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Sunday, Apr 9, 1989
Ecstasy Unlimited: The Interpenetration of Sex and Capital by Laura Kipnis (1985, 60 mins, Color, 3/4-inch, Videotape from Video Data Bank). Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $M. by Martha Rosler (1988, 28 mins, Color, 3/4-i
The body is the last site of colonization. If work and leisure have already been altered to comply with the interests of money and power, then the private anarchy of libidinous life must be conducting its final stand. Jeanne C. Finley's So, You Want to Be Popular?, a humorous but cautionary tale, looks at the pressures exerted by institutionally prescribed modes of behavior. Blustering sex ed. films from the fifties, personal recollections of youth since gone, and the dilapidated hallways of an abandoned school form the backdrop for a work that warns that the struggle for acceptance doesn't end with childhood but resurfaces in our maturity. Ownership of the body is called into question in Martha Rosler's The Strange Case of Baby $M. This analysis sees the court decision as a reinforcement of phallic authority and Mary Beth Whitehead's battle one of radical spirit confronting class and gender roles. Rosler offers self-reproof by donning infant's attire-pacifier, swaddling and all-for her polysyllabic exhortation. In Ecstasy Unlimited, Laura Kipnis declares that ecstasy is limited only by what the marketplace will bear, both literally and figuratively. Desire and fulfillment, says this work combining high brow and high jinks, have been turned into merchandise to be sold back to the commodified customer. Dramatic vignettes in a massage parlor, robotic machines at an assembly line, interviews with a sex shop owner, and sundry images from the id industry are amassed to examine the principal accumulated from pleasure. Steve Seid
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