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| Ann Hamilton - face-to-face |
I’m late on my posting! For that I
apologize. It’s a busy time of year – finals are well underway, I’m one term
paper down with another due in less than a week. What better way to
procrastinate than to look at some great liquidy art, hmm?
During our
amazing ‘Team Liquid Intelligence’ field trip to visit with Fiona Annis a few
weeks ago to learn about her use of the 19th century wet-plate
collodion technique, at one point we found ourselves talking about
non-traditional pinhole cameras, and I was reminded of a photographic project
by Ann Hamilton. Hamilton is an American-born artist who is well known for her
highly complex installations that frequently explore issues of language and
memory as they interact with the human body (her very well-known installation tropos, which included a room full of
horse hair, has always been a particular favourite of mine). Starting in 2001,
Hamilton has been working on a project called Face to Face, wherein she uses her own mouth as a pinhole camera.
The resulting images of faces and landscapes – again, I’m digressing from
video, but I’ll get to that in a moment, and these pictures are just too great
not to pass up! – are strangely distorted, the curvature of her lips forming a
shape that almost resembles an eye.
Like the
processes we observed at Annis’ studio – where images were printed onto
aluminum sheets after being coated with a thin layer of the wet-plate collodion
mixture – Hamilton’s Face to Face project
is another liquidy format of photography. In a sense, we could consider her
project as a fundamentally synesthetic one. Hamilton’s website describes the
project as “making the orifice of language into the orifice of sight.” The
orifices, even the gestures associated with speech and language (opening,
closing the mouth) instead work to generate images. The ways in which we
sensorially negotiate with the world become confused and Hamilton, in a way, is
able to indicate how sensorial processes are never as firmly delineated as we
would like them to be. The way we register engagements between people – between
Hamilton and the subjects of her photographs – becomes complicated as well.
What could otherwise be understood as a meaningful gaze between two bodies
(between photographer and photographed, or two subjects ‘making eye contact’ as
a standard form of social interaction) becomes distorted when our trace for
seeing is relocated into another part of the body. What does it mean to see
with your mouth, anyway?
The project also
toys with the boundaries of the body in a really interesting way. I find the
idea that a photograph could generate in the warm, wet space of someone’s mouth
to be both a beautiful and bizarre concept. The mouth as a space is a strangely
liminal place to begin with, halfway between inside and outside, it acts as the
frontier to our bodies and the gateway for a haphazard assortment of social and
biological necessities (many of which, of course, overlap in distinct and
interesting ways), from speech to nourishment to sex to breathing. Allowing the
mouth to communicate in an unusual way, to create a trace of its own
experience/perspectives (if you could call them that, I’m not sure), works to
decenter the body, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside and
allowing the space that exists between them to become productive in its own
right.
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| Ann Hamilton with her pinhole camera |
Or
perhaps, this work is less about subverting bodily functions than exaggerating
what they already achieve. Our flesh is already something like an interface
with which we negotiate with the wide variety of physical and sensorial data
that surrounds us. By registering the traces of this engagement (of Hamilton’s
face-to-face interactions with her subjects) the Face to Face project is capturing and exaggerating the modes
through which our bodies engage with space (and other bodies) on a daily basis.
When looking at her photographs, I’m reminded of another mouth-related piece of
video work that similarly renders excessive the communicational capacities of
that orifice.
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| Vito Acconci - Open Book |
Vito
Acconci’s Open Book (1974) is both
compelling and humorous, and repulsive and disconcerting. As his gaping mouth
slurs through a series of pleading phrases – “I'll accept you, I
won't shut down, I won't shut you out.... I’m open to you, I'm open to everything....
This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside....” – his words
distort, his tongue rolls around awkwardly, and we can hear the saliva welling
up in his mouth. Rendering the communicational capacities of the body excessive
and strange, I think there’s an odd similarity between Acconci’s video and
Hamilton’s photographs. Both consider how the mouth (and consequently, the
body) record and distort information, and the ways in which these modes of communication
are always fundamentally embodied. Both projects imagine the borders of the
body as a fluid interface that we use to both assert ourselves in the
surrounding space, but which also leaves our bodies open and vulnerable to that
space pressing back, leaving its
imprints on us in turn – like ghostly, distorted images nestled in Hamilton’s
mouth.
Ann Hamilton’s
website, info for Face to Face
Ann Hamilton on art21
Vito Acconci – Open Book on Youtube
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