THE AXIS OF EVIL
ARCO magazine nº 33. Pages 54 and 55.
One of the biggest surprises at the latest edition of ARCO was discovering the video by Cristina Lucas (Jaén, Spain, 1973) El eje del mal (The Axis of Evil). In the video, a 3-minute piece using 3-D animation techniques, a mother gets her daughter to help her to clean the bathroom while they listen to a radio news report on the invasion of Iraq. "Resistance and rebellion: invading troops face guerrilla warfare", says the Spanish version, and "no evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction has been found", says the English version. The daughter wants to go out and play with her friends, and really does not understand the obsession with household hygiene that seems natural to her mother, and in which the latter intends to involve her, originating a family conflict. The daughter thinks that the bathroom is already clean, "no evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction has been found", and the mother, like the invading troops, faces "resistance and rebellion". However, confronted with her mother's insistence and the threat of punishment -"if you get me mad you won't go out"- the daughter finally succumbs to the maternal orders (maternal-familiar authority discourse). When she has accepted her mother's demands and is fully given over to the task of "eliminating bad germs, which although you can't see them are very dangerous", she discovers that this activity can become a sadistic game to be enjoyed, whilst experiencing the feeling that unquestioningly sharing the dominant ideology gives her a safer place in the world (acceptance from her mother and the end of repression/threat of punishment). Once family order has been restored, the mother changes the radio station, and now a song is heard which harks back to the idea of a happy, well-ordered world that the USA propagated with such relish back in the 1950s and 60s through its cinema, television, music, and so on… An idea that was expressed through a social model that designated women's roles as spouses and housewives as an essential requisite in order for them to achieve happiness.
Thus, the video's plot falls into place, creating a parallel between the history of the warrior discourse broadcast over the radio, and the obsession with household tasks that has traditionally been imposed on women according to the logic of a division of labour along gender lines which involved the exploitation of women. The mother's reasoning evokes the advertisements for cleaning products aimed at housewives, which often used bellicose rhetoric comparing dirt with the enemy. In reality, these kinds of messages aim to make second nature both the hysteria that drives peoples to war (or to xenophobic or racist behaviour) and the compulsion for cleanliness attributed to certain feminine stereotypes.
The video is a contemporary slice-of-life scene, but achieves it effect from a feminist/Neo-Marxist perspective, thus substantiating its ideological structure to such an extent that, in reality, ideology becomes the star of the piece.
On the one hand, the video makes manifest the intricate relationship between the repressive apparatus of the state and its ideological apparatus. Although Marxist theory describes the state as the owner of the repressive apparatus (army, police, and whatnot), Louis Althusser (1971) took his Marxist analysis even further, drawing a more reliable map of how ideology works in contemporary states. Identifying and classifying the ideological apparatus of the state (IAS) into various groups, he shows the variety of strategies that power develops to consolidate itself; but above all, his map indicates that these varied strategies complement each other to reach the same end. From Althusser's IAS list, two, the IAS of information (press, radio, television, etc.) and the cultural IAS (literature, arts, sports, etc.), are present or implicit in Cristina Lucas's piece, together with a vision of the state as a repressive apparatus. Moreover, Cristina has chosen 3-D animation, simplifying the story and stripping it down to the point of commenting on the ideological nature of any discourse. According to Althusser, there is no innocent discourse; moreover, there is no discourse, subject, or social group without an ideology, since it is through these three elements that ideology is configured and developed. This idea is present in Lucas's video, as it is in a great deal of contemporary art, which questions and analyses art as a system of representation with political responsibilities.
On the other hand, the piece confronts ideas of the public and the private, the macro and the micro, because, although they are not the same thing, both discourses are presented in the video as integral parts of the same whole, the same dominant ideology. Thus, while it shows the personal experiences of a daughter and her mother, in reality these are issues of a social nature, because "the personal is political". We can even glimpse how the category of woman is an ideological category -"women aren't born, but made"- because the daughter has to learn how to be a woman in the terms that her mother, representing the dominant ideology, imposes on her.
El eje del mal deals with the complicated public and private infrastructure sustaining the patriarchy, and by stopping to point out that this infrastructure depends on the same ideological axis, it brings household issues to the fore. In this sense, it invites us to reflect on the true importance of petty everyday issues, which we accept daily as insignificant, only because we tend not to notice their profound ideological depths.
Xabier Arakistain. Independent curator.
