Friederike Pezold

close-ups of specific areas of the body, thereby rendering them almost abstract figures. The abstract impact of these body fragments becomes strongly determined by the way Pezold works with light contrasts in black and white and in rhythm. This effect is enforced by applying color—white for the skin and black for the eyelids, mouth and nipples, or by wearing black panties and black stockings. This sort of graphic addition intensifies the pictorial sensuality of these images—“more erotic in their disguise than the parts simulated would be in reality,” writes Lucy Lippard.² Pezold named individual images or video sections with reference to the anatomic parts they depicted, e.g. “Breast Piece,” “View Between the Legs,” “Navel Piece,” or “Eye Work.” In a further step, she developed the concept for the video sculpture “The Black and White Goddess,” or “The First Electronic Goddess of the World” (1975) consisting of five stacked video monitors, each of which showed a part of her body from top to bottom—from the face to the arms, breasts, belly and pubic region (or buttocks in another version), and the legs. Due to the monitor housing and screen shapes as well as to the differing scales of the individual body images in relation to the implied overall body, the figure resembles an archaic, totem-like sculpture. In 1977, Pezold created her “Radio Free Utopia” for which she attached a recording device and monitor to her own body in order to establish a technological mirror. She thus, viewed in terms of classic art-historical means, became painter and model at once. Pezold henceforth realized several videos and experimental films such as “Toilet” in 1979, which shows her putting on clothes in an exuberant manner. The later film “Canale Grande” (1983) shows the reactions of her environment to her and her video camera. And in 1995, Pezold founded her own “First Viennese Museum for Video and Body Art. S.E./W.S.