TERESA MARGOLLES / PLANCHA (2010)

Plancha at DHC/ART

One post in and I’m already deviating from my intended structure! Oh well. This post is a bit more tangential, actually, but I’m hoping it’ll give a bit more background as to how/why I’ve come to Prof. Hunter’s “Liquid Intelligence” research project and it acts as an avenue for me to reconsider some of my earlier writing. One of my initial attempts to theorize the ‘body as liquid’ came from a paper I wrote last semester on an installation by a Mexican artist named Teresa Margolles entitled Plancha – which was on display at Montreal’s DHC/ART last winter. The installation consisted of a series of heated steel plates which extended across the gallery floor, and Margolles had rigged a tube across the ceiling which sent single drops of clear water down to hit the plank and evaporate into the gallery air. After reading the accompanying wall text, it became apparent that Margolles sourced the water from a morgue in Mexico City where it was used to clean the bodies of the anonymous/unclaimed dead after autopsy. I recently read Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence for a course, and it struck me how helpful her writing was for allowing me to reconsider my (conflicted) thoughts on Margolles work. Through Precarious Life, I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation for how ‘liquid bodies’ can create new intersubjective relationships between disparate people. So I’ve written up some of my thoughts here! 

            In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the politics through which legitimized mourning becomes unevenly divided across different lives and different deaths, ultimately asserting that some deaths attain status as publicly grievable over others: “we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more valuable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others.” (30) Plancha renders this division of value palpable in the gallery air: the traces of Mexico’s dead – rendered anonymous and unclaimed through uneven systems of power and privilege – linger in the air and are taken into my lungs, into my very body, in the gallery space. In a quite deliberate, jarring manner, her installation calls into question how the deaths of some are simply absorbed back into the status quo – calling the gallery visitors to directly attend to the ephemeral (or even invisible) traces left behind by a necropolitical regime. By taking the traces of the anonymous dead into my body, a twofold form of violence occurs: on the one hand, they infiltrate my boundaries, disrupting my sense of coherence/cleanliness, yet conversely, by breathing them in I assist in their further dispersal/dissolution, perhaps their continued invisibility. In Precarious Life, Butler is arguing for a redistribution of grievability, a reconsideration of intersubjective relations that emphasizes vulnerability and interdependence over hierarchies of value: “In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt” (29). In a beautifully (or perhaps frighteningly) simple gesture, Plancha encapsulates these complex layers of intersectional vulnerability: by entering the gallery space and participating within its atmosphere (whether or not the water is ‘actually’ sourced from where Margolles claims, which is a whole other issue I’ve considered at length) visitors become aware of their own corporeal vulnerability and fundamental interdependence with others who – due to systematic forms of violence and oppression – are no longer able to speak for themselves. Standing in the gallery space, I take that violence into my body, creating an awareness of complicity and intersecting forms of interdependence that allows me to take responsibility for my own position of privilege. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other,” (23) Butler writes: my boundaries are undone by the traces of the dead in the air, just as I participate in their undoing by taking them into my lungs.

Margolles’ ambivalence in relation to this still unnerves me. Her work is amazingly effective in calling forth how this interdependence functions on a personal, bodily level – and causes me to consider how the air I breathe implicates me as a citizen of Montreal, of Canada, as a participant within the systems of power that exist here – yet is this at the expense of enacting more violence upon those who have already experienced enough suffering – the doubled violence of death and subsequent social invisibility? Is Margolles participating in what Butler has named  “the derealization of the ‘Other’” (33)? As they disperse into the air, are the bodies in Plancha rendered invisible twice over, rendered unreal and left anonymous? Perhaps it is the extremely loaded nature of her (presumed) material that prompts me to wish for something more, to ask for a treatment of the traces of the anonymous dead that more directly differs from the cold, medicalized, unsympathetic system that they are already subsumed within. Even as I write that, I wonder how feasible such a demand could be/what such an installation could look like – at the end of the day I don’t think it would be as effective in illustrating these intersecting forms of vulnerability and interdependence that Butler discusses. All in all, Margolles’ work manages to say a lot with a surprisingly sparse visual vocabulary, and Butler’s Precarious Life has assisted me immensely in sorting through many of the ambiguous, conflicting, and disarming implications of her installation. 

Info on the exhibit that Plancha was included in - it was a great show! http://www.dhc-art.org/en/exhibitions/chronicles-of-a-disappearance 

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN / FUSES (1965)

          

      For me, Carolee Schneemann’s 16mm film Fuses (1964-1967) is the ideal place to begin this project. It’s a remarkably complex film around which many of my ideas of liquidy bodies have crystallized. It acted as the introductory example of work to the Jonathan Katz lecture I discussed in the last post, and I was recently lucky enough to see a remastered version of the film at a screening of Erotic Experimental Films of the 60s at the Centre Segal, curated by one of McGill’s own English professors, Ara Osterwell. In an uncharacteristically delineated manner, I’d like to break down the different ways that “liquidy intelligences” operate in this film. It’s not a structure I intend to follow with every post, but since the watery influences are so multilayered in Fuses, I believe it will be a good exercise to get my juices flowing, so to speak (pardon the pun, and expect plenty more to come…) 

1.    Fluid Sexual Bodies

Fuses depicts Schneemann having sex in the afternoon with her then partner, the composer James Tenney, as observed by their cat, Kitch. The content is disjointed, without a deliberate narrative, and their bodies collapse and flow into each other in a series of overlaid images. As Katz indicated, this frenetic treatment of filmic content was an effort to merge male and female genitalia together, to dissolve the distinctions between separate bodies during the act of heterosexual intercourse. There is something beautifully intimate about this film – self-shot by Schneemann, the only participants in the entire endeavour are those depicted on screen: Schneemann, her lover, her cat. A typical subject/object binarism does not apply here: Schneemann is at once filmmaker and filmed body, and nor is their sexual relationship about the objectification of one body for the pleasure of another: as Schneemann has written about the project on her own website:

I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt-- the intimacy of the lovemaking... And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense-- as one feels during lovemaking... It is different from any pornographic work that you've ever seen-- that's why people are still looking at it! And there's no objectification or fetishization of the woman.

2.    Flowing Vision

Which brings me to my next point: Fuses supports a mode of vision that is fundamentally decentered and affectively charged. If typical heterosexual pornography is based upon the clear visualization of sex; a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing the (typically penetrative) act in its entirety, Schneemann’s deliberately obscured and feverish images seem to imply the bodily experience of sexual desire over a clear/logical/’dry’ visual representation of its actions. This fluid form of seeing could reflect what Laura U. Marks (in her amazing book The Skin of the Film, which I will be undoubtedly referring to throughout this project) has imagined as a “haptic” mode of visuality: a multi-sensory – almost synesthetic – form of seeing developed by experimental film and video artists, which collapses the distance between viewer and viewed, allowing the eye to graze across the screen like a caress:

Haptic images are erotic in that they construct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image. The viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the image leaves. By interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure and ground comingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of separatedness from the image – not to know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it. (The Skin of the Film, 183).

If a typically optical (or dry/static/mechanical, to borrow from Jeff Wall’s dichotomy) mode of seeing is one that maintains a separation between viewer and viewed, Schneemann’s radically fluid form of vision could threaten to engulf the viewer entirely, problematizing our seemingly coherent and concrete position as separate from that which we gaze upon. What could it mean, as a viewer, to be seduced/dissolved/subsumed into Schneemann’s Fuses? Could a complete dissolution ever occur, or does that remain a fantasy, a fleeting sensation? 

3.    The Liquid Capacities of Film

Lastly, in Fuses Schneemann has exerted a liquidy influence over the materiality of the film itself. Having repeatedly burnt, scratched, collaged, and layered abstract impressions and colours across the celluloid, Schneemann’s film seems to crackle, ooze, and undulate across the screen. Her film is by no means a static medium – its liquidy, entropic degradation is emphasized as a deliberate feature of Schneemann’s endeavour. It strikes me that her film treatment is all too appropriate for her subject matter: both the desire/intimacy she depicts and the damaged film she employs are equally fragile and frenzied, creating rich, embodied, yet precarious forms of engagement that seem to collapse sensory experiences typically understood as separate into a complex mass of feeling: I see the overlaid images/feel the film’s scratched textures/smell its burnt chemical processes, just as I see Schneemann and Tenney’s intertwined bodies/feel their caresses/hear their whispers and moans. The links I’m providing here don’t really do it justice, but watching Fuses in its entirety is a remarkably decentering, intimate, and alluring experience. A bit racy – but the perfect place to start my project!

Links:

Fuses on Ubuweb –

http://www.ubu.com/film/schneeman_fuses.html

 Fuses on Youtube – I’m including this shorter clip as well because the quality is significantly better than the Ubuweb version – although it has some obnoxious music added, feel free to mute it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltARZTPbV4

Discussion of Fuses on Schneemann’s own website:

http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/fuses.html

Info on that screening I went to at the Centre Segal –

http://www.segalcentre.org/whats-on/upcoming-events/cinema/crossover/erotic-experimental-cinema-of-the-sixties/

 

THE LIQUID BODIES PROJECT

 

The Idea

            In the essay that acts as the centerpiece to this project, Jeff Wall imagined the liquid, alchemical histories of photography – of uncontrollable chemistries, of liquids bleaching, dissolving, seeping – as exerting an influence (or ‘intelligence’) over the dry, mechanical, and optical modes that dominate how photographic knowledge-building is understood. “Photography and Liquid Intelligence” concludes with a reference to the malevolent oceanic planet in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris: as the astronaut-researchers encounter materializations of their long-dead loved ones, Wall wonders how “liquids study us, even from a great distance” (93). However, I believe that Wall’s choice in Solaris to exemplify the ‘liquid intelligence’ thematic can be pushed further. As the materialization of oceanic forces, Hari’s body is both liquid and solid, both coherent and radically decentered: her subjectivity and memories are beyond her control, and with each wound and self-imposed death, her flesh spontaneously regenerates. Hari’s fluid corporeality is central to the film’s narrative; she flows in and out of Kelvin’s grasp and her liquidy pull compels him to turn his back on planet Earth.  

            Liquid intelligences have also exerted their influence upon body-based artistic practices, feminist/queer/non-normative politics, and modes of identity formation over the last sixty years. In a recent lecture at Concordia University entitled “Art, Sex, and the 1960s: Body Politics,” Jonathan Katz discussed the “polymorphous perversity” of artistic practices of the Sexual Revolution (discussing artists including Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, and Lygia Clark) in order to build a body politic based in commonality over difference: a radical (deliberately utopian) mutuality that bridges bodies together instead of dividing them apart. For Katz, and the artists he discusses, this is a liquefied body; it seeps, flows, oozes, and altogether dissolves the social categories that demarcate difference. Even for Sigmund Freud, visions of the ‘liquid’ are intimately related to a sense of corporeal limitlessness: the pre-Oedipal child’s “oceanic feelings” are manifest in a stage prior to the demarcation of individual bodily limits, when bodily self-awareness is radically infinite and unbounded (Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, 723-725). Elizabeth Grosz has considered the gendered implications inherent within the notion of a “liquid body.” In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Grosz outlined how liquidity has become a central feature in the ontological status of women:

Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as a formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment – not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? (203)

Grosz’s assertion allows her to consider how certain bodily flows accrue social importance or taboo, and how the corporeal specificities of women’s bodies alter the ways in which social gender relations are built. Overall, it remains clear that despite the apparent coherence of bodies, their liquidy influences continue to seep into our collective imaginations. Therefore, what happens when artists surrender – like Kelvin releasing himself into Hari’s undertow – to these watery impulses? 

The Project

            With this project I intend to build a research archive that situates the ‘liquid intelligence’ thematic within performance, film, and video art produced during the last sixty years. By focusing on performative, body-oriented art production, I hope to consider how notions of ‘liquidity’ and ‘fluidity’ are essential to understanding how theories of gender, sexuality, and identity formation have developed across the last half-century. Using this blog format, once a week I will create a post on a chosen film or video work, including title and artist information, image stills, a working link or archive location information (where applicable), and a concise text that discusses how the video could be situated within the project theme. I will also use tags to organize each post under relevant sub-themes, while connecting each work to other pertinent articles, reviews, and critical theories. I hope to source most of the work through a variety of online databases (ubuweb, Youtube) while also making trips to physical archives and libraries within Montreal and Toronto (Vtape, le Cinémathèque québécoise, the McGill University library, and perhaps the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Artexte). Ultimately I hope to build a comprehensive (yet by no means exhaustive) archive that not only acts as a helpful research tool for my own academic interests, but also provides resources for others who wish to explore the ‘liquid intelligence’ thematic further while creating interdisciplinary connections across a variety of contemporary, body-based artistic practices. After accumulating a wide variety of video and film works, I hope to organize a screening of select titles in late Spring 2013. 

The Author

            I’m Daniella, an MA Candidate in Art History at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. My broad research interests include contemporary art, feminist and queer politics, diaspora studies, affect theory, embodiment, and phenomenology. Admittedly, studying film and video is somewhat new to me – my background is more aligned with performance, installation, and craft-based work – but it’s an avenue I’ve been really looking forward to exploring for some time. This blog archive is situated alongside Dr. Matthew Hunter’s broader ‘Liquid Intelligence’ research project at McGill University.