The beginning of a new desire is the beginning of a new wish,
the beginning of a new sadness.
- VOLTAIRE
In your room, where time stands still, or moves at your will
Will you let the morning come soon? Or will you leave me lying here?
In your favorite darkness, your favorite half-light
Your favorite consciousness, your favorite slave
In your room, where souls disappear, only you exist here
I'm hanging on your words, living on your breath, feeling with your skin
Will I always be here?
- DEPECHE MODE, "In Your Room," 1993
The year 1998 saw the release of an underrated, noir-inspired film titled
Dark City.
Misinterpreted as a kind of actionless attempt at a Matrix-type world simulacrum, the
poetry of its cinematic spatial psychology was lost on many, both critics and viewers
alike. Our world, we discover, is controlled - built, even - by a race of corpselike,
bowler-hatted "gentlemen" who glide (literally, as they have no visible ambulation)
through a terrifying project of reorganizing the world each day, for no greater purpose
than experimentation. The narrative is intercut with stylized shots of the city (the only
daylight images, since all human interaction takes place at night, in darkness) shifting
and swelling and morphing, the buildings growing or crumbling, Rubik's Cube-planes
reconfiguring themselves, people's surroundings transforming into new lives and
identities. People, their physical beings, remain, but their lives, memories,
relationships, and desires are entirely reassembled at daybreak. The problem is the
vestigial memories and recognitions that get layered in everyone's mind, despite the
otherworldly erasure of identity, and how they infect each day. The confluence between the
literal shifting of forms in space and the new worlds' traces and glimpses of the ones
buried beneath them becomes a metaphor of time and memory, a lyrically stylized
representation of the way the things that we as humans believe to be true and accurate in
life may always be merely subject to the way we woke up that day, the slip-shift that
happened in the night, in time.
Sue de Beer's work of the past decade has repeatedly tuned to this intermingling, even
reciprocity, between identity construction and space, both literal and psychological, and
its contingent shaping of memory and time. She often focuses on moments of rupture,
emotional extremes that are true enough, deep enough, terrifying enough, to trouble any
seamless, linear retelling of a life; yet she positions these vulnerable states of being
within tightly framed stages, rigorously formal parameters that allow the ideas and
emotions in the piece to extend out as far as they need go - a kind of structural anchor
to an endeavor inherently unstable. De Beer's early photographs, and in particular her
videos and attendant installations, vibrate with that tension of form and feeling, less a
fight than a necessary, uneasy synthesis.
De Beer's examination of space as a metaphor for psychological interiority traces back to
her earliest work. Operating within strict parameters of color, form, and content,
photographs such as
Door with Mirror (2000) map an architectural structure as a
translation of a psychological space. The careful staging of the minimal components - a
mirror, a door, a light switch - throws every detail into sharp relief. Unconnected,
unhinged, the door leans anthropomorphically against the wall. The reduced palette, and
slight adjustments of the light, push toward a neutrality that turns generic ugliness into
a kind of Holiday Inn-sublime. The precision of the visual structure gives the image a
near-sculptural reality, a theatrical organization that holds its imminent action tensely
within. The artist calls this "the structure of the idea."
De Beer draws on a long history of mapping the body into architectural space, from the
classical Greek and Renaissance practices of anthropomorphizing architectural elements to
the more recent constructions of space as a literalization of psychology often seen in
cinema. A recurrent theme in her work is the viewer's empathy with private spaces familiar
to all of us - places of both comfort and terror. There may be nothing quite so personal,
specific, and psychologically fraught, for example, as a teenager's bedroom. In the
photographs
Bed and
Bed2 (2000 and 2001), as in
Door with Mirror, presence is so strongly
suggested that no actual body is required. The stain of what appears to be blood on the
ceiling in
Bed implies the aftermath of horrific violence; the same sense of loss persists
in
Bed2. To represent the figure in these spaces would be redundant - what is unheimlich
about them is the combination of their phenomenological normalcy and the vibration of the
absent figure embodied in them.
De Beer's treatments of the figure, meanwhile, were equally discomfiting. A seminal early
video,
Making Out with Myself (1997), maps the artist into the scene, kissing her own
twinned face. As in the photographs, the simple, careful visual construction makes it
clear that vestiges of imperfections are intentional, the slight awkwardness of the
technique limning the sincerity and discomfort of the action. A slightly later series of
photographs pushes discomfort to the extreme, depicting often gruesome scenes of physical
violence that are observed by the blasé, almost tender gaze of the violated subject. In
one untitled image a woman, unabashedly facing the viewer, has been cleft from sternum to
crotch yet seems almost beatifically unperturbed. Once the moment of transgressive shock
has passed, the artificiality of the image becomes patently clear, opening up a sense that
the violence is both critical and beside the point - that it functions to open up a
different discourse. De Beer has discussed these images in terms of a physical
interaction: "It was talking about sculpture for me, this real experience/fake experience,
when the two are happening simultaneously." The photograph's content engages an immediate,
visceral reaction that is then mitigated by the nature of the image as a blatant
construct: it is "a fantasy image because it's so completely fake and why, then, would
someone fantasize that?" Foregrounding their near phenomenological presence in space for
the viewer and the tight, formal qualities of their composition, these photographs began
to approach what the artist has called a "sculptural experience." At the same time, in a
move recalling literary innovators such as Dennis Cooper, or the way horror films manifest
psychosexual tensions in the viscerally repulsive, the invasive act becomes an expression
of intimacy, even love. The deep human impulse to gain access to what one desires can
often effect its destruction.
The immersion of de Beer and other artists of her generation in the violent, the morbid,
the dark, often through popular culture, draws on the exploration of abjection in the art
of the early '90s but is critically distinct from it. While the earlier moment focused on
the overlooked and the pathetic, the contemporary address of popular media and culture
does not strive to "heal a split" between the repressed cultural self and the natural, or
between the vulgar theatrics of daily life and the exalted purity of high art. Fearlessly
engaging content thought difficult or even sensational, de Beer explores the possibility
that ambiguity, beauty, sincerity, terror, and perversity might combine to convey life's
most precious moments. She avoids the trap of sensationalist entertainment through formal
rigor, a stripping down of unnecessary content, and an insistent staging of her images as
constructs. Instead of assuming a privileged viewpoint on the referents she incorporates,
she reflects the internalized position of contemporary popular culture. The hierarchical
investigation/deconstruction that was the basis of Pop art is no longer even the question;
like others of her generation, de Beer seamlessly incorporates all cultural forms on their
own terms. Horror movie tropes can speak as eloquently of fear and repression as can
Freud, the sublime is as present in an awkward kiss between teenagers as in the romantic
landscape, the psychological mapping of architecture might appear in a classical Greek
theater, a modernist translation of the repressed body, or a teenager's bedroom plastered
with heavy metal posters and littered with bottles of pink nail polish. De Beer strives to
locate meaning, which is always fundamentally personal, through an endlessly mediated
world.
It's like glass, when we break
I can't stay in this place
I can't stand when the room turns round on my fate
- LOVE SPIT LOVE, "AM I WRONG"
Manifestations of individual identity have remained critical to de Beer's practice, but
later work - such as
Hans & Grete (2002), her first major two-channel video - receded
somewhat from immediacy and direct engagement with a personal psychological interior.
Borrowing from the extreme aesthetics of horror films, the sumptuous visuality of
high-definition video games, and the fatalistic credos of adolescence,
Hans & Grete revels
in artifice without sacrificing emotional intensity. The narrative maps two pairs of
teenagers, their agonies of self-determination expressed through both harmless desires for
fame and violent enactments of powerlessness. With its types of personality and codes of
conduct that betray sincere but painfully conflicted desires for connection, the maelstrom
of adolescent contradiction becomes the ideal arena in which to explore human
complexities. As the artist describes it,
This early engagement with "teenageness" started simply because I was trying to get to
something really vulnerable . . . something that felt real to me that comes to the
surface. Adulthood can be about veiling and armor of a different kind. Teenageness, well,
if the kid is wearing armor, it looks like this: "I AM WEARING ARMOR SO YOU CANT HURT ME."
Neither an exploitation of our youth-driven consumer culture nor a childish or escapist
regression, de Beer's explorations of this moment of development access both her own
personal history and, more abstractly, the fluid state of being that adolescence embodies.
Adolescence is an open realm of possibility for the creation of self: awkwardness and
antagonism, resistance and desperation for structure, violence and vulnerability, vision
and self-destructiveness.
The fractured enclosures of the teenagers' bedrooms in
Hans & Grete are zones of both
safety and of confinement. Despite the explicitness of the sex scene early in the piece,
the four protagonists never interact in any way that feels truly intimate; they dress in
carefully constructed costumes to represent their allegiances, they mimic their heroes in
private, sometimes they fuck, but mostly they talk on and on to no one, to the camera, to
us, expressing the elaborate irrational dreams of a teenage mind, trying to say something
real to someone, but in essence talking only to themselves and, painfully, still get it
wrong. Tenderly exploring the protagonists' alienation, the individual monologues have a
poetic lyricism, yet there is a distance to their emotive intensity. A minor but
illustrative example is the names: in all de Beer's later projects she uses her actors'
real names, letting them exist to a degree as themselves, but in
Hans & Grete the names
are invented - parts for the actors to play. This explicit artificiality is maintained
throughout the video in both the sets and the characters, who ultimately become ciphers of
themselves.
This moment in de Beer's work ultimately leans toward developing a structure of
investigation, a framing of the subject that establishes a distance from the immediacy of
the personal. The resonance of the literal interior spaces - most significantly, the
bedroom, and other recognizable arenas of adolescent formation and transgression, as well
as of the violent violation of the living body - necessarily slid toward being outside the
subject itself. At the same time, in terms of content, palette, and narrative the rigorous
rules of the early photographs loosened up, even while the foundational structure remained
compositionally tight (each frame of the video might be rendered as a perfectly
constructed still itself). There is a new sense of pleasure in the aesthetic baroque. As
the artist says, "Making
Hans & Grete, I freaked out and totally enjoyed myself. The video
looks like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory on crack."
The future is an infinite succession of presents...
-HOWARD ZINN
De Beer's three most recent videos -
The Dark Hearts (2003-04),
Disappear Here (2004), and
Black Sun (2005) - retain the precise staging she developed earlier but allow a space
within which the utterly personal can be reinserted. It is not a return to an earlier
approach but a refinement of one, designed to achieve "both more structure and more
complication - an expanded world." The focus on mediated becoming and identity in the
early figurative photos and
Hans & Grete turns toward internal transformation and history,
still situated and staged through a psychologically fraught construction of space. While
The Dark Hearts and
Disappear Here are discrete works in their own right, they can also be
read as "studies" for critical paths brought together in the more elaborate format of
Black Sun.
The short
The Dark Hearts depicts a teen sneaking out of the house to meet the object of
her affection - a familiar adolescent narrative. Julian draws in his notebook and moves
restlessly around on his bed, while Mimi stands in her space, both aggressively confident
and slightly awkward in the image, the body, that she presents to the cinematic frame as
if to a mirror reflecting herself or perhaps us. The setup is familiar from Hans & Grete,
where the characters are introduced by an intertitle and a clip of them in their bedroom,
a typically referent-laden set in which identity is indistinguishable from the spatial
construction and the actors' movement within it. Unlike the characters in Hans & Grete,
however, Julian and Mimi transcend the barriers they've constructed for themselves. Where
the earlier work exhibited a sense of blunted exchange, a desire to reach toward the other
person, and the world, that is at the same time out of step with them, the exuberant
freedom of the characters in
The Dark Hearts culminates in the first moment of true
exchange in de Beer's videos. Leaving her room, Mimi drives her pink Mustang to Julian's
house and takes him out for a spin. The camera lingers on the car's grille, the image of
the galloping horse an inexhaustible symbol of liberty and individuality. More obliquely,
the stallion suggests the less-discussed association of young girls and horses (a common
feature of "young adult" fiction targeted to girls, for example), the inchoately sexual
nature of that relationship, and the early understanding it brings of power, freedom, and
fear. This reading is underscored by the pervasive strength of the feminine in the work:
Mimi's bedroom, embodiment of her confidence, is emphatically pink; she, not Julian,
drives a car, also pink; she seems to be a little older than he is, and to be slightly the
leader in their interaction. Though mutual, the exchange of necklaces before their
poignant kiss is instigated by Mimi, and the necklace, of course, is a feminine object
itself.
The actual kiss resonates truthfully, slipping between the "acting" of a kiss by teenagers
and the actual exchange of one. But this intimate moment reaches its real consummation a
moment later, when Mimi reaches over and tucks an errant lock of Julian's skater's swag of
black hair behind his ear. Significantly, it is in this near-silent, dialogue-free work of
de Beer's that language ceases to trip up communication, and that what the artist calls "a
sense of aliveness and presentness" allows a real connection to take place. There is a
hovering fragility to the encounter, as if one deviation from the tiny cues of the
teenagers' interaction might cause the whole thing to collapse. The final kiss feels like
an exhalation of breath that you didn't know you were holding. Clearly communication can
and will fail repeatedly; it's not success that is striven for but the possibility of it,
and beauty resides in the resilience of the continued attempt. The search for the deepest
intimacy, in other works explored through a literal piecing out of the interiority of the
self, thrums as powerfully as a body split open in the simplicity of this encounter.
Near-platonic, Mimi's and Julian's kiss avoids the trap of fetishizing sexual nostalgia,
producing instead the sense of "too-muchness" that is the hallmark of formative moments,
when the real occupies a space not parallel to the measurement of time.
Hans & Grete is shown in an installation resembling the sets on-screen - a device that
refuses the kind of dissolution of self in the cinema that a movie theater encourages. The
installation approximates a teen bedroom, with shag rug, stylized sculptures of guitars
and amps, and enormous stuffed animals on which we recline to watch the piece. These props
encourage an awareness of space (both within and beyond the video), and of our own
relationship to it. Similarly, to view The Dark Hearts we sit in a replica of the patently
artificial Mustang that Mimi drives in the video. The car exists not as some kind of
diorama but as a sculptural object, meticulously fabricated but deliberately imperfect,
with silkscreened front grille, glossy pink paint, open wheel well, and an interior lined
with green Astroturf and complete with silkscreened Misfits lunchbox mounted on the
dashboard. We can open the door, climb in, adjust the seats; but our pleasure in this
playacting allows for a gleeful awareness of the set's fakery. Perhaps, like the memory of
a kiss (implicitly a first kiss) that the video may spark, accuracy matters less here than
the recollection of being in that particular emotional place. We are in the piece but
outside it at the same time.
YOU DON'T LIVE THERE ANYMORE
The first intercut image in the short video Disappear Here presents a sheet cake, as from
a child's birthday party, showing the sentence "The recollection is a cascade of spatial
metaphors" in frosting. (The phrase neatly summarizes a conceptual thread tying together
all of de Beer's work.) A teenage girl enters her bedroom. She is wearing a Girl Scout
uniform that seems at first sweet, then - as she gets ready for something before the
mirror - confining, too small. The props of her transformation include a cigarette and
studded leather bracelets, anachronistic accessories that imply the multiple roles she is
playing, outgrowing some but not yet comfortable in the next. Her awkward, semisexual
"performance" before the mirror, and the viewer, enhances this suggestion. The girl sets
up a tripod and takes a Polaroid of herself. In the video's last, silent moments, we watch
the image develop on a split screen - though we may as well have watched it fade away: we
are acutely aware that at this moment the girl is no more that image than she will be
years later when she finds it buried in a drawer. Voyeurism, directly confronted, is
mitigated, in the same way that the narcissism of the girl's youthful moment plays against
her discomfort with herself.
Meanwhile a voiceover in what we assume to be the girl's voice describes a school field
trip in the third grade. The memory is precise in its banal details ("a gray lighthouse
that Chris Cortland says his Dad bought for a dollar last year") and sweeping in the
dramatic poetics of youth ("Mrs. Pearson's classroom becomes a dead space in my memory . .
. and all I feel is just the darkness of the water"). Sliding from internal recollection
to performance, the scene cuts to the girl's face, which traverses the split screen, and
we see her speaking the monologue. For her this may be a mirrored moment, the teenage girl
articulating her own existence, defining herself through the traces of her memory and
image; for us it may be external proof of who she is, and of how she might begin to form
desire and sexuality of her own. The moment, still largely innocent and unself-conscious,
is troubled by brief close-ups of body parts: her slim leg as it emerges from the short
Girl Scout skirt, her long sleek hair curling against her bodice, her braceleted wrist
held awkwardly behind her back. As in much of de Beer's work, the viewer's relationship to
voyeurism remains in question. Are we understanding the origin of this fetishization, the
complicity that we all have in creating it (including the girl herself, posing for us, for
the camera, for her own reflection), even as we continue to produce it? This notion of
feminine desire and display as foundational to the formation of identity will become the
conceptual center of
Black Sun.
In
Disappear Here the teenager thinks back nostalgically to what she sees as a moment of
purity. The innocence of the memory calls attention to the complex signifiers of the set
and costume: the intense pinks of the slick satin pillow; the messy dresser littered with
nail polish, makeup, and stickers; the Girl Scout uniform that seems first sweet and then
too small, in tension with the cigarette and leather bracelets that show its wearer
outgrowing the parts chosen for her, beginning to find her own part to play in the
recognition of her realness, her presence. "I turn around once more to watch the sailboat
[cloud] melt and reappear as a mouse on stilts," she recites, demonstrating the acute
awareness of a moment of self-identification, "and for a second I know that everything's
gonna be fine, I know I'm gonna be okay cause I'm watching it happen."
The recitation of the memory is always malleable. The photograph that is the final image
of
Disappear Here brings to mind Roland Barthes's idea of the photograph's "structural
autonomy" as the crucial quality of the medium. Even though the photograph is clearly not
identical to the reality it shows, Barthes writes, there is no transformation from reality
to image; instead there is "a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a question of
exactitude, but of reality." It has been argued that with the advent of digital imaging,
and its destruction of the evidentiary role of photography (Barthes's "analogon," the
"has-been-there" quality), the viewer's trust must necessarily shift from image to source.
Power now lies not in the image itself but with the party who offers it.
Disappear Here
suggests that power has never been anywhere but with that party - that the
"has-been-there" quality of the photograph is never more than a specter, a ghost of
memory. As Douglas Crimp puts it, "In our time the aura has become only a presence, which
is to say a ghost." These metaphors of death resonate with the often used (indeed
seemingly inevitable) rhetoric of the undead in relation to photography, with its present
that is not the present, that is defined by its absence, but that the digital era takes to
a new level in which it may not have been.
De Beer, of course, makes no attempt to be a trusted source; she always reveals the
artificiality of her objects, sets, and scenes, in order to emphasize the meanings they
evoke. She is not interested in the falsely immersive state of conventional cinema,
"another world" that offers escape from this one. Instead she provokes in the viewer a
critical awareness of the simultaneous existence of both the fictional space and the
actual one. Just as she fractures the screen to avoid a singular viewpoint, the
stylizations and imperfections of her sculptural objects forestall passive immersion. The
experience is incomplete - fractured, ruptured - without the active participation of
viewer to understand it as such. A sentence in the last monologue in
Black Sun contains
this notion perfectly: "Things can't hold things."
BLACK SUN, OR GIRL WHO LIVES ON HEAVEN HILL
Barthes's discussion in
Camera Lucida of Pliny's myth of the origin of painting perfectly
fits de Beer's seaming of memory and desire. The story links art's beginning to the
passion of a woman, Dibutades, who traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall,
thus fixing his presence in the moment of imminent absence. Dibutades can only make her
tracing, however, by turning away from her lover's actual presence, using the darkness of
representation to hang on to the light of reality. Barthes determines the import of the
photograph as this contradictory "memory of the present." This is the paradox of the
photograph, which generates the undead, the specter of time without closure, a life of
infinite deaths with no actual death. This too is the haunting of memory generally: the
desperate human need - a need with which photography synthesizes - to contain that moment
of ephemeral limerance.
These aspects of feminine desire and display, of multivalent identity, the "spatial
metaphors" of Julia Kristeva, and - when we're lucky - these brief moments of direct,
unmitigated fulfillment weave together in the complex format of
Black Sun. Wanting, one
might argue, is ultimately determined by an idea of memory; our minds focus on the peak
and the final moments of a past experience while crowding out memories of its duration. In
this process, which de Beer has termed the "phantasm of predestination," (your idea of)
the past determines (your idea of) the future. Desire and memory rearticulate time
according to its meaning, not its actuality. If time really exists only as memory, and has
no relationship to the duration of the experience itself, why do we put such value on
"things that last"? Why is length more elevated than intensity?
The splintered syntax of time is reflected in the deliberate framing of Black Sun.
Ostensibly mapping three specific moments marked by simple numerical intertitles, the
video traces events in the life or the memory of a single girl at three significant ages -
roughly eleven, seventeen, and twenty-eight. Further intertitles trouble the temporal
flow, suggesting that these events are recalled, cloudy, and constantly revised according
to the girl's changing self. Quoting a similar practice used in cinema to organize the
passage of time ("Six Months Later," "Sometime in the Present"), these intertitles suggest
an attempt to organize and outline the past moment - a proposal ultimately confounded by
the images themselves.
1..
A girl stands outside the house. We hear the thunder of a stormy night, evocative the way
even the trope of a childhood memory can be. A tightly framed bedroom, an older woman
getting ready for bed, a brief shot of a man removing his pants. The woman lies down in
bed, hands folded like a corpse. Approaching, climbing the stairs, the image slips between
our point of view and the girl's - we are the viewer together. This potentially
fetishistic slippage is made complete in
Black Sun: we are as much inside as out; as the
girl watches from outside, we stare from inside. The palette is deeper, more jewel-like,
than in the earlier films, with shadowy outlines on the wall, filtered in deep red. The
girl's feet pad the Astroturf, her body moving up the stairs beneath the slippery
greenness of her satin nightgown, running, opening the door to an apprehensive unknown.
Time: Forgetfulness and Thunder
A slide show of objects - porcelain kittens, silk stockings, glittery rubber bracelets, a
fat silver ring against a quilted silk bedspread - accompanies a voiceover, a girl's voice
exploring the power of the image of another on one's own sense of self. She is feeling
that feeling of multiple lives into which our past falls as we grow older, and the need to
understand the other ones we once were: "Things about my other life seem to come back with
me. Here is getting scarier then there now." Memory is like a haunting, like a ghost. The
photographic image is itself a specter, according to Barthes's idea of the
"has-been-there" aspect of image capture. Memory is a means of life-beyond-death, but one
that is perverse, better, more horrific, limiting, essential. "She says where she lives,
strange things go on all the time. Magic things, evil things."
Not Fade Away
In a dance studio we see the young girl again, in a pink leotard and legwarmers. She gets
up and dances to a Phil Collins song on the radio: "You Can't Hurry Love." At this moment,
among others just like them at this time of her life, we are witnessing the birth of a
formative desire - the feminine desire to be looked at, but also to be in control. A pony
toy comes to life, she entices it to dance with her. As in The Dark Hearts, the moment
feels authentic: she is actually dancing, she choreographed the piece herself. The studio
walls are bright pink, there is a pink parasol to play with, a tiara on the floor, teen
fan magazines. Close-up frames show her total immersion, her dissolution, in the joy of
her body. We are slightly discomfited by our awareness of the joy and ecstasy of the
physical, by our brief glimpses of her own, suddenly fully embodied feminine sensuousness.
Flipping back to being a little girl, the curve of her tiny waist erotic and childlike,
she fetishizes herself as we do, again vacillating between inside and outside. Her
awkwardness alternates with the discovery of skill, the totality of being in her own body.
Tomorrow Is Yesterday
The first moment repeats, is different. She is outside the house, the woman is folding
clothes in the room, the girl is older but dressed identically.
2.
The older woman in the bedroom is framed against the split screen of the teenage girl in a
graveyard, trying on makeshift ghost costumes with a teenage boy. Their laughter is
pleasurable discomfort, the moments of intimacy allowed by the safety of their masking. As
in
The Dark Hearts, the tension of the encounter is satisfied by a purity of contact,
brief seconds of true exchange. The girl climbs the stairs, her body moving beneath the
slippery green satin of her nightgown. Her feet on Astroturf, she opens the door of the
same red room to an apprehensive unknown. What is happening inside?
A Fortified Castle
The graveyard, smoke and costumes, masks. They drink from a bottle, complicit. Her image
fractured across the screens, the girl speaks to us directly, voicing a monologue on the
construction of desire, the control of love, that is simultaneously powerful and
completely aware of its own futility:
Until then, here's what I want. Love. Specifically I want the power to make people love
me. Maybe a secret word which I'd only use when I saw someone special. I'd walk up to him
or her, say that word, and then he or she would be very in love with me. Then, if they
ever got bored, there'd be another word that would cancel the spell, wipe their memories
clear of me.
From Deadness to Aliveness
In silence that heightens the tension of physical desire and fear, she removes her masks,
her costumes, dons another as she performs a deliberate, minimal striptease, the next
version of the younger girl's dance sequence. Knowing her beauty, her power, giving him
(us) what we want, knowing we shouldn't be there. Moving, she is fully in herself, alive,
capped by the perfect discomfort of not knowing what comes next. Hands brushing her hips,
seductive and fully unsure.
3.
The Problem of Time
The same girl, older again, standing in the terminal, dressed to leave. One has the sense
of her life in full as she leans back against the slippery satin-blue of her seat. She
puts on a black mask to sleep, a red light glows from outside.
The Night of the World
She dreams, sees the house, the older woman on the bed. Is that blood on her stomach? The
young girl climbs the stairs, the teenager as well, bare feet move across the floor, the
young girl in her pink leotard dances to a distorted version of the song. Distortions
abound, in time and space. She opens the door, finally inside the room. The black-haired
woman in the pink nightgown is the young girl getting ready for bed. She slips off her
silk stockings; the black hair is a wig, carefully brushed and placed on her head. She is
all those women. The room is tight, the camera swings, pulls in so tightly we know we
shouldn't be this close. Her face is blank, looking at herself in the mirror. She has
learned/will learn to reveal nothing. Time stands still, the closed frame traps her like
the room itself, like the space of time the room projects.
The End
As she sits in an airplane the red room is on her person, in her red shirt. The continuity
of palette perhaps symbolizes how she carries it with her but owns that moment for
herself, for her own body. She reads, eats, drinks, sleeps. People's resonance in one's
life so rarely has to do with their actual presence, it is rather a manifestation of
desire for who they were, are, or should be. The conundrum becomes how to hold one's past
in a sense of the now - how to know that there is no real past, it's always that space of
the undiscovered and the constantly renegotiated. In Black Sun's last monologue, the
protagonist is shown on an airplane - the ultimate liminal space, nothing and nowhere,
nontime and nonplace. We hear on the voiceover, "Things can't hold things. . . . You don't
feel it when I do, since you're not me, though I hold you so dear, so deep, past the point
of knowing what's real. There's something there, but it's not here."
An imagined sun, bright and black at the same time.
- Julia Kristeva, BLACK SUN: DEPRESSION AND MELANCHOLIA, 1989
Like much of de Beer's previous work,
Black Sun weaves together myriad sources, from
cinema, literature, pulp fiction. One might be the sinister, graphic, Asian-inspired
aesthetic of Dario Argento's
Suspiria (1977), whose protagonist, an innocent ballet
dancer, faces the horror of the thing unknown. De Beer's spatial psychologies of the
unknown and haunted also pull from writings ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's
House of
the Seven Gables to melodramas like
My Sweet Audrina and
Flowers in the Attic, books
targeted toward young girls. The mise-en-scènes of this genre are usually staged around a
house, haunted by ghosts or by sinister events in the past that have trapped the heroine
in some way. References to specific personal and cultural moments also abound in Black
Sun, from the graveyard scene's gesture toward Michael Jackson's
Thriller video, through
the Phil Collins song to which the little girl dances, to the teenager's Sonic Youth
T-shirt. The monologues spoken by the teenage girl that frame the most significant ideas
of the piece-impossible desire, the transience of love, the difficulty in placing the
memories that form our sense of ourselves-are in fact excerpts from novels by Dennis
Cooper, originally written in the voices of young, gay men, a slippage of gender and
sexuality wholly in keeping with the idea of the unfixed, fluid self that de Beer insists
upon in all of her work.
De Beer's continued preference for a two-channel, split-screen presentation is a
conceptual gesture on two levels, both decentering the cinematic experience and
reinforcing the fractured nature of her narratives, which themselves in turn mimic the
layered, hybrid identities of her characters. The images reflect and mirror across the
screens; we often look at two versions of the same character, which seam together, then
slip apart again. De Beer's phrasing of multiple identities diverges sharply from the
pathological positioning pervasive in contemporary culture, projecting a sympathetic
intimacy with the subject rather than a diagnostic distance. The idea of multiple selves
is emotionally resonant; she has described it in terms of a doubling in which the
existence of the replicated self is both troubling and necessary. This doubling is
envisioned literally in
Making Out with Myself, as its title suggests; in Hans & Grete,
meanwhile, the two pairs of teenagers are played by the same actors, split selves
revealing how context and choice turn similar impulses into wildly disparate results.
The spectral, ominous tone of much of de Beer's work may be linked to this formative
notion of identity. "The multiple self is a place of horror," according to the artist:
because it is a place of no identity. Even if you can see yourself when you are doubled ...
or if you make that image into an object and place it in front of yourself to look at
it, you are displaced outside of yourself into this entity, which are now two. You become
a stranger to yourself - an Other. Is that adolescent? That is something that must
continue for one's whole life, right? Those moments where you step out of time and have no
recognition of who you are, or where you are, or what led you to that point.
De Beer's haunted spaces are limned by the notion of the phantom self, most explicitly in
Black Sun. Similarly, the installation for Black Sun is her most evolved evocation so far
of this complex of ideas in a physical state. The two-dimensional construction of memory
and desire in the video is reflected in the three-dimensional construction of the set.
Space, as always, is crucial. Entering the gallery through glass doors stickered with the
shadowy silhouette of trees, we are confronted by an aggressive wall of glossy pink. Even
though we are indoors, this girlish structure is clearly the exterior of a house. It is
impossible to grasp as a whole, however, for a total view of it is thwarted from all
sides, and its claustrophobic placement in the entrance space encourages us either to
enter quickly or to back away. Inside, the video plays on its usual two screens. Interior
space is flipped again; we recognize the house we're inside from the video we're watching.
Trapping us in layers of interiority - in the gallery, in the house, in the video - the
physical and psychological fracture seems complete. Actually
Hans & Grete,
The Dark
Hearts, and
Black Sun are all staged against the image of the house, whether the surreal
but familiar suburban houses of the first two works or the quintessential "haunted house
on the hill" of
Black Sun. Looming ominously above, one can almost hear the introductory
voiceover from Robert Wise's 1963 film
The Haunting: "an evil old house, the kind some
people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored."
The concept of the split self in female subjectivity is emerging increasingly in de Beer's
work. Historically divided in image, and today still constantly subjected to ideological
contradiction, the female is formed as a multiple self that incarnates fantastic and
irreconcilable mythologies. This fragmentation allows heterogeneity and flexibility to be
valued above a single critical perspective, but if a search for some essential center of
individual identity persists, there is a simultaneous danger of a splintered identity
becoming pathological. Suggesting that the fluid feminine is metaphorically a paradigm of
the postmodern nonlinear narrative, Laura Mulvey has used the Pandora myth to illustrate
this idea of the feminine as both seductive surface and concealed threat. It is a concept
that ripples beneath the surface of much of de Beer's work.
While Mulvey's critique is largely a barbed analysis of a male-oriented construction of
women, de Beer's investigation shifts the perimeters somewhat to include a space in which
the feminine can look at itself, becoming no longer purely the subject of another gaze but
of its own as well. The idea of the decentered feminine involves a rejection of the
modernist totality and singularity of form and narrative, replacing them with a web of
allusions and hybrid identities, a dissolution of oppositions that resonates more closely
with life. Perhaps a more truly "feminine" identity would involve a constantly shifting
set of renegotiated priorities, masks, and vulnerabilities.
Rather than closing around a sense of loss,
Black Sun posits the fact that memory and self
are always constructs, inherently flawed and false, as the pool from which a sense of
"aliveness" must be drawn. The last scene - in which the younger woman, the
quasi-protagonist, is on an airplane - embodies this sense of liminality, this critical
nonspace of becoming in which anything, in any direction, is possible. In this denouement
of its narrative,
Black Sun is permeated with a breathless sense of immanent "going," not
necessarily departure but movement, which carries within it all the hope and despair of
the before and after. As Paul Auster has written, "Finally on a plane, expecting,
believing that it would crash, waiting for it, and having it not: perhaps I had discovered
(quite simply) that the dead were not allowed to scream in you more than once a day. I
looked out the window-nothing happened. White clouds, silver wing, blue sky. Nothing." The
passage perfectly evokes the anticipatory tension of
Black Sun. Airplane space is the most
fully collapsed time we experience, belonging to nothing and no one but that exact moment,
yet encompassing all those moments experienced and yet to be experienced. Vague
possibilities shimmer in every direction.