Jenny Marketou

Jenny Marketou was born in Athens, Greece in 1954. Marketou received a Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute and is now teaching Photography and Interdisciplinary Studio Art at the Cooper Union School of Art and Science in New York City. Based in Brooklyn, Marketou works with video installations, Internet, performance, photography, and public dialogue. There is no question that Marketou takes interest in the technology available to artists today. Marketou says “although my projects are often discussed in relation to technology and surveillance, I incorporate these concepts along with playfulness, humor, and public participation in order to humanize these with other proliferating issues of social space which I consider imperative issues within our culture” (jennymarketou.com).
When researching Marketou’s work, I found the aspect of public participation most intriguing. Before the surge in technology, the public visited museums, walking through rooms and observing paintings, sculptures, and other works of art created through non-digital means. Now, however, the public is able to actually be a part of the work of art. To Marketou “reality and the flow of everyday life is more provocative then some “art” that we see today” (jennymarketou.com). In “99 Red Balloons: Be Careful Who Sees You When You Dream,” a work that we talked about at the beginning of the semester, 18 red helium weather balloons are anchored to the ground with red MOGU bean bags. Inside of the balloons are small wireless surveillance video cameras so, as people make their way through the exhibit, they are broadcast live on four video screens set up on the floor of the gallery. Marketou portrays the somewhat creepy idea of surveillance in a playful manner. Until this class, I had never heard of Marketou’s work. I can picture myself visiting this gallery and, without knowing anything about the exhibit, putting my face right up to one of the balloons, looking to see if there was anything inside of them and not knowing that someone was probably watching me do this on one of the small screens. Often times we do not know we are on surveillance cameras and if we later find out that we are being watched it sort of evokes an uneasy feeling. But, such is the case in social spaces.
From 1996 until 2001, Marketou created networked environments through the process of collective participation and events with “Translocal: Camp in My Tent,” an ongoing international and live project. In this time, Marketou set up a tent in public spaces within different cities. She videotaped her experiences in different cities as people approached the tent and received a lot of different reactions based on the city and culture. In NYC park police made her take it down immediately, while Palestine people saw her, a single woman setting up a tent, as a prostitute, creating a long line of male spectators. After setting up camp in numerous cities, Marketou set up the tent in museums and invited visitors to watch monitors one that displayed scenes from the interventions in the cities and one that showed images from surveillance camera placed outside of the museum. Once again, making the public part of the exhibit.
Marketou says that “one of [her] main interests as an artist is to make art that does not necessarily fall within traditional and institutionalized ways of working” (Brown 77), and I think that she does a great job. Her use of video is extremely thought provoking; taking us on a voyage through the world that surrounds us and causing us to think about our place in that world.