Leonida Kovac
During the course of the 1990s Duba Sambolec has exhibited six installations under the common title of Interscapes. What is it that she does? Through positioning certain objects within a specific architecture she demands the reception of the position of both the objects and the observer, as well as the mutual relations of those positions. Interscape is neither an ambience nor a place; Interscape is not a void within which objects are arranged. Rather, it is a space of interaction in which the existence of a network of various relations becomes apparent. Where definitions of space and identity are concerned, Interscape is a slippery area.
According to Foucault, space in our epoch imposes itself in the form of relations between positions. Today, a position that is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements has been replaced by an extendability which itself superseeds placement. Despite all the techniques that exist for the appropriation of space, despite the whole structure of knowledge that allows us to enclose it or formalise it, it could be that contemporary space has not as yet been wholly secularised. Therefore, a certain number of still inviolable opposites, which our institutions and practices have not had the courage to destroy, could still be ruling our lives. Those opposites are the ones we regard as plain givenness: for example, the opposite between a private and a public space, a family and a social space, cultural and utilitarian space, the space for play and the space for work. They are all nurtured by the obscured presence of the sacrosanct.(1)
The emergence of Interscapes was preceded by an exhibition that the author staged in the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana in 1988 entitled Uneasiness in Space. I am inclined to recognise the field of reference of that title in Freud’s study Culture and its Discontents in which, among other things, he talks about the process of establishment of internal-external relations and about the pleasure principle which, from the very beginning, ruled the functioning of the psychic apparatus but which is impossible to implement because its programme is in conflict with the entire world – in both macro and microcosm.(2). To paraphrase Freud, the cultural element appears at the moment of the first attempt to bring order to social relations. Communal life for people becomes possible only when a majority gathers that is stronger than any individual and which is united against every individual. The essence lies in limiting possibilities for pleasure to the members of the community. Personal freedom is not a product of culture.(3)
I am interested in the cross-section where the concepts of space and culture interfere with each other. Space appears as a effect of culture, and culture – being the totality of social practices – structures that space, manifesting itself in laying down limitations in territorialisation procedures: in measuring, separation, counter-positioning, exclusion, identification, classification and designation.
Interscape I and Interscape II, in which Duba Sambolec concentrates on light and its reflections as her subject of interest, were set up as a solid structure. Their appearance explicitly signifies a territory defined by light sources and reflective surfaces, thereby demonstrating the possibilities of positioning a subject either within it or towards it. Neon tubes and rectangular plates of brass structure the space of the room in which they are placed, and the emerging structure excludes the possibility of unhindered movement on the part of the observer. The positioning of the lights defines those places that should not be stepped upon. Paradoxically, the very places that are the sources of the process of lighting are those which represent the obstacle to one’s walking, one’s freedom to select one’s own position. It is within such a relationship, between light and a living body in which movement is immanent, that the space of exclusion appears. A living body can move only outside the structure, because its lines of force reject it, thus making its position ex-territorial.
The culture in which we live is based on the traditions of European Enlightenment whose discursive space is defined by a system of binary oppositions. One of these is internal-external. According to the logic of enlightenment, nothing must remain outside, since the mere concept of externality is itself a genuine source of fear. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, enlightenment is but mythical fear merely radicalised, while its final product – sheer immanence of positivism – is nothing less than a universal taboo.(4) In other words, the external position is the tabooed position, the position of absence from language. The non-existent.
Instead of structure, Interscape III offers topography. In the exhibition hall four places are marked by different objects, the only common denominator between them being the vertical direction in which they extend. It is this identical direction in which the different extends that disrupts the binary opposition within the system of Cartesian spatial co-ordinates. Links between those different positions are not indicated. On the contrary, the set-up insists upon mutual distance. Here, however, we are not dealing with the distance that is a precondition for the establishment of a perspective. Cognition of space is not based upon ocularcentric perception, since the positioning of the observer within the process of perception of objects deprives one of the possibility of constructing an image on the basis of having observed the space in its entirety. It is not possible to identify the properties of an object from a distance – from a point that enables us to capture the entirety with our gaze, those properties are manifested in counter-positioning. In Interscape III we find a torsioned corner constructed from neon tubes, a ladder (on which rise three heavy rectangular reflective brass plates), a tall post of white paraffin wax, profiled stepwise, and a post-cum glass showcase. Exhibited on the latter’s shelves are red pigment, a pair of gloves, the book Intimate Drawings of D.S., open at a page entitled “Absence-Presence”, showing the soles of the author’s feet imprinted into the golden colour of the page, and hair. Fetishes?
In deconstructing the rhetoric of Modernism, Rosalind Krauss arrives at the conclusion that Modernism imagines two orders of the figure. The first is that of empirical vision, the object as it is “seen”, the object bounded by its contours, the object modernism spurns. The second is that of the formal conditions of possibility for vision itself, the level at which “pure” form operates as a principle of co-ordination, unity, structure: visible but unseen. That is the level that modernism wants to chart, to capture, to master. But there is a third order of the figure, one that Jean François Lyotard has decided to call matrix. Psychoanalysis’s space, the space of the unconscious, he comes to realise, disdains this fundamental notion of the co-ordinates of the real. In defiance of all probability it allows two, or three, or five things to be in the same place in the same time. And these things are themselves utterly heteroclite, not variations on one another but things in total opposition.
This “space” is therefore quite literally unimaginable: a congealed block of contradictions. Not a function of the visible, it can only be intuited through the projection of various “figures” that surface from the depths of this “space”: the slip of the tongue, the daydream, the fantasy. To this medium, lying below the level of the visible, he gives the name matrix, and he begins to follow its activity, which he recognises as the production not of the gestalt but of bad form, the activity through which form is in fact transgressed.(5)
Interscape is a space that appears as a result of actions aimed at obstructing the formal conditions of vision, in the course of a process of constant transgression of form where the effectiveness of matrix becomes evident. For the matrix is in radical rupture with the rules of opposition. It is its characteristic to have many places in one place, and they block together what is logically incompatible. This is the secret of the figural: the transgression of the constitutive intervals of discourse, and the transgression of the constitutive distance of representation.(6)
What happens with “constitutive distance of representation” in the works of Duba Sambolec? Interscape IV is space established through relations between objects that singly represent perspective, or rather, the vanishing point inherent in the perspectival way of observing things. Thus, the structure of perspective viewing itself becomes that which has been given to the gaze. Three times over. However, the transgression of form, the ineffectualness of the principles of co-ordination, i.e., the by-passing of structure, deny one’s eye a position from which perspective would construct spatial integrity by making the appropriation of space possible. Each of the perspectives, represented and materialised by the sheer weight of the objects in question, becomes recognisable from different positions. The vanishing point, cultural-logically regarded as a goal of vision, is represented three times. Once, through a light corner constructed from neon tubes, a second time by steel netting formed into a horn attached to which are horses’ tails – a simulacrum of hair, and the third time by a row of lead tables positioned along the same longitudinal axis and which become proportionately smaller. Movement, aimed at identifying the goal of vision, reveals three different positions of the vanishing point. In which direction?
Perspectiva is a Latin word that means “seeing through”. In early use, perspective was a term applied to various optical devices, but it also came to mean the art of delineating solid objects upon a plain surface so that a drawing produces the same impression of apparent relative positions, magnitudes, and distance as do the “actual” objects when viewed from a particular point. Perspective, then, is reproduction of the “actual”, but it is also construction of the real – a delineation, through representation, of the defining characteristics of “actuality” as relative to and marked by distance – distance as marked from an unremarked, unseen viewer. The visual pyramid on which all classical perspective is built is a geometry, after all, by which the lines of sight and lines of light are absolutely co-ordinated, a co-ordination that produces the identity (in mirror) between the vanishing point within the picture and the viewing point within the eye. Where the receding parallel lines appear to meet is the vanishing point – and at that point, geometrically, is in exact proportion to the point of the viewing eye – an eye, importantly, outside the field of its own vision.
Interscape IV dislocates the viewing eye and positions it in the field of its own vision. Thus, the three times over materialised structure of perspective viewing eliminates the distance – which is the fundamental precondition for perspective viewing to be possible. The internal becomes the external, in the same place and at the same time.
It is necessary to stress the hidden assumptions of perspective: within the patriarchal economy of meaning, within, that is, the symbolic order of modernity, perspective, like the worldview to which it gives symbolic form, is deeply gendered. Within the terms of that order, the seeing eye is unseen. Its gaze penetrates a scopic field marked by distance. That gaze is rendered active, phallic, and it is a subject to and constituted by propriety of and anxiety about space. That which is seen is, simultaneously, that which can never fully be seen. The scopic field lays before the gaze but as secret(e)s within it, a point of vanishing, a mirror of the viewer’s own view by which access of the field meets the black hole of infinite inaccessibility. That which is given to be seen, is rendered passive, feminised, made into an object of phallic (gaze) penetration, yet it remains infinitely inaccessible.(7) These legacies of perspectival ways of seeing have erected the female body as Prime Signifier of the Vanishing Point.(8)
Duba Sambolec has named her Interscape V installation The Black Mirror. The black mirror is represented three times. A black rubber sheet is stretched across a tilted, oval-shaped construction, but not in a neat fashion. It falls over the edges that define the oval form; at the front it spills over like a stain, while at the back it functions as a curtain which hides and reveals horses’ tails – a simulacrum of hair beneath the mirror construction. Every mirror faces in a different direction, while the light – a sine qua non for the process of reflection – is located below the level of the smooth rubber surface. Directions of light are defined by neon tubes positioned on the floor. At the considerable mutual distance, removed from the mirrors and the sources of light, are three chairs so tall that they almost reach the ceiling, each facing in a different direction – but never in the direction of the incline of the mirrors. Their unreal height, combined with their relation towards the black mirrors and the direction of the sources of light, denote an impossible position. A mirror whose surface does not reflect, a light whose position cannot bring about a reflection, a viewing position that is unattainable. And a fetish on the other side of the mirror.
What is it, and where is that which is “given to be seen” in Interscape? The black mirror is offered to be touched. Mimicry of the body? Daring one to touch the surface and to realise that there is something other beneath the surface, something intimidating in its palpability. Internal or external? For the mirror is that which, according to psychoanalytical theory, establishes the internal-external relation, the presence-absence relation, which, by imposing a social identity of the subject, defines the positions of existence or non-existence in the language. The position of activity is counter-positioned by the position of passivity, the gaze is counter-positioned by what has been “given to be seen”, thus defining the extension of the concept of primary loss whose signifier becomes the vanishing point inherent to the perspective. The mirror is a precondition for the establishment of a symbolic order that defines the divided zones and installs a hierarchy of their meaning.
The strategy of mimicry of the body – the position of which, in the tradition of Modernism, has been signified by the syntagm “given to be seen”, or has, if you will, been explicated by the cult around Etant donnés by Duchamp – is manifested by the syntax of the language of Modernism being focused, in the materialisation of structure of Modernistic representation. Through mimicry a body has been given to be seen and to be brought to a state of awareness.
With the manner of representation of the basic binary opposition of light-darkness, denoted by its title Day – Night, the double installation Interscape VI desacralises the category of space, ignoring the cultural order of sense and demanding a redefinition of the concept of reality. Interscape VI – Night is a hyper-bright installation. The places are marked by three tall, massive columns made from white paraffin wax, while a multitude of directions is indicated by the white horizontals of neon tubes which, being elevated from the floor, appear to be floating in the air, criss-crossing the view. Three brass ladders, located in different positions, do not point upwards, but are resting against the floor supported by props of uneven heights, thereby demonstrating their own dysfunctionality. Ascent is not possible. The columns – surrogates of a body, tall, heavy and soft – carry their own torsion. Repetition of objects plays with one’s visual perception – the near is once again distant.
I am inclined to regard Interscape VI – Day as the representation of the anatomy of reality, through the bypassing of the co-ordinates of the real by modelling “realistic figures”, in their positioning and an insistence on mutual (non)relations. At the end of the millennium, in a period where the concept of humanism has become transparent, this space - within which a body is represented concurrently in three different ranges – erases perspective so as to allow the activity of the surrogate iconography to become visible; beneath the ultra-violet light. Post festum. In order to allow the process of metamorphosis of specific bodies into a “human figure” to become evident. Within the field of art that is only one in the never-ending grid of social practices. A virus.
Between Interscape VI – Night and Interscape VI – Day there exists nothing. That’s right, it exists. A material, physical, corporeal nothing, that is not a synonym for nothingness. It is there in the narrow, white corridor separating the zone of night from the zone of day, between motion and immobility, between space and the area where there is no space, between being and non-being. Between volition and waiting.
Interscape VI – Day is a statement the meaning of which is not defined by form but by the time needed to comprehend that form, the time during the course of which the unease within the space becomes active. We are speaking about three chambers, where the objects existing within them are set in relations that carry the connotation of waiting. Who is waiting, and for what? The central chamber is dominated by a high and long empty table, its surface covered with white ceramic tiles and illuminated by ultra-violet light. A houseplant in one corner. The left chamber resembles a depressing waiting room, where each of five polyester sculptures represents a female or male body in a different position. Or is it condition? Or does position equal condition? Positioned high above, on the white wall of the right chamber, is a horizontal row of five black rubber figures, their gaze overlooking all that happens in the space called Interscape VI – Day. Their X-ray images, functioning as a display (or rather, as a light source) are leaning against the walls in all three chambers. Visible in each of those images is one of the letters making up the word VIRUS. The position of the rubber figures (body surrogates) functions concurrently as a border line in which there is a door leading to the narrow white corridor where a nothing exists. Nothing as a place.
At this point we encounter the concept of the unspeakable, which is immanent to Modernism. The aesthetics of Modernism being the aesthetics of the sublime – and as such it remains nostalgic. It is able to convey that which is not representable only as an absent substance, while the form – because of its perceivable consistency – offers comfort to the observer and is a cause for pleasure.9 The works that Duba Sambolec has entitled Interscapes having nothing in common with the aesthetics of the sublime and thus they have no need of a consistent form. That ‘which is not representable’ is neither an object nor an event. It is, in fact, a condition and, such as it is – unspeakable and unrepresentable - it becomes a substance present in the space of Interscape. It is not perceived through the activity of gaze, but rather it is manifested as uneasiness in space. One’s own, of course.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault About other Spaces Glasje No. 6 Zadar, 1996.
p.9
2. Sigmund Freud Culture and its Discontents Rad, Belgrade, 1988
p.16.
3. Ibid. p.33
4.M. Horkheimer, T.Adorno Dijalektika prosvjetiteljstva (Dialectics
of Enlightenment). Veselin Masleva, Sarajevo, 1974, pp.29-30.
5.Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious MIT press, 1994.
pp.217-218.
6.Jean Francois Lyotard Discurs,Figurs cited from Krauss, ibid,
p.221.
7. Rebecca Schneider The Explicit Body in Performance Routledge,
1997 pp.62-63
8. ibid p.5
9. Jean Francois Lyotard, Response to the question 'What is post-modern?'
in Postmodern: A New Epoch or a Misconception Zagreb: Naprijed,
1988 p.242.
Copyright © : Leonida Kovac, June, 1999
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 10, 1999