Two Faces

In her oft-cited essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Rosalind Krauss says, “self-encapsulation—taking the body or psyche as its own surround—is everywhere to be found in the corpus of video art” (October 1, Spring 1976). This certainly applies to this early work of Hermine Freed. Utilizing a split and reversed screen, Freed faces herself, caressing and kissing her doubled image. Without narration, the tape shows Freed suspended between two images, existing as a doubled person. In light of feminist discourse on women’s alienation from themselves in a male-dominated culture and the co-option of women’s images by advertising and the media, this tape reads as Freed’s attempt to contact her self-image directly—to, in effect, claim her image.

This title is also available on I Say I Am: Program 2.