A project ‘depicting’ the psychological state of depression through a series of intimate portraits by Joanna Callaghan. Photographic installation with 35mm positive transparencies mounted in loupes on lightboxes.
Director: Joanna Callaghan
Performer: Frauke Requardt & Joanna Callaghan
Lighting: Joachim Bergamin
Exhibited (2005)
Museo Universitario Leopoldo Flores Mexico City
Gallery Barry Keldoulis Sydney
Elastic residence London
Exhibition essay by Maria Walsh ‘In an empty room a light’.
Publicity – Marc Lenot, Dépression, Le monde online, 22 June 2005
Artist statement
The research drew from a combination of sociological, psychological and philosophical perspectives. Texts such as Emile Durkheim’s seminal work Suicide, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Victor Burgin’s Thinking Photography. This research was applied directly and literally to the personal, physical context of the author and maker. The photographic series is set within a domestic space and uses a female model in a series of repeating gestures and positions. The exhibition explored the relation between narrative construction and meaning. Previous moving image work had employed conventional filmic narrative devices such as editing, sound and visual cues to build narrative. In this work, narrative was built through the ordering and presentation of the slide work on mounted light boxes. The viewer created their own narrative through their movement around the installation, specifically designed to create a number of parallel narratives.
Exhibition Essay
In an Empty Room, a Light…
by Maria Walsh
Maria Walsh lectures in art history & theory at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London. She has published essays on film in Screen, Angelaki, Sensesof Cinema, COIL and filmwaves. She is currently working on a book on spectatorship and duration in film installation.
In an empty domestic interior, a young woman stands in her underwear facing a billowing curtain with yellowish outside light seeping through. This is the first image in the series of viewfinders that are inserted at intervals in the two elongated light-box panels of Joanna Callaghan’s photographic work, Empty, 2005. (There is also a third squarer panel consisting of 48 slides – shots of empty rooms and exterior views.) The scenario is suggestive of voyeurism, a suggestion not contradicted by the image in the second viewfinder of the same woman lying languidly on a bed in another room of what seems like the same flat. She gazes blankly in the direction of the space outside the frame. Moving on to the next image, which is actually one of a sequence of two juxtaposed viewfinders, something else begins to suggest itself.
The first image here is of the woman staring out disinterestedly over the city from the flat’s balcony, the second, an aerial shot of her body splayed out on the grass storeys below. Registering the shock of this unexpected juxtaposition breaks the stillness that the scene of voyeurism depends on. Looking at this woman is no longer innocent. A narrative is being set up that destroys the anonymity of the protagonist, allowing us to attribute probable cause to her languorous poses. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two viewfinders to mirror the eyes of the viewer creates a somewhat stereoscopic effect. As one moves between the two views, the illusion of the second image appears in the first one, interrupting the scene with its obviously performed and fantasized conclusion. An interruption of another kind occurs in the next single image in the series which is of a different woman, this time naked and lying flat on the floor, a view which repeats the framing of the very first image of the room. The insertion of this other body into what seemed like the beginning and possible end of a narrative action acts like a punctuation mark, but whether a comma or a full stop is not yet clear. The substitution of one woman for the other in the same space suggests a relation between them, at least on a formal level.
In fact, the naked other body is that of the artist herself, literally inserting her presence into the series of photographs of her model, Frauke, a dancer. Rather than using her model simply as an alter ego chosen to portray and externalise states of depressive interiority, Callaghan places her own body in the gaps between feeling and communication, highlighting their incommensurability in the process. Callaghan conceived Empty at a critical point in her therapy and, although the question of authorship remains more firmly in place in Callaghan’s meditation on depression, one might think of artist Jo Spence’s notion of ‘photo-therapy’ here.
‘To be depressed is to be trapped in a system of acts, to act, think, and speak according to modes of which retardation is a feature’ (Daniel Widlocher cited by Julia Kristeva, 1989: 265 – my emphasis). The sequential, yet singularly static, nature of the photographic series is an eloquent medium for conveying the sense of retardation characteristic of depressive states of being. This is made particularly apparent in the final sequence of six juxtaposed viewfinders, which depict isolated instants of an action that begins with Frauke’s throwing her arms outwards and ends with her turning to scratch one arm. This series of poses, struck and caught in a moment of expressivity, poised but unable to flow, exemplify the delayed response and inhibitive movement characteristic of the depressive affect as well as commenting on photography’s registration of the privileged instant at the expense of the transitional, fleeting, moment. However, Callaghan’s reflection on the nature of the photographic medium does not rest there. Due to the stereoscopic effect of the juxtaposed viewfinders, a peculiar sense of continuity is imparted to the still images – in conjunction with the viewer’s movements between the images, each consequential action is reflected back on the previous one in the sequence. While this illusion of movement is predominantly automaton like in that a continuous action is broken down into a series of numerical shots, destroying or retarding the flow of action, these images acquire something approximating (but not the same as) film’s mobile point-of-view by means of the viewer’s movements between them. The continuity of cinematic movement lies dormant within this series of still shots in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Edward Muybridge’s photographs.
In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze discusses how Muybridge’s photographs differed from earlier photography where the emphasis was on the pose, i.e. a figure described in a unique moment. By contrast Deleuze sees Muybridge’s studies in terms of the snapshot which implies the continuity of the movement that describes the figure ‘in the process of being formed’ (Deleuze, 1992: 5). In Muybridge’s snapshot aesthetic, the ‘mechanical succession of instants replaced the dialectical order of poses’ (Deleuze, 1992: 4). Interestingly, considering Frauke’s poses in Empty, Deleuze conceives of the latter form of movement in relation to traditional dance. ‘Movement, conceived in this way, will thus be the regulated transition from one form to another, that is, an order of poses or privileged instants, as in a dance (Deleuze, 1992: 4). As opposed to ‘traditional dance phrasing’ which ‘creates units of movement that mimic the larger theatrical structure’ and where ‘moments of registration take precedence over the transitional moment’, contemporary dance attempts to articulate the flow of the latter (Yvonne Rainer in Brannigan, 2003).
Callaghan’s posing of her dancer model and display of the resulting instants in a series of juxtaposed viewfinders occupies a terrain between the pose and the flow of movement implied by the snapshot. In Empty, the flow of movement happens in the unseen intervals between the images, while the artificial arrest of action in the photographic series of shots displays ‘states as separate entities linked by succession’, which entails the loss of the continuity of duration (Grosz, 2004: 195). One might interpret depressive states as suffering from the lack of the continuity of duration, its temporal habitation and flow. As Grosz states: ‘Duration is the survival of a previous state in a successive one’ (195), and while the illusion of continuity appears in Empty due to the somewhat stereoscopic effect of the juxtaposed viewfinders, it is ultimately inhibited. The retardation of flow in depressive states derives from an overwhelming psychic sadness that prevents extension into the external world of complex objects. Rather than the scene of voyeurism then, Empty stages affects disconnected from objects using bodily contortions to translate or register their intensity in a manner akin to hysteria.
In the second light-box panel, as well as variations on the scenes and framings of the first panel, there are also two sequences of juxtaposed viewfinders, which contribute to the narrative of depression being staged here. The first sequence consists of two images; one showing Frauke poised in a moment of anger, the other with her hands covering her face. Typical of the rage sometimes felt in depressive states, this poised action is not directed at an object but reverts back onto the person. In effect, the depressed person does not suffer from the loss of an object per se, which would be more in line with mourning and grief, but from the loss of the loss of an object. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva states that, beyond the particular attachment to suffering that this lack of a connection
2
to external objects results in, ‘there would only be the loss of self within the darkness of the body’ (Kristeva, 1989: 179).
Another aspect of the depressive psyche is the desire to obliterate the separation between inside and outside as it is too painful to bear. One of the single images in Empty‘s second panel shows the body of the artist wrapped in the yellow tinged curtain as if disappearing into the room’s surroundings. I am reminded of Francesca Woodman’s wonderful series of photographs made in 1975-76 at Providence, Rhode Island, in which her body seems to disappear in the fabric of a house, being obliterated by wallpaper and stone. This loss of distinction between the self and the environment seems almost analogous to Roger Caillois’ reference to insects that camouflage themselves to merge with their environment even though this results in their being eaten up (Caillois, 1984). Caillois compared these insects absorption into their environment to certain psychotic states where a patient has lost the ability to determine its position in space and thereby feels him or herself becoming swallowed up by ‘dark space where things cannot be put’ (30). This analogy to insects has been taken up in psychoanalytic literature to illustrate the workings of the death drive, which seeks to collapse the separation between inside and outside, a border that the depressive affect dangerously skirts. However, Callaghan’s working through and acting out of states of depression and its attachment to inactivity, retardation, nothingness, isolation, etc. has a therapeutic quality not found in academic psychoanalytic accounts of the work of art.
The other sequence of juxtaposed viewfinders on the second panel begins with a shot of the naked woman (the artist) lying flat on floor but is followed by a shot of her in the act of unfolding from this incapacitated state like a chrysalis emerging from its cocoon. The woman is finally triumphant, standing in the final image pointing the camera at the viewer, in some ways an unnecessary signal of self-reflexivity which somewhat detracts from the more subtle interruptions and continuities at work across the series as a whole. Perhaps the shadow of the object that fell upon the ego, as Freud so movingly describes melancholia, has come to see the light of day.
c. Maria Walsh
Maria Walsh lectures in art history & theory at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London. She has published essays on film in Screen, Angelaki, Senses of Cinema, COIL and filmwaves. She is currently working on a book on spectatorship and duration in film installation.
References
Erin Brannigan, ‘”La Loie” as Pre-Cinematic Performance – Descriptive Continuity of Movement’, www.sensesofcinema/contents/03/28/la_loie.html, accessed 27 Jun 2005.
Roger Caillois, ‘ Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, trans. John Sheply, October 31: 12-32, 1984.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: The Athlone Press, 1992.
Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
3