[Page 2: The Underskin of the Screen: Performing Embodiment in
Through the Looking Glass, an installation by Cris Bierrenbach
by Cynthia Bodenhorst]

In today's market-driven world, we are surrounded by images as idealized projections of objects, set up for consumption. Consuming is often the terminal action in consumer culture, where the look and the onlooker are under cultural pressure to apprehend the world from a pre-assigned, normative, and habitually passive viewing position. At the same time, in terms of women's identities and desires, these are constructed as an effect of the visual economy of the gaze, conscripted by normative representations that serve to establish sexual, racial, and class difference.

Cris Bierrenbach appropriates the cultural industry's mechanisms, such as advertising and electronic panels, to challenge the capitalist abstraction of the image and the inherent violence of the instrumental gaze, through the articulation of an ambush on the structure of viewing. The purpose is to destabilize the viewer/viewed, subject/object positions through a shifting message of critique and agency. Her strategies vary, from the billboard-sized image to an unconformable body that hardly fits on the screen, to the intensification of video's flesh-like graininess, to placing the spectator in public view. As she often does, this art project begins with her own body; she presents her skin and the screen as two surfaces mutually implicated in alternative forms of embodiment.

Performing Otherness

The dominant trope of video art is the body.While writing about the practices of video artists in the 1970s, Rosalind Krauss suggested that narcissism constitutes the very organizing principle for video as a medium.10 In fact, many of the works that can be considered the cornerstones of video art, such as Paul McCarthy's Press (1973), Hannah Wilkes's Gestures (1974), Vito Acconci's Command Performance (1974) and Lynda Bengalis's On Screen (1972), use the artist's body as subject matter in one way or another. While the analogy between the closed-circuitry in video as a medium and narcissism as a self-referential psychological model is relevant to the present discussion, it is more important to consider these works as laying down the grounds to theorize issues of embodiment and subjectivity vis-à-vis representational technologies.11

One significant example of body art produced in the 1970s is that of Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta. Cris Bierrenbach's installation echoes Mendieta's performances from 1972-74, made while Mendieta was still an art student at the University of Iowa.12 Bierrenbach's installation resembles Mendieta's series of six Glass on Face Imprints and six Glass on Body Imprints, in which she uses a pane of glass from a sculpture by Robert Smithson to obliterate her appearance. Mendieta simply smashes her naked body and face against the surface of the glass. Mendieta and Bierrenbach show a subject that does not take its own image as the object of love thus questioning the self-absorptive economy of the narcissistic desire. In both artists, the body does not make a return as "the Real," and the subject does not return intact. Rather, the subject as wholeness is shown as an illusion, while the anatomical body is interrogated as the basis for identity.

In Glass on Body Imprints Mendieta uses her body to disidentify.By pressing her breast and nipples against the flat glass she distorts the body parts typically associated with the female anatomy and a desirable feminine body to eliminate any trace of it. She levels her butt and genitals making her body two-dimensional and transforming it into a kind of graphic imprint where sensuous curves become flat, pictorial circles. Blurring the distinction between male and female forms, Mendieta confuses gender identity, dislocating it from its dependence on organs. Society's dominant fiction, formulated in the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity, is probed, along with its predominant signifiers, penis and vagina, as uncertain markers of sexual identity. Mendieta's Glass on Face Imprints more closely converse with Bierrenbach's installation. Both works resort to disfiguring the face as the body's central referent of individual identity through the use of minimalist props and simple gestures. Subjectivity and selfhood, which are indexically located in a person's facial features, assume unfamiliar forms. As stark gender and identity examinations both artists stage a full-frontal assault on normative desire, by distorting the main features associated with ideals of beauty and femininity and through the staging of alterity: the ugly, the disfigured, the non-ideal, the strange. Identity becomes the movement of meaning itself, that which unglues the mask from the face and the "perfect body." In both cases, the artists refuse to present a full body, resorting instead to fragmentary and close-up views. This strategy works to displace the normative symbolic alignment of the gaze with masculinity and of subjecthood as possessing a total and totalizing view.13

While there are key similarities between the works of these two artists, there are also important differences, in particular from the reception point of view. While Bierrenbach's installation is spatio-temporal, Mendieta documented her typically solo performances through photographs that constitute the only record of her art practice. These performance photos have acquired a particular appeal as one-of-a-kind objects, fixing or increasing their auratic character and value. Their rarity has contributed to their particular fetishistic nature as sought-after collectibles. Still photography tends to maintain a discrete and transparent relationship between subject and object. That is, photographs induce a relationship of voyeurism that relies on the entrenched coordinates of Cartesian perspective. This is true even when considering the potential photographs have to activate desire as argued by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, as the "belong to me" aspect of photographs dominates.14 This polemic around photography needs to be questioned further, in particular with the advent of digital photography, which relies less and less on material/corporeal origins and where multiple originals are readily replicated. Nevertheless I am more interested in here establishing a difference between the point-to-point kind of visuality, which we can call perspectival vision, in still photography—as in the case of Mendieta's performance photographs—and the "non-punctal televisuality" inaugurated by the advent of digital technologies and the proliferation of the digital screen.15 As Amelia Jones argues: "[i]n a historical sense televisuality might be understood as signaling the collapse not only of Cartesianism but of the visual politics of domination that both motivated and gained from the structure of absolute difference posited by the Cartesian self-other relation."

The political implications of this shift are important, as more and more individuals are becoming producers and new inter-subjective networks are becoming available. Olivier Asselin writes about the screen suggesting that "there isn't a place, not an object or a body, that is not potentially equipped with a screen and/or a camera and that cannot as a result become interactive and hooked up to a network."16 Instead of dwelling on discourses that lament the disappearance of the body in the technological image, or the complete replacement of the perceptual field by a representation readily manipulated by capitalisms, racisms and sexisms, I would like to insist, as Walter Benjamin did in the 1930s, on the inherent resistance to authoritarianisms implied in the relationship between art and technology.17 With the advent of digital optics, as Paul Virilio suggests, a kind of "sightless vision" has been initiated that enables a "long distance telepresence." Paradoxically, the Cartesian coordinates of the Western gaze are simultaneously shattered and multiplied, inaugurating "the industrialization of the non-gaze," where there is no longer a unified focal origin for reason and knowledge.18 While both Mendieta and Bierrenbach show the relationship between body and representation as arbitrary and productive, Mendieta's body has been at least partially fixed through auratic photographs that establish the perspectival distance necessary for a fetishistic relation. Bierrenbach's body, on the other hand, returns transformed as screen-flesh and multiplied televisually.