The head does it all. While other body-parts have their separate functions as instruments, the head is an all-purpose tool. The head's universality: Object-oriented media magician Anna Vasof celebrates it, and at the same time questions its primacy.
In 24 ten-second-shots, her video Amazon Woman demonstrates what a head – always Vasof's – can do: The nose can be a socket; the ear can be the grip part of a steering-wheel. Teeth can be pliers to extract nails; the eyes punctuate processes by blinking; the mouth sucks. This is staged by way of exchanges based in equivalence and reciprocity: All the vignettes – most of them showing repetitive routines – have Vasof's head isolated, miniaturized and displaced; it serves as an object or tool in the hands of a body which has this very object or tool in place of a head. In this way, the woman with the socket-head uses Vasof's head as a socket, Mrs. vacuum-cleaner-head vacuum-cleans with it, and Mrs. ice-cream-head has her strawberry-mango cheek licked by Vasof's head on an ice-cream cone. Smart-phone woman wipes the head repeatedly, teabag woman lifts and lowers it stoically.
AWhen the head's work – eg, logics – becomes embodied and things become cerebral, humor emerges. Vasof makes you think ahead – as well as think back, remembering other heads, brutally displaced and manipulated in size: Méliès, Kienholz, Dada-style montages, horror cinema. Vasof's video, however, merges the tragic with slapstick in displaying life (en)during lockdown. This is intimated by the baffling displacements, and also by layers of meaning in the title: Amazon Woman is the door bell-headed delivery worker who pushes a Vasof-headed bell button in the first shot. She is an online shopper who lives all by herself with her lifestyle and kitchen tools. Ultimately, revolver-head shows us the Amazon as body-modified warrior with a headband. Mysteriously, it all ends with a door-sign showing a couple and the well-known logo of a super-glue: yet another all-purpose tool. (Drehli Robnik)
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