Girls On The Re-Make - Julie Zando - Josephine Anstey

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Cynthia Chris

John C. Welchman has examined the practice of appropriation as both a problem and paradigm that artists and critics positioned themselves in, around or against throughout the 1990s. He defines the practice most broadly as "the relocation, annexation or theft of cultural properties, whether objects, ideas or notations [emphasis mine]," escalating throughout the modern period "with the rise of European colonialism and global capital." [1] Welchman recognizes several appropriative art movements, such as Dada and Pop, scattered throughout the twentieth century. The most recent emerged in the 1970s from critical and artistic engagement with "poststructuralist theories of reproduction and repetition that connected it to related discourses of institutional critique and debates, including Barthes's, on the conditions of authorship." [2] He locates this movement primarily in photography, in the works of Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, but his remarks are equally relevant to the arts of the moving im age. Nam June Paik employed the tactic in video as early as his Mayor Lindsay (1965), based on TV news footage, and TV Chairs (1973), featuring images from the films of Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe. Video appropriation, such as Dara Birnbaum's Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79), garnered some attention at the same time as the "re-photographers" mentioned by Welchman, and the practice only proliferated. Video artists clipped, copied, reformatted and renarrativized images from commercial television and Hollywood films, inserted themselves into it, remade classic cinematic scenes and combined these approaches. A comprehensive list, even an abridged survey, would fill pages of this publication. A few recent examples suggesting the persistence and multivalence of appropriation in the media arts include Dee Dee Halleck's Gringo in Mananaland (1995), Suzie Silver's The Look of Love: A Gothic Romance (1998), Craig Baldwin's Spectre of the Spectrum (1999) and Leah Gilliam's Apeshit (1999), each of which resolves distinctive aesthetic or narrative problems with appropriated imagery. [3]

While these artists have appropriated largely from mass media, others working in video in the 1990s are engaging in new appropriative gestures that position their work not in relation to mass media but rather the early histories of experimental film, performance art and video art itself. Among them, Julie Zando's recent video The Apparent Trap (1999) articulates a set of concerns that might be said to embody--and to comment on--both longstanding and more nacent trends in the medium in which she works by appropriating from both mass media and from artists' video. [4] At the same time, the tape represents a reconsideration by Zando of ideas involving identity, psychoanalytic theory, performance and narrativity that have characterized her entire body of video work. [5] How The Apparent Trap treats these themes emphasizes the context and trajectory of each of Zando's appropriative gestures. [6]

Rather than appropriating footage outright, Zando, with her writing and performing collaborator Josephine Anstey, recreates scenes from a popular film. They also stage new scenes using the same characters and illuminate their intentions by recreating artists' performance and video on related themes. Although Zando has used appropriation before (for example, borrowing news clips of Pennsylvania politician Bud Dwyer's suicide for Hey Bud [1987] and inspiration from Pauline Reage's Story of O for Uh Oh! [1993]), none of her works has been so thoroughly constructed from elements of preexisting works. The film that Zando culled for The Apparent Trap is The Parent Trap (1961, by David Swift for Disney), in which Hayley Mills plays a dual role as 13-year-old twins separated by their parents's divorce.

In Zando's version, Sharon, a mannered Bostoner, lives with their mother; slightly tomboyish Susan with her father on his California ranch. Each is unaware of the other's existence until they meet face-to-face in the lunch line at summer camp. Initially puzzled by the coincidence of "having the same face," the girls embark on a series of practical jokes--Susan denies their resemblance by likening Sharon's profile to Frankenstein's monster; Sharon retaliates by tipping Susan's canoe and cutting the back out of her skirt during a dance with neighboring boy campers; in turn, Susan strings a web of booby traps throughout Sharon's cabin. They replay what psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin has called "the early struggle for recognition--which includes failure, destruction, aggression, even when it is working." [7] And it does work. Banished by camp counselors to an isolated cabin, the girls, comparing family photos, realize that their likeness is no coincidence. They scheme to exchange identities and reunite their est ranged parents. Zando and Anstey reenact the lunch line sighting, select pranks and for comic relief, some bits featuring the bumbling schoolmarmish camp counselors, here played by crossdressed men.