Protas ir jausmai. Moters atvaizdas Baltijos šalių fotografijoje ir videomene

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Baltijos šalių fotografija; Baltijos šalių videomenas; Baltijos šalių šiuolaikinė kultūra; Feminizmas; Feminizmo teorija; Fotografija; Fotomeno estetika; Moters vaizdavimas; Moterų dailė; Postmodernistinė estetika; Reprodukavimo technika; Videomenas; Baltic Photography; Baltic Video Art; Female Art; Female representation; Feminism; Feminist theory; Modern culture of the Baltic countries; Photography; Photography aesthetics; Postmodern aesthetics; Reproduction technique; Video art.

ENThe title of Jane Austin's novel was chosen for the article most consciously, though it sounds old-fashioned in the spirit of the Victorian period. However, it exactly reflects the state of contemporary female art and female representation in contemporary Baltic photography and video art. This region witnesses female issues in their early phase reminding of the old Victorian days. Feminist theory together with a female discourse in the arts reached the Baltic states as late as the 90s (possibly even the mid-90s), which right away seemed to be already too much canonized, limited and exhausted. On the other hand, the title also points to the radical changes which happened in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian photography and video art during the 90s - the confusion among objective and subjective coordinates in the construction of an image. The analysis of the politics of female representation directly influenced the critique of a canonic and dogmatic photographic image and its further transformation. The conversion of a symbolic subject into a physical one, a documentary fixation and autobiographical narrative instead of reportage, the renunciation of the "decisive moment" by the means of analysis, the growing masquerade instead of realism, doubt and critique, personalism are the major features provoked by female art, and they have interfered in the line followed by several generations of the Baltic photographers and video artists. The contemporary art criticism associates these changes with the general spread of postmodern thinking and aesthetics. In the present article an attempt is made to specify the new features of contemporary Baltic photo and video art supplementing the description of artists' strategies with traditional methods of art history: iconographic and formal analysis. [From the publication]