Lynn Hershman: Captured Bodies of Resistance
The Man, of whom they speak so much and whose liberation they seek, is himself a result of a much deeper enslavement. He is inhabited and elevated to being by a "soul", which is part of the authority's rule over the body. Soul - the effect and tool of a political anatomy; soul - the body's prison.
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The artistic activity of Lynn Hershman has started over a quarter century ago. That period was a time of constant transformation, affecting not only the structures of her works, its means of expression and technologies used, but also the art domains wherein these works were situated. However, despite these transformations, responsible for the formal and medial diversity of her art, her activity remains coherent and logical if interpreted through its problem contents and underlying attitudes. Performance art, in-place and interactive installations, photographs, videotapes - all these media, when used by Hershman, express the body's invariable and unwavering resistance to attempts of enslavement, its defiance in the face of external domination, its rebellion against all violence. All the varieties of art practiced by Hershman are, broadly speaking, visual creations. Thus, the specific dangers to the resisting body are revealed not only at the level of meaning - of problems undertaken and issues addressed - but also gain a presence in the onto-structural dimension, determined by the category of a look, a notion basic to this domain of creativity. This almost organic union of the works' semantics and construction (poetics) is one of the most essential and valuable features of Hershman's art.
The look in visual art is a causative agent, a phenomenon prefiguring its form. The work's structure corresponds to the proposed form of perception, related in its turn to the ideology it serves and by which it is determined. The look is never innocent or neutral. It structures and orders the looked-at object (structuring or uniting the impulses received by the senses), adjusting it to the perceptual preconceptions. It is a process possessing not only a physical-mental but also a cultural-ideological aspect.
The look can also be viewed as an form of activity; in such a case the intentions of the observer become of the utmost importance. A look satisfying only the viewer's own desires can be construed as a threat to the observation object. The unwanted look (e.g.. the voyeur's eye) watches and exposes, controls and takes over, strips of privacy, reveals and defiles. It changes the looked-at person into a thing.
The dialectic of subject and object - a foundation of many a philosophical edifice - is in a sense a function of the look. The appropriation of the point of view is a form of domination and enslavement. This is the argument at the root of the feminist protest against the conventions, organizing visual culture (especially those governing popular, mass culture). In the feminists' opinion these conventions serve the male eye only. The look brings knowledge, which in turn gives rise to strength and power (while being also its expression). The body comes under control. It is enslaved; and the soul - an externally enforced "self" - becomes the guarantor of the enslavement (problematizing, by the way, the dichotomy: Internal - External). For several centuries - states Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality - repression (sometimes perceived as a constraint of discourse) has been cementing power, knowledge and sex into an almost inseparable whole; but the actual binding agent is the look.
It should be kept in mind that in a figurative sense the look implies an entire world view, an ideology (please note the etymological and semantic affinity of the words "look" and "outlook" and the synonymy of the verbs "to see" and "to understand"). So, when culture is subjected to (dominated by) a specific (out)look, it means that it favors a specific world view, an ideology serving only a chosen group. The dispute on the look, its character, rights and representation in a given culture is therefore essentially an expression of the emancipatory aspirations of groups which feel discriminated in that culture. And the work of Lynn Hershman, seemingly strongly influenced by feminist strategy (which it indeed serves) can also be considered a voice speaking for all those subjected to discriminatory practices, of whom women constitute only a part.
Voyeurism thus becomes a metaphor of power-in-action, a symbol of domination, demanding the rights it has usurped; a cowardly power, and unsure of its status and permanence, but, because of that, even more grasping and unscrupulous in the realization of its wishes.
The body appropriated by the look defines a fundamental, almost archetypal situation, when domination is revealed on one side and subjugation - on the other. It is a symbol of conquest and bondage. A symbol of enslavement.
The rebellion of the body, once it breaks out, is therefore conducted on a total scale; it is aimed both against its internalized controller - the self, the soul or the superego (consciousness - argues Nietzsche in the Will to Power - usually appears only when a whole wants to subjugate itself to another whole, which it considers superior) - and against its internal guardian - the omnipresent, enthralling look. This struggle sometimes reaches the dimension of a search for rebirth, thus gaining the significance of self-realization, reconstructing the recently annihilated subjectivity. This time, however, not somebody else's requirements but its own will would become the foundation of the new, hylozoic body; a body no longer needing the soul-consciousness, which is always the slave's consciousness of the master, who does not need to be conscious at all (G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy).
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Voyeurism is the standard model of film perception; peeping into others' lives is the standard behavior of the moviegoer. Popular cinema has even developed a specific set of conventions - called the zero-style - to provide the viewer with the comfort of looking while being invisible. For example, this purpose was served by the rule forbidding the actor/actress to look straight into the camera lens; such a look would necessarily expose the audience engaged in its scopophiliac activity and make them also the object of observation, however imagined. (But when the cinema stopped avoiding the look into the lens, it lost no time in transforming it into another, this time more "transparent" convention).
The audience of a typical feature film looks mainly at bodies. Bodies dressed or undressed, fashionably made-up and coiffed or picturesquely disheveled, silent or talkative, beaten-up, killed or experiencing orgasm. They are the dramatic nucleus of the film, they determine the structure of the plot; and this privileged position makes their treatment and adventures in the film a part of an ideologically conditioned strategy. They not only co-determine the commonplace image of the world, but accomplish persuasive functions by taking a stand towards all that is allowed, forbidden or recommended.
The avant-garde cinema has either cast off these conventions or treats them in an arbitrary way, putting them to other purposes.
In the classic period of the twenties and thirties the film avant-garde typically presented an aesthetic attitude towards the body which was transformed - as in the films of Man Ray - into an objet d'art (a means of aesthetic pleasure). In the contemporary surrealist movies (e.g. those by Louis Bunuel), the deconstructed image of the body was a way of expressing the surrealist world view (insane love).
However, the new, multiform film avant-garde arrived at the opinion that the body images typical for the classic period remain subjected to the voyeuristic look, seeking in cinema only visual pleasure. Just as in the popular cinema, here also the woman was assigned only the part of the looked-at object.
The films of the new avant-garde show the body through functions and images which go far beyond the obligatory cultural conventions. The explorations of the body often, and with premeditation, break the various taboos. The images of the liberated body are confronted with images of enslavement. Carnality and sexuality are elevated to the rank of the most important subjects of neo-avant-garde cinema. Even in these films, however, we can sometimes observe a look, which, although uncompromising, can be suspected of a will to dominate. Stan Brakhage's film Window Water Baby Moving (1959), in which he registers the birth of his daughter, is a direct expression of feeling and, at the same time, a calculated symbolic construction, recounting the genesis. Thus he is able to retain male artistic control over a specifically female act of childbirth (recall here the rituals of some primary tribes, where the man symbolically enacts childbirth, appropriating the significance and value related to the act).
The film Window Water Baby Moving is dominated by the expression of the body's vitality. In another of Brakhage's film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971), we are dealing with emotions on the other extreme; we are terrified by the objective meatiness of a body which is cut, carved, skinned, measured and analyzed. Here also expression takes ascendancy over discourse, confronting us with another border experience - with death.
In the Jean Genet film Un Chant d'Amour (1950) the enslaved body is opposed - in a typically romantic manner - to the free imagination which transforms enforced auto eroticism into a sexual encounter with another; in the works of Kenneth Anger, e.g., Fireworks (1947), imagination speaks a language of myth and symbolism. Both are suffused with eroticism and (homo)sexual emotions which oscillate between direct expression and symbolic narration. The works of Genet and - especially - Anger, have given birth to an aesthetics of a body seeking its pleasure in pain, to forms of expression uniting sadism and masochism, and to a vision of death as the ultimate sexual experience.
A special place in this trend of film exploration is occupied by the work of Carolee Schneemann; in her films we find a direct visualization of sexual pleasure, embodied in their very structure. Ecstatic body behavior, orgasm, exploding with color laid directly on the film and expressed through violent scratches of emulsion, are the dominating features of Fuses (1967). The carnality, physicality of sensation is translated into physical action, literally affecting the film material (aided, of course, by the classic means of emotional expression, like e.g. multiple exposure).
The films of Jayne Parker, such as I Dish (1982) or K (1989) address the issues of identity, subjectivity, objectivity, consumption and defecation through the use of a "carnal" convention of the film performance. Claudia Schillinger creates, in her turn, a poetics of sexual perversion (Between, 1989), while Cleo Ubelman presents an ultimately objectified, uniform body, subjected to endless, unemotionally executed and accepted ritual tortures (Mano Destra, 1986).
The history of presenting the body in avant-garde cinema, from Man Ray's Le Retour de la Raison (1923) to Mano Destra and the films of Birgit Hein, is essentially the history of a discourse on the body's objectification. It covers the perception of the body as an art object; the vision of the body as meat; and the image of the body conceived as a tool of sexual pleasure. Situated between emotional and symbolic discourse, the body releases images of joy and transgression or of shame, repulsion and terror, and evokes visions of ecstasy, holiness, epiphany and revelation. Only rarely is the body perceived as the foundation of a subjective identity (albeit still dependent primarily on the soul or the psyche).
The images of the body in avant-garde cinema break down and deconstruct the representation conventions, violate numerous taboos, rebel against imposed authorities and speak in defense of discriminated sexual minorities. While creating new, radical forms of expression and penetrating unknown dimensions of carnality, both the avant-garde film and photography (egg. that of Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano) were nevertheless unable to undermine the domination of the viewer's eye. They could not turn back his gaze and provide him with a direct (as opposed to symbolic) experience of being the object of somebodies observation and activity. Very effective in their deconstruction of the rules of presenting the body, they were not equally effective demolishing the structure of the ways it is viewed - the structure of vision itself. Thus, they unintentionally preserved the otherwise problematized dichotomy of the subject and object of perception. They could only multiply images expressing specific emotions and evoking desired meanings in the hope that the viewer's attention could be drawn not only to the various aspects of carnality, but also to the problems of vision.
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These limitations of film (and photography), inherited by video art, were probably the reason why Lynn Hershman, consistently taking up in her work the question of the viewed body syndrome, had very early - at the end of the seventies - decided to add the interactive installation to the employed means of medial expression. Of course, she did not abandon the old techniques: photography and video. Her photographs show figures which don't exist at all (the Roberta series); figures collated from the portraits of real persons (the Hero Sandwiches cycle); or, finally, a special form of collage - female bodies combined with tools aiding vision or representation: camera, screen or binoculars (the Phantom Limb Photographs series). The focus of interest in each of these series is the problem of identity and its dependence on the world of media and the perception standards. However, Hershman's videos are also discourses on the real and virtual dimensions of carnality and communication (Virtual Love), on desire and seduction in media space (Desire Inc.), on feminism (Changing Worlds), on voyeurism and violence (Cut Piece) and on truth and identity (Seeing is Believing; Longshot). Her artistic video diary, kept over several years, (Electronic Diary) embraces all these problems and situates them within the personal sphere of intimate affairs.
Both these media - photography and video - have enabled Hershman to penetrate the representation spaces, to build ever new forms of deconstruction and unite them in a symbolic way with the perception problem. They have enabled her to develop a discourse on the subjugated body. They prepared the factual base and the visual structures for the interactive works; those which make it possible to implement fully the internal principle of her art, her main intention. Ultimately, they are the works which deflect the viewer's look and make him see himself looking, make him experience not only his subjectivity but also his objectivity.
As I have already argued, the basic, fundamental arrangement in visual arts is the confrontation of carnality and the look. The work is, revealing itself only because it is perceived. From the observer's point of view the internal (identified, as it were, with contents, sense, value, etc.) is only another form of the external. The look, taking in the material, physical dimension of the work, does not expose this internal essence - the soul - of the work, but on the contrary - creates it, under the pretext of searching for the hidden whole. This process of creation usually takes place in secret, camouflaged by the interpretation ideology: a concept proclaiming the program of discovering the work's truth either by reason or intuition.
By assuming existence, and actually forming a deep internal foundation for the work, the interpreter's look violates the work's integrity and destroys its physical identity; for this foundation, the work's soul, is a sign of the enslavement of its body. "The soul, real and immaterial, is not a substance; it is an element uniting the effects of a certain kind of power with the references of knowledge; a transmission-box, through which the relations of power create the possibility of knowledge, and knowledge extends and strengthens the effects of power" (M. Foucault, Supervision and Punishment. The Birth of the Prison). The work, enslaved by the interpreter, is subjugated to his imagination and closed (but only to him; to others it remains open).
An example, both drastic and model, of an artistic project objectifying a thus perceived look within the work's structure (as an element of the work), and a demonstration of the destructive function of the look, devouring the passive, gentle carnality of the work, is the interactive installation Zerseher by Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lusebrink; the looked-at portrait is destroyed under the viewer's gaze.
The works of Lynn Hershman build situations of reception which exceed the limits of the internal art context. They are not concerned merely with the problems of art. Her works belong to a space where the questions of aesthetic come into contact with social problems, and their message relates them to the feminist discourse - although limiting Hershman's art to feminism would be, as I have argued, an unsatisfactory simplification. The artist makes use of the powerful connotations of the pair: look - body, fundamental to her work, to create situations where the look directed at the work becomes the voyeur's gaze, infringing upon someones privacy, intimacy and security.
The diverse implications are present both in Hershman's earliest works (e.g. the Dante Hotel installation, 1972) and in the latest projects (e.g. her recent Internet work in progress, Venus Home Page) and include bodylessness, simulation, virtual identity, manipulation, the relation between private and public space. But the fullest expression and the most perfect (so far) union of artistic feeling with means of realization were achieved by Lynn Hershman in her interactive installations.
A specific property of Hershman's installations is their active character; as I have already mentioned, her works, unlike the Sauter/Lusebrink installation, turn back the viewers' gaze, letting them experience the state of being both the subject and the object of observation. The viewer looking at a created world simultaneously becomes the looked-at object. Voyeurism is uncovered and the observer status - shaken and problematized. Hershman's virtual figures demand that the audience behave in a way consistent with their needs. Her works struggle for subjectivity; their construction presents the viewers with an opportunity to realize the mechanisms governing their social behavior, and exposes the camouflaged rules by strength of which they appropriate works of art.
In the installation Room of One's Own (1990-93) the camera follows the viewer's eyeball movements and transforms them into a digital signal, enabling the work to adjust itself to the viewers' perceptual behavior. Thus it speaks not only of asymmetrical relations between people (i.e. such that can be described by the pairs: active - passive or active - reactive, like the salient relation "looker - looked-at"), but also about interpretation of art works and the rules of perception itself.
America's Finest (1994) places the viewers in the field of fire of a "weapon" they are operating, thus giving equal status to people on both sides of the view-finder and linking the media world with the world of death. The viewer becomes both the aggressor and the victim, and the objectifying look obtains extremely negative connotations.
Paranoid Mirror (1995) deconstructs the phenomenon of the mirror image; by mixing the projected and reflected images it confuses the onlooker and makes him doubt his understanding of the relation between images and the reality they represent (whatever it might be), as well as between images themselves. It raises the simulacrum problem and sets in motion a wide context of cultural and artistic connotations of the reflection phenomenon (the artist herself points out van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait as her source of inspiration).
All the above installations, together with two previous ones: Lorna (1979-83) and Deep Contact (1984-89), do not permit the viewer to retain his contemplative/voyeuristic detachment from the perceived objects. They draw him into an interaction, during and as a result of which he is forced to realize the nature of the processes in which he takes part. Thus, as the distance from the work decreases, there appears an awareness of the interdependence between the structure of the object and the structure of its perception; the distance from the latter increases, bringing about a detachment of the subject from himself and his own behavior.
The interactive installations of Lynn Hershman allow her to shift the focus of her art from the communicated meanings to the process of communication. But she does not remove these meanings from our scope of vision - to the contrary, she has made them more profound as an object of the receiving experience, not of mere interpretation. The passive mode of meaning, characteristic for video and photography, is transformed in her installations in a dynamic mode of signification.
In her latest projects Lynn Hershman reaches for other interactive media: the CD-ROM (its logic was already present in her installations) and Internet. The latter medium, with its dominating role of communication, opens before the artist new, fascinating vistas.
Employment:
1976- University of Lodz, Film and Media Department, since 1987 - Ass. Professor;
1990- Centre for Contemporary Art-Ujazdovski Castle, Warsaw, Media Art Curator;
1993- Centre for European Studies, Lodz; Professor,
1993- Contributing editor (media art section), Quarterly Art Magazine
1995- University of Lodz, Department of Art History, Professor
Published or edited about 10 books on theory and history of avant-garde, especially film, video, and multimedia, and more than 100 articles on media art and experimental artistic culture.
In 1988 founded Polish Video Art Data Bank (now: Media Nomad), a private, non-profit organization for media culture.
Selected festivals and exhibitions curated in CCA:
1996
Irit Batsry - videotapes retrospective; Lynn Hershman: Captured Bodies of Resistance - retrospective exhibition (photographs, videotapes, interactive installations, CD-Rom)
1995
The British Video Art in the Nineties; Peter Callas - computer animation retrospective; Lab 5. International Film, Video and Computer Art Exhibition
1994
International Film & Video Lab Week; Jozef Robakowski - Space of Kinetic Energy
1993
II International Media Meeting; David Larcher - film & video retrospective;
1992
International Media Meeting; Malcolm Le Grice - film retrospective;
1991
The Middle of Europe. Festival of avant-garde film and video art from Austria, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland;
Selected other curatorial works:
1996
Vid(oFormes, Clermond-Ferrand; Foro Artistico, Hanover; VideoFest Berlin;
1995
In Sight. Video Festival, Toronto; ELAC, Espace Lyonnais d'Art Contemporaine;
1994
Leipzig, Medienbiennale; Roma Europa Festival; Paris, Mutations de l'image; Budapest, Autumn Festival; Osnabrueck, European Media Art Festival;
1993
Plymouth Arts Centre; Coventry, Depot Studio; Wolverhampton, Light House Media Centre; Hull, Ferens Art Gallery; Dessau-Bauhaus, Ostranenie International Videofestival;
1992
Toulon, E.S.P.A.C.E. Peiresc; Manosque Video Festival; Osnabrueck, European Media Art Festival Genewa, Saint-Gervais; Tokio-Osaka, Image Forum Festival; Leuven, STUC; Berlin, VideoFest; Enschede, TARt; Riga, Arsenals Festival;
1991
Vienna, Medienwerksttat; Toronto, Festival "Unblocked"; Paris, Cinema a l'antrepot; Mainz, Kulturzentrum;
1990
Riga, Arsenals Festival; Kuopio/helsinki, MUU Festival; Linz, Querspur Video Festival;
1989
London Film Festival; Video Festival, Szigetvar, Hungary
1988
Riga Arsenals Festival.
Symposiums, panels, lectures
1996
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; Gallery Wyspaî, Gdansk, Poland; District Museum, Bydgoszcz, Poland; WRO - Monitor Polski, Wroc³aw, University of California, Davies, USA; Art Conexion, Lille, France
1995
York University, Toronto, Canada; McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Concordia University, Montreal, Canada; Direction Regional d'Art Contemporain, Lille, France; Conference on Postmodernism, University of Lodz, Poland;
1994
6th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Helsinki, Finland;
Juries:
Graz, Film + Arc Festival, '95; Locarno, International Video Festival, '95; Oberhausen, International Short Film Festival '95; Bauhaus-Dessau, International Video Festival '93.