Lethe Room 2004, concrete, wood, metal, paper, electric motor, the artist. Courtesy Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York.
Ennoia 2002, cast-concrete vessel, water, the artist, sound environment. Sound in collaboration with Stephen Vitiello. Courtesy Diapason Gallery, New York.
Krasis (Ennoia)
in New Realities: Being Syncretic
Ascott, R.; Bast, G.; Fiel, W.; Jahrmann, M.; Schnell, R. (Eds.)
Springer Wien New York 2009, 360 p.
Pages 310-314
1/ Lethe Room [i]
Your were feet at an angle
Stuck in a tainted stream,
And under your ankles the specter of a horse,
Its chestnut mane lopped off,
An ordinary creature in a time of war,
Hooves blown, trying to make do. [ii]
I lie inside a rectangular container, which resembles a stone tomb. Inside, hundreds of thin sheets of paper move gently under the pressure of my body. My hands hold chunks of graphite. I mark the sheets, cutting through their delicate surfaces; lines appear around my body. The viewers were asked to remain silent. One hears the paper crackling, shimmering like waters of a remote river. My perception is enclosed within the container. I perceive from beyond its walls, the walls of koimeterion [iii], the walls of flesh.
Perception as thought, as immersion in foreign matter (any matter being foreign), becomes altered through the infinite amount of mirroring between the self and the non-self. Markings and traces multiply our presence; yet at the same time consume it, resulting in our gradual absence. Consciousness as awareness of boundaries (my skin, my mind, my death, the other) and as knowledge of the impossibility of identifying these boundaries-becomes distorted by the impossibility of finding an exact place or an exact moment in this chronotopic universe where the boundary occurs.
Does one then pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilized before the threshold... What we are apprehending here concerning what takes place also touches upon the event as that which arrives at the river's shore [arrive ˆ la rive], approaches the shore [aborde la rive], or passes the edge [passe le bord]. [iv]
English home relates etymologically to Greek koiman, "to put to sleep, to die." Koiman combines notions of enclosure, safety, familiarity, and origins with that of return, departing from and arriving towards the same. Enclosure and return point towards a certain state of consciousness where perception and knowledge fall outside of life. In the European tradition of classical musical composition a syncope signifies a moment of collapse, where the rhythm stumbles upon itself, falling outside of itself. This method of syncopation, a temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent, is typically caused by stressing the weak beat. The term functions in medical jargon as a partial or complete temporary suspension of respiration and circulation caused by cerebral phenomena, in short, for fainting. As Catherine Clément argues in her "Syncope: the Philosophy of Rupture" artists and mystics have long shared the dream and the desire to remove the confines of time. Upon closer investigation and upon meticulous division into shorter intervals, time reveals itself as containing an infinite amount of particles within. Unable to define any moment that is now, we experience time as uncontainable, and furthermore, as unnamable.
Language contains, encloses, and marks our perception, leaving traces of historical meanings and of the many etymologies. We dream about flying above our selves, above body and language, the lightness of disembodiment corresponds with the impossible passage referred to by Jacques Derrida as "the refused, denied, or prohibited passage, indeed the nonpassage" [v]:
Belonging to a language does not compare, at first sight, with inclusion in the space of citizenship or nationality; natural, historical, or political borders; geography or geo-politics; soil, blood, or social class. As soon as these totalities are overdeterminated, or rather contaminated, by the events of language (let us say instead, by the events of the mark), which they all just as necessarily imply, they, in turn, are no longer thoroughly what they are or what one thinks they are. [vi]
Language as an act of receiving (receptacle, khora) means that we are at home, chez-soi, within oneself, hence able to welcome, accept, and admit something other then oneself. What is the relationship between language and border? We imagine an edge line of a country, of a body, of a meaning, of a life. How can we trace the line? By tracing and naming (enclosing) we threaten the border, "there is a problem as soon as this intrinsic division divides the relation to itself of the border and therefore divides the being-one-self of anything." [vii]
Consciousness would be then, quintessentially, a state of alertness in front of an unknown boundary, a non-crossable border, and a non-traceable passage. It would be our only possible con-text and con-tour, the upcoming event of the "proper" dying, the crossing over. Consciousness would be what makes us notice our status as suspended in time and in space, perceiving this borderline, glimpsing towards an unknown horizon, which shadows our journey and limits the visibility throughout the experience of being. Virtual [being] provides us with an escape, when consciousness arrives at the borderline, first succumbing to the "vulgar concept of time insofar as it privileges the now." [viii] Border as limit, as end (fini), outlines and contains. Border as line, traces and marks, but never contains:
We are speaking here with names (event, decision, responsibility, ethics, politics-Europe) of 'things' that can only exceed (and must exceed) the order of theoretical determination, of knowledge, certainty, judgment, and of statements in the form of "this is that," in other words, more generally and essentially, the order of the present or of presentation. [ix]
Perception contained in language and altered by language speaks in the name of the aftermath, re-presenting. Precisely in that moment of perception (representation, reflection and recollection,) which language is-as the act of naming, marking, tracing, containing-the fluidity between image and presence occurs. We must keep this question open (Derrida.) The possibility of fluidity should remain open as a "duty to respond to the call of European memory." [x] The concept of time that attaches itself to this aporetic 'real' is, once again, a 'vulgar' concept of time, which privileges the now. As an aporia, time itself becomes a topology, a surface, an exteriority.
2/ Ennoia [xi]
Understanding his own reflection, he saw it in the clear, shining water, which surrounded him. His thought power (ennoia) became active and visible. It appeared before him through the shine of light: it was a power that existed before the universe was born, this power, being an ideal premonition (pronoia) of the universe, this light, a simulacrum of a light, a mirroring reflection of the Invisible." [xii]
I am half-immersed in an octagonal vessel. Its shape was cast in stone to resemble a medieval baptismal font. The vessel is filled with cold water. Curled up like an embryo in its narrow space, I move slowly and silently in a circular way. Projected video image of the immersion, as viewed from directly above the vessel, appears on the far wall. Recorded at an earlier time, the image seems almost identical with the event and is the only source of light in the room. The projection shows the octagonal font against a white background, suggesting the scene was filmed during the day, thus complicating the viewer's experience of the immanent quality of the installation.
Then I saw a shining light, wide and high as a mountain, which spreading upwards flashed into many tongues of fire (linguas). And outside it stood a number of men clad in white, in front of whom, like a veil, transparent crystal extended from their breasts downwards to their feet. [xiii]
Hildegard of Bingen's "Scivias" is a three-part composition, the first containing the account of six, the second of seven, and the third of thirteen visions. All visions seem to have similar beginning, where Hildegard is "confronted by a bright light, which radiates over some wonderful piece of imagery." [xiv] Arguably light and thought are crucial companions in the history of allegory. Immersion of a fragment of light (or thought) that collapsed into the matter occurs in Gnostic writings in the context of "looking at (or thinking) emptiness." [xv] Consciousness becomes an experience of immersion, when we let our singularity and uniqueness dissolve in multiplicity.
In "Ennoia" the naked self becomes another kind of trace, when "human nakedness questions me-it puts the self that I am in question-it questions me in its unprotected and defenseless weakness as nakedness." [xvi] Perhaps the nakedness, even though portrayed by Levinas as an ultimate personal exposure, has yet another implication, that of an ultimate anonymity, the revealing of the fact of our vulnerability not as ourselves (chez-soi) but as anyone and everyone, calling to mind the nakedness of the fragile genderless figures marching in their journey towards another koimeterion, the Gaskammer.
Cartesian or high-tech fantasies of transcending the body through pure thought-or more recently, via free floating Internet subjectivities-are extension of this logic of the body as a kind of detachable image or sign for the self. [xvii]
In her discussion of the relationship between notions of embodiment, image and the self, Amelia Jones focuses on the ambiguous position of the image vis à vis the body it depicts as well as towards the body of the spectator and/or participant. Image as the mediator and as the interpreter announces itself both in early photography-as in Jones' example of the Hippolyte Bayard's "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man" (1884)-and in new media work, such as Pipilotti Rist's "Sip My Ocean" (1996). Bayard's image provides us with a paradox of representation, amplified by the fact that the artist depicts himself as a drowned man, hence questioning both the act of photographing himself as well disturbing our understanding of his state of being: Is he alive? Dead? Both? In a more multi-media fashion, Rist creates an environment that merges "image, screen, space, sound, and body" and "embraces the death of imaging in order to body forth the life of the subject through desire." [xviii] Her video installation proposes a world of sensual pleasure with its elegant shots of underwater landscapes, submerging and re-emerging figures and everyday household objects slowly drifting to the ocean floor.
There is, then, in the aggregate of images, a privileged image, perceived in its depth and no longer only on the surface-the seat of affection: it is this particular image which I adopt as the center of my universe, and as the physical basis of my personality. [xix]
Self-portraiture as an enactment of the self, as the performative self, performing on behalf of and for the self, arguably provides us with a palpable proof of our existence. However due to its intrinsic relationship with re-presentation (always, already a posteriori,) it also constitutes a proof of our non-existence, as we once were, yet no longer are. According to the rules of representation, we submitted ourselves to the 1st and 2nd degree of removal, the image as the past, and the image as a falsification. "It is no coincidence"--writes Martin Jay--"that the ocular and the photographic are inextricably intertwined in modern history; performance art enters that knot and makes it productively problematic... The interface between the performative body and the photograph presents ocularity with a twenty-first-century test case." [xx]
Photographic and digital images retain their documentary veracity independent of our well-established knowledge of their documentary meaninglessness. Self-exposure in video-based art (such as the double simultaneous image in "Ennoia") is also linked to the "critique of the cinematic 'apparatus'." In the words of Joanna Lowry, "video installation ... often involves a disruption of the indentificatory models of spectatorship that are associated with film theory: the embodied spectator is forced into literally acting out their engagement with the image." [xxi]
3/Wall Piece (epilog)
"Holbein's painting represents a corpse stretched out by itself on a slab covered with a cloth that is scarcely draped. Life size, the painted corpse is seen from the side, its head slightly turned towards the viewer, the hair spread out on the sheet... Cut off from us by its base but without any prospect toward heaven, for the ceiling in the recess comes down low, Holbein's Dead Christ is inaccessible, distant, but without beyond. It is a way of looking at mankind from afar, even in death-just as Erasmus saw folly from a distance. Is it a vision that opens out not on glory but on endurance." [xxii]
In 1522 Hans Holbein the Younger painted "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," on a canvas of unusual proportions, elongated and narrow, as if representing the tomb itself. In her essay "Holbein's Dead Christ," Julia Kristeva points at the physical appearance of the painting as if constraining the body within the canvas "which is merely twelve inches high, and intensifies feeling of permanent death." [xxiii] Among many interpretations of such dimensions, Kristeva follows the most probable opinion stating that the painting was created for a predella, which was to occupy a raised position with respect to the visitors.
In her essay Kristeva goes on discussing the lack of "beyond" in Holbein's painting, the symbolic lack of transcendence, and the lack of any indication of hope for the viewer, stripping down any religious conviction from its potential splendor, as she states "the most disturbing sign is the most ordinary one." Defining the painting's historical context, Kristeva reminds us that Holbein painted it in times of Reformation's war against images and against all representational forms or objects other then words or sounds. However she goes deeper into the underlying compositional reasons for the painting's visual austerity. Holbein needed to replace materialistic adornment and hedonistic desire with aloofness and disenchantment, proposing therefore "the desirability that one can give to the very withdrawal of desire," where "the idea that truth is severe, sometimes sad, often melancholy," [xxiv] was being born in Europe, a paradoxical painterly idea.
In his single-channel video, sound and strobe light installation "Wall Piece" (2000) Gary Hill flings himself repeatedly at a black wall. With each jump he utters a word, the meaning of which becomes veiled by the noise resulting from the encounter between the body and the wall. These speech acts are edited together to form a linear text and a video sequence with body presented in various positions, as it jumps up against the wall. In the recorded video projection we see a strobe light hitting the wall in approximately second-long intervals. The installation includes another source of strobe light, which strikes the projected image in irregular intervals. Mixing (krasis) of these elements results in a non-synchronized interplay of percussive rhythms of the moving body, the spoken text and the two sources of strobe light.
"Where am I...I feel abandoned by the real...Difference exists only through sound...a wall of sound. Can I go through it? Can I do through with it? Where does it reside? What does it feed on? Why does it flicker? Nothing approximates its speed...This is that hole which everything must pass through...Will there be a moment of recognition?" [xxvv]
[i] Monika Weiss "Lethe Room," (2004), concrete, wood, metal, paper, electric motor, the artist. Courtesy Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York.
[ii] "Aletheia: Girl in River Water" by Meena Alexander. Composed after seeing the performance "Lethe Room" by the author [Monika Weiss,] December 13, 2005, New York City, Lehman College Art Gallery, in Meena Alexander "Quickly Changing River," Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 2008, p. 28.
[iii] Greek koimeterion "sleeping chamber, burial place," akin to koiman "to put to sleep"; English home akin to Greek koiman, WEBSTER'S New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Co., 1977, pp. 179 and 546.
[iv] Jacques Derrida "Aporias. Dying-awaiting (one another at) the 'limits of truth'" ("Apories: Mourir-s'attendre aux 'limites de la vérité'," in Le Passage des Frontières: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida, Editions Galilée, 1993,) English translation by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993, p. 33
[v] Ibid, p. 8
[vi] Ibid, p. 7
[vii] Ibid, p. 11
[viii] Ibid, p. 14 in reference to Heidegger's "vulgar concept of time"
[ix] Ibid, p. 20
[x] Ibid. p.21
[xi] Monika Weiss "Ennoia," (2002), cast-concrete vessel, water, the artist, sound environment. Sound in collaboration with Stephen Vitiello. Courtesy Diapason Gallery, New York
[xii] Bodmer Papyri, 27, 1-36, 15, as quoted by Kurt Rudolph in "Die Gnosis. Wesen und Geschichte einer spatantiken Religion," Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990. Polish translation by Grzegorz Sowinski, Zakad Wydawniczy NOMOS, Krakow, 1995, p. 73
[xiii] Hildegard of Bingen "Opera, lib. 2, visio 7," p. 555, in Lina Eckstein's Woman Under Monasticism, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1896, reproduced by Elibron Classics, 2006, p. 265
[xvi] Lina Eckstein "Woman Under Monasticism," Cambridge: At the University Press, 1896, reproduced by Elibron Classics, 2006, p. 265
[xv] Clement of Alexandria, Ex Theodoto, 22, 7
[xvi] Emmanuel Levinas, 1987, 9 as quoted by Claudia Benthien in "Skin. On the cultural border between self and the world," English translation by Thomas Dunlap, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002, p. 99
[xvii] Amelia Jones, "Decorporealization" in Sensorium. Embodied Experience, technology, and contemporary art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, the MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, UK, 2006, p. 134
[xviii] Amelia Jones, Ibid, p. 135
[xix] Henri Bergson "Matter and Memory" ("Matière at Mémoire," Presses Universitaires de France, 1988,) English translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Zone Books, New York, 1991, p. 61
[xx] Martin Jay "Ocularity" in Sensorium. Embodied Experience, technology, and contemporary art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, the MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, UK, 2006, p. 193
[xxi] Joanna Lowry "Performing Vision in the Theatre of the Gaze" in Performing the Body, Performing the Text, edited by Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p. 277
[xxii] Julia Kristeva "Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia," ("Soleil Noir: Depression et Melancholie, Editions Gallimard, 1987,) English translation by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p. 110
[xxiii] Ibid, p. 114
[xxiv] Ibid, p. 127
[xxv] Gary Hill "Wall Piece," 2000, courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
