SHE-ONA media story
The Fleeing Woman in Red – Between Virtuality and the Need of Touch
The art of Izabella Gustowska is a phenomenon which can hardly be compared to anything else. Most certainly she is the first lady of multimedia art in Poland. Among other things, she creates huge multimedia shows which amount to singular total artworks, where videos, photographs and projections are interwoven with performance and real-life situations.
Probably the largest multimedia show done by Gustowska so far has been the She-Ona. Media Story, presented on the premises of the Old Slaughterhouse during the Malta Festival (23rd-28th June 2008). The scale of the whole enterprise was stunning, with thirty three video projections, three plasma screens, one CCTV system, installation with garments, light play, audio recordings and participation of extras.
All that combined into one tale, woven into the curious, slightly surrealist architecture of the Old Slaughterhouse. The main theme, the central concept of this extraordinary performance was 'the woman in red'. The audience would find out about this mysterious character already before they entered the Old Slaughterhouse building. A male voice repeatedly spoke mantra-like words about a search for a certain woman. The narrator had fallen in love with her, remembering only that she wore something red, before she ran away, disappeared in the crowd of other figures. Those waiting to come in and listening to the monotonous words were put under a hypnosis of sorts, ushered into a dream, a sphere of fantasy, to be shortly thereafter dazzled with colours and changing images, which coalesced into the grand performance of forms. The images transformed as in a kaleidoscope, which appeared in one of the projections, flew away like soap bubbles to which another presentation referred, yet through all the interiors the audience was led by the vanishing and reappearing women in red. They featured in films as living characters or avatars (designed by Cezary Ostrowski), played in performances in individual rooms and walked among the audience as well.
This is how the artist spoke about her project:
She. Media Story is not the contrived theatricality of the performance but a life merely glimpsed, fragmentary, chaotic, not subordinated to any stage rules. Because this is not theatre. It is the viewer who arranges his media story from fragments, films, texts, surveillance material. There are no stage acts here, but spaces opening themselves to the audience, among which a careful observer will find the same or similar women – the female THEM.
And they performed various roles – they were intermediaries leading one to the other side of the mirror, became the victims and the objects of being looked at, but also seduced and compelled the viewers to seek that one and only 'woman in red' on their own.
On the Other Side of the Mirror
The audience were drawn into that game of pursuit, desire and disappointment, unfulfillment, and at the same time of the inability to find the explicit meaning of the entire installation. The commitment of the audience and the emotional atmosphere of performance as a whole disprove Walter Benjamin's conclusions about the cold media of photography and film, which convey objects from their original setting and deprive them of the wondrous aura. Benjamin claimed that in the age of photography, reproduction and mass copying, a work of art loses its unique status associated with its existence in one place and time.1 Meanwhile, performances such as the one prepared by Gustowska demonstrate that it is precisely media art that defends itself best against the loss of the aura of an artwork. There can be no experiencing that performance without partaking in it, it cannot be reproduced in the same form in a different place, nor can it be recounted or shown by means of a reproduction. In this sense, the show might be construed as the praise of media and state-of-the-art technology. Here, any interpretation may only be based on selection and simplification, and will never be capable of rendering the meaning of the entire undertaking. Besides, the sense of the work relied on constant elusion. The audience were introduced into a domain in-between – between the physical and virtual reality, while their mutual infiltration and the inability to trace a boundary induce an impression of being on 'the other side of the mirror', as it were.
The women appearing on film were also physically present, strolling by under one of the walls, just as it happened in the film. The girl walking with a dog would appear in the company of two other girls on rollerblades and one riding a bike. All of them made an appearance within the space of the audience, while each wore something red. One cannot definitively tell whether the viewers were still the audience or whether they were already a part of the performance, especially that women visiting the exhibition could have worn something red, thus placing themselves within action taking place there. On top of that, the visitors could at any point be caught by a CCTV camera, while the recorded image also became a part of the show. Consequently, the division between the performance and the audience was blurred. Following relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud, one could say that 'since the audience becomes more or less unreal, the only thing that remains for the artists to do is to involve them in the process of creating a work of art'2 or, as in this case, to include the audience in being an object of art. As a result, the boundary between fantasy and reality had been overcome, the girls from the projection appearing among the visitors descended from the film, transgressed the barrier of the screen (those who have seen Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo know how powerful this device is).
By the same token, the show pointed to a broader issue, namely mediatisation and virtualisation of our reality, where, as Wolfgang Welsch writes, electronic media offer us all realities of history and the present as well as all possible forms of creativity and communication.3 And yet there is something that puts up resistance, denying us entry into the Paradise. Without doubt, it is the corporeality that counterbalances the electronic tendencies to de-materialize, but also 'fascination with electronic media is not only a fascination of the spirit or the imagination, but also of the longing and unfulfilled body.'4
By virtue of telematic worlds, a change occurs not only in our perception of identity (which is diffuse, shifting and fluid), but also of reality itself. The boundaries between physical reality and the media reality are fluctuating and indefinable; moreover, these realities exert an influence on one another. Virtualisation of reality ensues: 'reality is more and more often seen according to the media ideal' while 'virtuality also tends to be real'.5 Therefore a clear-cut division into everyday reality and the media reality cannot be maintained. Welsch not only warns against striving to separate these two, but also against valuating these two ways of perceiving our existence: the telematic and the corporeal, stating nevertheless with some nostalgia: 'Amongst the turmoil of the electronically multiplying world we rediscover the importance of singularity of a unique hour or meeting, or else the motionlessness and bliss of a hand or a pair of eyes resting on one.'6 Gustowska's show presented precisely that search for a touching hand or a possibility of looking into one's eyes. And yet this desire for presence seemed impossible to be satisfied.
Relationships with Others
All Gustowska's media-based tales address the inability of separating the real world and the reality of the media. The artist talks about the world where everything is processed, digitalised, transformed into an image and put out for display. Therefore She. Media Story may be read primarily as a tale concerning the media, as an analysis of mediatised world and the changing relationships between people. One could say we are beset by technological instruments enabling us to contact others, such as the mobile phone, e-mail, web messengers, skype and others. Relationships with others develop and reach a high degree of intensity on social networking and dating sites, on various forums and in multiplayer games. However, do media allow us to actually become closer to other people? There are many user-friendly and fast means of communication at our disposal, unpredictable and attractive, the technology grows ever more proficient. Still, between us and the others a barrier emerges, we commune more with machine than with another person, we lack physical contact, we gaze into the screen rather than into the eyes. Perhaps this is the source of inability to find and identify that woman in red in Gustowska's performance. She was not only elusive, but above all, despite appearing in excess, represented by so many characters, she was untouchable. Because 'the image does not constitute a trace of anything else but a string of digits, and its form is not a terminal of human presence.'7
Hence the work spoke not so much about the longing after the woman in red but about the desire of direct contact with others. Since, as Nicolas Bourriaud says, 'in our post-industrial societies the most urgent issue is not the emancipation of the individual, but interpersonal communication and the release of the relational dimension of existence.'8
'You are canvas!'
Still, do we know how these relationships with others should look like? Bourriaud observes that the 'absolute failure of contemporaneity consists in reducing interpersonal relationships to mercantile relations [...].'9 After all, do we not live in the world where the other person is largely objectified? Is it not the same with art?
In She. Media Story, the issue was referenced by an action in one of the interiors where the displayed films showed two girls who, like automatons, carried out the orders of a masterful narrator. This fragment of the show, also presented at the exhibition Uroki władzy [The Charms of Power] in Poznań's Arsenal Municipal Gallery (2009), drew on José Carlos Somoza's book entitled Clara y la penumbra [The Art of Murder].10 The novel describes a world of art with a predominant current called hyperdramatism, consisting in living people becoming works of art. They have to utterly renounce their subjectivity and, for the duration of the contract they become 'canvases' which decorates the galleries and the houses of the most affluent. Sometimes they take part in illegal 'art-shocks' filled with sex and violence. Hyperdramatism becomes foremost a very lucrative business. The novel begs the question whether indeed everything may become a work of art, as long as there are those who would be ready to pay for it? Is this still art or is it all about money? Does any ethics count for anything in the neoliberal reality, if people voluntarily become slaves? And finally, is it not that the world in Somoza's novel resemble sometimes that which takes place in the actual art world, where people are also exploited, their dignity is violated and privacy appropriated?
In the installation Gustowska used the fragment of the book in which an artist instructs his models regarding the principles of their conduct as works of art. The voice of the narrator, who enforces execution of specific instructions is a voice that does not tolerate any objection. One may observe that despite the futuristic setting of the novel, the relationship between the author and the woman-work of art repeats the traditional relationship between the artist and his model described by Lynda Nead. The posing model validates the status of the artist as a creator, judge and owner of the female body simultaneously. It is objectified and subjected to the rules of art. Metaphorically she becomes the canvas, which is borne out by Kandinsky's statement quoted by Nead: 'At first, it stands there like a pure chaste virgin... And then comes the willful brush which first here, then there, gradually conquers it with all the energy peculiar to it, like a European colonist.'11 Nead indicates the astonishing combination of sexual and colonial ideology of these words, she interprets these words as a reduction of the painting practice to rape, comparing the violation of the female body/canvas to the subjugating colonial power.12 The complete identification of the body and canvas is also found in Somoza's novel ('You are canvas' is stated explicitly there). In selecting a suitable excerpt from The Art of Murder, Izabella Gustowska devises a visual metaphor of the artist (the perpetrator and the master of the female body) and the model subjected to him.
The installation may also be interpreted in more general terms, as an observation how easily we yield to cultural imperatives, thereby losing our subjectivity. Perhaps this is also due to the fact that it becomes more and more difficult to separate the truth from fiction, or because our lives are more and more powerfully shaped under the influence of the media. What the media convey is sometimes imperative by nature, especially in the case of commercials, which order us what we should be like, how we should look and behave.
Offering
In Gustowowska's show, the impression of surreality, or perhaps of being lost between realities was emphasized by the curious architecture of the Old Slaughterhouse, which in itself represents a confusion of the order of the sacred and the profane. The venue was a splendid setting for the entire installation. The Poznań municipal slaughterhouse was built in 1897-1900 to a design by Fritz Moritz. The design clearly draws on the solutions offered by sacred architecture. The interiors follow the basilic arrangement. The central nave is divided from aisles by narrow columns and covered by a cradle vault with lunettes. Every visitor must have noticed that already in the first large room, where the vaulted ceiling served as a display for the image of a man speaking to a microphone, who was like a creator and god of the enterprise, the narrator, akin to a Big Brother. Its equivalent in the adjoining room was the aforementioned kaleidoscopic image.
The foremost task of sacred architecture is to evoke the impression of solemnity, but such references might surprise in industrial architecture, especially in a place where animals were to be slaughtered. Only the depressions in the floor with drainage gratings and the hooks in the walls indicate that this is by no means sacred architecture. Nevertheless, is it just coincidence that slaughterhouse looks like a church? Perhaps the reference to the symbolic of sacrifice was intended? With such framework for the entire show in mind, one might ask whether the woman in red was an offering as well?
After all, red is the colour of blood, furthermore, it is the most fetishist of all colours. Red beads put around the neck, rubies in the rings, red flowers attached to a dress, red fingernails and blood-red lips – all of them refer to the intense redness of the blood. Is then blood a fetish and why? Is it about the life-giving significance of the blood and associated meanings relating to vitality? Its insufficient supply connotes anaemia, and therefore a shortage of energy. In the 19th century, ladies suffering from that complaint were brought to a slaughterhouse to drink fresh blood and to raise their blood pressure. Perhaps it was more of a shock therapy, because they must have experienced one on seeing the slaughtered animals. Red also seems to possess references to sexual fulfilment (sexual organs being well supplied with blood). Red is the colour of love, youth, vitality, strength. In the legends of vampires blood features infallibly, and drinking it is to ensure them eternal youth. Perhaps for this reason red is so very attractive, this is why there are so many songs about women in red while in Gustowska's performance – there are so many women in red attire, and there is the search for the only one, also dressed in red. .
Nevertheless, the multiplicity of these women made them fuse into one. 'All women are one woman' – so T.S. Eliot would say, and this is the impression one could have had when watching the multimedia show – installation by Izabella Gustowska. Because what one saw there were döppelgangers, replicants, clones (including 'living clones', meaning twins or triplets). Those identical or almost identical figures which seemed to multiply, may on the one hand refer to the world where everything is being unified, where everyone becomes more and more similar, while on the other, to the problem of the quickly advancing biotechnology (clones). It is worth remarking that the figures echo the earlier, much more traditional works of Gustowska, such as the Relative Similarities.
Woman as a Screen?
One thing inscribed in the whole show was hidden violence – the violence of seeing, voyeurism, all-visibility. In the first interior the films displayed on the walls were made with CCTV and satellite cameras. Some of them tracked particular persons and did close-ups on them. The voice of the narrator who ordered the girls to follow specific instructions was also a voice full of hidden aggression, a voice allowing no objection. Just as the authoritarian male voice commanding girls to put on make-up heard in another room. The cyborg-woman preened herself and danced under the watchful eye of the cyborg-man. In turn, the only visible speaking woman was mute, speaking by means of sign language.
Man was a narrator there, whereas woman was but a screen, an object to look at. It was therefore a tale about a universal woman, or rather about the role of a woman in a performance, about a woman who is always a sign of desire, appears as an image, being the Other of the male subject, performing the function of a mirror to him. In the classic analysis of Laura Mulvey's 'a woman [...] stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bear of meaning, not mater of meaning.'13 With regard to classical motion picture representation, Mulvey observes that it is the man who plays the active role of an initiator of events.
And yet, in the situation outlined by Gustowska's performance, the woman constantly eludes, she is always on the move. Her image cannot be captured, there is no way to take control of it. What is more, a woman presented in one of the projections, shown in a spherical shot, tries to catch us in the snares of her gaze. Because what she holds in her hands is a 'seeing device', a photographic camera; every now and then she puts her eye to the viewfinder and takes pictures, the lens fixed directly on the audience. Meanwhile, the shape of the projection gives an impression that she also enters our space (although her image is simultaneously powerfully distorted). Thus, the camera directed at us reflects our gaze; in fact, it is we who are trapped by the show.
Thus it turns out that the situation had been reversed, the viewer does no longer exercise command over the performance; it is the performance that gains the oppressive power over him/her. The woman in red is decidedly no victim here, rather a phantasm that cannot be attained.
We live in a society of the spectacle, where everything becomes a show while the images are an object of consumption. We consume them in the shape of photographs, advertisements, billboards, TV images, the displays of our computers. We desire to capture and immortalise everything, we photograph not only that which is beautiful; violence, images of evil and death are also recorded. That which is not registered as image seems unreal. However, we do not realise that at a certain point, we not only consume images but become images ourselves. We have begun to function on the global scene of visibility, where the watchful eye of the camera sneaks into the most intimate spaces.
We also live in the world of surveillance. Today, the media reality is constructed chiefly by the constantly improved technologies of information: the internet, mobile telephony, CCTV, satellite telecommunications. The surveillance system develops, with its hidden cameras used as modern means of supervision, though not only to support safety but to increase the impression of being in control of a given situation. The network makes it possible to watch, in real time, the events taking place in the site covered by the system of cameras. Thus we have access to everything, but we are deprived of the ability to touch.
It seems that in the present times, separating the spectacle and the surveillance is not feasible anymore. Supervision becomes the element of the spectacle while the spectacle an inseparable element of supervision. And perhaps for this reason in the extraordinary work of Gustowska one finds a combination of such diverse, seemingly contradicting notions: desire, pleasure, visibility as well as supervision and violence.
Because the most important thing in the project is its ambiguity. As Bourriaud says, 'the works of contemporary artist possess the same degree of ambivalence as the technology which inspires them.'14 Probably, if a man were the author, it would be easy to conclude that the performance concerns his desire and his dreams... And in this case, a woman speaks about a woman but, surprisingly enough, she speaks in a male voice, on top of that using male voice as the voice of violence and oppression. It makes one wonder whether narrator's falling in love in a woman attests to the desire to ensnare, possess and appropriate her, or the inability to touch and look her in the eye.
Izabela Kowalczyk