Mimicry, meme and Walk with Contrapposto
The queasiness was caused by movement.
The velocity produced by observing myself being myself in two eras at once. It was summoned by the framing of an early video work Walk With Contrapposto (1968) by the artist Bruce Nauman. Commonly displayed on a Triniton monitor on a pedestal, a figure, presumably the artist, is captured from behind in a white t-shirt and jeans, holding his hands behind his head, elbows outstretched, and walking down a narrow plywood corridor. Sensually shifting his weight to each hip, from side to side, until he reaches the end of the hallway.
When I first saw the Nauman work, I saw my reflection in the figure of the artist, as though I was being recorded from behind by a surveillance camera. It felt like my form, like my body, was implicated in the work I was actively viewing. The framing of the movement in Nauman’s Walk With Contrapposto is a reconsideration of the body as sculptural material, engaged in a contemplative relationship to gender and duration. With the aid of the past, I could see myself in the present, and I could more objectively experience movements as a form of phrasing.
The consumption and production of media is transforming our understanding of mimicry. Homi Bhabha has stated that “…the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference…mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal…it appropriates the Other as it visualizes power.” (1) Elizabeth VR runs against the grain of narrative identity by casting the unmarked identity in a dance that becomes a mimicry of a mimicry. The excesses or slippages in the performance of these repetitions are like the non-reproductive germ cells that Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2), performing an autonomous form of social death, a sacrifice.
The production, circulation, and recirculation of video documentation formalize these acts of self-immolation as cultural agreements. Akin to memes, they are representative of how we interact in the material world as an individual and part of a collective. The videos demonstrate the morphology of the art object, the moving image, and the discursive formations we experience online and in real life.
Performance art is a mediation of the gallery exhibition in transition. In a period marked and divided by the hostile negotiation of citizenship and beingness, exhibition viewing has increasingly been restricted to public openings and the sociality and performativity those gatherings engender. Deploying research methods that integrate writing, rearrangement, concealment, performance, and video, the studio is imagined as the site of exhibition, as an abstraction of the affective, sociological, and political formations of space and narrative identity. New artworks should test and prove the tensions of the sociogenic principle, “ What it is like to 'be'” (3) between exhibition and artwork, authorship, and unstable identity.
1. Homi Bhaba. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, October, Spring, 1984, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis (Spring, 1984), pg. 126
2.”We might suppose that the life instincts or sexual instincts which are active in each cell take other cells as their object, that they partly neutralize the death instincts (that is, the processes set up by them) in those cells and preserve their life; while other cells do the same for them, and still others sacrifice themselves in the performance of this libidinal function.”
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle / Sigmund Freud ; Translated and Newly Edited by James Strachey. Rev. ed. New York: Liveright Pub. Corp., 1961. pg. 44
3. Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of “Identity” and What it’s Like to be “Black” to be published in National Identity and Sociopolitical Change: Latin America Between Marginalization and Integration, edited by Mercedes Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) pg. 33