전 지구적 여성 노동과 상품-이미지의 연금술 -미카 로텐버그의 <스퀴즈>를 중심으로-

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the relationship between commodity-image and labor with a female body as a node in Squeeze (2010) made by Mika Rottenberg. Rottenberg based in New York, has explored a female body creating the value in her previous videos. All of her videos including the latest work, Squeeze, shares common theme. It is the question how the value is produced in the capitalist system of the 21st century or more specifically how female image is created in the mode of production of the contemporary economic system. Squeeze recursively asks the same question to the visual art including her own works as well. In order to answer the question, Rottenberg has constructed several miniature factories exposing the process that the value of a product including visual image has been generated in every video work. Each factory in each work has different form, structure and movement. According to Rottenberg, the way capturing a movement and rhythm of each factory has an analogical relation with a cinematic ability that can externalize the internal perception. Cinema can uniquely visualize and articulate internal thoughts and affects on its surface, that is, screen. In order to produce excess value and maximize profits, today’s capitalism prefers immaterial labor to material one, and attempts to transform the non-productive into the productive. We call this kind of capitalism as cognitive or mental capitalism. In this system, the economy of spectacle in the virtual might not be distinguished from a general economy in reality. The economy of image, of course, is related with the matter of desire. The more desirable the image becomes, the more values it can produce. Spectacle of female body on screen has been an articulation of desirability and image value. In the logic, she deals female body image and her labor as a crucial key to reach the core of the mode of capitalist production in the 21st century. This paper especially examines the matter of female body image and labor in Squeeze in terms of the concept of the fetish and the abject.