Katia Bassanini: The Counterfeiters
18.04.08 – 24.05.08
In her work, Katia Bassanini (*1976, New York) is systematically picking to pieces the most obstinate prejudices towards the domestic, foremost womanly world.
Her latest film The Counterfeiters (2008) unrolls three women’s successful endeavors in starting and running their own business. The entrance sequence of the video reveals the initial motivation for the women to becoming active in this sense: we can identify a young, uncombed bride hysterically frazzling her pillow, the explicit commodity for recovery but implicit symbol of paternalism over the female body. The fervor of the scene is reminiscent of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974) with the wonderful cast of Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands as a married couple with ambiguous feelings for each other, where the viewer is left in feeling uncertain about the housewife’s influencer, whether it is her husband, her life at home with noisy kids, or some kind of mind sickness.
In the next shot, the set is in the nostalgic spirit of a grandma’s kitchen where a sexy manager and her employees, a chef de cuisine and her stooge, are keeping track of production and organizing processes whose goal is rather cryptic. However, each duty step and each person executing them are physically as well as verbally interconnected, a literal embodiment of assembly-line work. This can shift into slapstick humor as been demonstrated by The Three Stooges, a popular American vaudeville and comedy act of the early to mid-20th Century which also inspired Katia Bassanini for The Counterfeiters.
The interior of the kitchen, the reconstruction of a doll’s house heightened to human-size and in its original form manufactured by Sara Ploos van Amstel-Rothé 1745 in Holland, appears to look quite sophisticated for today’s notion of modernity, especially relating to the furniture and utilization. What the three women exactly produce remains unclear until the end, but in contrast the how is strikingly clear: it is all about making order, bringing system into chaos, bottling, distributing, transferring, examining, evaluating, etc., and all this with breathtaking velocity.
The artist emphasizes this absurdly hectic activity with the filmic fast-forward mode. Fast-forward, in contrast to slow motion, dispossesses a scene of its severity and seriousness, and makes all operations appear overtly futile. At one point of the storyline however, we are told what the manufactured item is: after making herself comfortable on the table in a rather vulgar posture with spread legs, the business woman in this successful trio retrieves eggs from her own vagina. This utterly ambiguous kind of “productivity” obviously refers to the female fecundity, but also to the woman as a non-reflective nature commonly called “chick”. Ironically, the egg-laying chicken’s body indeed is a factory supplying a big segment of the food industry. How did it come though that in the 1950s, young and pretty women started to be widely called “chicks”? It was the American Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis who first used the word in that slang way, as it is stated in his novel Elmer Gantry (1927): “He had determined that marriage now would cramp his advancement in the church and that, anyway, he didn't want to marry this brainless little fluffy chick, who would be of no help in impressing rich parishioners.”
“All the things I love are what my business is all about” (self-made entrepreneur Martha Stewart *1941), who was named the third most powerful woman in America by Ladies Home Journal in 2001. One of her best working businesses is the talk-show Martha, a morning program featuring celebrity guests and airing Martha Stewart in conversation with them about topics such as cooking, interior design and gardening. The actions most often take place in her gigantic studio kitchen, an impressive high-tech cuisine with at least ten chefs in the background making her culinary dreams come true.
The most striking aspect of her quote is the fact that what she says to love is her business, but her business effectively is something given to every household with all the typical duties bound to it. “Home” is substituted with “business”, what suggests in Martha Stewart’s particular case, with an audience largely composed of housewives having comfortable access to television at 10am due to their labor condition, that it should be every woman’s goal to make her home run like a factory. This ominous expectation echoes Marshall McLuhan’s critical metaphor The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), the pioneering study of ads and popular visual culture by Canada’s “Intellectual Comet” (Naïm Kattan, 1965), drawing attention to their symbolism, their implications for the corporate entities and the engagement of the woman both as sender and receiver of new wealth standards.
More or less at the same time, the most well known feminist theoretician of the 20th Century, Simone de Beauvoir, claimed “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” in her book Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). In this realm it appears obvious that running a business, even though it has for economically precarious reason to be one’s own household, is what most effectively demonstrates a woman’s achievement of self-definition (unfortunately often confused with self-realization, even nowadays).
The artists Katia Bassanini evidently likes to refer to have all reflected, at least to a certain degree, the mentioned issues: Carolee Schneemann, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, and earlier Francis Picabia. And if we consider Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina a.k.a Ilona Staller’s marriage also under the angle of view of a creative artistic partnership, Staller’s declaration that her body is like a factory can be taken as forthright reference, too.
In Bassanini’s drawing series entitled Dolls, quite large but fragile, 2-dimensional linear sculptures made of acrylic paint and on which she has been systematically working in the past three years, are declining in all imaginable variations the range of constructed feminine appearances. With names such as Dolly, Bridget, Gloria or Wilma, the single parts of these often funny, not particularly balanced but very filigree and passion evoking assemblages are found objects – virtual of course, but what one would expect to find because they are the ones most people throw away and shortly later need to get back (or substitute).
Dolls are exclusively virtual, imaginative sculptures, not meant to be realized by the artist herself but at the most can be taken as guidance for the viewers retroactive impulse for a desire of construction and creativity. A further drawing series by Bassanini that explicitly deals with this compulsive desire of keeping on-hold the carrying out of a directive are the Performance Recipes (Adventure of a Nurse) from 2008. The drafts give us an insight in potential performances, a genre Katia Bassanini is very familiar and works with, from which as for the immediacy of the single procedural elements we cannot be 100% sure whether they already took place and function as “leftovers”, or if they are free devices for an upcoming but barely scheduled event. This can be truly seen as a democratized notion of performance art, envisioning how seldom it happens that we are among the happy few personally attending such events. After all, only the documentation of them remains, what doesn’t seldom turn into fetishist objects regarding their mediation, too.
Bassanini takes this disadvantage at its best by turning upside-down the prevalent chronology of events: the residues of virtually conceived performances become the starting point and artery of her visual world. Some people would be inclined to call this a “deconstructive approach” of the creative process, but in fact Katia Bassanini is in a lustful manner so familiar with the art and cultural history dealing with comparable issues, that the playing with and tearing apart of the time axis allows her a free approach of preliminarily burden themes. We can’t rewrite books, but their rereading indeed changes over time – Katia Bassanini’s work is a strong, candid contribution to our actualized reading, especially of the self-critical kind.
Cathérine Hug, Zurich, March 2008
------------------------------------Italian---------------------------------------
I "Counterfeiters" sono i falsari, coloro che ingannano. Ad ispirare il video di Katia Bassanini è stata la celebre Martha Stewart, la "casalinga d'affari" americana finita nei guai per una speculazione finanziaria. La cucina diventa spazio domestico e di lavoro: visivamente l'artista si ispira ad una tipica casa delle bambole olandese del 1745. Ma nella cucina di Katia Bassanini tutto è in movimento: un'infermiera (ruolo intimo e professionale, spesso considerata come un simbolo erotico), una segretaria e un cuoco sono gli attori principali. I loro movimenti sono quasi meccanici, come gli "slapstick" degli anni Venti. Alla catena di montaggio che si consuma nella cucina partecipa anche "The Bride", la sposa: è lei a spiumare la gallina, ad iniziare il percorso che porterà - passando attraverso diverse fasi, in cui tutto si trasforma, la farina diventa "Dust”, polvere, cocaina - alla produzione delle uova, il risultato finale.
Sono ingannevoli anche le "Dolls", le bambole: donne costruite con vari oggetti trovati nella natura. Come in una sorta di rovesciamento di quanto accade oggi nella nostra società, dove con la chirurgia plastica è possibile cambiare completamente aspetto e forma. Le "Dolls" (disegni acrilici su carta) sono bambole che si assemblano e prendono forma progressivamente. Quasi "inevitabile" il riferimento all'artista visiva statunitense Carolee Schneemann e al suo lavoro incentrato sui taboo e il corpo dell'artista legati in una relazione dinamica con il corpo sociale. Un po' come diceva Simone de Beauvoir, "uomini si nasce, donne lo si diventa".
Se si amalgamano diversi ingredienti - ancora ritorna la cucina come filo conduttore - si possono realizzare ricette molto particolari, come dimostra Katia Bassanini nei disegni che fanno ancora una volta risaltare le molte inconguenze della nostra società. Impossibile non individuare in queste ricette i riferimenti al movimento dada (sviluppatosi principalmente a Zurigo) e in particolare a Francois Marie Martinez Picabia, pittore e scrittore francese, che del dadaismo fu uno degli alfieri principali.
Marzio Arigoni, aprile 2008