Process..
Procession.. Possession by
Ewen McDonald
1) PROCESS...
‘A course of action’, ‘a method’,
‘a series of changes’... ‘a construction’,
‘as time goes on’ these variables suggest
a beginning. From the start, photography is specified
as a ‘process’, a method of manufacture,
a ‘set-up’ a coaxing out from darkness.
Equally, it could be that we are being led back into
the dark. Imagine this: face to face with a life-sized
photograph of a woman in a wedding dress, her arms outstretched,
half-welcoming, half-pleading, and bearing a faint smile.
She stares out from the darkness, but from behind a
golden mask. She looks but we cannot know if (and what)
she sees. Without eye contact we cannot tell for sure
what we see. In this game of blind-man’s bluff
the ‘bride’ waits... perhaps she leads us
on.
In this instance the subject (now the object of our
gaze) is a photograph of the artist herself. Yet it
is hardly a recognisable self-portrait; blurred and
‘erased’, a degree of de-processing exaggerates
the enigmatic. The photograph worked on and indeed,
worked over is now disguised and appears to be more
like a laser copy, making identification of both subject
and production process difficult. ‘De-processing’
the photographic image becomes a means by which the
artist questions not only the role she plays (both in
and out of the photograph), but casts doubt on the true
nature of identity. By placing herself within the role
a ‘bride’ she critiques the masquerade as
she plays the game; the role ‘artist’ then,
is treated as a misnomer for Webster refuses to let
the activity be separate from the daze of everyday life.
For the spectator then, unresolved tensions within
such an ‘art object’ can focus attention
on the real contradictions of daily existence. In front
of an art work and later, touched by its reflection,
can be deduced as being the same process by which we
find ourselves and our place, in the world. The word
‘process’ is now extended beyond any specific
photographic reference; if it is a construction ‘in
time’, it is equally a state between. This is
an important focus in discussing photographic series
by Christine Webster. In recalling the circumstances
of first encountering her work, I am remembering a specific
image a blurred street scene, a line of open-mouthed
garages and a dark-suited, white-faced figure running.
As with the Bride of the Black Carnival ten years later,
the dramatic use of light is used to heighten and reveal
inner tensions. Always, one thing is posed against another
yet stilled within the frame. The human figure taunted
by light, is haunted by darkness; fleeting life is pitted
against postures of confidence.
2) PROCESSION...
In orderly succession...’ceremony’... ‘festive
occasion’; the recent work of Christine Webster
can be seen as yet another parade of passing types.
Black Carnival is made up of masked, unmasked and cross-dressed
characters, ‘propped-up’ as if to suggest
a celebration of life. Yet there is something about
these particular photographic surfaces that disturbs
the festivity, that makes them more than mirror-like.
Despite their monumental statement (indeed, Black Carnival
is a ribbon of cibachromes, fifty running metres in
total, lining the room), the work is charged with a
peculiar fascination that interchangable conundrum,
I and Eye. In this Carnival the ‘I/eye’
seems disembodied and stares right into us.
Webster uses the very aspect of photographic surface,
the seductive quality of cibachrome as well as its recent
history not only in terms of her own working (for example
The Players and Possession & Mirth), but incorporating
as well, a photographic practice that has turned the
cibachrome portrait into a mainstream art form. Now
in Black Carnival, it is a history turned in on itself,
an inwardness distinct from narcissism that becomes
an examination of objectification. By objectification
here, I am referring to the notion of ‘expressing
in concrete form’, ‘an embodiment’,
which sees the art object separated from its means of
production and further, sees it return as ‘precioius
capital’ as something removed from the realm of
labour yet capable of adding to, everyday life. Here,
the photographer occupies a strange space. By using
a process, a coaxing out of darkness, cibachrome itself
as well as the subject matter thrusts us back to our
shadowy side. Webster demands that we confront ourselves
via the art object to ask what is this Carnival? Whose
identity is behind the mask?
Masks, manifestations of persona, are a playful, if
not sinister means of disguise. They prevent identification
yet they identify within us the very need for role-playing,
the essential nature of ‘characterisation’.
In saying this, I allude to a sense of terror that lurks
beneath these shining surfaces. If this is a reflected
world, then these photographs that are locked into representations
of particular character types, simultaneously examine
flaws in the looking glass. The strange thing in viewing
Black Carnival (and here I return to the disembodsied
I/eye and the active moment between the work and the
viewer) is that on reflection, we see in these representations,
the kinds of constructs, social and otherwise, that
seal us over. Life-sized, these photographs question
the habits and conditioning that make us as mute and
smooth as a cibachrome surface. In Webster’s parade,
we face the uncertainties and ambiguities we often dare
not admit to; the characters themselves switch roles
effortlessly from male to female, bride to groom and
as spectators in a room full of stilled life, we are
reminded of seventeenth century ‘vanitas’
paintings where the impermanence of temporal life and
mortality is contained within objects.
This is the terror of masked characters. At the heart
of this ‘black carnival’ is ghostly presence
shadows of friends lost and traces of all the things
we could have been. Because each photograph is both
object and reflection, the act of viewing becomes participation
in the dance. We find ourselves caught within the celebration,
as if caught too and stilled by the camera’s eye.
There is something here about the significance of dreams,
about confronting identity, about oscillation between
‘the presented’ and the represented. There
is a sense of dislocation. In destabilising the ‘social’
portrait and revealing the shifting nature of social
relations, Webster suggests identity as spectral. And
equally, like shadows... contingent and mutable.
What appeared at once to be a parade of human experience
(characterised as a union of masked roles from carnival
and vaudeville performers) is ultimately, one large
portrait. Webster evokes in the viewer the possibility
of a ‘multiplicity of selves’, that each
one of us is a polyphony of voices waiting in the wings
to play the roles on stage. By trying on (and thereby
taking on) the establishment of identity, Webster’s
Black Carnival is a single portrait, the key to which
lies the fact that acts of transformation (and here
like cross-dressing, taken on in the viewing) unlock
and liberate ‘fixed’ notions of identity.
Black Carnival, like any carnival, is an act of ‘becoming’.
The self is revealed as being no more than a set of
indeterminate presences, of ghostly traces harboured
just beneath a social skin. Hence Webster’s constant
use of masquerade. Whether it be masking the face, or
as a complete costume, the masquerade stands for the
elaborate human games that play between representation,
transformation and ‘identity’. Masks neither
deny nor affirm identity; they say as much as they silence.
As symbols they can create and enforce a sense of social
cohesion, yet they have the power to interrupt that
coherency by exploiting notions of gender, identity
and ‘misbehaviour’. If in the parade they
seem stereotypic or symbolic then, equally, masks ease
the way for subverting social order.
3) POSSESSION…
Taking hold... to occupy, to own, to take as one’s
own. In the silence of this gallery room, one takes
stock of oneself. Representing the masquerade as a room
of deep dark portraits, Christine Webster suggests in
Black Carnival, means of distancing oneself from social
‘normality’. Space is created for hidden
selves or self-images deemed at odds with the world;
the corseted ‘hat-check girl’, the fluffy
bunny girl, the ‘ballerina’ of dancing jewel-box
fame, the ‘can-can’ boys frozen like the
faces on their necklace masks, caught ‘knees-up’
in front of the red curtain. The scale of the work is
crucial to the effect. Almost human in size, each character
is engulfed in a field of darkness, suggesting that
abyss we all face when confronting the mirror. These
photographs are entrances and exits, doors through which
we could easily pass on a journey toward realisation:
a ‘Divine Comedy’ in which we encounter
only aspects of ourselves.
If this be a ‘body of work’ in the very
literal sense, then the spectacle like some circus hall
of mirrors is about an essential distortion as much
as it is about reflection. Unlike some Lacanian mirror-stage,
where an idealised self or wholeness opposes the fragmented
self one feels oneself to be beyond the mirror, this
photographic carnival suggests there is no comfort in
Self-comfort. Dis-integration is the key to recognition
and affirmation, to self-awareness and self-assertion
in a world of illusions. This procession of costumes
and masks (a multiplicity of identity) suggests the
very impossibility of social cohesion, even questions
the desire for sameness.
Mirrors tell many stories. Like masks, they oscillate
between acts of self-enforcement and subversion. If
anything, despite the darkness beyond the photographs,
the body presented here is a clear mask like ‘glass
for licking’, window shopping in a mall amidst
likenesses of ourselves. Herein lies the true fear that
Webster’s work provokes. Behind all masks lies
that other mask, the hidden face of death. In the Black
Carnival, in this shuttered silence, ghosts have been
caught in the room dancing with life.
‘Life-in-death/ Death-in-life’, this neatly
balanced role-reversal reveals, yet revels in, the precariousness
of it all. Under masks are other masks... and maybe
this, in the end, is how we all face the world.
© Ewen McDonald
2005, Sydney-based writer, curator and editor.
A text written for Black Carnival, updated 2005, Art
New Zealand No 68, 1993
|