[Page 3: The Underskin of the Screen: Performing Embodiment in
Through the Looking Glass, an installation by Cris Bierrenbach
by Cynthia Bodenhorst]

The soundtrack in Bierrenbach's installation represents the acoustic space of this "distant telepresence," creating a kind of presence-in-absence. The sound originates from textual segments collapsed into a montage of undifferentiated and juxtaposed voices presented through the single voice of the artist. As bodies off-scene, the women's narratives stand as referents of this televisual presence and as the space of utterance. The textual fragments extracted from personal self-descriptions locate women as producers and self-actualizing individuals:

"I rent myself but I'm very expensive:

Bitch and arrogant: yes, please!
Straight: yes, like Madonna
Like to tease: yes
Like to eat: yes (a lot) Like mirrors: oh hey mamma! "

The acoustic space works by creating not so much a feminist or counter-site to dominant visual politics and their reliance on stable differential and differentiated viewing positions, but a kind of distance from site: a distance from the dominant representational epicenter. The off-scene body of the women, their desires, fears, uncertainties and convictions, are brought into view by these bits and pieces of audio into an arena of shared meanings. The artist's aesthetic gesture extends into the space of the social the communicative impulse of the women that envision an audience, and vice versa.

These self-descriptions can also be understood as self-portraits that function like a pose.19 More than a masquerade, the pose re-inscribes agency into the field of normative vision as an intervention by which the women give themselves to be seen in a particular way.20 This suggests a more complex relationship between the image/screen, the gaze, and the subject that sees or is seen. Although one might argue that there is a limited agency that these women have in controlling the way they are apprehended by those that see/read them on the Internet, I suggest that agency occurs at different levels. The most evident one is the pose, as the women "play" with the screen and manipulate what the viewer "sees," evidencing him/her as a desiring subjectivity.

The second instance of agency comes from Bierrenbach's disruptive action that identifies at-a-distance with the women through the performance of alterity. While we hear the voiceover, Cris performs the anti-aesthetic body. Without veiling desire, but augmenting it, the artist permits us to better see the workings of the cultural gaze, while also promoting an identificatory relation through the image with "the women themselves."21 In other words, the viewer not only sees from an unexpected vantage point—literally manifested by the displacement to the street—but also through a radical disarticulation of his/her ego. Without affording imaginary identification with the image or self-image, the eccentric or out-of-scene aspects of the installation creep into the realm of the viewer's unconscious and stake a claim as "implanted memories." The viewer is engaged in a "remembering look," unconsciously open to otherness through an estrangement of self.22As the artist's face contorts, we hear and have access to that which does not belong to us; we remember the memories of others, those women that resonate with their pleasures, fears, and desires. The viewer is thus moved to care, to pay attention, to listen, and take a second look, beyond the complacencies of self and the limitations of the image-culture repertoire. While Cris performs otherness in a way that precludes libidinal incorporation, she re-inscribes the screen from an abstract geography into a feminine cartography, as a site where struggles over meanings, identities, and sites are brought back into focus.

The Underskin of the Screen

A screen is a protective membrane, a safe and discrete place from which to look, a border, and a tool of ideological interpellation. While the installation literally stages the idea of the self as an effect of the cultural inscription through visual capture, it cannot be understood as a mere commentary on the symbolic arrest of the body by the image. The installation insistently fleshes the screen, restoring it as texture and as a performative site for identification and identity. Cris's aesthetic gesture has more to do with the act of looking, strategically subverting it from a passive into an active and ethical performance of seeing. This is the reason why Chris Bierrenbach chooses to directly address the materiality of the screen as a way to in-corporate the structure of viewing; it is the screen that she is mostly concerned with, materializing it as a corpus.

The "screen" in Lacan's model of the field of vision constitutes the "locus of mediation;" that is, it is the site where the image takes place and where the gaze and the subject of representation meet.23 This site, where subject and object, self and other meet is further defined by Jones as a complex and disruptive site, rather than a "site of unity," where "subjects reciprocally define and negotiate one another within in the visible [realm];"24 The screen can be understood as an alienating site, or equally, as a performative site of subject formation, where a complex dynamic of identification and projection illuminates the unavoidable dependence that we have on others for our sense of self and individual identity. We are simultaneously the subjects and objects of looking.

While for Lacan the screen is mainly a flat surface, described as a "thrown-off skin" or an "envelope," Bierrenbach's screen is reformulated as thick flesh, a contact surface that is tactile and corporeal.25 Paradoxically, rather then veiling the simulacral aspect of the projected body, Bierrenbach uses the language of advertisement, the billboard-like size of the projection, to highlight the artifice of the image and to embody the screen. Her face and neck occupy the entire surface that assumes a skin-like quality: a visible porous texture attained by amplifying the graininess typical of video. Cris's embodiment of the screen, though resolutely technologized, performs an appropriation of the projecting surface; she fleshes the screen transforming it into an intimate epidermis.

In normative forms of representation, idealization is constrained to corporeal bounds and restricted "to certain subjects, while rendering others unworthy of love."26 This abjection works by naturalizing certain bodies as essentially ideal, and others as unfit for representation. This is the basis for the pathological and often violent relationships that individuals tend to have towards themselves and others. We hate our bodies if they do not conform to sanctioned ideals, or repudiate others that do not conform to cultural norms. Bierrenbach alters the screen through a determinate fleshing of it, transforming it from a transparent tool of ideological interpellation into an opaque in-corporation. From a surface that reflects the emphatically corporeal representation of the ego, the screen is reinstated as a thick and performative container that encounters the viewer as an incarnated presence.27

Furthermore, by addressing the door of the gallery space, Bierrenbach destabilizes the authority of the institutional space, rendering the "white cube" as an empty surface only relevant from the street level. The screen and the gallery are relocated to the street as a collective and public terrain. This strategic (dis)placement calls attention to the door as the passageway between inside and outside, public and private, while also organizing an attack on the homogenization and inherent violence of the neo-liberal city as a spatial confusion of privatized space and de-historized sites.28 The viewer is also relocated to a symmetrical position to the image and exposed as voyeur to public view. The voyeur becomes the object of voyeurism and interpellation, an aspect that is exacerbated through the sound that incessantly repeats the words of soliciting women. A sound of flesh meeting the grain of our skin; bare words touching both screens:

"Who can hold me tight; keep me warm, through the night?
Who can wipe my tears, when it's wrong, make it right?
Who can give me love, til I'm satisfied?
Who's the one I need in my life."

"Attention: I only communicate via the scrapbook + Underestimated from day one + Refugee from Kabul + 12 years on the run + finally made it to Berlin + + Singer (getting better and better) + Hoping to really settle down some day + Watch it! I am a slap in the face."

Bierrenbach stages her body off-scene in order to expose cultural exclusion: that which is not presented onscreen or is simply overlooked by the dominant representations of the body in general, and the feminine body in particular. Through the Looking Glass adopts a sort of anti-peepshow setup that troubles both the aestheticizing gaze of the video/cinematic projection and the voyeuristic or pornographic gaze. The Narciso and the Voyeur stand exposed, put on the scene, where spectatorial comfort is troubled. The spectator's taken-for-granted autonomy is not afforded the distance or the coherent position of a viewing subject at the apex of the focal coordinates. If the artist's body persists in this installation it is not as remnant or an abstraction of flesh, or to repeat a narcissistic self-staging, but as an arousing otherness that saturates the eyes. This artistic endeavor takes us back to the Surrealists' projects that "countered the realist eye that cuts and pierces with another orb, the eye, neither totally blind nor all-seeing, that weeps with the memory in the face of violence."29