Ursula Liebling

Labyrinths of Subjectivity

The blurring of selfhood in Suite Venitienne, 1980, by Sophie Calle

S. Calle, Suite Venitienne (1980) Black and white photograph, [online image]. 

Source: http://arttattler.com/commentarysophiecalle.html [Accessed 10 February 2011]

   “Woman always remains several” posited the French psychoanalyst and theorist Luce Irigaray in her landmark text This Sex Which Is Not One. [i] Irigaray’s momentous project endeavours to weave a discourse of female subjectivity that prioritises plurality and mutability over - the allegedly masculine tendency towards - unity and coherence. In her model identity is imagined, not as a rigid and singular conclusion but as a blurring and perpetually flowing progression, like an endless shedding of skins. It is this conception of selfhood which provides the framework for my consideration of Sophie Calle’s Suite Venitienne. In January 1980 the French artist staged a performative action (documented under the title Suite Venitienne) in which she embodied a simultaneously submissive and predatory subject position so as to articulate the fluidity and capriciousness of selfhood. Through an act of stalking she unveils her fantasy to tease a masculine stranger into the narrative of her existence and subsequently to destabilise the structures of his subjective identity. The artist followed a man for a few minutes on the streets of Paris; she photographed him furtively and then let him slip away into the crowd. In a startling coincidence she found herself being introduced to him at a gallery opening later that evening. She discovered that his name is Henri B and that he is travelling to Venice, and so the artist decided to follow him there. Suite Venitienne is the name given to this unfurling tale of fourteen days in Venice in which Calle became embroiled in the following of Henri. At first she spends days searching for his silhouette and once she finds him she dedicates her time to his surveillance, she mirrors his trajectory, photographing him relentlessly. The results of Calle’s action were documented in a book containing her photographs and diaristic narration, along with an essay by Jean Baudrillard.

Sophie the reflection

   Irigaray’s thesis asserts that female sexuality and subjectivity have been neglected from theorisation in the psychoanalytic tradition and describes that as a consequence female sexuality is understood as, “a mere echo of masculine sexuality”.[ii]  The female sexual organ is regarded as an index of absence, as the invisible counterpart to the male organ rather than in autonomous terms. In this phallocentric model women are positioned as the otherness or lack that corresponds to the male figure, and the instrument through which the man can recognise himself as a subject. Thus the female as spectral echo functions to verify the existence of the male subject whilst simultaneously providing evidence of her own non-existence. Irigaray employs the allegory of the mirror to elucidate her model of female representation in which the female is revealed as an intangible reflection of the male. In Hilary Robinson’s articulation, “as man is confirmed in his ‘sameness’ by her ‘otherness’, the representation, ‘woman’ (which he has constructed) functions for his subjectivity as a mirror”. [iii] Irigaray’s use of the mirror allegory establishes an intriguing lens through which to read Suite Venitienne. Through this schema the artist’s following of Henri can be deciphered as an enactment that is symptomatic of the phallocentric representation of the female as imperceptible, non-subjective matter which functions only as a reflective surface for the palpable, masculine subject. Correspondingly Jean Baudrillard equates Calle’s mirroring of Henri with a self-erasure that secures the artist in her absence, “you seduce yourself by being absent, by being no more than a mirror for the other who is unaware”. In his interpretation the following denotes a disappearance or diminishing of self by way of seduction. I would contest however, that Calle’s incarnation of the mirror-image is closer to a conscious suspension of identity than a performance of the flaccid invisibility of the female.  Baudrillard goes on to demonstrate, “the other’s tracks are used in such a way as to distance you from yourself”.[iv] In this way Calle’s following entails a dissociation from identity; as the artist weaves around the interlacing streets of Venice after Henri, slackening the fibres of her subjectivity as she goes. However, the artist does not simply abandon her own identity, as the reflection might also have ramifications for the one reflected. In Baudrillard’s interpretation “a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject’s tenuous position as a subject”.[v] In accordance, Calle’s performance attempts to designate the frailty of Henri’s subjective identity, not merely her own.

   Does Calle’s mirroring of Henri denote a feminine substantiation of the masculine subject’s existence, and, consequently, her lack of existence? Or is her reflection ultimately more predatory and stained with a more disquieting strategy for disruption or devouring? Art critic Robert Storr articulates “existence is verified by surveillance, and mnemonically preserved”.[vi]  Thus Calle serves to authenticate and, consequently, to shelter Henri’s presence in her performative gesture. However the entrancing potency of Suite Venitienne lies in a dichotomy: between her testimony to Henri’s being on the one hand and her violent erasure of him on the other. The surface of the looking glass serves to ensnare the subject within its frame. Correspondingly, as an embodiment of the reflective surface Calle’s following is imbued with the desire to seize and incarcerate Henri within her skin. By severing a fragment of his subjective identity and entrapping it within the void of the mirror, he is set adrift, extracted from his own existence. To reflect is to fissure the wholeness of the subject; it is to disperse the unity and completion of his being. Calle initiates an incessant performance of reflection which serves to undermine the stability of the stranger and, by allegory, to encircle him within the flattened skin of the mirror. As such the following is more akin to a wilful embodiment of the mirror’s reflective facade, as a strategy to dilute the subjective integrity of the one she follows.  Art writer Emma Cocker writes:

This [following] gesture sets in place a form of infinite mirroring in which the repeatedly reflected original becomes remote and loses its meaning as the copies develop their own disembodied and abstract reality.[vii]

   Irigaray elucidates that within the mirror there is a surface which does not simply reflect back to the male, a plane which has a texture of its own. The back of the mirror is a surface which is shielded from the representations of the phallocentric gaze. Potentially it is a site wherein the female can compose her own representation, and regain her being as a subject that is not clouded over by phallocentric constructions. Irigaray writes:

This silvering at the back of the mirror might, at least, retain the being – which we have been perhaps and which perhaps we will be again – though our mirage has failed at present or has been covered over by alien speculations. [viii]

   Hilary Robinson demonstrates that for the female to be defined as autonomous from the male, as a subject on her own terms and disengaged from masculine perimeters, would be to potentially disturb the structures of the man’s subjective identity. Thus the non-reflective face of the mirror’s backing can be harnessed to “disconcert the economy of representation, disrupt the unity of the male subject”. [ix] In this vein Calle harnesses the opacity of the mirror’s backing as a deflective, rather than reflective, surface in which Henri cannot see himself. In doing so the artist dismantles the self-meditative function of the mirror as a strategy for the emasculation of the male stranger. Calle ‘s enacted role vacillates between an embodiment and effacement of Henri’s reflection in order to unsettle the foundations of his subjectivity, so that he might perceive himself to be vanished.

  In becoming a mirror for Henri, Calle forfeits her itinerary and purpose in favour of synchronisation with his. By curtailing her subjective identity, Calle’s artistic encounter alludes to an unravelling of the self into a lack of self, into unthinking, reflexive substance. As Sheena Wagstaff illuminates Calle posits “a (fictional) state of artist-as-self-less”.[x] Calle’s yielding to the will of another addresses a dislocation from personal identity which paints the follower as merely a ventriloquising instrument for the one followed. In Suite Venitienne the artist shrouds herself under the lustrous facade of the mirror which deflects penetration and functions only to reflect, through which she becomes little more than a supine conduit onto which the movements of Henri may be inscribed. The act of following divulges a desire to consent herself, like a nineteenth century flaneur, to become “a blank page upon which the city writes itself”.[xi] For Anna Dezeuze, the “vertiginous abdication of control” that is entailed in the ceaseless following of another can be harnessed to unsettle an assumedly “centralised and coherent subjectivity”.[xii] By extension, Calle’s surrendering to Henri functions to disconcert the conception of a consistent self and unfurls a narrative of identity as fragmentary and incomplete. As Robert Storr has discerned, Calle’s true identity is always secreted somewhere underneath that which is perceptible in her artistic practices, as such he imagines Calle as:

a kind of stalker-provocateur who enters into the lives of others in order to construct her own, playing out daydreams of selfhood by isolating and pressurizing the otherness of those on whom her attention settles.[xiii]

   Calle’s mimetic trailing is hinged upon a yearning to exist vicariously, as she harnesses a surrogate body as a veil for her own subjecthood. By becoming a mirror for Henri, she swathes her identity with his, thus using its polished surface as a mask. Through this performative gesture she reveals herself not as a wound, or void, as she does not use the mirroring to attest to her absence or subjective disintegration. Rather the artist deploys the reflective opacity of the mirror’s surface as a defensive shield, a strategy for self-concealment. Our access to Suite Venitienne is predominantly through Calle’s narration, which serves to reveal her as a tenuous, story-bound character. Her narration is opaquely cryptic and intrinsically fluctuating, reverberating with Irigaray’s depiction of female language and expression: “woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring”.[xiv]  This is opposed to the conception of language proposed by the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, which longs for the solidification of the “fleeting identities that seem available in the imaginary”.[xv] Calle’s lack of narrative explanation functions to preserve the ambiguity of the following, and the furtive machinations of the follower. In her narration she exists only as a sinuous yarn of subjective recollections as though to “write prose poem of a mind constantly in flux”.[xvi] Fluttering between subjective existence and absence, she squirms against static verifications of identity and photographic substantiation of her presence that threaten to coagulate the fluidity of her selfhood. As art writer Yve-Alain Bois articulates “all these Penelopean constructions of identity [are] endlessly discarded as soon as they threaten to solidify”.[xvii] This reverberates with Irigaray’s affirmation that female language is “always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them”.[xviii]

   Cocker proposes an equivalent for Calle’s shadowing in the Minotaur’s persistent and “disoriented” pursuit of the labyrinth in which rationality and reasoned motive are subordinated.[xix] In my reading the interweaving streets of Venice are employed as a maze in which to lose oneself, Calle writes, “I see myself at the labyrinth’s gate, ready to get lost in the city and in this story. Submissive”.[xx] The physical disorientation entailed in the indefatigable following is paralleled in a psychic entanglement, in which the lucidity of identity becomes increasingly matted. As Irigaray writes “’she’ sets off in all directions leaving ‘him’ unable to discern the coherence of any meaning”.[xxi]

Sophie the bereaved girl-child

   Irigaray’s discourse elaborates on the behaviour of young girls suffering from alienation from the mother. She describes that the young girl will demarcate a protective distance or space around herself in an attempt to defend against feelings of rejection and, more perilously, a withering of identity. She will:

Organise a symbolic space around herself. She produces a territory through gestures of spinning, sexuate, gender-specific circular movement. This performs three main functions for the girl: it protects her from abandonment, depression, attack, loss of self; it attracts; it refuses access.[xxii]

   This is opposed to the reaction of the male child who will endeavour to master his alienation by appropriating an object which he uses to denote the mother. In the Freudian case of Little Ernst the boy-child appropriates a reel which he thrusts away, unravelling its string and then subsequently attempts to reclaim the reel. This action was observed by Freud and given the name “fort-da” (far-near) based on noises the child made during play. Thus, the child is acting out a performance of proximity and distance, casting an object in place of the vanished mother. In Irigaray’s argument the girl-child would not employ a surrogate for the mother in the form of an object in the way the boy does, but in the form of a doll or “quasi-subject”. This “quasi-subject” is not an object to be possessed or manipulated as other toys are, rather it is an object on which the child may bestow affection and with which to inscribe an illusory mutual relationship. Irigaray articulates that because the girl is alienated from a subject of the same gender then she is “bereaved” in the sense that she feels she has been divorced from a fragment of her subjective identity. In Suite Venitienne Calle does not spin or move in circles, rather she enacts a passive trailing gesture by moving mechanically in a course that is dictated by the male subject Henri. She delineates a void between them which distances Henri from her. Read through Irigaray’s framework this distance may be deciphered as a defensive strategy harnessed in order to shelter the artist from alienation and loss of self. The artist becomes a protracted, elongated shadow that stretches away from the male subject with which she is engaged, in a submissive inversion of the boy’s dominating and possessive teasing of his plaything. For fourteen days they become reciprocally attached and indivisible from each other in a gluey cohabitation that is bound by a transient and invisible cord. This is not analogous to the string of the reel as in the Freudian case of Little Ernst, as Calle possesses no governing mastery over Henri. Like the young girl in Irigaray’s model, Calle does not truly seek to cast Henri away from her, or pull him closer in their mutual dance but merely to preserve the palpable chasm that divides them. In Irigaray’s schema the girl has no need to dominate or master an object. In playing with a quasi-subject,

She gains comfort; through repetition, the play gains signification: it produces signifiers of the little girl’s subjective identity and the means of possible mediation for that subjectivity.[xxiii]

   If the girl-child performs her maternal role and thus gleans symbols of her subjectivity with the quasi-subject of the doll, then Calle in relation to the subject Henri might be equally understood to be enacting her feminine or sexual role in an attempt to designate her subjective identity. The artist performs as a smitten seductress, however this appointed identity is surely a fabrication. She numbs her own thoughts and consciousness in order to succumb to the counterfeit feelings and sensations of the infatuated female who is merely a construct of her own game of make-believe. Robert Storr has elucidated how, after a seven year sojourn, the artist returned to Paris and was hit by a strong physical and psychological sense of unsettlement and so began following people in order to relieve herself from her disoriented sense of estrangement. Calle writes:

When I came back, I felt lost in my own city. I had forgotten everything about Paris. I had no habits, I didn’t know anyone. I had no places to go, so I just decided to follow people – anybody. I became attached to these people, so I took a camera and made notes.[xxiv]

   It might be said that Calle’s performance of synchronicity with a stranger operates as a mediation, in order to navigate her own existence through the blurred and formless identities of others. This lure of following echoes with Elizabeth Wilson’s articulation of the “fragmentary” traces of the identities and existences of passersby that can be glimpsed whilst wandering around the city:

 We constantly brush against strangers; we observe bits of the ‘stories’ men and women carry with then, but never learn their conclusions; life ceases to form itself into epic or narrative, becoming instead a short story, dreamlike, insubstantial or ambiguous.[xxv]

   Through this we might understand the enticement of the oneiric dislocation from individual identity that can be engendered through the following of a stranger, in which one may glean fragments of his story. In this reading Calle pursues the temptation of following in order to interweave the disconnected vignettes into a fictitious, dreamlike narrative of existence. Calle herself writes “I’m the only one dreaming. Henri B’s feelings don’t belong in my story”.[xxvi] With this in mind, the following might be deciphered as a pursuit to engrave a portrait of identity through the disjointed and ambiguous fragments of a stranger.

   Like the mirror’s surface, the camera lens entraps the subject and congeals them within its limits into a static image. Baudrillard writes: “photography is itself an art of disappearance, which captures the other vanished in front of the lens, which preserves him vanished on film”.[xxvii] By photographing Henri, Calle ensnares him, as a strategy to make the other disappear, to flatten him into a lifeless image. Consequently, Calle veils herself behind apparatus for capturing the disappearance of another, as though to pilfer his identity through an act of petrification. By being photographed the subject is imperilled by, what Barthes refers to as, the “death in which his gesture will embalm me”.  As he articulates, photographers “turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal”.[xxviii] The photograph is equivalent to a disinternalisation of the other, laying his organs on a slab for display. Although Calle does not engage in a physical manipulation or puppeteering of Henri, her incessant act of photographing him evokes a desire to make of him an object, to be possessed, a flat image to be caressed and mastered. As a consequence the artist’s following might be read as though inconsistent with the performance of the bereaved girl-child in Irigaray’s schema. It could be argued, however, that Calle’s photographing of Henri does not enclose a desire merely to possess the other but to embrace his image, to metamorphose him into a surface that can be touched and stroked. As Irigaray writes “ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine. At least sexually. But not nearness”.[xxix] This is not to claim that Calle’s gesture is passive, or any less commanding, but simply that her action of incarcerating him into an image is not for possession in, and of, itself but rather a tactic for enduring proximity.

Sophie the shadow

   In Greek mythology the realm of the soul and shadow is the monotonous Meadow of Asphodel, a place where shadows wander, mimicking the activities of their former lives; unresponsive and unaware of each other they think only of their physical counterparts. According to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the shadow is constituted of the inferior and dark aspects of personality and is situated exteriorly to the conscious self. Jung argues that the shadow threatens to uproot the stable personality and that one must acknowledge the negative portions of his self in order to integrate the shadow and thus achieve a balanced and unified psyche. By ensnaring a man’s shadow and impeding its assimilation into the conscious ego one threatens to protract its fragmentation and thereby disturb the balance of his consciousness. Thus Calle inaugurates her desire to fissure the wholeness of Henri’s identity, to reveal him in a state of fractured incompletion. Prior to a conscious integration, in the Jungian schema, the man is at risk of being enslaved by the shadow. Using Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an illustration, Anthony Stevens writes, “it must be Jekyll, the conscious personality, who integrates the shadow…and not vice versa. Otherwise the conscious becomes the slave of the autonomous shadow”.[xxx] In his elucidation of Suite Venitienne, Baudrillard describes how “the shadowing makes the other vanish into the consciousness of the one who follows him”.[xxxi] With this in mind we might comprehend Calle’s shadow-play, as a quest to devour him, so that he no longer exists independently from her; like a man enslaved by his shadow.  In my reading however, Calle’s following is not a pursuit to ensnare Henri in order to gain completion and oneness through amalgamation into his solid form. The artist does not yearn for the unity and seamlessness of a single identity but rather to abandon her own rigid perimeters in favour of a plural existence. As art historian Tom McDonough articulates, both follower and followed are “denied their distinct identities, a shared desire for the other now provoking their mutual choreography through the city”.[xxxii] Like two people sewn into a single dress, the subjects lose all of their former shape as they are anchored together in a perpetually touching existence. Suite Venitienne engages the artist’s body in a performance which chimes with Irigaray’s expression of the female propensity for proximity “so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity…impossible”.[xxxiii] Cocker articulates the slackening of selfhood that is an intrinsic consequence of the shadowing of another as “the wilful fragmentation and disintegration of the self inherent in the gesture of following or being followed”. Analogously, her mimetic trailing of Henri instigates a softening of identity wherein subject and object seem to melt together, and through which the contours of her body are loosened and rendered permeable.[xxxiv] As an effect of Calle’s shadowing, the delineation between her and Henri becomes muddied, as both subjects cease to exist as singular and enclosed selves. McDonough alludes to this in his articulation of the “libidinal tangle in which pursuer and pursued lose their clear polarities”.[xxxv] Echoes of Calle’s strategy can be felt in Irigaray’s reflection that “the feminine does not insist on a strict dividing line between the self, and what is outside of it (the other)”. The solid and unyielding perimeters of a “fortress-like” segregation are, for Irigaray, more closely aligned with the masculine.[xxxvi]

  At the denouement of Suite Venitienne the artist punctuates Henri’s consciousness so that he becomes cognisant of her. Baudrillard makes reference to echoes of the Orphic myth within Suite Venitienne, most prominently because Calle’s rules dictate that if Henri should turn around and look at her then the shadowing must cease. In accordance with the Jungian conception, should Henri’s conscious recognition of Calle purge her possession of him, rendering him free from her? In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice; Orpheus releases his mirror-bound wife from Hades’ realm on the condition that he mustn’t turn around and look back until they return home safely. When Orpheus flouts this instruction and looks at Eurydice she immediately vanishes and becomes trapped in the death realm forever.[xxxvii] In accordance with Jung’s model of the psychic shadow, for Henri to become conscious of Calle would be to integrate his shadow, and thus she would become drowned inside his singular form; devoured and digested into his unified psyche. Thus, once Calle is unmasked she permeates the fabric of his consciousness and becomes absorbed as a memory, and thus she continues to dog him from within. Calle writes, “I cannot follow him anymore. He must be worried, wondering if I am there, behind him-now he thinks of me-but I will be on his trail. Differently”.[xxxviii] In this respect the shadowing does not encapsulate a longing for an absolute assimilation into the perimeters of his solid flesh, but rather speaks of the fragmentation of the subject into a plurality of shards that can be dispersed. In Irigary’s discourse the female sex is posited, not as a lack of tangible form, but as a myriad of surfaces in perennial contact with each other. By this token, Calle’s performance serves to articulate her identity as a picture of incompletion, in opposition to the - allegedly male-centered - preference for a unified and singular structure. As Irigaray reflects, “woman takes pleasure precisely from this incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself over and over again”.[xxxix]

   Suite Venitienne posits that through the acquiescent trailing of a stranger, one might become embroiled in a slackening of identity through which the perimeters of individual selfhood are written as porous. This is a testament to the female proclivity for closeness and the mutual easing of borders as described in Irigarian discourse in which, “rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two”.[xl] In Suite Venitienne Calle stages herself simultaneously as a looking glass, a bereaved child and a shadow. Through these enactments the artist successfully submerges her elusive subjectivity under a labyrinth of interwoven fictions, in which she becomes unreadable as an object of speculation. Enmeshed in a clandestine choreography with another she attests to the reciprocal blurring of selfhood that is her want.

Anna Barriball at The Fruitmarket Gallery

                           Draw (fireplace), Anna Barriball 2005

Barriball’s is principally a drawing practice. In saying that, her modest processes teeter on the brink of sculpture and regularly tip over into wholly three-dimensional avenues. She is perhaps best known for her hand-drawn impressions of windows and doors in monochromatic hues ranging from impenetrable graphite to the radiance of silver ink. It feels as though they might be better described as low-relief casts of such surfaces, as the drawings’ many pocks and depressions are earnest accumulations rather than a trompe-l’oeil ruse. Barriball concentrates her exertions on the architectural touchstones which are the most vulnerable, where the skin that separates in from out is at its most skeletal. Protracted and labour-intensive though it is, her drawing is a vacant and depersonalised gesture. It is as though through the giving over of time to the grain of an object she proposes to anchor it firmly within her memory, to commit them to their own space in her past to which she grants us admission.

Upon entering the gallery the viewer is encircled by the sound of a barren, mechanically-composed breathing. The sound is emanating from the video projection Draw (fireplace) (2005), at the heart of the space and set back within the recesses of a small, darkened room. The video displays a fireplace, its hearth shrouded with a sheet of tracing paper which persistently billows and shrinks to the contours of the grate in corporal-seeming breaths. This suction is actually activated by the furtive manoeuvres of the artist: repeatedly opening and closing a door. The inhalations function to pull the fireside out from the detached scaffolding of filmic space and, experientially at least, into a more embodied terrain. Both sensual and hypnotising, the effect is one of a monstrous organ ventilating an image of its own past. Another work that dominates the lower gallery is Untitled (2011), a sculpted grid of plastic windbreaks, the plaited fibres of which have been flooded with the ink of a marker pen. Though the emblematic tri-colour of the plastic has been partially effaced, the familiarity of their striped pattern affords varying shades of identification through the soot-black ink. Windbreaks are designed to shield our bodies, we employ them to forge a temporary material refuge of tranquil space; a reassuring vacuum. Here, the ruts and dimples are written as a testament to the gusts that would once animate and sculpt its dormant skin. Even the aeration of the fireplace can’t tease it beyond its semblance as a comatose monument to the vigour of British weather.

Upstairs on the back wall of the gallery a newly commissioned wall drawing constitutes a first for the London-based artist. Taking its pattern from acoustic tiling the wall appears to have been punctured with thousands of miniature holes with which to absorb sound. This is an act which gently destabilises the wall, undermining its solidity. What at first seems like a void, however, reaffirms itself as an embellishment. It is additive through the laborious application of, an insistently sharpened, 2B pencil. In this manner the wall is re-imagined as a sea of sequin-like reflective circles, which ring with dazzling lights in a synaesthetic exchange wherein light is also sound and time becomes material. Elsewhere, a series of silver ink drawings entitled Mirror-Window-Wall  I-IV (2008), is hinged upon a phenomenological upheaval. Framed and hung in couplings of four, each component poses as a glazed pane, whilst the gap between each frame ensures that the works resemble a childlike depiction of a window. Seeming to offer a route beyond the gallery walls and gesturing towards a variety of functional planes these drawings eventually reveal themselves as nothing more than embellished pelts; painted barricades of festering paper. Barriball’s mimetic windows are created by bleeding reflective ink into sheets of paper pressed up against an expanse of brick wall until their surface comes to look like a desiccated mirror. They are the philosophical equivalents of painting fictitious vistas onto the walls of a prison cell. Manifested here as claustrophobic scenery they mend over the rhetorical apertures they take as their subjects.

‘Fertile’ is not a word I would use to describe this work, it is a hostile and stifling landscape which discloses an almost agoraphobic seizure of interior space. Barriball’s visual metaphor is extended fluently in this vein throughout the exhibition from synthetic autumnal foliage cut from curtain textiles to rolls of ink-slicked paper that bear a resemblance to fossilised trees. The superficial effects of brilliant light and circulations of air are all in fact a consequence of the artist’s dexterous material mirages. In this way the exhibition feels something like navigating a dolls house wherein all domestic features are only as deep as their painted facades. Operating within such a thread-like palette of visual and conceptual tropes, I can’t help but wonder how Barriball will be able to negotiate beyond her fated walls and windows. For whatever the eye of her camera or the tip of her pencil is to settle on next however, I will wait with bated breath.

(Source: rosemarygeorge, via lincolntaft)

Ten in Love, Markus Schinwald 2006

Fanny, Markus Schinwald 2011

RECREA(C)TION: Versatile Beings at Arts Complex

Mining the fertile juncture between dance and visual art, this group exhibition brings together a collection of artists to address the physical agency and gesticulation of the body whilst investigating human surfaces alongside architectural and ambient spaces.

The preview of the exhibition hosted Transmission, a participatory dance installation by Skye Reynolds in collaboration with Jung in Jung. Beginning with an interactive glimpse of contact improvisation, the audience was invited to tug, stroke and engage the mute bodies of five performers. Their choreographic eruptions chimed with a familiar contemporary vocabulary in which the dancers moved along their own lines of energy and exchanged weight with graceful, sweeping motions. The tableau closed with an affecting solo which made audible the sounds of human limbs moving through the air in fluid and sinuous embellishments. Pulsating, spider-like hand gestures crafted creeping sonic whisperings while the miming of filigree, plant-like movements composed a landscape of sensitive sounds.

Riccardo Attanasio’s video work Diagrammer 1 comprises restrained yet visceral choreography in which a single male dancer poses his form in harmony with the metamorphosis of a geometric pattern in black tape. Opening with a shot of the dancer’s arching torso, the film skilfully utilises the scaffolds of the camera as a framing device which encircles the performer in his own furtive plot. Elsewhere in Andrew Houston’s film Untitled, set in a perturbed underground chamber, dancers writhe and animate their limbs in slumped, drooping movements as they drift languidly in and out of the frame, performing uneasy disappearing acts. Evoking the twisted figuration of Egon Schiele, Houston harnesses awkward gesticulation and gnarled contortions of the human frame.

Some of the most accomplished works in this exhibition belong to Adeline Bourret - the artist and curator at the centre of this collaborative project. Ghosts of Francesca Woodman are at play in her photographs in which she stages the architecture of her body against the artificial geography of the visual plane. The legibility of her photographic self-portraits is contaminated through a tantalising performance in which she appears to simultaneously invite and recoil from our gaze.

While it is true that the conceptual arc and assembled formal conclusions that constitute this exhibition could be cultivated further, this still proves to be a fluent and captivating demonstration of a perennially entrancing subject.

Stephanie Richardson

Brian Cheeswright: Thresh.Hold at Superclub

Now approaching its seventh month, Superclub has been carving out an appealing name for itself in the midst of Edinburgh’s artistic landscape. Brian Cheeswright’s solo show - the second in an ambitious summer programme of weekly changing exhibitions - presents a generous collection of new and older paintings which are framed by an infantile immediacy, grotesque humour and spirited characterisation. His body of work encloses a tendency to boil down his physical subject matter into congealed cross-sections through which we can glean glimpses of their curious ontological stories. By unfurling his peculiar fantasies of matter Cheeswright has composed a series of seductively misshapen relations, many of them masked in tribal veils of impasto application. He describes his process as ‘a pained, difficult birthing or a quick, satisfying discharge of restless energy. Retrieving matter from liquid chaos’. 

Formal correspondences with Philip Guston can be felt in Cheeswright’s semi-representational, cartoon-like depictions and personal lexicon of pictorial emblems. One of his most recent paintings Headache (2011) is a touching portrait of conjoined heads, occupied in a symbiotic and - one suspects - cannibalistic engagement.  In Goody Two Shoes (2010) a young girl maniacally bares her teeth and gazes through mottled eyes that are cradled within ghoulish sockets, while streaks of unmixed oil paint become the skeletal scaffolding of her impassioned face. In Not the Doctor (2008) Cheeswright again coaxes the protagonist’s bones to the surface of his skin, as though wheedling out a tapeworm, so that they are nestled on the same plane as delicately tended wisps of hair. 

On one wall a pared coupling of figurative paintings lends a forlorn sensitivity and domestic sweetness to the otherwise untailored manner of arrangement. In the first a pair of legs are poised tentatively on a precarious branch, while the second depicts a couple clinging together against a bleak painted milieu that has begun to dribble and despoil its ephemeral paper base. Elsewhere in a tiny adjoining room is a composition of noisily-coloured works on paper in which the artist’s perpetual re-staging of fractured and dismembered figures serves to project a luminous feast of refracted visions. Painted with a lyrical and morose simplicity, these works perfectly ensconce the marriage of comic violence and pedestrian magic that seems to be the nub of Cheeswright’s artistic exertions.

Stephanie Richardson

Hayashi Takeshi at the Corn Exchange Gallery

Hayashi Takeshi’s solo exhibition is comprised of two large-scale stone sculptures which inhabit the floor and the walls respectively. Haku-u (2008)is a composition in white stone whose material plane is fractured as though through the spiralling of an illusory undercurrent. The smoothened skin of Haku-u (meaning ‘White Rain’)is punctuated with a myriad of distended blemishes resembling the splashes of pebble-drops in water. The lustrous swellings stir from their marble bed which evokes a traversal of environmental states and, in doing so, illuminates an uneasy liaison between object and space. Its disjointed surfacefunctions as a fallacious memorial to the vast fleshliness of the sea in which the lapping gradients of the waters are stifled into an artificial rhythm.

In contrast to the silken marble of Haku-u, Glade (2011) consists of five black granite pillars which are crafted from a furrowed sculptural tissue. Just as tree saplings can be moulded into unnaturally manicured formations, Takeshi’s forms are teased into subtly arching postures against their spatial supports. The limb-like pillars appear shrunken in the elevated heights of the Corn Exchange Gallery and there is something almost melancholic about their clinging dependence on the walls. Faintly recalling Toya Shigeo’s carved wooden sculptures, they share more in common with withered headstones than living boughs. Unlike trees, however which are coupled together by the interlacing tendrils that anchor them to the ground, Takeshi’s stones are severed from the earth and distanced from each other in a synthetic alignment.

The discord between internal and external space is articulated by the French philosopher Jean Hyppolite who wrote that ‘beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two’. In this manner Takeshi reveals the discomfiture with which his sculptures sit in their internal dwellings, as they blister like the skin of marine animals or choke in the shade of the gallery’s interior. The continuous and elemental nature of the stones is splintered into a crowd of estranged shards. Perhaps in an attempt to reconcile us with their immeasurable form, Takeshi has composed a human-sized portrait of environmental elements through an absorbing series of disconnected vignettes.

Stephanie Richardson

Still from Innocence

Peecheep, GL Brierley