Beyond Face Value: Dismantling the Face in Contemporary Video Art

Abstract

This thesis calls the face into question, investigating how the face operates within larger socio-political frameworks. I argue that by placing an emphasis on the face, these frameworks uphold particular forms of power concerned with surveillance and gender. As a result, the face becomes a construct and thus, is a politics that assists in the assemblage of power. This thesis insists that it must be dismantled through rethinking the role of the face and consequently redefining the face as a mere surface exterior. I argue that this is possible through the medium of video art, whereby artists are able to reimagine a faceless system and moreover, conceptualise the radical freedom that is able to occur from this very system. I work to expose how these artists expose the face as socially constructed, articulating what it means to undo the face and more specifically, what this might look like. Attention is intently focussed on the mediated face, how it is performed and how this performance must be called into question. Thus, this research becomes concerned with methodology, advocating new ways of reading video art texts and therefore faces.