Ennoia, 2002 Installation, 6-hour performance: cast-concrete vessel, water, artist's body, video projection. Sound in collaboration
with Stephen Vitiello. Courtesy Diapason Gallery, New York.
Ennoia (Performing the Water), 2002-3 Color print (edition of 10 of right image) - View of six-hour immersion:
cast-concrete vessel, water, artist's body. Collection Enid McKenna Soifer, New York. Photo: Quyen Tran.
Baptism of Water / conversation on Ennoia (Performing the Water), 2003William Anastasi
Bill Anastasi (BA): How was the length of time of your immersion determined? Was it determined before or was determined by what went on while you were immersed?
Monika Weiss (MW): The time of my immersion in water was determined before I made the project. I decided it was going to be six hours, but I wasn’t sure how I would feel. In my studio, prior to the project at Diapason, I immersed myself for several hours. After the sixth hour I wasn’t really able to go far beyond. I would get very cold and then very sleepy. The day after I wanted to go back to the vessel. It felt as if someone took away from me something important.
BA: With art that is damaging. It's one of my difficulties with ballet also, because it's very hard on the body. It sounds as if you tried to extend ennoia as far as possible, short of some serious physical negative reaction.
MW: I wasn’t concerned about the level of comfort. I got cold. It was difficult, but it wasn't my goal to destroy anything in me. It’s tricky. In my recent project I was immersed in paint for many hours. It took me a while to find a kind of paint that would not damage my body. You know, they told me it’s ninety-five percent safe. So there was still this five percent.
BA: I remember there was a live video projection in your project. But it wasn’t totally live. Was it an earlier recording?
MW: I was interested in that tension, the suspension of disbelief. I am very interested in this way of translation, the way technology complicates presence.
BA: I like the idea of reality mixed with something very close to it which is virtual. I’ve done the video piece Free Will, which has the virtual picture of the corner and the actual corner. Your work—this particular piece—seems connected with the idea of a video version of an earlier reality. It’s a video memory of a similar performance while you are doing a very similar performance.
MW: It’s also the same object, so you think it’s the same time, but it’s a lie.
BA: All art is a lie. In German, art also means "fake." Like [Nam June] Paik’s fish in a fishbowl. He took the inside of a monitor beyond the screen is an actual fish?do you remember that piece? I feel like you were informed by the piece on some subconscious level.
MW: I was primarily interested in the baptismal font and the act of immersion in it. To be honest, I don’t think Paik inspired me in this case.
BA: So you immerse yourself for long stretches of time. Why?
MW: I like to remove the beginning and the end from the experience, leaving just the space. That's why I want to come back for many hours, for days. To create a place where people come and go, encounter something that happens almost the same, and almost all the time. Just like life itself. Like a grid in time and in space. Hours, days, the change of light. There is this gradual change, like getting tired, like the way we
disappear. More and more I think about it, because I have not used my own body until the last several years. I didn’t think about it until I felt a tremendous need for presence. I am still not sure where it comes from. One thing I am ready to think of is the need for that tension. Between my presence and the presence of others, and also between presence, technology, and the reflection. The reflection in water, in video, in sound. What happens in between has a different quality.
BA: Were you brought up Catholic? Did you ever become skeptical? And if so when did you become skeptical?
MW: I think I gradually became skeptical until I reached a point of rupture. As a child I was quite skeptical because of the form, the way things were explained or not explained, the way that church and Communist ideologies erased each other. I took religion classes to be prepared for the first communion. That’s something people do in Poland.
BA: In south Philadelphia also.
MW: Before the rupture I had my own vision of the religion. I went often to the cemeteries. I liked the smell of freshly harvested earth.
BA: Baptism is a thing to erase the original sin. You are born with original sin and only this wonderful organization called the Roman Catholic Church can eradicate it. The same church, which threatened to burn Galileo when he said that the earth moved around the sun. I was brought up in that tradition. I wouldn’t be surprised if my wife’s family of my wife secretly baptized my three children. James Joyce’s two children were secretly baptized.
MW: For me baptism is a metaphor, a state of passage. I am interested in the physicality of it. The feeling you get when you go under the water, how it shifts your view of the outside. Drinking, in taking, overflowing, immersing, are all about the same ontological dis-rupture.
BA: There is the return to the pre-natal state, since we are in water for the first nine months of our existence.
MW: Combining both before and after life?...
BA: And for the first million years or so our predecessors were in water. In “civilized society” we are constantly told to be cleansed. Urine is dirty. But this is only particular to a certain level of what we call civilization. It’s part of our problem that we accept that essential and natural functions are shameful.
MW: It extends beyond bodily waste. It’s about the body and its dying.
BA: And the shame that comes with sex. You can never be too clean. But all water on our planet has been in the system seven times already. All the water we have is all the water we ever had. You are immersed in the waste of millions of years of humans and other animals, trees?
MW: That’s why I don’t see that much of a difference between water and other fluids, like oil, and I work with other fluids also. But I am probably the most attached to water because of the mirror nature of it and because you can see through its transparency.
BA: No oil or any liquid is possible without water. We are mostly water. So there is this circular thing that ennoia is doing.
MW: Carolee Schneemann once said that the most important split in our culture is between body and mind. That’s where the visual tension comes from for me as well. From combining the two together. I think sometimes that I can do it through silence. I am interested in silence. Speaking is an expression of mind and so much so that I think speech is a way of erasing the body.
BA: You were silent, but I did enjoy the kind of sound that was in there. Even just the sound of what you were doing. And it was interesting to be in that level of light and hear what people were saying. Of course I have a different approach towards mind. The human mind is the most complicated thing we know of.
MW: I was brought up thinking that my body was only some kind of shameful tool or a case to carry the things we have inside, which we really are.
BA: It's an interesting area to work in. Baptism is either a barbaric tradition carried over from pre-modern times, which millions of people believe is the only possible way of salvation, the very first thing that must be done. Or it is a cleansing, a symbolic cleansing for people who don’t subscribe to that horrendous idea that hell, or at least limbo, is waiting for them. How much were you indoctrinated?
MW: I sometimes wonder to what extent I was.
BA: We don't know how much of our subconscious is affected. The reason why baptism interests me so much is that it was the second thing I couldn’t accept. I was told by the nuns that anyone who is not baptized of fire, water or desire—baptism of desire is if you lead a
good life, according to the tenets of local morality, baptism of fire is when you undergo martyrdom, and baptism of water is the kind we all know so I asked a question when I was twelve. What about the infants who die before they reach the age of reason? They are deprived of the sight of God. They go to Limbo, the place where you are not unhappy, you are just?deprived.
MW: Why are people of all ages and kinds suffering and dying? I asked and the priest said we are not to understand him. And so I (she) left. I was twelve.
BA: If the church is correct that life is just a brief preparation for eternity, then that would be correct. You can't beat it, if you take their premise. I believed what they said when I was nine. I was extremely devoted. I guess I’ve been devout in whatever. If I am a socialist, I am devout socialist.
