Helene Black: 2005 :: Somatopia: Mapping Sites, Siting Bodies

Hellenic Centre, London, UK
Group show
Curated by Antonis Danos
27 Sep 2005 – 23 Oct 2005

Text by Denise Robinson

For to End Yet Again¹ "Sand pale as dust but dust indeed deep to engulf the haughtiest monuments which too it once was here and there."

Samuel Beckett²

Relative Distance echoes the dynamic of Helene Black’s own name, for a distance is embedded in it — and sustained. It’s also a recognition of the distance inherent in all names. Black, a Greek Cypriot, migrated as a child to Australia then returned to Cyprus, yet not as a return to close a cycle, for her insistence on retaining the anglicised version of her name is a choice to stay in the breach – a moving ambivalence, a simultaneous refusal and embrace of belonging.

Black’s body of work over 30 years includes, amongst other concerns, a concentration on the psychic mediations of portraiture — whether painting, photography or, more recently, film. Through these mediations within portraiture Relative Distance incorporates ‘time’ as a central motif — central because it is always possible to return to a place, but time is irreversible. A feature that has all of the effects of melancholy. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, melancholy held within it the structure of a response to unsuccessful mourning, and in ‘Relative Distance’ this response is visceral, embracing those features of melancholy that oppose the effects of nostalgia, that crude belief that fuels the fantasy of the possibility of a return to an ideal.

I initially saw this installation in an exhibition in Nicosia,³ coexistent with an exhibition in and around Nicosia’s so-called Green Line:⁴ a place that carries all the import of the ruin, in this case a ruin that rises from the violent split of Cyprus, in 1974. Both exhibitions are examples of the recent acceleration of interest in Cyprus through the presence of a major international cultural organisation, Manifesta,⁵ while all events are also conditioned and contained by the conflictual interests of the European Union in this region — a psychic violence of real politik that still awaits an effective response. Relative Distance is a work that approaches this territory in recognition of the dominant ideologies of representation embedded within this recent history. Yet Black’s approach is imbued with a refusal, in the form of the work’s focus upon an encounter with the life of a Cypriot woman — and the subsequent recognition of the forces and energies that exist when it comes to the unsecured formation of subjectivity: to act as a stain within the field of these representations — one that looks back at us.

Peggy Phelan describes the figure of woman as being inescapably ‘unmarked’, hence unvalued, and to escape this nomination the options are either a kind of invisibility, or a claim to increased visibility as a form of empowerment. Instead she proposes "…an active vanishing, a deliberate refusal to take the pay-off of visibility."⁶ And Lacan, "in this matter of the visible everything is a trap."⁷ Relative Distance is constituted by a frisson in relation to this negotiation of visibility. A frisson in the sense of its French origin; a shiver. It’s certainly the case that there is a consideration of ethics in this encounter with a life, ethical in the sense that it is an ‘act’, "an ethical act does not apply to given ethical standards but redefines them."⁸ There is a frisson of a different, more troubling kind, one that determines the representations of the history of Cyprus itself, overwhelmed and obfuscated by the military and political representations that have determined it since 1974. Cyprus is now at the centre of compelling international interests. All discourse functions as if contemporary Cyprus began in 1974, that what went on before is fixed and can only be expressed within the vested interests of representations in the present — along with the proliferation of historical revisionism, and the exploitation of nostalgia that this inevitably brings. In place of these progressivist fantasies masked by nostalgia — a nostalgia likely hard to shift in this context, given the echo of the ‘ideal’ in Classical Greek harmony, the originating moment of ‘Western Civilisation’ — Relative Distance responds by looking elsewhere.

It is a response necessarily made up of fragments, not to retrieve the stability of a gesture, of a word, of an image but to shelter it so as to, "make a clean sweep, to expel from the context, to destroy…it loses its character as a cathartic testimony and instils it with an alienating power."⁹

The screen that drops into the centre of the exhibition space shows a scene, ostensibly a film of a woman waiting. The woman who waits, sits on her chair outside her small inner city house in Limassol (on the southern coast of Cyprus) — as do many of the older women in the streets of the poorer neighbourhoods. It’s a prosaic enough image, banal almost, and although she has agreed to be filmed she is unaware of when she is being filmed, and as a consequence there is no address to the camera. The point of view is significant, as it is from above and at an oblique angle; the framing static, framed at its edge is the woman’s body, thick with age, self contained. She too is framed at an angle that flattens the image, all of which creates the effect of an ambiguity of place; the space striated by overhead wires that cut across the surface and bring the background into the foreground. In fact it is painterly through its passage between a flattening of space and an undermining of any secured mimicry of a place. The ‘empty’ surface of the asphalt street that constitutes most of the image adds to this effect of painting, for it appears to wait for an inscription, perhaps of that which is already there.

The film, with its superimpositions, editing and the looping that breaks the temporality of linear time, nevertheless retains the sense of the slow drag of real time due to the retention of motifs of duration; the woman sits alone for long periods, with the sense of time underscored by the self circuiting pleasure of smoking as her companion. It is an intimacy she is determined to retain, a kind of connection to the world imagined through orality. She adjusts the fold in her clothes, enacting a decorum, she continues focusing on the minutiae of her immediate environment: her body — ensuring the last button on the bottom of her cotton dress is done up. Occasionally someone walks by, a woman stops briefly to talk, a man touches her shoulder briefly, imperceptibly, another walks by quickly, without looking he drops a scratch card into her lap as he passes by — a moment of brutally imprecise recognition. And the scratch card? It is that which gives a split second of hope, the marker of a future. Yet Black frames his figure also on the periphery of the image while the expanse of space remains — to be filled. This is a space awaiting inscription delimited only by the affect of the woman’s waiting.

The superimposition of one moment over another in this scene ghosts her figure to become a scene with no present. In other contexts this is a technique to show time passing, but in this instance it invokes the revenant, for these are fragments of time, delivered by the mimicry of the technology to ghost the image, double it, and notate a betweenness — and ours.

There’s a structural core to the work, one which foregrounds technology’s capacity to break the measurability of time so as to, through its very distance, come closer to its subject: the looping of the film which defeats the teleology of narrative, repetition, that which erupts with the elision of memory, and superimposition’s capacity to double the indexical trace and invoke the revenant. A capacity accelerated and reformed through new digital technologies certainly, but something that was always a desire in the development of cinema. Carl Dreyer saw in early cinema’s film technology the potential for film to create another dimension, to erase the signifier, to show death itself through the materiality of film, surpassing even its capacity for mimicry.

This first screen acts as a portal — with all of the contradictory energies a portal embodies — and leads toward the source of the sound of a recorded woman’s voice speaking in Greek. Emanating from the space behind this transparent screen it takes us to the other side, the space between this image — now reversed — and the projected image of the same woman in her house talking to camera. She tells a story of her life, reiterated in translation, in English subtitles, for the non-Greek speaker. Subtitles require a different form of attention to that of looking and listening, for its not possible to synchronise the spoken word with the text on the screen and neither can the subtitles carry the sonority of voice or its rhythm, and translation itself is always disproportional. Yet what is striking here is that the subtitles are timed to bear a relation to the, albeit untraceable, emotion of the woman’s speech — the etymology of the word ‘emotion’ is a putting of something in motion, it’s a bodily sensation. As Alan Weiss writes of the thwarted radio project of Artaud, "the recorded voice is an ontological risk…a stolen voice that returns to (one) as the hallucinatory presence of the voice of another."¹⁰

The voice is that which runs over and through language to produce speech, inflected in ‘Relative Distance’ by the apprehension, or movement, from waiting to speech. There’s no doubt that this woman knows what it is that she wants to be seen and heard; a well rehearsed story of her life. Yet it is also clear that she knows what it is to receive the structure of drama from others — here through mimicry she delivers it as her own.

Shot in the existing half light in her house, the three-camera set up to ‘catch’ as much as possible of her image and her speech is pretty much overwhelmed by the control that the woman deploys through the logic of her telling as it meets her performance in the recording of her and her story. The role of editing here is central, it is what separates the work from documentary, not because it is edited — for all films and photographs undergo alteration in some way — but how it is edited, how it values its interruptions in relation to what can and cannot be narrativised. It is what Jalal Toufic describes:
One of the dangers of the editing stage is that …one is increasingly tempted to get rid of all the errors…It is a (Vampire’s) law that one must sacrificially interrupt processes until one reaches the point when it becomes manifest that there is no unfinished business, the point where one feels that what others consider to be an interruption does not interrupt anything.¹¹

There’s no claim here — as there is in much recent contemporary ficto/documentary work — for the success of the camera as an interlocutor to respond to the circuit of sublimation through which the stories of others are filtered, for ‘Relative Distance’ is replete with the recognition that this woman has no interlocutor. She narrates her life from child to woman, to speak of the brutality of her childhood — so distant in its expression as to be almost that of another, in effect, disembodied. It’s a feature of trauma in that it "could not be fully integrated as it occurred so it returns in its exactness at a later time."¹² At one point, the question in reference to her escape from a violent family as a child is posed, "where could I go?" and, "… I believe, saints of God, that a woman wants her rent paid…what was I supposed to do?" A question asked rhetorically, she expects no response, expects no one to ask, "What was it that you did?" Like all such narratives there’s the sense it has been told, even if only to herself, many times before. It is after all a process of remembrance.

Fade-outs twice in the looped film show not only that time has ‘passed’ but also that something is missing. There’s a sequence that lifts out and reframes the hand-coloured portraits of her from the 1950s and 1960s that hang on the wall behind her. They move across the screen and they cut into the momentum of the film to become a discrete parade of time. They are painted over to the extent that they all but erase the indexical trace of the original photograph, the image is broken into again in this way, perhaps to reinscribe and shift this trace. They function on the cusp of photograph and souvenir, not so much to say, "see I was there," but to raise the question as to where she is now. But in the midst of these is an exception, the one image of her daughter, someone she describes as lost to her. These are fragments, they have been selected, not only by the artist, but before that by the woman’s own relation to her history as it relates to the elisions of memory. Relative Distance necessarily sits between this specificity of the subject and the processes of memorisation. There was also something else, something I almost missed, both in entering the installation and writing of it here. It is one of these portraits, newly framed by the artist, hanging near the entrance. It is talismanic. Talismanic in the sense that it acts as a conduit to, in Lacan’s terms, "what is hidden from us, behind the lack of representation:"¹³ It leads us to the real, the real that is the missed encounter.

There’s a passage from the film to photographs of the interior of the woman’s house, after it was abandoned, photographs that carry the imprint of her possessions: the absence of those that were stolen or scattered in her absence. Printed with the same hue throughout, it is an archiving of the place of her possessions to produce another archive. In this way Black reinscribes this as a scene, to show that it is not so much the destruction or theft of the objects that disturbs but the destruction of the value attributed to them; the hand crocheted doilies are not stolen but left behind, assigning an insidious negative value. It raises the question of a life that would leave her with no other but the passage of habitual, brutal, urban gleaners to determine the fate of her possessions. Amongst the scattered fabrics, blankets, kitchen utensils, is the framed image of the Greek Cypriot President. It’s a compelling fragment for a woman whose life was so clearly diminished by the failures of the governance of this island, and as a woman, by the psychosexual economy of her culture.

Like the house, the woman too has since ‘collapsed’, like her house her ‘self’ has been attributed with a negative value. As we know, the end doesn’t come, so I will begin this text again at the end, the last image, an ‘end’ image. On a small screen her face is framed close so that the face itself might become the cartography of her desire. She can no longer speak due to the institutional suppression of her sensate life. Yet this film is no less silent than in the filming of her ‘story’. From the film of waiting as it met her story, to this silent deep gaze, there opens the chasm of the ‘remainder’. As the fragment from her speech says, "but I did not tell you the story from the beginning." This isn’t information, it is a dramatic trope, a narrative drive that refuses an end. In this ‘end image’ all attributes and fetishisations she had taken on to perform her ‘self’ have been removed: her make up, hair dye, clothes – all of which were so carefully coded and hyperbolised in the hand coloured portraits. She no longer has her mobility. The artist addresses this attempt at erasure by transforming it into what Phelan would describe as seeking a value for that which is not really there. The film is looped and the image manipulated so that her face is held within a small range of expressions that show distress — with one momentary attempt to respond to the pleasure of recognition; an attempt at intimacy as she addresses the camera challenging her erasure by a desire to enter into the promise of an exchange. After all she is distressed because she has been restrained, bound to the chair (albeit out of frame, out of sight) to prevent her ‘unruly’ behaviour, her excess. In showing this last image in black and white/monotone, Relative Distance insists upon this image, insists upon its ineffable quality as an impression, and that it leave an impression, an impression of all that can be implicated in the moment of the imprint of the archive.

The focus, framing and manipulation of the image of her face — produced from and constituted by an infinitude of fragments — refigures the distance of ‘intimacy’ and challenges the formations of incarceration. Foucault has shown us that institutions are composed solely of the effects of their attempts at concealing their failure of control. In Relative Distance we are not engaging with a woman’s story, but the sites where her body and her desire both meet and disturb the fantasised harmony of the Polis. It is not a ‘story’ which ends, for the work and remains — open to the truth it tells.

"Some grey all that little body from head to feet sunk while deep were it not for the eyes last bright of all."¹⁴ Samuel Beckett, again.

Notes:

• Samuel Beckett, "For to End Yet Again", in Samuel Beckett-For to End Yet Again-Beckett Short, no. 6 (London: John Calder, 1999) ^back
• Ibid. p. 14 ^back
• "Accidental Meetings", Municipal Arts Centre, Nicosia, 6 May-31July 2005 ^back
• "Leaps of Faith (an international arts project for the Green Line and the city of Nicosia, Cyprus)", initiated by Rana Zincir, curated by Katerina Gregos and Erden Kosova, May 2005. It’s also prescient that when looking for information on the web, commentary is often accompanied by sales pitches for holiday homes in Cyprus. ^back
• Manifesta, one of the major European art biennales, takes place in a different city each time; in 2006 it will be held in Nicosia. Manifesta is one aspect of the organisation "International Foundation Manifesta", based in Amsterdam. ^back
• Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 18 ^back
• Jacques Lacan, "Touche Automaton", in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques Alain Miller (London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977), p. 93 ^back
• Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Revised Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 105 ^back
• Giorgio Agamben, "The Melancholy Angel", in The Man Without Qualities (Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 104. Agamben, via Benjamin, shows that the very untransmissability of culture is a new value. ^back
• Alan Weiss, "Radio, Death and the Devil", in Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant Garde (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1992), p. 300 ^back
• Jalal Toufic, Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (The Post Apollo Press, 2003), p. 15 ^back
• Trauma, Explorations in Memory. Edited and Introduction by Cathy Caruth (The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 153 ^back
• Lacan, op. cit. p. 53 ^back
• Beckett, op. cit. p. 14 ^back