IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN
By Simon Sheikh
Published in Catalogue; Eyes Wide Open, Fotomuseum Diamanten, Copenhagen, 2000
You step into the room, and over in the corner you hear a woman's voice. Whispering and intimate, the voice describes another woman's movements and appearance. The voice, which constantly changes its position in the room, comes from speakers placed on the walls up to the corner, and thus territorializes this corner. Yet the corner is not just a corner, but an object, an architectonic installation that doubles the existing space. From over behind the wall come a number of gleams of light flashing in time with the speaking voice. The corner thus marks off its own zone, in terms of both sound and space. The work, which is by Ann Lislegaard and from 2000, bears the title Corner Piece - The Space Between Us, which points factually to the spatial installation and to the relationship between speaking and described subject on the soundtrack. At the same time, though, it is as if it is the wall that is speaking, the wall that describes a person who is in the space, surrounded and identified by the corner walls.
In the 1930s the French Surrealist thinker Roger Caillois wrote a later famous, even notorious essay entitled "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia", in which he describes a special state of mind where the space around the subject takes over its personality. 1 It is a state where the subject is depersonalized in its attempt to assimilate with the space, and can be compared to certain animal species' attempts to become one with the surroundings in order to protect themselves and/or fool their prey! But among human beings this state is known from the schizophrenic's understanding of the surrounding world, the syndrome called psychasthenia, where the subject is no longer able to distinguish itself from the surroundings. Instead one enters into what Caillois has famously called "dark space", where, unlike in light space, one cannot establish clear relations, perspectives and points of view, and where objects are not separate. On the contrary the darkness engulfs the subject and dissolves it. Although Caillois on the one hand sees psychasthenia as an expression of Freud's death instinct (although he does not directly mention Freud), that is a return to a stage before organic life, at the same time he sees the merging of space, identity and subject as something creative, almost positive, and as an important insight into art. 2
The relationship between space, identity and subjectivity is of course an important theme in the post-minimal installation art of our time, where space is explored, staged and identified, whether this is the space of art itself or other social, functional and symbolic spaces. And if the minimalists of the 1960s can be said to have produced art objects that attempted to shift the experience of art from something found inside the work into a more variable mode of experience in a receptive space between viewer, object and architecture, postmodern video installations cannot simply be seen as a consequence of this, but also as an inversion of the given spatial relationships. While the space of modernist art was typified by the white cube, a space with optimum visibility and an isolation of the objects from their surroundings that could make their interrelations appear autonomous, the video installation instead establishes an unclear, dark space in the most literal sense. Whereas in the white cube one had a space that illuminated the works, in video art one instead has a darkening of the space, which is by contrast illuminated by the works. With video art dark spaces are created which envelop the observer and obscure the spatial relations, or the psychasthenic spaces, one could say. It is thus characteristic that video installations to a great extent make use of the features of the cinema space, where one precisely had to renounce one's personal space and even subjectivity, and permit oneself to be seduced, sucked into the space and narration of the screen and the film, and identify with the people on the screen. But while in the cinema one is placed in a well ordered spatial framework, immobilized in the cinema seat, video installations instead employ a device from minimalism: one must move around - in this case in the dark - in an attempt to establish the spatial relations between oneself, the space, and the works.
This tendency is also characteristic of Ann Lislegaard's work, where various methods and elements are used to create an unstable space where the viewer must constantly relate his or her own body, perceptual apparatus and psychological intentionality to the spatial mise-en-scène and orientation - a situation that for example finds expression in the video installation Nothing But Space, 1997, which consists of a double projection placed on each side of a partition wall situated in the middle of the room as both a division of it and a distorted doubling of it. The actual video images consist of people who move soundlessly in an eternally changing, obscure, hallucinatory space where elements and people constantly merge. This is achieved by filming vibrating silver foil, which gives the image an unpredictable, surrealistic and organic character. In other words, we have a dark or obscure space at several levels, and the title seems deliberately underplayed, as if the artist's and the observer's visual experiences, both conscious and unconscious, are always telling us that the space is never just a space, but always already includes its own double, negation and phantasmagoria. 3
In almost all Ann Lislegaard's works, we can thus experience an exploration of the subjectivity of space and the space of subjectivity, all the way from her early works to the most recent sound installations and now the video/sound installation Eyes Wide Open. Lislegaard is interested in the way subject and space merge, as when the wall appears to speak with a woman's voice, or when a coloured spotlight slowly fades in and out, while the wordless ejaculations and moaning of a voice can be heard in the work !, 2001. Both Corner Piece - The Space Between Us and ! have an intimate and seductive character that invites the viewer to come closer, but which never allows the viewer into the space where the sounds and the images they evoke actually take place. They may seem intimate, yet they afford no opportunity to actually see, only to imagine. The images are evoked purely inside the observer's own head, own intimate apace, own fantasy. These installations share this element of the imagination of space and action with earlier works such as The Garden of Eden, 1994, where one was led around the exhibition by a hypnotic voice, and Liberty Bells, 1995, which consisted of drawings done under hypnosis, but also with the sound installation I-You-Later-There, 2000, where, as in Corner Piece - The Space Between Us, one again has the juxtaposition of object and sound: on the soundtrack one hears the voice and the movements across the floorboards of a woman who is describing the room in which she seems to be present, and the object represents a floor, apparently from the very same room.
Eyes Wide Open continues the idea of a descriptive soundtrack from I-You-Later-There and Corner Piece - The Space Between Us, and like the latter represents one woman's description of another - but in contrast to these two sound works, in Eyes Wide Open Lislegaard again uses a series of video projections, and thus ironically enough at the same time removes any spatial description from both the sounds and images. The only room or space is the real, semi-dark one in which one stands. The soundtrack consists of simple, factual descriptions of the actions of the woman in the images. These images are stills of a woman's face and close-ups of individual body parts - hands, torso etc., all with simple, almost minimalist positions and facial expressions. But the sounds and images are not synchronized, they alternate randomly in a computer-generated loop in which both image and sound sequences change. This splits up both any narrative and the represented woman herself, who appears as a woman without characteristics or qualities. But at the same time the work represents a way of approaching this anonymous woman; we know nothing about her qualities, but her movements are described to us in words and images.
Her portrait thus changes character: from primarily being about the woman herself to being about the description of our gaze at her. She becomes an effect of the description as much as its cause. The ostensibly descriptive language is thus made "performative", that is, it is opened up in terms of possible orientations and productions of desire. What does it mean to describe, and what does it mean to desire? And how does this desire take place through the verbalization and visual representation of the subject? Thus Eyes Wide Open has points of contact with one of Lislegaard's older video projections, I Cannot Escape the Ghost of You, 1995, which consists of a three-minute sequence with a close-up of a woman sniffing at a rose. On the one hand this plays through the romantic clichès of longing and love, but at the same time the video has a clear auto- or even homo-erotic reference, with the rose as the symbol of the defloration of the woman. But here it is the woman herself who enjoys the scent of the rose. Does this mean an appropriation of the male sexual gaze? Or could one speak of a visualization of a female desire that implies both self-enjoyment and the desire for other women? In Eyes Wide Open Lislegaard also attempts to ask such questions through the deconstruction of the traditional art-historical female portrait, here reduced to literary and pictorial fragments, but at the same time pronounced by a woman about a woman. One can thus see in this work the production of a desire that is more open, not firmly rooted in heterosexual norms. The identification of the other becomes an identification of the self.
Such a model for the production of desire is of course familiar from thinking that is not too far from Caillois' analysis of the schizophrenic perception of space: Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's schizo-analysis, which deliberately attempts to view desire as energies, flows, surfaces and intensities that can go in many - all possible - directions, rather than being confined within heterosexual matrices, and the repressive triangle of psychoanalysis, Father-Mother-Me. According to Deleuze and Guattari the determination of the direction of desire is a social convention that attempts to fix us in a being rather than liberate us in a possible becoming. 4 This analysis is of course of great importance to certain parts of feminism - as Elisabeth Grosz argues - not least the description of a female production of desire directed towards women, as in Eyes Wide Open, which is neither ignored as deviant heterosexuality and the appropriation of a male gaze as in Freud, nor idealized as a political showdown with the patriarchy as in certain parts of the woman's movement. Sexuality, and especially the lesbian kind, must in Grosz's metafeminism always be seen as perverse rather than normative, and as an extension of Deleuze and Guattari, as production, not as model. 5 Rather than thinking in terms of binary structures, one must think in terms of energies and exchanges - not unlike the way desire fluctuates between observer, language, image and space in Lislegaard's installations, into which we must enter with eyes and ears wide open.
1 Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia (October # 31, Winter 1985).
2 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1921, Freud describes the death instinct as a drive of a conservative nature: an impulse leading to the restoration of a previous state of affairs, an impulse that the living entity was forced to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces, i.e. a sort of organic elasticity. Although Caillois does not mention Freud, there is a clear parallel with Freud's description of the death instinct as embedded in the organic and Caillois' description of mimicry as not just a survival mechanism but also an urge towards a more basic mode of being without consciousness or feeling.
3 The mirror in Nothing But Space can as such perhaps be viewed as a mirror seen from behind, and the world it shows is not unlike the one Alice found in Behind the Looking-Glass.
4 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988 (French original: L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972), which like Caillois sees the schizophrenic gaze as a
5 See Elisabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, Routledge, NY and London, 1995.
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