Photo/Video Language and the Feminine in Selected Works by Eugenia Raskopoulos

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Notes

1. Hélène Cixous, ‘Preface: On Being Interviewed’, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), xvi.

2. See Jacques Lacan, ‘God and the Jouissance of The Woman’, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed., Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 144.

3. Nicholas Tsoutas, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Eugenia Raskopoulos (Woolloomooloo: Artspace Visual Arts Centre Ltd, 2002), n.p.

4. The debate around a feminine writing, language, and aesthetics has been current within feminism for decades. In the English-speaking world it has been criticised for its essentialism (relying on a biologically determined difference) but the French have continued to explore feminine writing (écriture feminine) and the debate is far from over. Luce Irigaray and Hélèn Cixous are among the chief exponents; neither of them can be dismissed as essentialists. Cixous is quick to point out that femininity also exists in men and that it does not necessarily exist in women. See Hélèn Cixous as quoted in White Ink, 22.

5. Eugenia Raskopoulos, as quoted in Huang Du, Image Anxiety: Fourteen Views from the East, exhibition catalogue (Madrid: La Fábrica, 2012), 73.

6. Hélèn Cixous, ‘La—The (Feminine)’, ed., Susan Sellers, The Hélèn Cixous Reader (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1994), 59.

7. Eugenia Raskopoulos, as quoted in Victoria Lynn, ‘Eugenia Raskopoulos’, V1DE0 L0G1C, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), 52.

8. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 138, 144, 191.

9. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (Middlesex: Penguin, 1990), 73.

10. Marks, Touch, 2–3.

11. Marks, Touch, 3.

12. George Alexander, ‘Re-Departing’, Eugenia Raskopoulos, ed. Nicholas Tsoutas, n.p.

13. Ibid.

14. Marks, Touch, 7–12.

15. See especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The intertwining—The chiasm’ in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 133–4.

16. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), passim.

17. Eva Cantarella, ‘Dangling Virgins: Myth, Ritual, and the Place of Women in Ancient Greece’, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 57.

18. Cantarella, ‘Dangling Virgins’, 60, 64.

19. Ibid., 63.

20. For female suicide in the ancient world see Anton J. L. Van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

21. Elise P. Garrison, ‘Suicide in Classical Mythology: An Essay’, lists the reasons that Greek women committed suicide. She notes that Aspalis, who is represented in Raskopoulos’ series, hanged herself to avoid being raped and that this was common in ancient Greece. See http://www.stoa.org/diotima/essays/garrison_essay.shtml (accessed January 5, 2015).

22. Aitia denotes a reason or cause that contributes to how things are and have always been—a kind of fate. Under the laws and religions of the Ancient Greek patriarchy, a woman's fate is to sacrifice herself.

23. Cantarella states: ‘female suicides by hanging are aitia, that is, they explain religious rites, the structure of which is uniform throughout the Greek territory’. See Cantarella, ‘Dangling Virgins’, 58.

24. Jacqueline Millner says that the image of the girl on the swing was overlaid by an image of a wax tablet that was inscribed with the names of women from Greek mythology/history. See Jacqueline Millner, ‘Tongue Trace’, Eugenia Raskopoulos, n.p.

25. John 1:1 and 1:14, see http://biblehub.com/john/1-1.htm (accessed January 8. 2015).

26. John Conomos, ‘Turn on the Tongue’, Eugenia Raskopoulos, n.p.

27. Trinh Minh-ha, as quoted in Russell Ferguson, Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 329–30.

28. ‘As Time Goes By’, music and lyrics by Herman Hupfeld, copyright 1931, Warner Brothers, Music Corporation, ASCAP.

29. Tsoutas, Eugenia Raskopoulos, n.p.

30. For an extended analysis of these issues, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

31. Sigmund Freud, ‘General Theory of Neurosis’ (1917), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 16, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton & Company, 1962), 294–5.

32. Alan Sheridan, ‘Translator's Note’, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques Lacan, trans., Alan Sheridan (Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), 280.

33. Sheridan, ‘Translator's Note’, 280. For a compelling analysis of Roland Barthes’ theory of photography in relation to Lacan's Real, see Margaret Iversen, ‘What is a Photograph?’, Art History 17, no. 3 (1994): 450–64.

34. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 191–210.

35. Millner, ‘Tongue Trace’, n.p.

36. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), 91 (Barthes’ emphasis).

37. See especially ‘Tuché and Automaton’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 53–64.

38. Margaret Iversen, ‘What is a Photograph?’, 452.

39. Ibid.

40. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990).