I think that a lot of what was said about Sue de
Beer being the grand dame of adolescence aesthetics
missed her treatment of that category as a strategy.
It is not the agonies of youth in her early works,
nor the melancholic stupor of her more mature protagonists in a later work, The Quickening (2006),
which she found interesting and she knew well to
guard herself against their ululations by putting in
their mouths or as a voice over (the voice of God)
texts written by fanatics like Jonathan Edwards in
his fire and brimstone style of preaching or decadent
like Joris-Karl Huysmans. That created a discrepancy that destabilized meaning and located de Beer
as a true voyeur of the modern. Moreover, though
it was the pleasure of their beauty rather than their
tortured souls which gave grace and made it possible to mobilize the youths as compartments of
minute rituals, de Beer maneuvered them into
reflecting a much wider topic, that of the passage
from modernity to all its posts - the passage, its
illusions and traumas. As reflectors, they build the
visual matrix of her works.
Adolescence then, known for its stuttering gesticulations, was also her way to take language out of the
game so that the fuzzy logic of her images stands
independent of any explicit interpretation.
This is why looking at the video installations of de
Beer is not exactly a lesson in textual coherence but
one in recognizing appearances. All the requisites
which enable understanding disappear by intention. Linguistic scaffolds crumble unless you favor
private mythologies. The narrative seldom relates
to the image, the sequences are delirious. It's a
dreamscape with iconic memories.
In a sense de Beer is a true American artist in the
tradition of Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha and Robert
Longo, and by True American I mean the capacity
to generate a spiritual production without it being
immersed in a historical matrix. It is the capacity
to form ideas on the basis of a continuous present,
where history is a tourist resort, whose souvenirs are
brought back home as a set of collective memoirs.
History, then, is not the source but the antidote, by
which the present is being understood, grasped.
This understanding of the historical dimension
shifts her works towards a certain treatment of
the present. It is now framed as a horror tale, and
therefore is also nostalgic in its lack of immediate historical consistency, uncanny and obsessed
with its surfaces. A mythical and fossilized present
which uses the gothic format to emphasize its immediacy exactly because the notion of the gothic is
based on faking history, and by doing so it builds a
past which never existed.
The present orphaned from its past is traditionally delivered in the form of the fairy tale, which
de Beer applies in many of her works. Hans and
Grete, her video installation from 2002 may relate
on its surface to the national German myth of the
RAF group and there is a great comfort in equating
pubescent melancholia with their actions as a fulfillment of a desire. But if you discern horror from
terror, you realize that de Beer made it very clear
that horror, being a construction of the mind, is the
true authentic capital to be used in her works rather
than the terrorist acts on which the piece is based.
De Beer, we might say, exchanges psychoanalytical procedures in favor of a certain sense of wonder where things are not explained-but shown. By
calling the work Hans and Grete, the code names of
Ensslin and Baader, catapults reality into the realm
of the fairy tale where the Lacanian Real becomes
visceral and starts bleeding. Hans and Grete, I
remind you, were sent to their deaths by their
parents, simply so and with no apology. All fairy
tales are about the horror being laid bare and this
is the skeleton on which de Beer's tale of ambiguities can be told. In The Quickening, a maiden
is dancing with a wolf and was it not the mother
who sent Red Riding Hood to her incestuous
encounter with the animal knowing a thing or
two about rape? Or the recurring theme of the
doubleganger as in the many split images which
ends in her own head being cut in two (Untitled,
1998).
The real does not need a narration but it needs
a frame of mind which brings me back to the
gothic. De Beer, like Kienholz and Ruscha and
Longo makes it an aesthetic mediator. By using
the aesthetics of the gothic de Beer can assume
the role of the unreliable narrator and the beauty of
being misunderstood. She is admitted to the realm
of the haunted place, the antiquated arena and its
necromantic delights.
This is why de Beer gives importance to the presence of a staged context while viewing her videos. It
creates a snow globe effect where by virtue of a set
of decisions the space is an extension of the hallucinatory screen, that is, it encapsulates the horror and
encloses it within a confined environment together
with the one who observes. It is now a movie turned
real, in other words the sacralisation of a space no
more mundane and therefore enriched with possibilities of miracles and atrocities.
As in her earlier works de Beer's use of the pastiche
technique is present also in her last video installation, presented at Arndt & Partner Berlin (2007),
which is the story of the Bauhaus told against the
grain. In the official chapters of art history the
Bauhaus stands for all things modern, that is, a
construct of a future of promises based on rational
thoughts. But the Bauhaus, like much of abstract
art is also rooted in occult perceptions and its obsession with the idea of progress was often translated through many of its mentors, such as Johannes
Itten or Vassily Kandinsky, into a language which
was more esoteric than scientific. These occultic
tendencies stemming from theosophy as in the case
of Kandinsky or the Zoroastian styled sect, the cult
of Mazdaznan, whose adept was Itten, are given a
visual space by de Beer which relates to the occult
in its color scheme, its morbid atmosphere, and its
physical contextualization (you are lead to the work
through a forest), that is the mental landscape she
used in earlier works, the mental space she feels at
home with. And as in the earlier works, here also
meaning is destabilized by overlaying the text, the
Bauhaus Manifesto, rich in expectations and spoken in the authoritative voice of the one who knows
against the images which mutate its meaning. The
text echoes Oscar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet about
an alliance forged between man and machine that
is now morphing into a break-dance sequence, thus
keeping the promise but denying it the sense of
original decorum it entailed. This discrepancy between the utopian and rational text and the occultic
paraphernalia of light machines and unsolved presentation, this rebus between rationality and its mad
daughters, is the heart of darkness towards which
we are being lead. From this perspective the Bauhaus is a ghost town whose inhabitants visit us in
our dreams, a place you entered through the woods
and by mistake. A place of broken promises.