New Feminine Spaces of Representational Inquiry: the Works of Nina Levitt and Angela Grauerholz
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NEW FEMININE SPACES OF REPRESENTATIONAL INQUIRY: THE WORKS OF NINA LEVITT AND ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ Andromachi Gagas How do we translate conceptual-language-based art digitally while retaining its original relational function, or how do we situate a public intervention and social redress in virtual space dynamically rather than as inert photographic documentation, are issues we are trying to envision in these digital and virtual forms of exhibitions. I believe that this ambivalence of space is a notion that is a reflection of the postmodernist period in which the artists of the CCCA were producing the artworks displayed on their respective pages. Postmodernism was a questioning of our knowledge system and the “incredulity towards meta-narrative” such as was stated by Jean- Francois Lyotard in the 1979 publication of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.1 The striking down of the master narrative allowed for the petits recits of individual singular experience. And this expansion in the space of experience produced artworks that dwelt in a multi-dimensional space that re-enacted an idea or a memory, or produced artworks that directly disrupted the structures of authority of the totalizing narrative of the order of knowledge. Artists Nina Levitt (b. 1955) and Angela Grauerholz (b. 1952) address these spatial issues of experience and their works intervene and come to create new spaces where the rift in the master narrative can be widened even further. These artists, through their works, create new feminine spaces of representational inquiry. Levitt has created a new feminine space by abducting the white walls of a gallery and rendering them alive and actively engaged in the discourse of female representation. Grauerholz has also intervened in a space, that of the archive. An often exclusionary and immovable space has been trespassed by a fictional nineteenth-century female ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 photographer who has inserted her own photographic impressions of time within the reality of its folders and cases, and in turn has expanded the notion of the archive to include a moment and to inscribe an experience. Nina Levitt is a Canadian born artist with a MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently an associate professor of photography at York University. Her practice examines the representation of women in popular culture and often involves the recovery and manipulation of existing images. Levitt’s 1997-1999 video installations Gravity and Duet, are two works that were exhibited together in 1999 at the TPW Gallery in Toronto. Gravity composed in three parts, Spin, Wave and Nostalgia, is a series of video projections that instead of being restricted stationary screens, take total possession of the space of the gallery through Levitt’s integration of the gallery’s floors, walls and ceiling as sites of projection. Entering the dark room of the exhibition space, the voice of an aria fills the room, punctuated by the sound of a sonar echo. ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Nina Levitt Spin 1997-1998 22 x 26” Video Installation Mini video projector, tripod, VCR, floor covering http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=15871&title=Gravity%2 C+%3Ci%3Einstalla>tion+view+of+%22Spin%22&artist=Nina+Levitt&link_id=1836 ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 The first part, Spin (1997-1998), is projected onto the floor. This video installation is a sequence of images from the Women’s Diving Competition of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, with the divers spinning in slow motion into a blue pool. But in this video the divers never make contact with the water. The viewer is trapped in this anticipatory state of anxiety where there is never any point of arrival. ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Nina Levitt Wave 1997-1998 19 x 9” Video Installation Mini video projector, tripod, VCR, Plexiglass suspended from ceiling http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=15873&title=Gravity %2C+%3Ci%3Einstallation+view+of+%22Wave%22+%3C%2Fi%3E&artist=Nina+Levitt&lin k_id=1836 ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Wave (1997-1998) is projected onto an opaque Plexiglass screen which hangs from the ceiling allowing the video loop to be watched from both sides. In this piece, the projection consists of the flickering black and white image of the slow motion smiling and waving of a female figure, that of the Russian Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Seemingly trapped in her space suit and helmet, the wave of her naked and unencumbered hand, a usually banal gesture of greeting, is now made the focus through its repetition in the video loop. ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Nina Levitt Nostalgia 1997-1998 8 x 10' Video Installation Video wall projection, LCD video projector, VCR http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=15870&title=Gravity%2C+ %3Ci%3Edetail%3C%2Fi%3E+&artist=Nina+Levitt&link_id=1836 ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Nostalgia (1997-1998) is the largest of the works, an eight-by-ten-foot wall projection of lesbian couples intimately dancing on a crowded dance floor. These images are from The Gateways, a lesbian bar in London England, one of the only safe spaces for lesbians at the time, as it appeared in Robert Aldrich’s 1968 film The Killing of Sister George. Once again the video is slowed in motion and we are made to witness a private dreamlike intimacy between women. ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Nina Levitt Duet 1997-1999 6 x 8’ Video Installation LCD video projector, VHS deck, 6 unhoused full-range speakers, CD playback deck http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=15870&title=Gravity %2C+%3Ci%3Edetail%3C%2Fi%3E+&artist=Nina+Levitt&link_id=1836 ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Levitt’s Duet (1997-1999) is often defined as a memorial piece for women who for various reasons lived their lives disguised as men. The artist calls this a memorial piece about the death of women. Projected onto the corner of the wall, the image of a large torso in a white shirt breathing hard and deeply is shown unbuttoning and buttoning the shirt. The audio accompanying this work is two overlapping female voices recounting the lives of women who passed as men. We glimpse the hint of a strapped down breast at the last shirt button, but then the video loops back to the hand buttoning the shirt back up again. This loop underscores a denial that reflects the denial of revelation inherent in a mutable and disguised gender. These video installations by Levitt are formally, temporally and spatially altered to illustrate historically repressed feminine spaces. The formal deconstruction of the medium of video through simple cinematic video-loops and other low-tech projections in the 1990s has been defined by Johanne Sloan as the idea that “the very structure of contemporary visuality could be dismantled, could be broken down to their component parts.”2 And Levitt’s temporal disruption of these appropriated cinematic sequences and news footages implies “that we might have missed some crucial bit of visual information that normally would have passed us by too quickly.”3 The repetition of the video loop also points to memory and trauma. In Lacanian theory, the post-structuralist belief which rejected that reality could be captured in language, the traumatic is defined as a missed encounter with the real. As it is missed it cannot be represented, it can only be repeated. Levitt’s repetition of a dive, of the gesture of a wave, of the dance between two women and of the unbuttoning and buttoning of a shirt questions the representation of the real and alludes to trauma which resides in the in-between spaces of female subjectivity, ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 where appearance and disappearance, absence and denial have the power to disrupt, as Levitt even further demonstrates by taking over the space of the exhibition in its entirety. Angela Grauerholz is a German born artist who lives in Montreal since 1976 and teaches at the École de design de l'UQAM since 1988 and is the co-founder of Artexte (founded in 1980), a documentation centre for contemporary art in Montreal. Her practice focuses on the conceptual and on the expansion of the medium of photography to allow for the consideration of time and memory and its relation to the archive as well as the notion of representation and the collective imagination. Secrets, A Gothic Tale (1994) and Sententia I-LXII (1998) are works that deal with the photographic archive and its logic. In both, Grauerholz reinterprets and reactivates the notion of the archive as a storehouse of knowledge and techniques. ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 Angela Grauerholz Éclogue or Filling the Landscape 1995 Plexiglass cabinet 152x152x91cm, 6 drawers, 27 portfolios, 216 black and white photographs Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art http://cielvariablearchives.org/en/component/content/article/423-between- heaven-and-earth-the-loci-and-the-cosmos-at-work-in-the-reading-room-for- the-working-artist.html In 1995, Grauerholz exhibited Éclogue or Filling the Landscape at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.