Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art New York

PERFORMATIVITY IN THE WORK OF FEMALE JAPANESE ARTISTS

Yoko Hasegawa

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo　chief curator

Idemitsu, who also used video and monitors to create her narratives, took a less metaphorical approach, reconciling her roles as mother, wife, and artist using a kind of al1egorical horror, A video monitor appears in many of her works, a monitor within a monitor representing a deep psyche or alternate self: the acting is mechanical and amateurish, based on archetypal characters and clearly meant to be symbolic．The works thus take the form of what might be called a “horror/home drama,” a Jungian analysis of repressed Japanese housewives and the various complexes and conflicts they experience with their homes, husbands, and children (no,9), Idemitsu's house- wives are domestic prisoners who snatch normalcy from the household through their strange and obsessive day-to-day activities. Idemitsu's distinctiveness lies in the way she keeps one foot in the reality from which many female artists have fled and turns it into popular yet critical works.

Another Day of a Housewife　1977 － 78．Video Color sound，18min