Phantasmagoric

phan-tas-ma-or-ria\n [fr. phantasme phantasm (fr. OF fantasme) + -agorie [perh. Fr. Gk agora assembly] (ca. 1802) 1: an exhibition or display of optical effects and illusions 2a: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined b: a scene that constantly changes 3: a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage (Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, Tenth Edition)

The word “phantasmagoria” refers to a type of entertainment popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in which slides were projected onto an opaque screen with the aid of a magic lantern, a precursor to the modern slide and film projector. The projectionist, usually an itinerant salesman, “animated” the projection by rolling the magic lantern either away from or closer to the screen. In so doing, he manipulated the size and location of the images, thereby creating the impression of movement. The magic lantern itself was positioned behind the screen or, alternately, the audience. Concealing the device in this manner served to secure the illusion: with the virtual safely insulated from the real, viewers were better able to suspend their disbelief. While most phantasmagorias took place in conventional theatres, with spectators arrayed in front of a shallow stage, others occurred in elaborate environments, as in the phantasmagoria realized by Etienne Gaspard Robertson in 1799. Robertson’s phantasmagoria, held in an abandoned convent in Paris, consisted not only of a magic lantern show, but props, painted backdrops, and sound effects. Before taking their seats in front of the screen, the audience was first led through a series of dark passageways ringed with human bones. Phantasmagorias, as the etymology of the word implies, involved a very specific iconography, but only at first. The slides generally depicted subjects ofa macabre nature, such as skeletons, ghosts, witches, and demons. Most early phantasmagorias, as a result, resembled what we think of today as haunted houses, their intent being to simultaneously delight and terrify. Luke Savisky’s installation at testsite belongs, at least in part, to the history of the phantasmagoria. Indeed, it conforms in almost every way to the definition of the phantasmagoria provided at the beginning of the essay. The viewer notices a soft glow emanating from the front yard before she even opens the gate. Upon doing so, she is greeted by two 16mm projectors resting on tables in the grass. The projectors project two different films onto to the outside of the living room windows. In the film on the left, a man pulls himself along an underwater rope, while in the film on the right, a woman clings to an orange life preserver. The man appears to move towards the woman, who occasionally glances back in his direction. In addition to anthropomorphizing the house (the windows resemble big blue eyes), the films produce the

1 illusion of a physical and, by extension, psychological connection between the man and the woman, but the precise nature of this connection is never resolved. The projection in the front yard, however, constitutes only the beginning of an elaborate spectacle that engages almost every sense: sight, hearing, and, paradoxically, touch. (I will return to the tactile dimension of Luke’s installation later in the essay.) Scattered throughout testsite are eighteen additional projectors: ten in the living room, six in the dining room, one in the kitchen, and one in the bath-house in the backyard. Single loops of film run through some, double through others (a technique called “bipacking”). Luke purchased or rescued a little over half of the film, shooting the rest himself. Not a single screen is to be found in the installation. Luke projects the majority of the films onto walls, niches, windows, and corners; he projects the remaining films, five total, onto images and objects that, in keeping with his penchant for the readymade, were scavenged from flea markets and appended to the original environment. The projectors, films, paintings, and objects work together to create what amounts to nothing short of a phantasmagoria. Yet there are important ways in which Luke’s installation departs from the phantasmagoria of the 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed, the installation is best described as a thoroughly modern reiteration of the phantasmagoria, for it is informed equally by developments in sculpture, experimental film, and site-specific art of the last thirty years. For instance, as much as the installation creates a compelling mirage of “things seen and imagined,” so too does it call attention to the manner in which this mirage is produced. Luke makes no effort to hide or disguise the projectors. As a result, the viewer is, at the exact moment she is seduced by the illusion created on the surface opposite the projector, made aware that what she is seeing is just that: an illusion. Luke’s installation obliges the viewer, in other words, to simultaneously suspend and activate her disbelief. Luke’s installation also emphasizes the materiality – the very stuff – of the cinematic apparatus. This has everything to do with the way he treats the projectors and the film. While some of the projectors rest on pedestals, others lie on the floor. The viewer approaches the projectors, therefore, as she would a human body or, alternately, a sculpture. And beautiful sculptures they are. Despite their bulk, there is an elegance to their shape and a delicacy to their moving parts. (If you look closely enough, you will notice miniature projections of color and light that almost every projector creates in the space around it.) Instead of looping the film around spools, moreover, Luke feeds it into the projectors by hand and then hangs it on stiff electrical wire that he attaches to the front of the projectors. The film, as if alive, moves, twists, and spirals before our very eyes. Yet it is not only the materiality of the projectors and film that Luke exaggerates. The two dimensional projections are themselves endowed, as if by magic, with the illusion of three dimensionality. Take the projection just across from the living room windows. A film (shot by Luke himself) of a young girl floating in water is projected into a niche. Inside the niche Luke placed a relief sculpture, like the kind used in

2 biology classes and medical schools, representing the birth of a child. The projection lands simultaneously on the outer edge of the niche, inside the niche, and on the relief. If you watch closely enough, you will eventually see a pair of tiny hands appear to reach out from the water and grasp the lip of the niche. The main reward, however, comes at the end of the film, when the projection registers exactly with the relief. Just as the girl breaks the surface of the water, her head superimposes itself over that of the baby, whose own head is in the process of leaving the birth canal. The effect, not unlike that of a balloon being filled with air, is uncanny, even spooky Although it is possible to observe several individual projections at the same time, the entire installation is visible from no single point of view. The spectator, lacking an ideal place to rest or gaze, is encouraged to traverse the space with her body. In this way, Luke creates an environment that departs dramatically from the “black box” of cinema, insofar as it is participatory rather than immersive, phenomenological rather than absorptive. While the viewer is certainly able to abandon herself to a single projection, in other words, her relationship to the installation as a whole is decidedly theatrical. My use of the term theatrical is indebted to that of Michael Fried, who, in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” speaks of it as a quality specific to Minimalist sculpture. According to Fried, the experience of Minimalist sculpture “is of an object in a situation – one which, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”1 The theatrical mode might thus be said not only to acknowledge the spectator, but to enlist her cooperation, both visual and physical. This holds even truer for Luke’s installation, which is designed so as to force the viewer to wander through the space. Because the act of looking is here linked to the viewer’s experience of her own body and, even more importantly, to the experience of her body in relationship to the projections, the installation relies on embodied, as opposed to disembodied, perception. For all these reasons and more, Luke produces, with film no less, an environment completely antithetical to cinema, challenging Fried’s claim that only “one art… escapes theatre entirely – the movies.”2 Like the best site-specific artists, Lukeconverses with the space at testsite rather than simply occupying it. He does so, on the one hand, by making use of architectural elements that existed prior to his intervention. These function as surrogates for the rectangular screen, which is completely missing from the installation. Luke also made several important alterations to the original space. In the living room he added the sculptural relief discussed above along with two paintings and a chart representing the anatomy of the human neck and skull, while in the dining room he added two paintings. These supplemental elements, all of them found rather than made, work in concert with the projections to transform our perception of the space. More specifically, they produce the illusion of having contracted or,

1 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967), p. 15. 2 Ibid., p. 21. 3 alternately, expanded its physical parameters. What was once transparent is made opaque, as with the two films projected onto the outside of the living room windows, and what was closed is made open, as with the six overlapping films projected directly onto the living room wall. The latter is a particularly successful projection, because of the way it “pierces” the solidity of the wall. Thanks to the point of view of the camera, the cars appear to speed towards the viewer, as if she were standing in the middle of a highway instead of a living room.

Luke repeats this effect elsewhere in the installation. In between the two living room windows hangs a small painting of a cityscape rendered in silhouette. The area above, below, and around the cityscape has been divided into elongated triangles (arrowheads, almost) whose tips all converge on a single vanishing point: the center of the painting. Superimposed over the painting is a film that depicts an acrobat – the camera positioned just above his head – diving off a tower. To the viewer, however, it looks like the acrobat is flying horizontally through the wall, a function of the exaggerated perspective of the painting.

A projection in the dining room also serves to “perforate” a heretofore enclosed space. Three films representing the same pair of feet, all of them seen from below, are projected into a corner, creating the impression that the feet extend through the wall to the garden outside. In this way, Luke’s installation strives to exceed – to escape, even – its immediate context. There is something palpably melancholic about Luke’s project. Death and longing, desire and loss, pervade the installation. On the one hand, this results from the content of the individual films and paintings. It is difficult not to think of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine Ophelia, who committed suicide by drowning, when watching the film of the young girl floating just beneath the water’s surface. We realize with one glance at the film superimposed over the painting of the young solider that suffering and misfortune await him. The films depicting a perilous car chase on a steep mountain road will inevitably end, as we know from so many other films of the same genre, in the demise of at least one of the protagonists. While the projection that couples the double portrait with a scratched film of a sunset powerfully

4 evokes the fractious relationship between mothers and daughters (depending as it does on both identification and rejection), the film of the two wrestlers portends the end of the prelapsarian moment allegorized in the adjacent painting. The melancholy of Luke’s project arises equally from the materials he chooses to employ. In large part, his is an effort that revolves around retrieval, reclamation, and recovery. The projectors and film in Luke’s installation, once considered at the forefront of technological innovation, are, with the proliferation of digital media, fast approaching obsolescence. In the face of such obsolescence, Luke has taken it upon himself to assemble an archive of 16mm projectors and film, which he alternately purchases at auction, scavenges from surplus, or rescues from trashcans. If the technology Luke utilizes in the installation is “outmoded,” so too are the paintings he hangs on the walls. Variously categorized as “folk,” “naïve,” “amateur,” or even “kitsch,” these paintings – which at one time Luke collected with almost as much ardor as he does 16mm projectors and film – flaunt their disregard for recent developments in cultural and artistic production. They too are verging upon extinction. If we were to identify a politics in Luke’s project, it would be here, in his stubborn attraction to outmoded forms of art and technology. To embrace the obsolete is simultaneously to draw attention to the manner in which capitalism, as a mode of production, incorporates obsolescence into the goods it manufactures and, even more importantly, how it depends on obsolescence for its very survival. Capitalism is able to perpetuate itself only insofar as it perpetuates consumption. Obsolescence functions to do just that – by phasing out the old and replacing it as quickly as possible with the new, capitalism constantly replenishes its supply of consumers, who will forever lag just behind the market. Yet Luke does more than simply illuminate this process. Insofar as he reanimates the outmoded, Luke actively counteracts the effects of obsolescence – at a moment, no less, when artistic and technological innovation, much to the delight of capitalism, is proceeding at an ever more accelerated pace.

The development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled…. From this epoch stem the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and the panoramas. They are residues of a dream world. The realization of dream elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking. For this reason dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. (Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”)

Kelly Baum | October 2003

All images are details from an installation by Luke Savisky at testsite, October 2—November 20, 2003. Images by Steve Fitch. testsite is a project of Fluent~Collaborative. © 2003 – Kelly Baum & Fluent~Collaborative.

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