Article By Denise Robinson
The work of Helene Black
Nothing is so completely past as a past emotion, like a person who is a stranger to us, we can only know it in the form of its appearances.
(Lou von Salome correspondence with Nietzsche…)1
Thus was born the future, vision of an irrevocable happiness, of a maneuvered paradise in which chance has no place, in which the merest fantasy seems like a heresy or a provocation
(E.M. Cioran)2
The title of this text is taken from the work of E.M. Cioran the Rumanian born philosopher and exile, and the quotation is from his view of 18th Century utopianism, for Cioran, the “age of ‘enlightened’ superstitions”. The effects of which for Cioran extend much further and are visceral; “hostile to anomaly, to deformity to irregularity… banishing the irreparable” – no doubt a withering negation of all constructions of utopia along with their advocation of the rationalisms that would get us there. Contemporary Cyprus is one place among many living out the breaches of such imagined futures and is one context for the work of Helene Black. Black, a Greek Cypriot, approaches this territory, with portraiture as her point of departure, but portraiture on a threshold, one where resemblance is no longer related to a fantasy of origins. Through a body of work split into three exhibitions in Cyprus over a period of two years: ‘No ID’ held in a gallery within Archangelos Monastery, Monagri, ‘No Choice’ exhibited in Limassol on the south coast of Cyprus and ‘NoThing’ the last part of the trilogy in Nicosia, Cyprus’ capital breached, like Cyprus itself, there’s a passage through the implications of the veiling and negation inherent in portraiture. This passage broadens through the inclusion of the temporal opacity in digital video – along with its seamless editing – photographic and computer manipulated images, the duplication and reinscription of cultural artifacts or the sheer absence of images. Although most of the work is installed within the conventions of portraiture: framed and hung on walls, there are also video projections often onto something other than a screen: a bed of salt or embroidered fabric. Black’s work is somewhere between assemblage and archive, as do vitrines, they hold the ubiquitous and necessarily incomplete motifs of her work. Negation for Black, as for the nihilist Cioran, has a plenitude. ‘Sleep Watches You’ may be Black’s most recent work, but its also a work that winds back into what came before. There’s a network of references here, from one place to another and from one moment to another. ‘Sleep Watches You’ gives a twist to the notion of embalmment: the desire for preservation. Black sweetly folds in and stores the residue of memory, while evoking the social and psychic implications of this desire. It asks what is buried within ‘Sleep Watches You’, what are the technologies of reproduction and transmission deployed here preserving from oblivion?. There are two screens, one a bed of salt, invoking the salt lakes in Cyprus mutated to become a screen for a projection of a young woman sleeping. As if in time lapse the visual residue of each shifting pose of the woman is held into the next. The kind of bed that Beckett would write in reference to a ditch, ‘…just wide enough for one, on it no two ever meet’3 On the second screen behind this bed, images of Cypriot women both Turkish and Greek are morphed, each becoming the deep shadow of the next – intercepted by static and by images and sounds of a massive explosion and the heavy thud of industry, as metal slabs are driven together, as if snapping shut a new horizon. These morphed images are intercepted also by sub titles which ask for ambiguity, not the fixity of two, of one or the other, or the fantasy of two becoming one. Image and sound surface here as if they have encountered a shock, the kind of shock that collapses language and along with it our perception of sounds and images, taking them back to the place of their formation, echoed in Black’s sub-titling: “anaesthetize reality”, “mythologise your origins”, “TV watches you”, “fade to nothing” – or in that space preceding the sound of an explosion in which a Buddhist chant is dragged into slowness. ‘Sleep Watches You’ is marked by the artist’s immigration from Cyprus to Australia as a child, then her migration back to a country, split. Not however a return to a time – which is irreversible. Yet this biographical trace is also submitted to a sleeping state – sleep itself being a kind of embalmment, which, for the viewer of ‘Sleep Watches You’, may also evoke the liminality of waking. Submitting autobiography to the work of the sub-conscious suits Black’s enigmatic inventions, as they encounter the vicissitudes of memory. Thus the trilogy has the beholder in a kind of loop, in Raymond Bellour’s words, “the road that leads from memory to invention is circular; the circles repeat themselves and inscribe themselves one inside the other, without ever coinciding, in a progression which is not a progress.”4 but a controlled drifting”. In the context of contemporary Cyprus this road is marked by a deep ambivalence toward the forms in which history and language are proposed as memory and in the midst of this array, the figuring of woman is central. Black contemplates this through the residual trace of women throughout the trilogy and through her recalling of an ancient ‘double’ idol. Nietzsche’s return – where the return is not the return of the same – is invoked, as Black returns us to an icon: an ancient object, the double idol – distant in time from the chalcolithic period, around 3000 BC. The key to this return to an idol-become-icon is its ambiguity. The upright resembles a female figure and the horizontal that of a man, both abstracted, becoming one body, with the apex of its abstraction at the intersection of the two. Appearing in many of the works in ‘No ID’ and accumulating a kind of intensity through repetition in ‘NoThing’, Black identifies the ambiguity of the idol as being usurped by history in favour of an idol now altered, and closer to the logic of Christianity – the crucifix. Its also possible that Black’s rendition of this idol is intended to breach both the official and more subterranean cultural hold of the Hellenic tradition in Cyprus and to displace this, by her excavation of the idol acting as some devilish proposal for a collective memoire involuntaire – in Proustian terms, what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience, can become a component of the ‘memoire involuntaire’. In the same exhibition, but deep in the dark, stone crypt-like space in Monagri’s monastery were two video projections. These are in no way cinematic, but fragments, masking out the video frame, shaping them as if to bring their subjects to a new ‘life’. Works such as ‘Loop’ the circular video image of Cypriot women, later returned in an altered state in ‘Sleep Watches You’ and ‘Modernism’, a projected portrait of a man looking out from within a sphere. Other hands from another image, another time, obsessively wipe a cloth across his face: an attempt at erasure. These reproductive technologies of modernity also depict the double idol falling out of the frame of the projection ending in an unframed pile of actual copies accumulated on the ground: a strange gap between the object and its imaging – holding ‘Modernism’ in abeyance. The reference to the ‘fall’ in this instance does not produce the trajectory of redemption through sacrifice which ends in the crucifix but returns us to the double idol and raises the stakes with regard to the ‘forgetting’ of the ambiguity of the sexuality of this idol. Futuristic moths/butterflies scatter and are buried within perspex, embalmed along with the image of a mother and child taken from a French postcard in ‘I Love You Mummy’, in ‘No ID’: a generic image from the western worlds 1950’s dream. They are ‘petrified’, hermetically sealed in the surfaces of the materials and technological dreams of the late 20th Century. Emerging from the wall with one edge hinging it, it enables us to see through it’s layers, like all of Black’s work its made to show all, through an inscrutable process of not showing. We literally see through the failed utopia of an embrace of mother and child – so beautifully articulated in its kitsch-ness – along with a text, listing children killed in war. A palpable ambiguity leads us to a memorial, a protest, and a crushed complaint of love – the presence of the irreparable. It is significant that our gaze is directed through the work, past the work, to the back of the gallery at a large cross made up from manipulated photographic portraits, portraits too inside and between transparent surfaces. Titled ‘Time Fragments’ it’s not so much constructed to depict human faces as to show their embedded-ness, and their lost-ness: portraits as dedications and as estranged mnemonic conduits. The selective history which figures Cypriot culture through its Christian core is addressed again in ‘Twin Idols’ in the last section of the trilogy, ‘NoThing’: here its the found photograph of a young woman from a holiday resort postcard, a contemporary figure with her back to us, a kind of jibe at the Greek classical ideal maybe, whatever, here its promise of access to the female body meets the double idol: cut from stainless steel, and raining down before her. No doubt the Cypriot fascination with Hellenism is a cause for this dissembling. What is a seemingly overt reference becomes less so as Black knows that the turning away of this idol from the light of Cypriot history is not itself the reason for her return to it here, its not a retrieval of the meaning of the idol (too distant to know) but the potential within its reappearance. Black spends time in factories directing the production of her work. Large stainless steel and Perspex constructions or the hundreds of double idol cut-outs, a kind of mass manufacturing for her encounter with history and memory. Meanwhile she develops techniques to hold the materials she works with, materials not usually fond of each other, like syrup, rose cordial, shampoo which engage with amongst other things fibre optics, stainless steel, mirrors and photographic transparencies. Perhaps it’s the metaphorical trace of this unmutuality and the noises of industry, along with the cultural static of technology that returns for Black in ‘Sleep Watches You’. There’s a relation to materials here, which mimic the tactics of minimalism but only for the purpose of producing a kind of ‘hot work in a cold frame’. ‘No Choice’ includes the work ‘‘Silent Imprint/Reprint’, twenty standardised full-length portraits of women divided into two. ‘Silent Imprint’ the elder (and poorer) women’s’ images are held in a kind of mock embalmment i.e. in olive oil, sunflower oil and blended vegetable oil while in ‘Reprint’, images of younger women from another time undergo the same process but in shampoo and household cleaning fluids. Split, then interspersed with each other in a strip of images and attitudes, there’s something of the sentiment of Arte Povera or even a perverse kind of alchemy at work which historicises and genders these liquid filters. But most of all its a sign of Black’s desire in encountering the mimetic capacity of the portrait by floating them out of one context into another, paring down the details and creating new forms of colouring by using the materiality of women’s lives. There’s even a phantom-like emergence of the look of early hand coloured techniques. Black is both echoing and displacing the process, and the moment – perhaps even parodying its fetishisation – when the photographic print sits in the developing tray, its indexicality coming into being under the photographic chemicals. A work with the same determination in the meeting of unlike materials in ‘No Choice’ is ‘Natural Blonde’. Mounted on a mirrored backing, cut bleached hair from the women’s hair salons in Limassol are woven into a kind of mandala relaying a certain pleasure, pleasure at the sheer lightness of desire it embalms, while a more pungent odour of ambiguity and of women’s rituals for negotiating their world seep through – in this instance to reduce the marks of ethnicity by going blonde. Scattered through many of the works is the accumulation of reflective sparkling things: glass, cut beads, tin, silver leaf, mirrors, liquid crystal paint; a kitsch array, and a game with attraction that embraces an ancient idol transformed by the plexiglas and stainless steel sheen of the eternally new, building to a kind of critical mass. Is this the eternally new as Jonathan Crary would have it: “the ceaseless perpetuation and creation of new needs in a newly defined era that well exceeds the paradigm modernism’s ‘progress”5 However much her work engages with this dynamic including the altered relation of object and observer in the new visual spaces created by new technologies, Black is more circumspect about the demise of Modernism’s progress, she ghosts it with her use of natural substances identified with Cyprus’ history of trade and traditions: Carob syrup, Carob seeds, Olive oil and Rose cordial. Her work ‘Sweet Melancholia’ also in the last section of the trilogy, underscores this with a golden, viscous pool: the title in gold leaf, submerged under carob syrup – if there is a fascination with the ‘eternally new’ it is in the context of loss and its what Freud recognised in melancholia, as a condition of being held within a process of unsuccessful mourning. Returning to Black’s ‘Letter to my Father’ in the first of the trilogy the beholder is isolated: both focussed and focussed upon by the work as we put on the headphones and listen to recorded voices of a man and a woman, with all of the ellipsis that listening entails. The technology cuts into the voice, becoming more visceral as the voices overlap and oscillate from one ear to the other. Recorded voices, as always speak from the past moment of the speaker – however recent it may be – experienced in our present, and just as we know Salome’s letter, ‘in the form of its appearances’, so we ‘know’ this letter. ‘Letter to my Father Demetris I. Perentos’ (by Louis Perentos’) is a poem and as we listen we face a large photographic portrait of the artist, striated and ‘breaking up’ as if the image has some kind of auditory ‘interference’ – its not so much a confusion of the senses as a gesture towards what this image, exposed through photographic techniques, might be preserving from oblivion under this address to the symbolic father?. That the trilogy persists with a negation: ‘No ID’, ‘No Choice’ and ‘NoThing’ shows that it holds within it an implicit urgency to speak. Yet there’s a caveat built in, in relation to any assumptions that this speech, if simply mirroring what is already formed, will too be lost. Black responds by entering into a vertiginous encounter with portraiture, producing her work from, and for, a place on a threshold, and as it was for Freud, it is at this place where the work get done.
Very postmodern