Helene Black: 2001 :: No ID

Monagri Centre of the Arts, Monagri, Cyprus
Solo show
27 Nov 2001 – 24 Jan 2002

Review by Nikos Papastergiadis published in the catalogue of the exhibition. It has been almost a year since Helene Black first contacted me to write for her catalogue. In the course of that time both of us have experienced extreme personal and we have all now witnessed shocking social events. Difficult times can bring you closer to some people as much as it forces you to separate from others. During this period I have pondered over the photographs that I have received. I can become attached to photographs very easily. Like many migrants of the twentieth century my parents lived with the photographs of their friends, parents and homes in the way that religious people live with icons. Photographs are like mobile homes or like the ‘filakto’ that protected those who journeyed to unknown shores. In the house of my childhood photos were at first stored in small boxes. We shared our home with other migrants. To put our beloved on display would be a kind of blasphemy, or at least it would lead to some form of harm or sorrow. There were already too many memories for a single house to bear, and they were all raw. When we could afford to live on our own and bought a television the photos also appeared on top of the box. Looking at the photographs that document the work in this exhibition makes me feel as if we have known each other for a long time. I have received many letters, emails and faxes. We have spoken on the phone. Last week I even received a video which toured me through her studio, streets and eventually arrived at Monagri, the site of the exhibition. The city and landscape resembles the topography I imagined from the stories I have heard. Cyprus compresses and sharpens many of the contradictions that recur across Greece and the Levant. Greek Orthodox churches opposite Turkish hamans. Stalls with Cypriot potatoes across from bars with English and German menus. Chinese restaurant and Italian shoe shops. The tourists and the cosmopolitan citizens are living cheek to jowl with those of hardened stares that predate the arrival of the Ottoman. I have never been to Cyprus. I have never met Helene. However, her voice, and the place from which this work come, now seem very close. In fact, I want to write this essay in the form of a letter. I feel that I know this subject and yet it is far from me. I feel confident about saying something, and yet I feel tentative. The form of a letter would let me speculate. It would allow me to say something about myself even as I ask about your well being. It would give me permission to cross a number of borders that conventions would otherwise prohibit. In this essay I want to say something in the same tone as the voice that speaks when you scratch your head. I want to offer something that is not entirely mine. In this sense I invite readers to also cross with me into a space that is between the private and the public. It is the place where we think out aloud and it is the place where our dreams of belonging can find a new beginning. Even when we feel the urge to speak in this way we often hold back. There is still the fear of living with the difference within our own selves. The withdrawl of speech that might lead us to an unknown place. What holds us back from coming forward with a new direction? Why do we hesitate to re-orient ourselves even when the turbulence of our times have shaken loose all the foundations? Who will recognize their image in the mirrors that smile and bleed? This essay is written from a distance but with the aim of coming closer. It is written as a part of series of correspondences and seeks to reflect on this experience of corresponding as if it were a theme that not only addresses our respective positions – writer, artist, reader, viewer – but also touches the common search to not only find a place to speak from, but also one which speaks to and of you. How wonderful it would be to be in a place where your name, identity and address appear as one. These days who can say, with clarity and without interference: ‘I am from here!’, or even more strongly: ‘Here is where I am from!’. No sooner is such a signal emitted than another voice, or another receiver cuts into the message, another reference point cuts into the message and complicates the signs of being and belonging. Amongst the signs that I have received are the images of a material and references to a space that both resonate deep in my memory and imagination. The use of the mirror in Helene Black’s work conjures up all the mysteries of reflection that not only captivate the most narcissistic elements of my self but also recalls my sense of wonder of the technology of revealing. Since childhood I have marvelled at the power of the tain in the mirror. Where in between the glass and its back does the reflection occur? How deep does a mirror need to be in order to give back all the dimensions of an appearance? Why do I find it impossible to avoid looking up or back when there is a mirror looking at me? The space that allures me in this work is not one which is represented directly, but is nevertheless ever-present: it is the space of the border. All borders have a space and a place. The former may be abstract and the latter physical, but in Cyprus, I imagine that the border is always political and real. The dimensions need be no more than the width of the mortar between two walls, or it may be the sparse metres of weed-filled no man’s land that is patrolled by nervous sentries. However, the border is also the place where beginnings and endings overlap. It is never a neutral or empty space. It is always bristling with energy and pressure. Being divided by a border will forever haunt your sense of belonging. In poem by Louis Perentos, that Helene Black sent to me, there is this lament: “We say we have houses and they don’t belong to us we say we have children and they don’t belong to us we say we have history and it doesn’t belong to us we say we have a country and it doesn’t belong to us we say we have and we have nothing apart from our unbearable loneliness” I want to approach the images of this work, by reflecting on the process of understanding as it unfolds in the passages of correspondence. I think that we learn about things as we experience the tremulous moments of appearance and disappearance. It is a process of exchange which does not really end. Things come and they go. People arrive and they depart. I don’t mean that we only appreciate something when it is lost, or recognize the value of others when they have gone. Rather, I am suggesting that we come to an understanding in the process of these extreme possibilities. For instance, let us consider the proposition that presence and absence are the two extreme points along a spectrum of experience, understanding is an event that occurs between these points. It does not appear suddenly at either end. It is not bound exclusively to the points of arrival or departure. Understanding did not present itself in the first letter, nor will it be declared in the final sentence of this text. It happens throughout the encounter with the other. I hope it reveals itself somewhat, even if only between the lines, of my replies. The model that I am proposing for reaching understanding is one that can also be stretched to cover the broader contours of identity.

Looking at the images of Helene Black’s work that I have received I can see a sense of identity that also reaches into this in-between space. The question of identity arises immediately when we see portraits. However, in Helene Black’s work the question is posed from many different positions because not only are the portraits multi-layered, but the context – in which the identity is defined – both draws from diverse histories, and works with the spatial elements of the institution. In this arrangement of images, the otherwise personal question of: ‘who am I?’, takes on broader symbolic and cultural dimensions. There is no sense of identity in this work which is pure and fixed.
When Helene Black commences the reflections and projections of identity she is both discovering and inventing the self. In one sense there is an archaeological quest for a past self. She must find her sources. The people who, at some point in her past, influenced her. But maybe the word influence is too strong here. They were there in her life, they put pressure on her in one way or another, they provided directions or opportunities, they enabled certain steps to be found, but this influence is not like an external force that exerts itself on an object whose shape or trajectory is then inevitably altered. There is no sense of a hierarchy or an homage to the figures above and outside of her identity. There is a lineage that is being suggested but it does not come in the form of a family tree, in which the stock of values, characteristics and destiny is pinned back to an original forebear. By contrast, there is another sense of connection and influence. The relationships are not established by lines of descent or opposition, rather there is a softer and more fluid movement between personae and figure, past and present, tradition and contemporary. From this perspective we can see that the construction of the self is almost cinematic. The self becomes an image which can be manipulated and invented. It is re-invented as one image is morphed with another to create a third and unknown, new and previously unseen self. While the archaeologist would search to discover the missing self, the one that we knew was buried in the deep and not visible on the surfaces of everyday life, the cinematographer, by contrast is not so concerned with simply recovering the past, but rather is driven to construct another identity based on the fragments that already exist. Between these two modes of discovery and invention we see a form of identity which oscillates between presence and absence on the spectrum of experience. Helene Black’s work defies an easy form of classification. She can work on a theme in a number of media, in each instance there is a veracity and tension in the voice that gives the work a compelling strength. What endures across the different media is a quest to uncover and project a sense of identity that is always in the making, alive to the rhythms in tradition as well as in the beat of the contemporary.

Nikos Papastergiadis
Melbourne

Review by Rheya Lynden.
Awareness of the differential relation between one’s self and all that is not self, the ability to articulate ourselves through our productions, to turn back upon ourselves and ask “ Who am I?”, comprise the fountainhead of human consciousness and creativity. ¹
Journeys of the self are necessarily janus-like: simultaneously forward and backward looking , the present a psychic bridge which assimilates the past to create the future. Dis-integration , the deconstruction of an assumed or imposed persona, is integral to the process. When the traveller embarking on this unpredictable and perilous journey is a woman her quest carries the added risk of becoming mingled with cultural expectations and circumscribed by time-honoured constructs of her gender’s meaning and possibilities. She must confront “unconscious blocks against trespassing, opening the doors formerly locked against her entry , the keys still untried, the hand tremulous in fear that the knowledge within the forbidden spaces may destroy her fledgling sense of self. “Self doubt “ holds her back “like the bogs that immobilise one’s legs in nightmares.” ²
The mythically treacherous “night sea journey”, the quest of retrieval and rebirth, essential as it is to her task, does not belong to her. It is the cultural and archetypal domain of the masculine hero who, “through rigorous and risky personal testing” undertakes “the dreaded and lonely night sea journey, when his inner mettle is honed.” ³ She risks being doubly mocked, as artist and woman, essentialised and marginalised. “Women artists, writers and curators have never been able to masquerade in the Emperors clothes of universal humanity.” (4,3 ) However although “women’s journeys to a core of being…do not reconcile them to a society dominated by men, the journey itself continues to provide the structure of” (2,106) creative expression.
A journey of the self through the medium of art practice necessitates for the woman / artist nothing less than a “feminist questioning of the discourse of art history “challenging” any activity which addresses the logic of production (and this includes cultural production) but which neither attempts an analysis of the construction of sexual difference nor posits an alternative economy of the sexes” as “either naive or obtuse to the point of complicity.” (4 , 2)
Helene Black’s art pays tribute to and simultaneously transforms her past-clearing a path to individuation of self: the courage of I Love You Mummy 1 and 2 is political; the work defiantly refuses to beg for a place in the mainstream but, in the words of Arthur Danko (4, 226) is powerfully engaged in the post-feminist process of redefining the territory: “to push the issue of gender past the point where it can be used to ghettoize women.” (4,3)
The artist ascribes meaning to, and thus controls, the spectres which formerly assailed her, finding in their no longer abhorrent tapestry of glance and nuance, resonant material with which to create. However, the journey, as with all such emotionally redolent journeys into the half-forgotten, partially reconstructed past , ensnares as it liberates. The self remains embedded in the network of significant primary figures. She is present in the past, enmeshed in the agonising paradox of the participant observer: an “auto-ethnography” (5,6) which ,far from the stance of “the objective unbiased observer” validates “memories and reconstructions of experiences”.
The works themselves submerge the viewer in the janus-like journey, conveying by their constant flux and shifting images a shuddering recognition that the emerging material will not yield to complete artistic control: the mature artist recoils from her child- face, trapped and inescapably reflected. As in a mirror, the woman will “fashion and refashion” herself “through these necessary and repeated encounters” which , although “only fragmentary misrecognitions” are “nevertheless constitutive”. (4,225)
Eyes, bewildered, bemused, provide the viewer’s galvanising focus.
Eyes, organs of perception, constructing meaning from the flux of experiential material.
Eyes, vulnerable to unexpected injury, guardians of the fragile Self, are not permitted the comfortable safety of closed lids, not even a momentary blink. Unshielded, their gaze is fixed, focused, accusatory. Reminiscent of images of displacement, of refugee or death camp photographs, eyes mirror the disintegrated sense of self, lost and searching for pieces adrift on multiple shores. For the artist and the woman this is a journey of consolidation. It is also a bearing of passive witness to the doubly shackled condition of a woman-artist confronted by and confronting a world where culture and history conspire to subjugate the feminine: the eerily steadfast gaze, filtered through a gauze of lapsed time, constitutes a powerfully silent indictment.
In inviting the viewer to locate the “in between space” we are challenged to deconstruct the overlay of received and constructed meanings implicit in “the look” to arrive at the space between the eyes, the shielded vulnerability between the ego, represented by its publicly asserted identity, and the reclusive self, shyly and fragmentally peering from within the constructions, asserting its unmistakable presence despite the use of artifact, constructed object light and projection to dress the raw and recoiling subject of experience. A necessary protection for a woman asserting herself in the male dominated world of art where to expose self is doubly suicidal, the narrative ceases to be abstract, emotions denigrated , their rawness considered obscene, like self-flagellation or menstrual blood.
Eyes reflect relational bonds. The mother, space traveller peering from a time capsule of certainty , her gaze flickering with a mocking Mona-Lisa smile. The daughter, submerged, drowned, boxed-in. The physicality of the box asserting itself over the tremulous self. Yearning battles its way through scar tissue and the ever-present diaphanous mist of time and displacement. The memory is dredged for lost treasure but what surfaces is not always palatable or expected. In the artist’s self-representation, her face fragmented by the prism of her interconnections stubbornly refusing to cast her adrift, we discover the paradox of identity. ¹ For that which “leads us to have faith in an essentially unchanging “me”, whose existential coordinates were fixed at birth “engages in a dialectical and uneasy tension with our “doubt, lose or confuse ourselves” it remains “painfully apparent that there can be no sustained public fact of identity without an equally sustained private sense of personal continuity”.

Rheya Linden
Department of Political Science
University of Melbourne
September, 2001

References
¹ Mark R. Gover and James Gavelek, Persons and Selves: The Dialectics of Identity, Michigan State University, USA. Page 1
² Annis V. Pratt, “Spinning Among Fields: Jung, Frye, Levy-Strauss” in LAUTER, E. and C.S. Rupprecht (1985) Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of Jungian Thought, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
³ Eugene Monick,1987,Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. Inner City Books, Toronto, Canada. Page 48
⁴ Jo Anna Isaak, 1996, Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, Routledge, UK
⁵ Sasha Roseneil, 1995, Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and political Action at Greenham, Open University Press, Philadelphia.

Review by Morgan Falconer published in the catalogue of the exhibition.
Speed is the vital force which is conquering all in the contemporary world. Not nations, not individuals, but pure velocity. Speed of movement is carrying the new into the old; speed of communication is muddling east and west; and speed of development, of historical change, is altering our sense of ourselves. Personal identity is the new prism through which humankind is perceiving the vast mutations that are coming upon it, and by attending to the personal, it is understanding the political.
As Helene Black’s new work testifies, in none of this has fine art been left trailing. Rather than reach into the past for justifications, and for disguises which might costume the pace of change, art has developed new forms with which to bear witness. Black’s art has done just this, and consequently it eludes any easy stylistic categorising, yet its roots clearly lie in those twentieth century traditions which were most vitally engaged with the pace of modernisation. She draws on the textures and materiality of Minimalism, the aseptic gleam of Constructivism, the locomotion of Kinetic Art and the love of spectacle and drama which is only just emerging as one of the chief attractions of the newest Video Art.
Black’s work bears the traces of the contemporary world, but in its themes it is addressing those fundamentals which have been forged over ages and which are only now being altered by technology, those issues of personal and cultural identity which Cypriots, of all people, can recognise as political. Black was born to Greek Cypriot parents in Cyprus, but was raised in Melbourne in Australia where she experienced the typical schizophrenia of life in an immigrant family. Black’s father stayed apart from the Cypriot community, believing that above all his family should seek to integrate without the support or the shelter of his compatriots, yet he also jealously guarded tokens of his upbringing within the walls of his home. Like many immigrant’s homes, it became a shrine to fragments of a folk culture. He looked outward to the new world, but inward, for comfort, to the old. His daughter could only have been marked by this.
Educated in the customs and ambitions of contemporary Australian society, Helene Black has returned to Cyprus, to the old culture of her parents, but instead of finding some lost wholeness, some dream of home, she has found a nation evolving fast. She has returned not as a prodigal daughter, but in some way marked as a foreigner herself, and she has found a nation divided against itself, where issues of cultural identity, cultural memory, religion and race are matters of social conflict.
It is for these reasons that the Black’s Time Fragments series has the character of a memorial. These aren’t monuments to the dead – the series collects together family and friends who are very much a part of Black’s life – but they are icons to memory and relationships. The Memory Boxes, as Black calls the silvery cubes, are constructed from thick leaves of Plexiglas, which bind together photographs with layers of treated film. The faces seem sunk in indefinable depths, while the sheets of film set off lightning sparks of colour and waves of distortion across their surface – metaphors for the emotive, the cinematic nature of the memories we carry within us.
These boxes are tributes to individuals, and in that they are distinct in themselves, but in Time Fragments (1-20) Black has mounted the images in the form of a cross, on a stainless steel backdrop, and in so doing she has also added another layer of meaning. On one level its form is undeniably that of the Greek Cross, a reminder of the Orthodox Christianity which forms such a crucial facet of Greek Cypriot cultural identity, but Black also points to an ancient Chalcolithic motif, a “Double idol”, (3000-2500 B.C.) which takes the form of a woman bearing a man in her arms. Its ancient function was as a symbol of fertility, but it is also a relic of a older matriarchal culture of the period, and in that respect a touchstone for Black’s recurrent interest in the issues of power and gender.
It is these very contemporary themes which are addressed in Relieving Toils, though here it is not personal identity which is at stake, but the wider cultural memory. Black has borrowed two motifs which were frequently used in traditional Cypriot embroidery: one, the geometric web, comes from a Syrian influenced design of around 800AD., which was commonly used in Asprobloúmi, traditional white embroidery; the other, the flowing, criss-crossing motif, derives from the Potamós design, which evolved in the later Venetian period. Black’s tableau revives both of these motifs in the costume of a new, modern language, overlaying them in a sparkling weave of fibre optic light. In so doing she gives them a new beauty, but she also recognises the strangely mismatched character of the designs: geometry and the serpentine line might be working symbols within the many-layered cultural history of the same island, but in some way, for some reason, they still don’t match.
If Relieving Toils looks outward, to the cultural history of a whole people, many of the works in the exhibition encompass concerns closer at hand, in particular the tensions inherent in the family. Here Black’s work gives up a tense web of conflicting emotions: in Letter to my Father she is borne down with mournfulness and remorse, yet the two pieces in the series I Love You Mummy, suggest at first nostalgia and sentimentality, and then a mordant rage.
Black’s motivations in both these works spring from an awareness not only of the bonds of affection forged in family life, but also of its more brutal mechanics. Feelings of devotion and self-sacrifice spring naturally, but families also exist to coach new members of society in the means of defence and self-perpetuation – objects which brook no moral qualms. Hence while one side, I Love You Mummy holds an old French postcard scene of children gazing at their mothers entranced, on the reverse Black has discreetly noted the death tolls of modern war and disease: families educate in hate as much as they do in love. And in the poem by Louis Perentos which is incorporated into Letter to My Father, the narrator stands at the intersection of the private and the public, the material world and the afterlife, drawing up accounts on each front.
Works such as Letter to My Father undoubtedly accent the qualities of mourning and memorialising in the exhibition, but much of the work also has the campaigning spirit which betrays a fighting optimism. This patterning of anger and optimism is perhaps clearest in the works which incorporate texts, and it’s a conjunction of form and emotion which has distinct echoes in the work of the American text artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. Like them, Black looks at identity and everyday life as a battleground.
In the shimmering grid of Dissolve the Image, in the flickering, interactive signography of Touch Me, and in Binarity, her homage to the South African writer and ANC member Andre Brink, Black looks for something approaching a wholesale reconstruction of self, memory and cultural history. This is something she seeks in order to right the wrongs she sees in contemporary life, but it is also a spirit which finds strong roots in the long history of the Modern tradition, something which might be seen as having its beginnings as far back as the Renaissance. Modernism addresses this most directly: on one side it shows a process of personal cleansing and renewal, a work of erasure, while on the other it shows the Double Idol falling from the skies: the perpetual revolution of modernity knows no bounds.
Black’s new work shows a vast reach and a sure foot. It encompasses a strident view of the world’s social and political terrain, and of the changing face of personal relationships, and it betrays an acute sense of the significance of tradition and history within the present. She grieves for the past, but she also looks forward to the bright day to come.