The history of presenting the body in avant-garde cinema, from Man Ray's
Le Retour de la Raison (1923) to Mano Destra and the films of Birgit Hein,
is essentially the history of a discourse on the body's objectification.
It covers the perception of the body as an art object; the vision of the
body as meat; and the image of the body conceived as a tool of sexual pleasure.
Situated between emotional and symbolic discourse, the body releases images
of joy and transgression or of shame, repulsion and terror, and evokes
visions of ecstasy, holiness, epiphany and revelation. 4) Only rarely is
the body perceived as the foundation of a subjective identity (albeit still
dependent primarily on the soul or the psyche).
The images of the body in avant-garde cinema break down and deconstruct
the representation conventions, violate numerous taboos, rebel against
imposed authorities and speak in defence of discriminated sexual minorities.
While creating new, radical forms of expression and penetrating unknown
dimensions of carnality, both the avant-garde film and photography (e,g.
that of Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano) were nevertheless unable
to undermine the domination of the viewer's eye. They could not turn back
his gaze and provide him with a direct (as opposed to symbolic) experience
of being the object of somebody's observation and activity. Very effective
in their deconstruction of the rules of presenting the body, they were
not equally effective demolishing the structure of the ways it is viewed
- the structure of vision itself. Thus, they unintentionally preserved
the otherwise problematized dichotomy of the subject and object of perception.
They could only multiply images expressing specific emotions and evoking
desired meanings in the hope that the viewer's attention could be drawn
not only to the various aspects of carnality, but also to the problems
of vision.
3
These limitations of film (and photography), inherited by video
art, were probably the reason why Lynn Hershman, cosistently taking up
in her work the question of the viewed body syndrome, had very early -
at the end of the 70's - decided to add the interactive installation to
the employed means of medial expression. Of course, she did not abandon
the old techniques: photography and video. Her photographs show figures
which don't exist at all (the Roberta series); figures collated from the
portraits of real persons (the Hero Sandwiches cycle); or, finally, a special
form of collage - female bodies combined with tools aiding vision or representation:
camera, screen or binoculars (the Phantom Limb Photographs series). The
focus of interest in each of these series is the problem of identity and
its dependence on the world of media and the perception standards. However,
Hershman's videos are also discourses on the real and virtual dimensions
of carnality and communication (Virtual Love), on desire and seduction
in media space (Desire Inc.), on feminism (Changing Worlds), on voyeurism
and violence (Cut Piece) and on truth and identity (Seeing is Believing;
Longshot). Her artistic videodiary, kept over several years, (Electronic
Diary) embraces all these problems and situates them within the personal
sphere of intimate affairs.
Both these media - photography and video - have enabled Hershman to
penetrate the representation spaces, to build ever new forms of deconstruction
and unite them in a symbolic way with the perception problem. They have
enabled her to develop a discourse on the subjugated body. They prepared
the factual base and the visual structures for the interactive works; those
which make it possible to implement fully the internal principle of her
art, her main intention. Ultimately, they are the works which deflect the
viewer's look and make him see himself looking, make him experience not
only his subjectivity but also his objectivity.
As I have already argued, the basic, fundamental arrangement in visual
arts is the confrontation of carnality and the look. The work is, revealing
itself only because it is perceived. From the observer's point of view
the internal (identified, as it were, with contents, sense, value, etc.)
is only another form of the external. The look, taking in the material,
physical dimension of the work, does not expose this internal essence -
the soul - of the work, but on the contrary - creates it, under the pretext
of searching for the hidden whole. This process of creation usually takes
place in secret, camouflaged by the interpretation ideology: a concept
proclaiming the program of discovering the work's truth either by reason
or intuition.
By assuming existence, and actually forming a deep internal foundation
for the work, the interpreter's look violates the work's integrity and
destroys its physical identity; for this foundation, the work's soul, is
a sign of the enslavement of its body. "The soul, real and immaterial,
is not a substance; it is an element uniting the effects of a certain kind
of power with the references of knowledge; a transmission-box, through
which the relations of power create the possibility of knowledge, and knowledge
extends and strengthens the effects of power". 5) The work, enslaved
by the interpreter, is subjugated to his imagination and closed (but only
to him; to others it remains open).
An example, both drastic and model, of an artistic project objectifying
a thus perceived look within the work's structure (as an element of the
work), and a demonstration of the destructive function of the look, devouring
the passive, gentle carnality of the work, is the interactive installation
Zerseher by Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lusebrink; the looked-at portrait is
destroyed under the viewer's gaze.
The works of Lynn Hershman build situations of reception which exceed
the limits of the internal art context. They are not concerned merely with
with the problems of art. Her works belong to a space where the questions
of aesthetic come into contact with social problems, and their message
relates them to the feminist discourse - although limiting Hershman's art
to feminism would be, as I have argued, an unsatisfactory simplification.
The artist makes use of the powerful connotations of the pair: look - body,
fundamental to her work, to create situations where the the look directed
at the work becomes the voyeur's gaze, infringing upon somebody's privacy,
intimacy and security.
The diverse implications are present both in Hershman's earliest works
(e.g. the Dante Hotel installation, 1972) and in the latest projects (e.g.
her recent Internet work, Venus Home Page) and include bodylessness, simulation,
virtual identity, manipulation, the relation between private and public
space. But the fullest expression and the most perfect (so far) union of
artistic feeling with means of realization were achieved by Lynn Hershman
in her interactive installations.
A specific property of Hershman's installations is their active character;
as I have already mentioned, her works, unlike the Sauter/Lusebrink installation,
turn back the viewers' gaze, letting them experience the state of being
both the subject and the object of observation. The viewer looking at a
created world simultaneously becomes the looked-at object. Voyeurism is
uncovered and the observer status - shaken and problematized. Hershman's
virtual figures demand that the audience behave in a way consistent with
their needs. Her works struggle for subjectivity; their construction presents
the viewers with an opportunity to realize the mechanisms governing their
social behaviour, and exposes the camouflaged rules by strength of which
they appropriate works of art.
In the installation Room of One's Own the camera follows the viewer's
eyeball movements and transforms them into a digital signal, enabling the
work to adjust itself to the viewers' perceptual behaviour. Thus it speaks
not only of asymmetrical relations between people (i.e. such that can be
desribed by the pairs: active - passive or active - reactive, like the
salient relation "looker - looked-at"), but also about interpretation
of art works and the rules of perception itself.
America's Finest places the viewers in the field of fire of a "weapon"
they are operating, thus giving equal status to people on both sides of
the view-finder and linking the media world with the world of death. The
viewer becomes both the aggressor and the victim, and the objectifying
look obtains extremely negative connotations.
Paranoid Mirror deconstructs the phenomenon of the mirror image; by
mixing the projected and reflected images it confuses the onlooker and
makes him doubt his understanding of the relation between images and the
reality they represent (whatever it might be), as well as between images
themselves. It raises the simulacrum problem and sets in motion a wide
context of cultural and artistic connotations of the reflexion phenomenon
(the artist herself points out van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait as her source
of inspiration).
All the above installations, together with two previous ones: Lorna
and Deep Contact, do not permit the viewer to retain his contemplative/voyeuristic
detachment from the perceived objects. They draw him into an interaction,
during and as a result of which he is forced to realize the nature of the
processes in which he takes part. Thus, as the distance from the work decreases,
there appears an awareness of the interdependence between the structure
of the object and the structure of its perception; the distance from the
latter increases, bringing about a detachment of the subject from himself
and his own behaviour.
The interactive installations of Lynn Hershman allow her to shift the
focus of her art from the communicated meanings to the process of communication.
But she does not remove these meanings from our scope of vision - to the
contrary, she has made them more profound as an object of the receving
experience, not of mere interpretation. The passive mode of meaning, characteristic
for video and photography, is transformed in her installations in a dynamic
mode of signification.
In her latest projects Lynn Hershman reaches for other interactive
media: the CDRom (its logic was already present in her installations) and
Internet. The latter medium, with its dominating role of communication,
opens before the artist new, fascinating vistas.
[ Introduction - back]