phantom in the corner staging a gothic spectacle

Kylie Banyard, Master of Fine Arts 2007, University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 1 contents

2 Introduction

6 Chapter One The hybridisation of Phantasmagoria and the Wunderkammer as an abridgment of and supplement to the spatial notions informing spectacle in the present.

9 Chapter Two The Phantasmagoria: Locating the origins of atmosphere, credulity and spectacle within aspects of the Gothic genre.

15 Chapter Three Sitting the female protagonist inside the constructed atmosphere of Gothic/Horror cinema.

28 Chapter Four Examining the dialogue between contemporary visual art and the lexicon of the Gothic/Horror spectacle.

46 Chapter Five Chamber of wonders: recognising and re-visiting ‘the archive’.

53 Chapter Six Contemplating the compendium: Contemporary Arts’ engagement with ‘the archive’.

59 Conclusion

60 Bibliography

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 1 introduction

he origins of Phantasmagoria and the Wunderkammer are convergent T paradigms at the core of my research. Both of these archaic display methodologies were prominent modes of didactic entertainment in the late eighteenth century. They are devices that created a visual spectacle by inciting astonishment and curiosity in their audiences – and in some senses it could be argued are strongly precursive of cinema.

My research is extrapolated out of an analytical engagement with the fundamental functions of Phantasmagoria and the Wunderkammer, namely those of atmosphere and display. My paper is divided into two inter-related parts; the fi rst concentrates on constructs, defi nitions and implications of Gothicity within the context of Phantasmagoria, Horror fi lms and contemporary art. It seeks to align my studio-based practice with contemporary artists’ who similarly engage with aspects of the Gothic spectacle. The second part considers the Wunderkammer in terms of its history and prefi guration of archival practices. The investigation of contemporary artists’ affi nity with redundant modes of display provides a theoretical platform for my conceptual engagement with the Wunderkammer.

The objective of my research has been to collate reference material aligned to various modes of historic and theoretical enquiry, thereupon concluding my studies in the ‘staging’ of Phantom in the Corner an immersive multi-media installation.

According to Hal Foster a distinctive turn has occurred in recent art, he describes, much art of the past decade as “works which fall somewhere

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 2 between public installation, an obscure performance and a private archive.” 1 He refers to Foucault’s theory of “discursive practice” 2 in reference to his notion of “art as informal probing into a specific figures or events in history or politics, fiction or philosophy.” 3 In this sense, shared attributes linking the artist’s work examined in chapters four and six are positioned within Foster’s reading of Foucault and locate my work in its theoretical vicinity.

My practice refers to the signification and location of the female protagonist within the exaggerated atmosphere of Gothic/Horror cinema. Phantom in the Corner embodies a fragment and does not actualise a protagonist or portray a linear narrative; instead the viewer is presented with a series of suggestive components that infer traces of human presence.

When the viewer first encounters the installation they encounter an illuminated freestanding wall. The space is sombre with the only light coming from within and behind the wall. Lighting is a fundamental cinematic device and crucial to this installation – as both, a point of reference and as an atmospheric tool. Coloured lighting and ambient sounds seeping from the cavity behind entice the viewer to approach, in tacit acknowledgment of the spectacle within. Evoking at the same time both the site of a ruin and a film set, the structure is decontexturalized by the gallery space – as though lifted from a fictional landscape.

As a locus for the display of objects and illusions, the edifice with its thirteen recessed boxes is reminiscent of a cabinet-of-curiosities. Inside the boxes, overhead lights illuminate small still-life paintings of objects; prominence will be given to objects/props emblematic of femininity.4 Patricia White’s essay Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting outlines the role of female characters in Horror films by making the connection between signifiers of femininity and the domicile. Therefore the non space behind the wall evokes a film-set; the interior of a house, possibly a kitchen.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 3 “In relation to the narrative work of classical cinema defined as the playing out of space (the house, the grave, the womb) as the very image of femininity that I wish to situate the story of the Haunting.” 5

Still from Suspiria (1977)

Notes 1. Foster, H, “Arty Party”, London, Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 23, 2003 p1. 2. Hal Foster quotes Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘discursive practices’ as sourced from “The Archaeology of Knowledge”, Routledge, 1989. 3. Foster, Op. cit., p1. 4. The importance of the female protagonist to the Gothic spectacle of Horror films necessitates an emphasis on signifiers of gender construction, specifically: shoes, gloves jewellery and household utensils. The containerized renderings of objects symbolise eerie object fetishism. 5. White, P, “The Horror Reader: Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting”, ed. Ken Gelder, Routledge, 2000, p215.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 4 “She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear – of motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor, over-spreading her face, had proved to me that my

exertions to reassure her would be fruitless.” 6

Notes 6. Poe, E, A, “Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings”, Penguin Books, 1967, p.75.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 5 Chapter One The hybridisation of Phantasmagoria and the Wunderkammer as an abridgment of and supplement to the spatial notions informing spectacle in the present.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 6 n Devices of Wonder Francis Terpak cites early modes of display as embodiements of Ithe central role that visuality played in the act of learning in the seventeenth century.

“By bringing the wondrous into the world at hand, the display cabinet (and the magic lantern) prepared the modern mind to expand the limits of its imagination and to be transported beyond the here and now.” 7

Spectatorship is a common thread linking Phantasmagoria to the Wunderkammer. Through variant modes of display, the central functions of both were to instil an atmosphere of wonder that promoted a visual spectacle, inciting awe and curiosity in their audiences. As previously mentioned, each of these archaic display methodologies were popular modes of entertainment, and they provided their audiences with an immersive sensory experience, recalling aspects of spectatorship common to contemporary cinema and in the age of elaborately designed block buster theme shows – the museological experience.

Clockwise from left: Studio of Jean-Pierre Dantan (1800-1869), artist & date unknown; Fantasmagerie de Robertson dan tu Cour das Capucines on 1797, artist & date unknown; Fantasmagoria A View in Elephanta, artist & date unknown

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 7 The audience for a typical Phantasmagoria, with their desire to be ‘taken in’, sat in a dark room waiting for suspenseful images and sounds of spectres to flood their imaginations and test their nerves. The visitor to a Wunderkammer was free to roam a vast, often opulent hall, spending as much time as they liked investigating facets of an exotic collection.

Whilst the fundamental aim of each display was to entertain and educate, the disparity between them is their method. The Phantasmagoria required a seated audience willing to passively submerge themselves in an onslaught of unfathomable projected images. The Wunderkammer required an ambulatory audience willing to actively investigate a variety of disparate objects, whilst also being able to step back and appreciate the relationships between them as a whole. Phantom in the Corner, actualises the similarities and disparities between the two display methodologies by deconstructing and re-figuring literal and metaphoric elements particular to each methodology. 8

From left: Kylie Banyard, Props sans Protagonist, preliminary exhibition at Blank Space, 2006; Kylie Banyard, video experiment for Phantom in the Corner, 2006

Notes 7. Terpak, F, “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen – Objects and Contexts”, The Getty Research Institute Publications Program, 2001 p 164. 8. For example, shadow-play, stage-lighting and a soundtrack combine to dramatise the constructed environment in a similar way to the Phantasmagoria. The placement of the false-wall in the corner of gallery recalls the trend among Phantasmagoric shows to situate the screen for the projection of images in the corner of the room. The composition of the false–wall with its recessed boxes and decorative shelving make direct reference to the structural aspects of a cabinet of curiosity; as does the collection of images and objects it houses.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 8 Chapter two Phantasmagoria: Indicating the origins of atmosphere, credulity and spectacle within aspects of the Gothic genre.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 9

The Devil’s Mansion, by Rex Jardin, Paper Back Library, 1966.

“...the real theme of the nineteenth-century supernatural tale is the reality of what is seen: whether to believe or not believe in apparitions and Phantasmagoria, and whether one can discern behind daily appearances another enchanted or infernal world. It is as if the supernatural tale, more than any other narrative genre, was expected to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, to take shape as a series of images, to entrust its communicative power to its ability to create ‘figures’. What counts is not so much skill in verbal manipulation or in following flashes of abstract thought as giving visual form to some complex and abnormal scene. The element of ‘spectacle’ is essential to the fantastic in narrative: and it is no surprise that the cinema has drawn so much inspiration from this genre.” 9

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 10 n an essay titled A Cinematic Fable (2003)10, Adrian Martin chronicles the Icontinuously shifting dialogue between art and film since the 1960s. In this he foregrounds the reciprocal relationship over time that artists have with film, and traces a path to our present cultural moment. Martin reveals that the current trend among many contemporary artists is to:

“Disengage themselves from the critical-intellectual demand (of the avant-garde), and to address themselves to specific films that exist in the public sphere or popular culture...To the typical film, as it were, and our experience of it...The typical film is the apparatus of cinema itself – the screen, the projector, the architecture of the hall, the light, the soundtrack and the classic moment...” 11

My research has revealed that long before the dawn of cinema, the Phantasmagoria dominated the Gothic stage. If the ‘typical’ film is the apparatus of cinema itself, then modern cinema inherited components of this apparatus from proto-Gothic spectacle – Phantasmagoria.

Early magic lantern, c. 1850

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 11 With the notion of spectacle as ‘site’, my research articulates the inextricable connections between Phantasmagoria, cinema and art; broadening the already established dialogue between art and film into a reciprocal discourse between, the Phantasmagoria, film and art.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Magic Lantern projections of large-scale supernatural imagery was a popular mode of entertainment. Its success was largely due to its ability to rouse the imagination of its audience, generating shared nightmares. Robertson12, for example transformed a nunnery into a ‘Theatre of the Macabre’; his audience traverse an old cemetery to reach the location of the ravaged convent. Robertson’s mastery of the dramatic art of atmosphere and suspense made him the most successful of all of the Ghost Show hosts.

“Although the magic lantern can be numbered among these older optical devices for puzzling audiences, its greatly expanded role at the end of the eighteenth century conditioned the modern world to a new kind of visual culture. Within two centuries, the magic lantern had developed from a rudimentary device that projected small, dimly lit images to magnificent machines that could cast huge, brightly coloured, animated entertainment for hundreds of people.” 13

In Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and Modern Reverie (1988), Terry Castle outlines the influences of lantern technology on the history of imagination and foregrounds shifts in the etymology of the word ‘phantasmagoria’. She notes that by tracing the history through which Robertson’s spectres were internalised, “so that by the time of Freud, thought itself seemed to be haunted. The term ceased to refer exclusively to the lantern shows and began to refer to the ‘contents’ of the mind.” 14 To illustrate this shift in meaning Castle examines the first and then third Oxford English Dictionary definition. According to Castle the definitions read:

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 12 1. “A name invented for an exhibition of optical illusions produced chiefly by means of the magic lantern, first exhibited in London in 1802.” 15

2. “A shifting series or succession of phantoms or imaginary figures, as seen in a dream or fevered condition, as called up by the imagination, or as created by literary description.” 16 The secular trend towards the internalisation of the phantasmagoric is also manifest in Italo Calvino’s introductory essay to Fantastic Tales (1997) Calvino makes a separation between stories written in the first half of the nineteenth century and those written in the second. He calls those from the first ‘visionary fantastic’ and those from the second ‘everyday fantastic’. In doing so he illustrates the trend towards, “the interiorisation of the supernatural.”17 Subsequently, an originally external spectacle later became an internally embodied experience. Over the course of time the notion of Phantasmagoria altered, resulting in a philosophical, subjective and somewhat sceptical definition. A definition that runs parallel to ideas that shape the theory and history of imagination. Figuratively, this shift in meaning, reflective as it is of changes in taste and sensibility, provides a forum for contemporary re-engagements with archaic imaging technologies.

“The impact of the Phantasmagoria on the visual arts (other than cinema) has yet to be fully appreciated. While it is easy to see the shared iconographical ground, the deeper connections (in terms of narrative structures, visual effect and style) are only beginning to be explored.” 18

In A Cinematic Fable Martin refers to a new context of visual culture “based less on the properties of any specific medium in isolation, and more on the passages and exchanges between them.” 19 The classical emphasis on becoming, for example, a ‘master’ painter has been overshadowed by a desire

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 13 to work with whatever media best suits the project at hand. In this sense, the diverse materialities that combined to create the typical Phantasmagoria mirror the nature of contemporary multi-media installation art.

An artist whose work evidences an engagement with this premise is David Noonan. Noonan’s collaboration with Simon Trevaks titled SOWA (2002-2003) embodies classic cinematic clichés from the Gothic genre. Noonan employs similar composited elements to that of the Phantasmagoria - the iconographical imagery, the soundtrack, the theatrical lighting and the dimly lit space. Paul McCarthy is another artist who has often utilised a combination of atmospheric devices to create his wildly saturated spectacles. These artists employ aspects of Phantasmagorical construction in a manner similar to that articulated by Phantom in the Corner, where a Gothic vocabulary is anchored within my own practice.

Notes 9. Calvino, I (ed), “Fantastic Tales”, Penguin Books, 1997, p7. 10. “A Cinematic Fable” by Adrian Martin is a catalogue essay that was published as an accompaniment to Art + Film, an exhibition that was held in 2003 at the Centre For Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. The exhibition features Australian artists - Chris Bond, Philip Brophy, Starlie Geikie, Lily Hibberd, Christopher Koller, Brendan Lee, Ricky Swallow, David Noonan and Simon Trevaks. 11. Martin, A, “A Cinematic Fable”, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2003, p 12. 12. Invented by Belgian physicist Etienne Gaspard-Robertson in March 1798. 13. Terpak, Op. cit., p 303. 14. Castle, Terry, “The Horror Reader – Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie”, ed. Ken Gelder, Routledge, 2000, pg 29 15. Ibid, p 30. 16. Ibid, p 30. 17. Calvino, Op. cit., p 13. 18. Myrone, M, “Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination”, Tate Publishing, 2006, p.146. 19. Ibid, p 12.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 14 Chapter three Locating the female protagonist within the phantasmagoric atmosphere of Gothic/Horror cinema.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 15 “The job of an actress is doubly demanding...She is called upon to depict the most horrifying situations and to display the most disturbing emotions. She must make the horror become real for us... The women of horror are counted on for convincing performances as victims.” 20

ulia Kristeva, Barbara Creed and Linda Badley are among several prominent JFeminist theorists who have spent decades analysing the gendered issues of the Horror genre. Kristeva’s Powers of Horror - An Essay on Abjection (1982), Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine (2004) and Linda Badley’s Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (1995), are key texts that have assisted in developing the critical framework that defines my engagement with Gothic/Horror films. In Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic, Linda Badley reveals that:

“...until recently the genre was thought to be a myth of male power...Horror is reactionary. Its job has long been to punish transgressions of gender roles and reinforce stereotypes.” 21

However, contrary to early critical thought, Badley also refers to Ellen Moers as the first theorist to define the ‘Female Gothic’ as an alternative literary tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, enabling female authors to depict woman. Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) is an example of a contemporary film directed by a woman that, in some senses, it may be argued falls into the category of ‘Female Gothic’. In my opinion, the film is an example of active female subjectivity, Campion addresses female sexuality from the female perspective by portraying her protagonist with a depth of character that extends beyond traditional role as ‘object’ and into the realm of female desire.

“Female Gothic fiction adapted the codes of the male Gothic, using them against themselves to expose oppression and articulate female experience, embodied experience in particular.” 22

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 16 Drawing on my understanding of specific critical Feminist texts, I have implemented a theoretical reading of two films that have formally and thematically informed my studio practice. Dario Argento’s film Suspiria (1977) and Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) variously articulate five areas of directorial focus that I have foreground in the elaboration of the physical and metaphorical properties of Phantom in the Corner.

Kristeva’s definition of abjection as that which does not respect borders and threatens identity is paramount. In relation to the Horror film Kristeva believes that we are drawn to Horror films because they present the abject (that which threatens our understanding of self) in a safe context:

“The spectator is able to view encounters with the abject monster, take perverse pleasure in the gruesome sights on offer, and then withdraw secure in his/her sense of what constitutes the whole and proper self and body.” 23

Creed builds on Kristeva’s notions of abjection in her conception of ‘the Monstrous Feminine’. Creed claims that although a substantial amount of texts explore the Gothic/Horror genre, very little has been written about the woman as monster. In her detailed account she refers to the Monstrous Feminine as a powerful, active figure in the Horror text:

“...the vampire, primeval mother, witch, castrated body, possessed body, monstrous womb, menopausal monster, non-human animal and femme fatale.” 24

Amoung other things, the scene behind the wall in Phantom in the Corner is an illusion of a witches den, an un-mappable in-between place, as much lair as lure, it makes visible Creed’s augmentation of Kristeva’s paradigm.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 17 We all accept that ‘The gaze’ is a popular subject in psychoanalysis and feminist film theory. Badley and Creed exemplify the problems of female spectatorship and subjectivity by drawing on Laura Mulvey’s influential text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975): “The patriarchal unconscious had structured the film form, gendered its narrative codes and the spectators role. Woman (positioned) as image and man as bearer of the look.” 25

In Pandora’s Box, Creed recalls arguments regarding issues of spectatorship since Mulvey’s initial essay in 1975. A description of the lineage of critical thought regarding ‘The gaze’ is beyond the scope of this paper; however, the elaboration of certain key concepts is pertinent to my line of enquiry. An illuminating example of this is Creed’s claim that since the 1990s women have appeared in mainstream cinema in a range of diverse and confronting roles. The presence of a feminine voice in cinema has presented sexual difference... differently. She implies that female directors often form their narratives in opposition to the classical (patriarchal) narrative structure by offering an open- ended conclusion – denying the spectator resolution. Also, the implication of nuanced forms of ‘the gaze’, exemplified by, ‘a black gaze’ or ‘queer gaze’ has expanded upon the conventional notion of ‘the male gaze’:

“Psychoanalytic readings of spectatorship were not abandoned; rather the field was broadened to include a range of complex and varied spectatorial relationships.” 26

Creed amoung others has prescribed semiology as a relevant feminist methodology for the critique of the Gothic/Horror film. Writing in support of this:

“A semiological analysis is concerned with all the possible layers of meaning in a film and how these are constructed through a range of codes: codes of image and dialogue, codes of narrativity, scale of shot and camera angle and codes of lighting.” 27

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 18 Theorist Mary Ann Doane defines the connection between the typography of Horror films and signifiers of femininity as the domicile. She cites Norman Nolland and Leona Sherman’s version of the old Gothic formulas as simply ”the image of woman-plus-habitation. It is the uncanny house that the heroine is forced to inhabit and explore.” 28 An observation that was to be very influential on the motif and motive of Phantom in the Corner.

Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides locates the female protagonist inside the confines of the ‘uncanny house’. Which in relation to Badley’s theory, is a metaphor for her destiny being bound to her sexuality. Within the house, the surrounding props, costumes, lighting and architecture signify the protagonist’s suffocating entrapment.

Abandoned house, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2005

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 19 Stills from The Virgin Suicides, 1999

Set in the 1970s against a suburban backdrop, The Virgin Suicides tells the story of five beautiful teenaged sisters. After the youngest sister attempts, fails and then succeeds in killing herself, the remaining four sisters retreat into a detached melancholy fantasyland of feminine exclusivity. The film’s narrative structure is investigative, the story is told from the point of view of the boys – who exist on the edge of the narrative – looking in from the house next door. For the most part, the girls are represented as objects of ‘the male gaze’. Bev Zalcock has written about the shifting object/subject position that the Lisborne sisters occupy through the course of the film and how their thwarted quest for identity represents female subjectivities embodied experience. Zalcock writes: “It’s about growing up a girl in a society whose values and aspirations repress the needs and development of its female subjects.” 29

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 20 Earlier in her text she refers to their typical objectification as being ruptured by moments of ‘active’ subjectivity, particularly when the youngest sister is talking to a male therapist who asks her why she’d try to take her own life at such a young age, she replies with a statement that foregrounds the central theme of the film. “Obviously Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.” 30

Stills from The Virgin Suicides, 1999

Sophia Coppola’s subtle, desaturated, palette reawakens a sense of the past in the viewer. The dreamy evocation of teenage life is reinforced by the film’s mise en scene: time-lapse photography, slow motion effects and a moody, organ- driven soundtrack. Possessing a nostalgic resonance akin to Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Virgin Suicides also locates its subjects in the past.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 21 Still from Picnic At Hanging Rock, 1975

“It seems that in order to express the enigmatic and ephemeral nature of budding female sexuality it is necessary to put some distance between the narrative and the time of it’s telling.” 31

The Lisborne sisters possess an ideologically patriarchal purity: blonde, healthy, nubile beauty that is confounded by the abjectness of their bizarre fate. The Virgin Suicides reconfigures the problems of emptiness and anxiety at the nexus of repressed female sexuality and suburban existence.

In accordance with Creed’s prior evaluation of a female voice, the director, Coppola, offers no answers to the questions raised by her narrative. Like the narrators of the film (the boys next door), the audience is left unhinged. The only remnants that signify the Lisbournes’ existence are objects of enclosed feminine ritual: diaries, records, ribbons and scented bottles. Similar objects are the subjects of the small panel paintings at the core of The Phantom in the Corner.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 22 Kylie Banyard, Untitled small panels, oil on masonite, from the installation Phantom in the Corner, 2005-2007

Relative to my thematic concerns, the space and the artefacts that the Lisbournes’ leave behind symbolises nostalgia and fetishised objectification. I have used a similar atmosphere in elaborating my installation. The emphasis on items associated with femininity, such as, jewellery and ribbons conflate the constructedness of gender within ‘the set’. The narrative premise of my work concerns the strange and secretive workings of an enigmatic guild of girls (so

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 23 secretive that the viewer never actually sees them). The ‘girl gang’ is a popular theme in the Horror film because it exacerbates sexual difference and articulates women as mysterious.

“The Femme Fatale’s most striking characteristic is the fact that she is never really what she seems to be. She harbours a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable or manageable. In thus transforming the threat of the woman into a secret.” 32

Kylie Banyard, Untitled, Digital image, 2006

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 24 In Dario Argento’s Suspiria, the female protagonist is also located within the uncanny house; in this case, the house is a Baroque mansion characteristic of the archetypal haunted castle.

Suspirira is a cult classic that was set in the time and place of its making – Italy in the 1970s. Recalling the sensory immersion of phantasmagoria, Argento’s films are not plot-driven; instead he propels his narratives through saturated visual spectacle. Dramatic coloured lighting with stark primary colours, richly textured Op art wallpaper, abrasive sounds, exaggerated corridors, curtains with metres of billowing fabric and seething shadows in combination with Argento’s use of outdated technicolour film stock result in the films distinctive aesthetic – enormously influential on Phantom in the Corner.

Stills from Suspiria, 1977

Argento is renowned for his ‘point-of-view’ camera techniques. His camera angles are often rapidly inter-cut with ambiguous shifts between the victim (“the reactive gaze”), and the stalker (“the assaultive gaze”).33 He repeatedly switches from a long shot to an extreme close-up and back again. These techniques

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 25 coupled with the intensity of the soundtrack result in a destabilisation and disorientation of the audience’s point of view.

Stills from Suspiria, 1977

“What obtains in all of these sequences is a sense of pleasure and excitement in a pure sensory, perspectival play partially rooted in ambiguity, an emphasis on dynamics that begins to transcend stable generic polarities of active/passive, sadistic/masochistic, stalker/ stalked. The cinematic gaze is refigured not specifically because the stalker’s vision is somehow qualified, but because the look becomes radically diffused, unmoored from classical subject/object positions.” 34

The ‘Monstrous Feminine’ is omnipresent in Suspiria. Shortly after arriving at the academy, Suzy (the protagonist) finds herself surrounded by a host of unexplained murders. Her illusive teachers (all female) mysteriously leave the school each night at dusk, and each night another student is brutally killed. Eventually, Suzy starts to question her own sanity – wondering if she is suffering delusions, she feels as though she is living

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 26 in a dreamscape. Initially, she believes that the academy is haunted before finally realising that it is being run by a coven of witches. The predatory, scheming witches hide within a vast secret chamber in the school and flashes of their profane world are particularly unnerving. The matriarchal headmistress protects the head witch – who looks more like a rotting corpse than an elderly woman. The coven embodies a guild of monstrous women, whose rapacious actions permeate throughout the dance academy. On a thematic and aesthetic level, Suspiria functions like a template for Phantom in the Corner and is particularly expressive of groups of women (witches) engaging in ritualistic conjuring. Behind the false-wall in Phantom in the Corner the kitchen doubles as a strange workshop, not unlike a witch’s den, complete with cauldrons.

Kylie Banyard, Concept sketches for Phantom In the Corner installation, 2005

Notes 20. Badley, L, “Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic”, Greenwood Press, 1995, p 101. 21. Ibid, p 102. 22. Ibid, p 103. 23. Creed, B. “Pandora’s Box: Essays in Film Theory”, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2004, p 38. 24. Ibid, pg 36. 25. Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, vol. 16, no.3, 1975, p 26. Creed, Op. cit., p 30. 27. Creed, Op. cit., p 13. 28. White, Op. cit. p 214. 29. Zalcock, B, “Renegade Sister: Girl Gangs on Film”, Creation Books, 1998 p 215. 30. Ibid p 212. 31. Ibid, p 214. 32. Doane, M.A, “Femmes fatales: feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis”, Routledge, 1991, p 8. 33. Knee, A. “The Dread of Difference: Gender, Genre, Argento”, The University of Texas Press, 1996, p 223. 34. Ibid, p 222.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 27 Chapter four Examining the dialogue between contemporary visual art and the lexicon of the Gothic/Horror spectacle.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 28 ather than trace a lineage of the Gothic/Horror genre stemming from Rits vast architectural origins, I have chosen a route that begins at the Phantasmagoria and travels through cinema, towards contemporary art. I have decided on a somewhat alternative route to illuminate overlapping domains of the Phantasmagoria, cinema and multi-media installation art. There are numerous contemporary artists whose work draws upon different facets of the Gothic/Horror genre. I am going to concentrate on particular artists whose work strikes a connection with the Gothic/Horror genre in a cinematic context - forging formal and thematic correlations between their work and my own.

Since the early 1970s Paul McCarthy’s “contaminated aesthetic” 35 has manifest through performances, videos, installations, drawings and sculptures serving as an astute critique and hilariously dark parody of the interlaced cultural clichés of mass media imagery and the sanitised social conditioning of deeply embedded family values.

The combining of disparate figures from mass media that each contribute to our perception of moral and social order – such as a cartoon personae – like Pinocchio, and B-grade slasher movie effects, he invites his audience to consider the potential absurdity of universal narratives through his re-mixed versions of an uneasy visual culture.

Paul McCarthy, Pinocchio Pipnose Householddilema, performance video installation,1994.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 29 “His carnival-esque and explicitly ridiculous performances privilege a transformation of the pure into the impure. Masks and prostheses reshape the ideal bodies we know from advertisements, as well as from Disneyworld and from Hollywood films, into grotesque composite figures. These come to be covered in fluids, such as ketchup, mayonnaise... Paul McCarthy follows the rhetoric of dream language by placing centre stage what Hollywood’s dream factory abjects.” 36

Paul McCarthy, My Doctor, performance, 1978.

McCarthy’s metaphoric obsession with bodily fluids has often resulted in him smearing himself, and those performing with him, with foodstuffs – simulating acts of debasement, violating taboos and drawing on Kristeva’s definition of abjection. McCarthy employs the same B-grade slasher effects in his work that Kristeva examines in Powers of Horror.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 30 McCarthy’s substitution of condiments for bodily fluids resonates with a desire to metaphorically imply sensory excess in my work. For example, In Phantom in the Corner, the vista behind the false-wall depicts the aftermath of strange implied action. It’s domestic interior is part kitchen and part workshop. A table, chairs and kitchen utensils map a typical domestic space. However, on closer inspection, there are too many pots some of which are over-flowing with viscous red syrup that has spilt onto the table and seeped across the floor. Boxes of apples are stacked around the space. Baskets reminiscent of one that Red- Riding-Hood may have carried through the forest are full of carefully prepared toffee apples. The scene is chaotic, seemingly hurriedly abandoned. Toffee apples appear again on the face of the wall carefully placed on ornate shelves – appearing more like rare jewels than a sweet treat.

From left: Kylie Banyard, Untitled, resin dipped apple with jewels from Phantom in the Corner, 2006; Kylie Banyard, concept sketch of resin dipped toffee apples for Phantom in the Corner installation, 2006

In the context of the installation, the toffee apple represents an object of sugary potency and beauty. Similar to the iconographic ‘femme fatale’ – the symbolism

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 31 of the apple is unpredictable and enigmatic. According to the bible, giving in to the temptation of the apple was the original sin. The poison apple sent Snow White into a deep slumber resembling death. The use of many apples metaphorically symbolises overt female sexuality through over-abundance.

In a essay called ‘Mr McCarthy’s Neighbourhood’, Ralph Rugoff maps McCarthy’s transition from performance artist in the 1980s, towards videoed performances that later doubled as installations. Throughout his career, the stage set has been an integral aspect of McCarthy’s practice. In the early nineties the prominence of the set was augmented due to McCarthy’s continual interest in theme-park culture – evident in his kinetic installation The Garden (1991-92).

The staged aspect of McCarthy’s work has been of central significance to the development of the ‘film-set’ metaphor in my work. In Bossy Burger (1991) McCarthy developed the idea of video-and-stage-set-installation, where he installed the set from the video performance along with the video as and inclusive work. The audience is able to experience the aftermath of the tainted set.

Paul McCarthy, Bossy Burger, performance video installation, 1991.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 32

Paul McCarthy, Bossy Burger, performance video installation, 1991.

In Phantom in the Corner, a similar sense of ‘decontexturalized aftermath’ prevails. The installation does not sit flush in the corner of the gallery rather it stands out from the walls so that the viewer may access the structure’s hinterland by peaking around its sides. Thusly, the viewer will experience a voyeuristic behind the scenes glimpse of the work, heightening the ‘film-set’ metaphor.

Kylie Banyard, Phantom in the Corner, concept image, 2006.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 33 McCarthy’s The Garden is a simulated hyper-realistic environment, a tableau vivant, similar in its voyeuristic atmosphere to Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés... (1946-66). Rugoff refers to these works as being “arranged in such a way that our point of view is narrowly framed.” 37

Paul McCarthy, The Garden, multi-media installation, 1991-92.

Both The Garden and Etant Donnés... were influential on the direction of my installation in relation to the onlooker’s restricted point of view. Upon encountering Phantom in the Corner, the viewer will be prompted to adopt a forensic posture playing the role of fascinated observer/ investigator – peering through peepholes and cabinets.

Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnés, inside view, 1946-66.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 34 From left: Lily Hibberd, Collapse (of dreams), oil on canvas, 2001 Lily Hibberd, Inferno (blurred), oil on canvas, 2001

Lily Hibberd’s paintings concentrate on the psychological, spatial and atmospheric dimensions of cinema. She combines the audiovisual effects of sound and light in her expanded version of painting as installation. In 2001 she produced a series called Burning Memory. The mnemonic symbolism of the luminous red and gold paintings of a house engulfed by flames were rendered in a style with soft blurred edges – like that of an out-of-focus frame grab from a film. Located at the entry of the gallery and off to the side, a small black-and- white loop of images of burning houses – with crackling flames and a haunting piano piece screened as part of the installation – further romanticising the detached experience of an otherwise violent association.

Hibberd’s fascination with the illumination of celluloid continued into a later series called Blinded by the Light (2003). In this series, Hibberd reconstructs scenes from films that depict characters confronted by a cold flood of white light – like that from a strobe light or camera flash.

“The blinding light in Hibberd’s paintings is light that is a special effect. In a word, a light that is ‘cinematic’. The spectral events

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 35 that she paints are all derived from scenes in Science Fiction and Gothic fantasy cinema: Close Encounters, Altered States, Fearless, Cocoon, Fifth Element, Ghost and Poltergeist.” 38

Lily Hibberd, Blinded by the light series, oil and phosphorescent paint on canvas, 2003

Hibberd’s preoccupation with the glow of the screen is reinforced by her use of phosphorescent paint. Instead of projecting images onto a surface or creating illuminated light boxes, Hibberd has developed an ambitious technique that incorporates glow-in-the-dark paint – resulting in paintings that illuminate themselves.

When the viewer experiences this installation they spend ten minutes in a conventional gallery context with a series of paintings typically hung and lit by

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 36 conventional gallery spotlights. Unexpectedly, the gallery lights fade-out and the after-glow of the phosphorescent paint transforms the images.

“This after-image of the exhibition is a phantom, a special effect, visible only by losing sight of the image, while also being a false double of that image. The image that we take to be the real subject of the exhibition is a counterfeit human skin taken off by an alien body in the dark. And in this darkness, like the darkness of a cinema, we see the lucid substance of our own desire to be taken in.” 39

Lily Hibberd, Blinded by the light installation view, 2003

Through a deconstructionist method Hibberd has identified and re-figured atmospheric effects within the cinematic tradition – the ghostly, uncanny quality of viewing illuminated imagery in a darkened space. Her engagement with cinematic effects leads us, once again, towards the Phantasmagoric. In this sense, my practice shares a kinship with Hibberd’s; I am similarly intrigued by the experience of reconceptualized illuminated imagery in a darkened space, my installation also embodies a conceptual genealogical link between art, film and Phantasmagoria.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 37 Similarly, Anna Gaskell’s elaborately constructed images are more concerned with the history of film and literature than that of photography. In this sense, it is logical to employ the semantics of film theory to contextualise her imagery.

Anna Gaskell belongs to a generation of photographers who have abandoned the convention of documenting the everyday in pursuit of constructing an alternate reality. She treats the medium of photography as though it is a stage set onto which, she projects her fantastic landscapes, with her subjects as actors engaged in a series of suggestive actions. The characters in her elliptical narratives generally travel in packs, performing strange tasks. Gaskell’s use of close-up cropping, theatrical costumes, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, hyperrealist natural settings and sweeping Baroque staircases emits a nightmarish cinematic atmosphere of implication and thinly veiled violence. The erotically charged secrecy of her characters’ strange scenarios implies an active sexuality.

Gaskell positions her female characters as the focus of her point-of-view camera angles, yet she often veils their desire by allowing their hair to cover their faces. In the Resemblance series (2001), a group of girls in scientific lab coats huddle tightly in the corner of a room, with their backs to the camera. They are conspiratorial and their actions are uncertain.

“Anna Gaskell’s photographs effect a realm of scopophilia – we look, and we are uncomfortably caught looking. If her work is both seductive and alienating, it’s because she wants to analyse voyeuristic desire while revelling in it, to participate in its omnivorous processes of objectification while commenting on them.” 40

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 38

Anna Gaskell, Untitled #25 (override), C-print, 1997

According to Kristeva and Creed, the sexually active female is unspeakable in patriarchy; in the Gothic genre, female desire is often displaced on to the supernatural. In the traditional Gothic text, prominent female desire is made abject through transgression of the borders between normal and abnormal sexuality.

Gaskell’s work possesses a complex interplay of self-conscious contradictions. Gaskell constructs a forum for female subjectivity. In accordance with Creed’s argument, if the Gothic informs feminism and provides a ‘language’ for its sense of victimisation and the female Gothic adapts the codes of the male Gothic, using them to expose repression and articulate female experience, then it is possible to consider Gaskell’s photographs as contemporizing the ‘female voice’s’ presentation of sexual difference...differently.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 39 “Though Gaskell accepts the role of artist as unseen creator and voyeur, our knowledge of her gender infuses our looking. Over and over, she stages the spectacle of female subjectivity – which she suggests, may not exist – but the spectacle.” 41

Phantom in the Corner also addresses the notion of female subjectivity and plays with active/passive politics associated with the gaze. When approaching my installation the viewer is recategorized as voyeur - gazing through peepholes. The view through the small aperture reveals a chaotic feminine space, devoid of human presence, yet charged with the traces of their actions; leaving the spectator with the sense that they may have just missed the action by seconds. The constructed scenario promises a spectacle within and toys with the audience’s expectations. The installation de-subliminates the patriarchal construct of woman as object by removing the image of woman and presenting in her place the objects that ‘stage’ woman.

Kylie Banyard, maquette for Phantom in the Corner, 2006

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 40 The scene behind the false-wall, the delicately ornate toffee apples mounted on shelves on the face of the wall and the painted objects mounted inside the recessed boxes all culminate in ‘signing’ the coded aspects of femininity and female sexuality. The construction of a feminine space through the use of objects as a sign, rather than a literal figurative representation, implies that the experience of female subjectivity is a socially constructed ‘staged’ spectacle.

David Noonan, Kindred, gouache on paper, 2003

David Noonan’s work is symptomatic of our current post-media epoch. Noonan started out as a painter, later branching out into photography, video and multi-media installation. 42

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 41 David Noonan, SOWA, installation, 2003

His installations are based on traditional cinematic models pre-empted by the Gothic. He enjoys recreating classic moments and motifs from 1970s horror films. In particular, the large-scale, multi-media installations, Waldhaus (2002) and SOWA (2003), both were inspired by Dario Argento’s film Suspiria.

“Offering a new variation on their favourite motif, a lone protagonist drawn through a highly charged, physical space, and eventually over into the realm of dream: this is cinema as labyrinth, as gauntlet, as journey – which requires not a hero and sometimes not even a plot, only the ritual scenography of space, place and movement.” 43

Waldhaus was made a year before SOWA and it portrays a fragment of an interior. Consisting of a false wall, wallpapered with a custom designed black on white owl motif, the wallpaper featured makes direct reference to the bold black and white Op Art wallpaper in Suspiria. The false wall has a doorway at its centre, with skirting boards and cornices. The gallery sidewalls are apple green and the rear wall an intense red. Upon which hangs an image of a wolf. The coloured walls are reflected on the gallery floor. When the viewer enters the

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 42 space they are faced with a scene that feels makeshift, ephemeral – like a film set. The viewer is free to make the journey through the doorway, when upon entry, the thinly veiled illusion collapses and the viewer is offered a behind the scenes view of the set. Once on the other side, the makings of the structure are revealed; the stage has been set, but there are no actors. I have adopted ‘the set’ as a paradigm in Phantom in the Corner in a similar way to Noonan and other artists who have used this rhetorical device. Particularly in reference to Waldhaus where the stage is set, and in a sense, because of the constructed environment’s gallery context, the viewer becomes the performer.

David Noonan, Waldhaus, installation, 2002

In SOWA, Noonan and Trevaks decided to use elements of Waldhaus as a set for a video piece. The installation is evocative of classic psychedelic moments within Horror films. In particular, SOWA distils an ambience, reminiscent of scenes in Suspiria where the solitary protagonist finds herself wandering opulently decorated, shadowy corridors. She exists in an enigmatic dreamscape travelling an elliptical uncertain journey – a role that is usually reserved for a female character in the classic Horror film. Patricia White draws on Freud in her essay on The Haunting (1963), substantiating her analysis of signifiers of femininity and the domicile. “The woman provokes the uncanny; her experience of it remains a shadowy area.” 44

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 43 Therefore, Noonan’s treatment of the female subject signifies the gendered construction at work in the Gothic spectacle. Like Paul McCarthy, Noonan recycles elements of ‘the set’ as spatial environments for his video installations, in this case: the owl wallpaper, the 1970s light fittings and the red, yellow and green lighting.

David Noonan, Owl, from the Waldhaus series, 2001-2002

He achieves cinematic atmosphere by reconstructing symbolic elements of a film set redolent with Gothic ambience. The lighting effects are always dramatic and coloured and the narrative’s language is cyclical and unresolved. In this sense, my work shares similar formal concerns with Noonan’s, by identifying, isolating and re-contextualising cinematic facets that coalesce to form spectacle.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 44 Similar to Noonan’s work, my installation insinuates the residue of human presence. The viewer is presented with a multiciplicity of clues that when composited contemporise the Gothic spectacle.

Kylie Banyard, maquette for Phantom in the Corner, 2006

Notes 35. Rugoff, R. “Paul McCarthy: McCarthy’s Neighbourhood”, Phaidon, 1996, p 61. 36. Bronfen, E, “Simulations of the Real: Paul McCarthy’s Performance Disasters”(essay from: La La Land Parady Paradise Paul McCarthy), Hatje Cantz, 2006, p 227. 37. Rugoff, Op. cit., p61. 38. Colless, E, “Off Your Face - Blinded by the Light” exhibition catalogue essay, p 2. 39. Ibid, p 4. 40. Kaplan, C, “Anna Gaskell” Artforum International, March, 2000. p34. 41. Ibid, p 34. 42. Smith, T, “Criticism + Engagement + Thought” Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2004, p 23 43. Martin, Op. cit., p 12. 44. White, Op. cit., p 214.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 45 Chapter five Chamber of wonders: recognising and revisiting ‘the archive’.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 46 “This is the passion that knows no end, the compulsion that only death will finally set to rest. It is a sickness that particularly strikes those wishing to compile and anthologise. The collecting impulse, like love, is a condition that both stimulates pleasure and harbours infection. The archiving malady requires ongoing attention, its pleasure/pain is constant and unforgettable and, once in its tender trap, it demands constant fulfilment.” 45

Georg Haintz, Untitled, oil on canvas, approx. 1666-1672

‘ he Archive’ is broadly defined as a collection of records created over the life Tof an individual or organisation. The term describes both the items collected and the place in which they are kept. Common household furniture, such as a cupboard, closet, dresser, doll’s house and jewellery box all invite us to gather, arrange and display.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 47 Jacques Derrida contemplates the concept of ‘the archive’ in Archive Fever, highlighting the tensions between public and private inherant within the archive. He describes ‘the archive’ as:

“...an impression that shelters a memory - a place of origin – a depository of civic records and public histories stocked with personal artefacts of private lives.” 46

Historically, the meaning of ‘Archive’ stems from the Greek ‘arkeion’, a house or domicile of a superior magistrate where official documents were filed and stored; an institutional dwelling that Derrida refers to as “the passage from private to public – where a house becomes a museum”. 47

Throughout the course of time Archives have existed in myriad forms, from the scientific to the vernacular. Whether an anthropologically classified ensemble of endangered plant-life, or a small domestic sideboard containing sentimental family heirlooms, each collection possess the attributes of an Archive. Furthermore, in recent generations, a plethora of instantly accessable and malleable electronic media, such as, email, ebay, iPods and youtube have altered and greatly expanded the definition of ‘the archive’.

“The cabinets of curiosities with their encyclopeadic collections, elaborate iconographic programs, and writing surfaces – can be associated with the Internet. Both employ the visual as the primary mode of interaction and, more important, both “collect” and link far-flung and disparate ideas in a new and ever-changing configurations.” 48

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 48

Woodcut from Imperator’s Dell’ historia naturale, artist and date unknown

The conjunction between my research and ‘the archive’ is the Wunderkammer or wonder-chamber. The Wunderkammern were prominent throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century, as a precursive form of natural history museum – an archival methodology that brought together encyclopaedic collections of strange objects and rare specimens for the purpose of display. These collections often varied in size from entire rooms (Wunderkammer) to smaller tabletop cabinets (Wunderkabinette).

“Natural specimens as objects of study and wonder played an integral part in the intellectual life of early modern Europe, from the 16th through the 19th century. The acquisition, examination and display of such items produced a community of collectors who visited one another.” 49

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 49 The Getty Museum acquired a cabinet that was crafted during the early seventeenth century by Ulrich Baumgartner. This cabinet represents a typical Wunderkabinette of its time and it is believed to have been crafted for an aristocratic woman. Because of it’s specifically female focus The Getty Cabinet has provided me with specific aesthetic reference in my placing of objects that suggest a possible narrative.

The Getty Cabinet, originally owned by Gustavus Adolphus, made in Augsburg, approx. 1625

“Like several of Hainhofer’s cabinets, the exterior of the Getty’s cabinet delights the eye: an exuberant pattern of coloured marbles is set off by the deep lustre of the ebony frame. Behind this layer of splendour is a multihued interior whose carvings, painted miniatures, and inlays are patterned into a complex iconographic program of biblical, mythological, and historical subjects...” 50

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 50 The Getty Cabinet, originally owned by Gustavus Adolphus, made in Augsburg, approx. 1625

Establishing the abiding topicality of the topic “Charle’s Green has argued that since the late sixties there has emerged a developing strand of artists who have revisited the Archive.” 51

In my opinion, in a digital age of absolute visual saturation, artists continue to reference antiquated display methodologies in an attempt to simplify, and re- read the past from a contemporary perspective. The onset of visual saturation via the mass media has robbed the world of some of its sense of wonder. For example, in my experience of the popular digital archive Google image search, if the images that we search for don’t load quickly we simply abort the search, therefore, with notions of progress come expectations of urgency and ease. We no longer wonder in our search for visual culture, we expect visual information to appear instantly.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 51 The spirit of object wonder was transformed in the world of Modern Art when Marcel Duchamp exhibited his first ‘readymade’. The widespread genealogy that stems from the Duchampian ‘readymade’ has significantly impacted upon art made since. Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Christian Boltanski, Mike Kelley, Damien Hurst, Annette Messager, Fiona Hall, Sophie Calle and Kate Rohde, are an example of artists that locatable within this inheritance. The allure of archaic display methodologies as a point of reference infuses their work with both, a sense of wonder, and an impersonal – yet nostalgic detachment.

In ‘Fabricating the Archive’ Christina Barton talks about the way that:

“....contemporary artists reference the Archive; its contents, classificatory systems and its institutional adjuncts: the library, the art gallery and the museum. This is motivated by a desire to find a means to work after the ‘death of the author’, utilising found materials, recycling existing images and intermingling different sign systems, in order to emphasis the coded nature of representation and to expose the contingent relation between meanings and contexts.” 52

Barton refers to the recontextualisation of ‘the archive’ as a desire to abandon a belief in progress. In accordance with Barton’s proposed recontextualisation of ‘the archive’, I have employed the Wunderkammer not only as a formal point of reference but also as a fulcrum to lever the diverse compositional, theoretical and material components of Phantom in the Corner into place.

Notes 45. Stanhope, Z, “An Affair to Remember”, Artlink, vol 78, 2006, p 51. 46. Derrida, J, “Archive Fever – A Freudian Impression”, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, p 26. 47. Ibid, p 2. 48. Terpak, Op. cit., p 164. 49. Terpak, Op. cit., p 148. 50. Terpak, Op. cit., p 149. 51. Barton, C, “Fabricating Archives, Six New Zealand Artists Confusing the System”, Artlink vol 19, 2001, p 22. 52. Ibid, p 22.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 52 Chapter six Contemplating the compendium: Contemporary Arts’ engagement with ‘the archive’.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 53 “...the artist doesn’t invent anything new because there is nothing new to invent, the artist assembles differently, classifies differently and edits the images – to use a cinematic analogy - differently. It is through the artist that relics assume a magical value.” 53

he adaptation of formal aspects of ‘the archive’ in a museological sense has T become a popular mode of re-contextualised display for contemporary artists. Two artists whose work is particularly entrenched in the idea of the collection are Christian Boltanski and Kate Rohde. Christian Boltanski refers to the anthropological Musée de l’Homme in Paris as an important influence on his work. He has often said that he works around the idea of ‘vanitas’ and takes a perverse pleasure in the spectacle of death. His thematic concerns of loss, remembrance and imminent mortality were shaped by his formative experiences of two monumental institutional dwellings – the church and the museum. Of the latter, he has said that metal and glass display cabinets reminded him of tombs displaying dead cultures, by employing the language of anthropology, he constructs whole rooms of image/object storage as a way of activating the experience of remembrance in his audience. 54

Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, mixed-media installation, 1985

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 54 The correlation between my work and Boltanski’s concerns the collection of objects from the past being held in a strange often theatricalised stasis. Boltanski’s references to ‘Vanitas’ loss and remembrance possess a similar presence in my installation. Boltanski’s lighting is particularly relevant to my practice; he rarely uses conventional gallery lighting. In Reconstitution (1991) he lights each of the religiously arranged images individually. I believe theatrical lighting heightens the sense of loss in his work. In Phantom in the Corner the architecture of the false-wall is reminiscent of a commemorative mnemonic substrate. The paintings of objects mounted inside the illuminated boxes are like reliquaries in relation to the way that they are individually spotlighted.

Christian Boltanski, Monuments, from Inventory, mixed-media installation, 1991

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 55 Boltanski’s published picture book Kadish (1998) presents everyday objects as evidence of past life. The black-and-white images are depicted on shallow metal trays as though they have been shot in a forensic storage system or museum storeroom. Like Mike Kelley’s dolls, many of his objects appear ordered and catalogued. Even though they’re ordinary items like kitchen utensils, shoes, wedding photos, bicycles and strollers, they’re treated as artefacts or relics. Boltanski constructs a scenario of dramatic theatrically by presenting his work in this archaic institutionalised model. He is at once, celebrating and critiquing an outmoded method of classifi cation and display.

Kate Rohde’s monumental installations are immersive, extruded environments that mimic particular archaic models of the natural history museum, namely, the Wunderkammer and the taxidermist’s workshop. Rohde became interested in natural history and its associated display techniques via the discovery of a 1950s do-it-yourself taxidermy manual. In an article by Rebecca Cannon, Rohde recounts the decision to adopt ‘faux fur’ in her practice as a consequence of not being able to stomach performing taxidermy on actual animals. Consequentially, she subverts traditional methods of taxidermy, developing a practice that veers towards parody. 55

Kate Rohde, Chateau Fatale, installation view, 2005

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 56 Upon one’s first encounter with a Rohde installation, the atmosphere is overwhelming. The entire gallery space is transformed and as a witness you feel transported into the pages a fantasy novel, wandering like an enchanted character; surrounded by cabinets and shelves housing dioramas of strange habitats for unnatural creatures. As the viewer, you become a player, a visitor, in Rohde’s universe.

Every detail of Rohde’s constructed environments is carefully considered – from the glossy pink ‘marble’ floors, gilt cornices and cabinets of Chateau Fatale (2005), to the icy, crystalline vitrines, fake pewter tables and aqua walls with silver trim, of the wintery Some Kind of Empire (2006). Ornately framed distorted mirrors function as an atmospheric device, lining the walls of both Chateau Fatale and Some Kind of Empire, and cleverly allowing the spectator to locate the image of themselves within the context of the saturated scene.

Kate Rohde, Some Kind of Empire, installation view, 2006

Rohde’s installations combine a kitsch amateur craft aesthetic with technical prowess in complex sculptural processes involving resin casting and building. Her installations are particularly reminiscent of several proto-digital models of ‘the archive’. In Chateau Fatale and Some Kind of Empire the glamorous Baroque design recalls the Wunderkammer, particularly, The Grunesgewoble in Dresden.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 57 Larger-than-life peacocks, pheasants and owls are perched, frozen, on constructed rockeries covered in paper-craft vegetation and mounted on decorative wall shelves, and heavily gilt tables display large icy vitrines. Both Chateau Fatale and Some Kind of Empire emanate feminine sensory indulgence.

Kylie Banyard, preliminary photo montage for Phantom in the Corner, 2006

In my installation the false-wall doubles as a site for the display of objects. The placement and lighting of objects in recessed boxes, on gilt shelves and in timber draws, echoes the taxonomy of the Wunderkammer. Like the Getty Cabinet and Rohde’s Chateau Fatale my compillation has been assembled by or for woman; and is illustrative of the prevailing constructedness that exists in relation to the Wunderkammer as a spectacle. Like the spectator of a Wunderkammer, Rohde’s curious audience and that for The Phantom in The Corner are invited to visit and explore a fantastic collection of rare and wondrous objects.

Notes 53. Semin, D, “Christian Boltanski”, Phaidon Press, 1997, p 57. 54. Ibid, p 73. 55. Cannon, R, “Kate Rohde”, un Magazine, issue 7, Autumn 2006, p 15.

Kylie Banyard Phantom in the Corner: Staging a Gothic Spectacle 58 conclusion

roducing an installation like Phantom in the Corner, that positions Pelements referencing both the Phantasmagoria and Wunderkammer, as concurrent archaic display methodologies, has obliged me, through my research, to consider what it is that distinguishes the spectator’s experience of one from the other. Fundamentally, they were both popular forms of didactic amusements that channelled the attention of their respective audiences through variant atmospheric and display modalities.

My research has revealed that facets of multi-media installation echo the diverse formal elements of Phantasmagoria, together with aspects of cinema. Furthermore, central to the work of the six artists I researched is the ‘staging’ of ‘spectacle.’

The intention of my research has been to gather reference material, concerning both, Phantasmagoria and the Wunderkammer through historic and theoretical enquiry. Thusly, enabling me to engage with the semantics and archaic devices at work in these precursive methodologies

My attraction to the history of display methodologies is symptomatic of my desire to imbue my work with a nostalgic sense of old-world ambience and wonder as an exercise in historic contemplation – and as a point of difference in an ardently progress-driven, disposable, digital age.

The summation of my research is a multi-media installation that to strives present ‘spectacle’ by combing metaphoric, structural and thematic elements of both the Phantasmagoria and Wunderkammer.

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