus transferred to this recorded body by means of low-angle shots, because the sculptures were erected to exercise a vertical gaze and to helplessly attend the grandeur of their forms.

Quotes:

• Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
• Nam June Paik interviewed by Jean-Paul Cassagnac, Jean-Paul Fargier and Sylvia van der Stegen, Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 299, 1979.
• Murray, R. and Santesteban, A., Nire amaren etxea: Tracing Feminist Genealogies in La marche des femmes à Hendaye, Manifestation à Hendaye and Les Mères espagnoles, no. 2 ZINE, 2021:5-39.

(On display in Bilduma, ikusgai program from 1 Octuber to 3 november 2024)