Marx: The Video (1990)

Kipnis describes this tape as "an appropriation of the aesthetics of both late capitalism and early Soviet cinema—MTV meets Eisenstein—reconstructing Karl Marx for the video age.” She presents a postmodern lecture delivered by a chorus of drag queens on the unexpected corelations between Marx’s theories and the carbuncles that plagued the body of the rotund thinker for over thirty years. Marx’s erupting, diseased body is juxtaposed with the “body politic", and posited as a symbol of contemporary society proceeding the failed revolutions of the late 1960s. Seeking a parallel between the body of the state and women’s bodies, Kipnis brings to light the manner in which women’s bodies have been used as the site of displacement for social and political anxiety, with the state of the nation currently reflected in a female body plagued by anorexia and bulimia, traversed by pornography, manners, and regulations on abortion. From Video Data Bank.

Laura KipnisDirector