Cleaning up the Picture: Rose Frain's What I
brought with me (2003)
Amna Malik
ISSN 1462-0426
In
the waiting room of the Outpatients department at Eastbourne District
General Hospital (UK) visitors, patients and staff will find two
light-boxes that depart radically from the usual posters issuing health
warnings. The larger one reveals a white-coated figure in the sewing room
of the hospital laundry. She stands between a sewing machine and shelves
of hospital sheets, gowns and scrubs with her arms outstretched, a
stethoscope in one hand. On a more intimate scale, a seated figure in
nurse’s scrubs appears in the smaller image. She holds an airline
tray but her offering is far from the usual culinary fare: in its place,
are a blue liquid in an old-fashioned glass phial and a pink toy pram.
Travel a few kilometres west along the south coast to Conquest Hospital
in Hastings and strangely, in the main corridor by a gift shop and a
waiting room, an almost identical pair of images can be found. In this
second space there is an impression that time and space co-ordinates are
subtly altered but how? An attentive observer will note the change in
gesture of the white-coated figures. In the smaller photograph it is the
camera’s position that has moved slightly to the right. With this
shift in perspective there is a corresponding change of objects on offer:
lapis lazuli appears in place of the toy pram. An accompanying leaflet
featuring both sets of images and a brief text presents the opportunity to
consider these differences.
These two parts form the installation by Rose Frain entitled What I
brought with me. They were displayed as part of strangers to
ourselves, a series of exhibitions curated by Judith Stewart, Maud
Belléguic and Mario Rossi (10 October-19 December 2003) that
addressed the presence of migrants and asylum seekers in the UK. The
choice of location, at several venues on the south coast of England and in
Kent, reflects the particularly intense conflict of interests that the
migration of significant numbers of foriegners has provoked in that area.
The aim of these exhibitions was to confront these conflicts and the
debate within Britain about immigration but their title, referencing
Kristeva’s seminal text, signals a concern to move away from identity
politics and towards an interrogation of subjectivity.
Given this reference to a psychoanalytic model it is not surprising
that the register of these photographs is neither didactic nor advisory
but subtly surreal and visually seductive. These figures are not actual
staff in the hospital but models staged as if they were metaphors of
gift-giving, creating a strange suspension of time and space, parallel to
that which occurs when people and objects are displaced from habitual
settings and functions. Hands that might dispense medication or fill forms
are staged in gestures and poses alerting us to Frain’s metaphorical
approach in recognition of the contributions of migrant staff in the
United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS). The brief text in the
accompanying leaflet explains her intention to make visible the invisible
knowledge, skilled labour and, crucially, the transmission of care that
they bring with them. The leaflet includes reproductions of three
additional photographs and clips from a video-film that form part of this
project but were not on display in the temporary exhibition. The different
languages spoken by staff are registered in the title on the front cover
and available translations of the text in English, Portugese, Fillipino
and Arabic (Baghdad).
In this article, I would like to examine Frain’s approach to this
commission and particularly her concern with the visceral and corporeal
possibilities of visual practice. Central to this project and her practice
as a whole is an interest in materialising a feminine unconscious,
particularly its libidinal and ethical potential, famously explored by
Luce Irigaray whose radical linguistic and psychoanalytic theories counter
a social order in which women are symbolically castrated. Frain’s
intention is to alter perceptions and it is rooted in a belief in the
subversive and transformative potential of the feminine unconscious to
effect social change. One wonders how Frain might convey this subversion
of the symbolic order through jouissance, given that What I
brought with me was installed initially in a non-art location and
where it was viewed primarily by a non-art audience. This potential
problem is compounded by the diversity of her spectators including
migrants whose perspectives may not be determined by a Western cultural
tradition.
In Judith Stewart’s introduction to the catalogue of strangers
to ourselves, the fragility of this belief in the potential of
visual practice is explored at length. Explaining the origins of the
project in the communal sense of impotence and despair in the aftermath of
September 11th, she addresses the dilemma of how artists can respond in
any significant way to such crises through cultural forms. Citing Terry
Eagleton’s concern that the dominance of cultural politics now is the
consequence of a failure in the political culture of the 1960s, Stewart’s
sceptical note is salutary here. My concern is that the situation is
complicated by the fraught relationship that sometimes exists between
feminist and post-colonial notions of the speaking subject.(1) Luce
Irigaray’s emphasis on sexed difference through psychoanalysis and
her theoretical dependency on a specifically Western model of the subject
with its reliance on anatomical metaphors has been criticised for
essentialising female experience, removing it from social and collective
responsibility.(2) Yet, the reference to Kristeva’s seminal text in
the series of exhibitions suggests a need to think beyond narrow political
constructions of identity and to build ‘an awareness of the
limitations of our practice’ which Stewart argues ‘allows
us to move forward.’ (3) As for Frain she is aware of the dangers
of espousing universality with its connotations of a regressive and
masculine humanism. However, she is strongly committed to exploring the
spiritual, material and psychic aspects of the feminine unconscious in her
practice as a process of transubstantiation. This concept refers to the
Catholic ritual of communion: the swallowing of bread and wine as the body
and blood of Christ, based on the belief that this food will transfer
Christ’s physical presence to the worshipper. In Frain’s wider
practice this transference of the spiritual and psychic through the
material, emerges in the distillation of jouissance into visual
and visceral forms that parallels the writings of Irigaray, Kristeva and
others as a form of cultural and personal enquiry. Frain cites this
transubstantiation as a distillation of theory and practice, an act of ‘making
something where before there was nothing, straddling areas of difference,
of intellect and affect, forging new meanings which
communicate outwards changing the rules of the discourse.’(4) I
want to explore this process of transubstantiation further in relation to
What I brought with me and in the process evaluate Frain’s
attempt to transform perceptions of migration in the UK. However, I will
begin with a brief commentary on the significance of the NHS which is
relevant to this subject.
The National Health Service was established in the post-war era with the
founding of the welfare state and is one of the most cherished,
controversial and contested of public institutions in contemporary
Britain. Like many health institutions across the world it is
governmentally administered; made up of hospital boards directly
accountable to the Department of Health. Each board is regionally
organised in a vast network that runs throughout the country and manages
local general practitioners and dentists, family planning clinics and
hospitals. Like other public services in the UK, the NHS is currently
experiencing upheaval as the pressures of a global market-based economy
place its promise of free and high quality health care at the point of
delivery under question.(5) Meanwhile, these same economic factors have
produced a more educated workforce attracted by new, technologically
driven industries, encouraging skilled labour away from under-funded
public sectors into private corporations, who often offer their employees
private heath insurance schemes. The NHS which invited foriegn workers to
apply for work especially from former colonies which had become
independent post-1945, is currently again trying to recruit from abroad.
Under the current Labour government, the creator and traditional guardian
of the welfare state, the NHS is at the centre of public debates over its
future funding from taxation or private sponsorship.
One might argue that the condition of the NHS reflects that of Britain’s
‘imagined community’(6), forged in the post-war era on
the promise of inclusiveness that transcended otherwise entrenched class
divisions. Its fortunes, for some, are an index of the nation’s
conflicted sense of identity. In The State to Come Will Hutton
advocates a stakeholder society that does not relinquish economic growth
to social welfare but balances individual responsibility with the demands
of market forces (7). This benign vision of an inclusive society is
clearly the bedrock of our contemporary Labour government but overlooks
certain underlying tensions. As many writers have pointed out New Labour’s
promotion of “Cool Britannia” is an attempt to
mask the inevitable decline of England’s loss of global prestige that
reduces Englishness to an ethnicity like any other, and reveals its
neutrality as an attempt to absorb differences of race and gender that
marked its imperial past (8). Arguably that neutrality has taken other
forms, most notably in Labour's contradictory approach to the notion of
inclusiveness that Hutton promoted as the keystone to a stakeholder
society.
In his critique of diversity under New Labour Paul Gilroy points to the
wider contradictions within this notion of inclusiveness: ‘Our
rulers appear to be caught’ he writes, ‘between one
world where the idea that nurturing relatively peaceful encounters with
difference is a minor political asset, and another more important one
where being tough on immigrants of all types affords real political
advantages.’(9) Can it be a coincidence that conflicts over
immigration and asylum are fought out in places where the host community
itself has limited economic resources? Power relations between centre and
margin proliferate on many levels when the “host”
is impoverished and has nothing to give, reinforcing divisions that only
benefit a small ruling elite. Race, or foreign-ness becomes the signifier
of an unwelcome difference that allows the local host community to express
a wider social alienation within the geographical boundaries of an
imagined nationhood. Hence, the appropriateness of the NHS as the site of
Rose Frain's project, signifying the diminishing ideal of public service
and collective welfare and one of the key institutions that advocates of a
liberal democracy like Will Hutton regard as the site of a future
inclusiveness.
Eastbourne District General and Conquest Hospital in Hastings are
located on the south coast of England and therefore on the geographical
boundary that defines a certain form of “Englishness”.
Writing from the viewpoint of the migrant, Gabriel Gbadamosi suggests that
a fissure is created by the need for each stranger to identify their
origin, motives and presence prompted partly by the recognition that one
is seen as an alien and therefore a potential infiltrator.(10) Hence the
evocative space of the laundry department in What I brought with me
that assumes the interiority of an imagined nation occupied by the migrant
worker. In this space the white-coated figure allows us to see otherwise
invisible hands that wash, clean, repair and store laundry; metaphorically
disabling social hierarchies between people and transforming it into the
site of the “imaginary”.
Fundamental to this “imaginary” is the
visualisation of an unconscious through a semiotic register realised in
the medium of photography. In Freud’s analysis of the dream work he
identifies displacement and condensation as key mechanisms that have come
to assume semiotic value: the first acting as a substitution of one
element for another is metaphoric, the second referencing several elements
in the single object or person is metonymic. Both terms are significant to
the uncanny register of the photographs in this installation. Their
emphasis on doubling as a repetition of the same but different references
the time-space of the unconscious as always located in the present.
Historically, psychoanalytic theories of visual forms, particularly
photography and film, have been used to expose the seduction of the
spectator by the dominant capitalist order. Christian Metz’s
writings, particularly ‘Photography and Fetish’ (1984)(11) are
important here and of course Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’(1975) that identifies beauty as a
subcategory of visual pleasure and locates it in scopophilia.(12) Mulvey’s
and Metz’s Lacanian theorisations are dependent on “lack”,
the disavowal of the world cropped out of the frame that structures the
image as a semantic constituent in, and of, the symbolic order. In these
interpretations the spectator is placed in a position of voyeurism that
corresponds to psychic processes of fetishism in which the threat of
symbolic loss is allayed by displacement. In Frain's images, this occurs
through the sublimation and regulation of libidinal energy into aesthetic
pleasure.
Frain’s photographs are subtle attempts to wrest the visual realm
away from the phallocentric structuring of representation in the image, as
identified by Mulvey and Metz, through her use of saturated blues as
metonyms for medical staff, the hospital and NHS. Central to this feminine
semiotic is a subtle frisson, a tension created by the metonymic
signification of the photograph and the arguably more disruptive potential
of colour. The photograph as a framed re-presentation declares its status
as part of the quotidian but Frain’s creation of expansive surfaces
of pure colour shed the utilitarian function of these nurses' scrubs. They
become visual and visceral spaces that break apart its representational
associations. In contrast to the Lacanian model, one might argue that the
photographs in What I brought with me do not rely on disavowal.
The materiality of light, captured mechanically in a fraction of a second
in chemical processes on light sensitive paper, produce its spatial
realisation as a rupture in consciousness. A momentary but dramatic breach
in the flow of real time, caught in the flicker of an eyelid. Though their
staged appearance belies the speed and immediacy of their mechanical
source, their materiality is pronounced in its excessive colour and
enhanced luminosity which together render the passage of light through
space more material, coagulating to assume a thickness in the field of
vision. It is as though the mechanical eye is located in the materiality
of lapis lazuli.
Frain’s earlier work frequently employs the visceral qualities of
light and colour. These celestial blues, for example, can be found in a
temporary fresco in Rome, forming part of an installation entitled Radio
Vaticana (this time in history) (2000). Assisi, Suture (meanwhile)
also shown in Rome, is a cluster of small seemingly abstract canvases
and a metal text: RUPTURE/ SUTURE in which colour again, is used with both
social and ‘excessive’ references to the quotidian blue pigment
used on the exterior of dwellings in Assisi, and an artist's oil colour. ‘This
is an attempt’ writes Frain‘to “suture”
the time discrepancy, after the earthquakes of 1997, between the
restoration of the houses in Assisi and that of the frescos attributed to
Giotto in the Basilica of S Francis.’(13) Her exploration of
colour continued in an installation Brighter than the stars shown
at Swansea Museum in 2000 in which cabinets ranged around the
walls of a large gallery were illuminated with a deep pink glow. The voice
of Italian opera singer Adelina Patti filled the space, alternating with
that of a Male Voice Choir. A small photograph of an Italian family acted
as trigger for associations with the maternal and cultural differences or
similarities between Wales and Italy. In What I Brought with me
this evocation of the referent but refusal of the representational
counters the symbolic system of signification, dependent on the phallus as
the determinant of meaning, in which pleasure is regulated by the threat
of castration or the law of the father. The visceral appeal of these
saturated blues and warm flesh tones convey a flow of libidinal energy
that are placed in symbiosis with the metonymic meaning of the photograph
as part of a wider social realm.
This
tension between semiotics of a dominant order and a playful jouissance
is particularly productive in Frain’s use of airline trays as
metonyms of the migrant, of flight, of a physical movement in space, the
crossing of time zones, geographical areas and nationalities. In this
sense they hover in an impossible space. The saturated blues are
signifiers of sea and sky, those amorphous sites of passage, not
permanence and they conjure a pleasurable state of floating. In the
opening paragraphs of Salman Rushdie’s infamous Satanic Verses
his principle protagonists Ghabriel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are
introduced to the narrative as they fly through the air after their plane
explodes. This suspended state is the moment of death and rebirth in the
migrant’s identity and the occasion for a playful polyglot voice to
erupt. This is the first of Rushdie’s novels in which the literary
invention of a free floating word-play between his mother tongue of Hindi
and father tongue of English is fully indulged. They land eventually,
softly, mysteriously on the English shore, where their identities are
fixed into angelic and devilish personas representing the dualistic image
of the migrant and his double vision.(14) Frain’s figures do not
represent this type of incarnation, but they do evoke a state of being in
their temporal suspension. In the shift from institutional associations of
nurses scrubs to a celestial transcendence, there is an attempt to unravel
the fixity of identity by language and the law that designates “the
same” against “foreigner” or “other”.
It signals the excess of the body, the pleasure in corporeality in the
undifferentiated space of the imagination and the realm of possibilities.
In this respect they indirectly resist the fetishism of hybridity
celebrated by some post-colonial theorists for whom the migrant’s
schizophrenic condition, of existing “in-between”
cultures is a transgression of cultural purity. Arguably such an analysis
is in danger of overlooking the class privilege afforded an elite that
permits such mobility. (15)
The movement of goods and people is perhaps the most potent signifier of
our global economy where mobility is an index of social, economic and
political freedom. Yet, the fantasy of unfettered movement as the pleasure
and promise of globalisation is all too often painfully exposed by the
rootlessness and subsequent mental instability of the migrant worker; or
rudely shattered by the refugee whose displacement is the consequence of
brutal violence; or the sex worker who becomes a commodity, forced to
cross time zones illegally.
Frain’s commitment to countering the atomised relations that
constitute the social fabric is arguably necessary in these conditions. In
her work this is played out through the transformative potential of lapis
seen in its raw state and as a blue liquid in the glass phial used for
dyeing cloth. This is a reference to the alchemy of knowledge migrants
bring with them: identifying them as precious stones with the potential to
transform and be transformed by their environment like the valuable
mineral resources from their countries of origin. This is in keeping with
her earlier work in which precious materials are used in a manner which is
intrinsic to their cultural/social value. Frain requested the purchase of
the lapis from someone who was travelling to Pakistan who bought it for
her in a market from an Afghan refugee. The circulation of these minerals
as commodities of exchange are therefore fundamental to their presence in
these images of the migrant flying between time zones. The inscription of
the glass phial ‘GR/E11R’ also marks the historical
interface between two reigning monarchs,George V and Elizabeth II, in 1951
at a time when the first wave of immigration in the post-war era was
happening and when the issue of post-colonial hospitality emerges.(16) The
transubstantiation implied in the displacement of minerals for nourishment
becomes metaphysical and with the gesture of offering up Frain attempts to
reverse the symbolic order by emphasising migrant workers’
contribution to British society. In place of a negative image that
condemns them as scroungers or parasites abusing the limited resources of
the welfare state, they become the healers of these splits in the social
fabric, giving more than they receive, contributing more to that
Common-wealth than the monetary exchange of commodities acknowledges. The
toy pram, a found object made of a single piece of metal, referencing
again an earlier model of production, becomes a metonym of the depletion
of skilled labour from the poorest to the richest countries and
particularly their invaluable role in maternity care.
This association between migrant and healer is evident in the larger
light-boxes. Displacing the image of healer/surgeon from the operating
theatre or ward to the sewing room in the hospital laundry, Frain also
evokes the primary condition of the migrant as being metaphorically out of
place, either through accent, appearance or gesture. Subsequently her
experience of dislocation is seen as uncanny by the native citizen and
from this the stranger emerges as similar but different. Displacement also
occurs in her work through repetition: the location of these images in
different spaces if experienced by the same spectator in different time
zones suggests deja-vu, the already seen. The subtle changes
evident in the images’ content reference the implicit change in the
viewer's position separated by real time. Placed symmetrically these
life-size figures play on the ambiguity of doubling as reflected image.
They become mirrors that throw our sense of self back to us in a manner
that is estranged. They act as prompts for us to reflect upon the problem
of sameness and difference and the wider problem of self/other,
native/foreign which remain confused by the authority we automatically
confer on the white-coated figure. The healer’s gesture is
deliberately posed to imply an imminent transformation of the migrant’s
sense of being out of place and consequently make whole the dissonance
that results in the alienation of self as other that constitutes the
foreigner. Arms outstretched in invitation, supplication or perhaps a
state of grace with a divine light falling from above all suggest a moment
before a miraculous occurrence. The gesture evokes the priest’s
before the altar when conferring the divine properties of Christ’s
physical presence onto bread and wine for Holy Communion.
Transubstantiation is once again vital here, in the metaphysical
transformation of materials that signals a change in the spiritual and
psychic realms. It is referenced in the sewing machine as the means of
suturing, stitching together the schizophrenic condition that is not only
the fate of the migrant but, as Frederic Jameson argues, has become the
nature of modernity under late capitalism. In her text ‘Some thoughts
meanwhile’, Frain speculates on the possibility that the dissonance
made present by the uncanny can potentially be transcended ‘perhaps
a healer’s healing of splits (ruptures) between material and psychic
domains’(17). Visceral effects of light, gestures of invitation
and the dominant colours of blue and emerald create a soothing visual
whole. This is enhanced by the subtle glow of the light-box that
illuminates the exterior space around it whilst remaining somewhat
enigmatic. The act of making whole that the healer’s presence
suggests through straddling the material and the psychic, the spiritual
and the quotidian is central to transubstantiation and by implication to
art practice. It may not come as a surprise to know that for Frain the
healer is also the woman artist employing psychoanalysis as a powerful
instrument in the task of repairing splits in the psychic realm, the
separation between ‘who we are and what we know’.(18)
The need for migrant workers within the NHS and elsewhere marks a
fundamental shift from the earlier wave of immigration in the immediate
post-war period when scarcity of manual labour was created by increased
industrialisation. Changes in the market economy toward knowledge
production as the new source of labour power fuelling Internet and
communication technologies have prompted a revision of Marxist theory for
the global age. Hardt and Negri have coined the term ‘informatization’
to describe the production and exchange of data and knowledge as the
commodity that now drives the global economy. These new migrant workers
are not needed to fill our factories but our offices, school rooms and
hospital wards, as the move towards ‘informatization’
creates a scarcity of highly educated and skilled labour in the public
services sector. This shift allows subversion to occur. If knowledge
production drives this economy it can equally be challenged by the social
production of truth, the wider implications of their Marxist evaluation is
that the world of ideas and of cultural exchange can hold some power to
transform the economic realm and by extension the symbolic order.(19)
Turning to Frain’s installation at Conquest, we can see the
potential for this on a number of levels. These images are placed in a
corridor adjacent to a gift shop that sells tabloid newspapers. In his
seminal study Benedict Anderson points to the daily newspaper as one of
the key vehicles of nationalism created by print-capitalism that forged a
secular sense of an ‘imagined community’. Most British
citizens are familiar with the contemporary role of the tabloid press in
feeding nationalist anxieties over immigration and asylum with a daily
diet of sensationalist rhetoric. Frain’s images contest the
colonisation of knowledge in their close proximity to the commodities of
informatization that prey on the fragile corpse of nationhood. Seducing
the spectator through the saturated blues that suffuse these images and
signalling an excess, a surplus of energy, they seep into the material of
the photograph, of light on photochemical paper transgressing the
boundaries of representing while making visible the contributions of
migrant staff. The dyed blue cloth of the nurses’ scrubs speaks of
our need for decoration and adornment that capitalism has appropriated but
could not, with its narrow concern with economic value, have anticipated.
Desire thus creates new objects that are subsequently pursued by capital
but not created by it. The raw condition of the lapis – a precious
resource – implies caritas: the exchange of a gift that does
not rely on its reciprocity and gratitude but on the pleasure of
bestowing, of conferring love in its widest sense upon the other and by
implication placing it into circulation.(20)
The meaning and impact of these photographs rely on contiguity in their
forms and their location, the latter chosen to extend the possibilities of
the former. The nearby gift shop also sells a wide variety of stuffed toys
and confectionary; contrasted with Frain’s images they could prompt
the spectator to reflect on the form and value of objects of exchange.
They may even be prompted to note the strange appearance of the glass
phial – possibly a pharmaceutical object in use in countries where
disposables are not a cheaper option. Like the toy pram at Eastbourne, the
phial evokes an earlier stage of industrialisation, as outmoded objects
their fossilised forms powerfully evoke the existence of the past in the
present.(21) Frain’s use of them can be interpreted on a number of
levels but to our western eyes they appear curiously old-fashioned.
Evidence of their contemporary usage disrupts that sense of the past as
being located in time rather than space. They create a contiguity in
meaning in the suspended time of the photograph that forces a
re-consideration of its status as metonymic, as part of the real. In the
process they question the mode of simultaneity we unconsciously inhabit in
our everyday world, conditioned both by modernity and discourses of
nationhood. Anderson’s analysis of this simultaneity suggests a time
and space that is imagined but not known, a collective consciousness
shared by members of a nation.(22) These objects might be seen as a
contemporary form of transubstantiation implied in the transcendence of
the hovering figure and the gesture offering a tray in a manner that
resembles the act of performing the sacrament of communion. In our
contemporary consumer culture this transubstantiation of minerals and dye
as nourishment might lie in the kinship relations established by gift
giving.
Counter to the traditional Marxist evaluation of consumerism James
Carrier, an anthropologist, offers a view that chimes more closely with
Frain’s interest in caritas. In Gifts and Commodities,
Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 Carrier identifies ‘inalienable’
gifts as distinct in nature from commodities in the relationship they
establish between the giver and the receiver. The latter, he argues, are
neutral and impersonal tokens of abstract value whilst gifts bear the
identity of the giver and the relationship between giver and recipient ‘Those
who transact and the objects transacted in pure gift relations are viewed
in terms of their basic, inalienable identities and relationships, so that
they are uniquely specified and linked to each other.’(23)
That labour can also be a form of gift giving might be problematic if it
were not associated with the site of the hospital where work becomes
service. The care of strangers returns us to the historical origins of the
modern European hospital in religious institutions, often run by nuns and
monks of a particular order. Historically the hospital was also a site of
sanctuary for pilgrims, soldiers on their way to the crusades and
travelers, who were usually only admitted if their race, religion or sex
conformed with the members of that community. Refusal of the foreigner
then, presents a paradox to her status as the benefactor of hospitality
now. As the accompanying leaflet reveals, in a number of images these same
figures cradle their hands to suggest the power of healing and care. The
gesture of protection, nurturing and offering up can also be one of
holding on. Hence, the ambiguity in the images of airline trays offered or
received, simultaneously reference food, the richness of hospitality, the
oral pleasures of devouring, and perhaps allude to erotic love. The
ambiguity references the space between me and you, native and foreigner
and affords the possibility of bridging it through the giving and
receiving of love, allowing the foreigner to exceed the limits placed upon
her.
I want to turn now to a consideration of the subversion of capitalist
time, dictated by clock and calendar, by a feminine time in the video-film
The Folding Room that appears in the leaflet as a series of clips.
In this work Frain subtly records the pleasure in being of service, not in
servitude. The image captures the movement of hands caressing, smoothing,
straightening, folding and piling a stack of emerald green sheets. The
level of care that goes into this repetitive and otherwise dull process
suggests an investment in the value of labour. In conceptual art practices
of the 1960s repetition was frequently adopted as a mechanistic metaphor
reiterating the destructive effects of alienated labour, the worker’s
condition of wage slavery and subsequent lack of leisure time. Taylorism
as it became known became a point of interest for these artists.
Introduced to the Ford motor company in the 1920s it was widely taken up
in industrial production in the post-war era. Charles Taylor devised a
time and motion study to improve efficiency in factories by creating
assembly lines that distributed different tasks to different workers, the
repetition of a single action becoming a faster and therefore a more
cost-efficient procedure. We find it in the hospital laundry, divided into
washing, folding and repairing rooms but Frain brings something else to
this rationalisation of time. The linear march of progress driving this
repetition of labour is transformed into a cyclical process that slows it
down and makes it attend to its own visceral rhythms.
Rose Frain The Folding Room videoclips
The video camera dwells on the subtle play of movements reflected in the
smooth shining surface of the table, its colour echoing the coat and
contrasting dramatically with dark skin and the emerald green of sheets to
create an arresting whole. The consequence is a visual pleasure in this
repeated action that returns us to earlier, more ritualised forms of
behaviour in child’s play for example, the satisfaction in throwing a
ball and catching it over and over. Central to its visceral, rhythmic
register is the sound of touch, dissonant beats echoing in the space of
the room from contact between skin and cloth, caressing, smoothing and
folding triggering associations with cyclical time, it subtly echoes the
glorious movement of cloth flowing towards us and gliding back, like the
waves of the ocean flowing in and out with the movement of the tides. This
slowing down of time to motions of touch and rhythm seen through feminine
eyes is suggestive of a libidinal economy directed by a different sense of
temporality implied in the daily rituals of washing, cleaning repairing so
often associated with female labour in the home, paid or unpaid. Or its
identification with the condition of maternity experienced through the
feminine subject, suspending temporarily the ongoing march of
rationalisation so fundamental to the capitalist economy. The title of
Frain’s text for the catalogue to strangers to ourselves ‘Some
Thoughts Meanwhile’ implies both narrative and the temporary
suspension of its flow into an indefinite present.
This disruption of capital through a libidinal economy is present in
Frain’s earlier work. In Sissy Graffiti (1989) a series of
neo-expressionist paintings, the artist used very expensive materials,
vermillion and rose madder, which she could ill afford but their
materialisation of desire spoke of an excess of expenditure issuing from
the instinctual drives of the body.(24) The artist’s interest in
Italian Renaissance painting is pertinent here. The use of precious
substances like lapis or gold is entirely in keeping with this commitment
to tensions between the pleasure and reality principles that define the
dilemmas and perilous conditions of art making. This is explored further
in a letter published as an intervention in AN magazine: ‘Aesthetic
Excess Tax’ was a response to the introduction of Self Assessment and
parodied the Inland Revenue, informing the artist of her overpayment of
twenty aesthetic units.(25) The “pleasure” of
making an art that far exceeds its status as commodity is tempered here by
an awareness of the financial risks attached to it as a form of
non-alienated labour that is nonetheless compromised by economics
determining its formal realisation. Ambiguity between a monetary exchange
and a libidinal economy also materialises the law of the father and its
regulation of jouissance.
In the context of What I brought with me the flows of global
exchange that have cast these migrants onto British shores are countered
by the flows of jouissance that seep through the emerald green of
these sheets and the deep blue of nurses scrubs, transforming their
clinical surroundings as they circulate throughout the hospital: through
wards, operating theatres and back again to be washed, repaired and stored
away only to be distributed once more. They become a vital form of contact
between staff and patients that relies on the elimination of bacteria, the
dis-infection of cloth that so easily transmits disease. Caritas
lies in this transmission of care evident in the hands that caress, smooth
and fold and the sheets as points of contact, a curious intimacy that
brings skin together with skin as they pass from hand to hand. It cannot
be seen as it makes its way through these institutions but its effect is
evident with every departure of a patient recovered to good health. The
act of making whole and repairing damage brings us back to the image of
the healer in the laundry room and by extension the role of maternal jouissance
in transforming the symbolic pact.
The problem outlined earlier in this article, of cultural forms becoming
substitutes for belief in the political process to effect a change in
social relations, is not particular to our contemporary moment. Arguably,
the masculinist avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th centuries emerged in
similar conditions becoming embroiled in the cultural politics of the left
in the inter-war period and the cold war politics of the post-war era. If
one is to believe the proponents of l’écriture feminine
the feminist revolution is in its early stages, its second phase led
by artists and writers is only just beginning to make its influence felt.
By harnessing underlying psychic energies these artists and writers can “change
the dynamics of signs” and hence the dominant order.(26)
Fundamental to that shift is the challenge of forging a notion of
universality that can be rooted in the feminine but allows productive
connections with other political movements. Kristeva views it as a third
wave of feminism, a corporeal and mental space rather than a generation or
group.(27) Though this terrain is only just being explored, for example in
Kaja Silverman’s writings, Frain’s concerns with the liberating
potential of jouissance in What I brought with me signals
an important step in this direction. Though at times the Catholic
specificity of transubstantiation in her photographs may themselves appear
“foreign” to spectators removed from Christian
ritual, the metaphoric transformation of properties, be they mental,
physical, spiritual or psychic are effectively carried through in this
project. Frain’s subtle seduction and brilliant economy of means
brings with it an ethical sensitivity to the human subject that might more
effectively disseminate what the academy unwittingly excludes. If the
image is increasingly the lingua franca of our global world, then
the woman artist may indeed be the propagator of the revolutionary
possibilities of a feminine semiotics.
An
image reproduced at the back of the accompanying leaflet beautifully
conveys this metaphor of the potentiality of transforming the social,
psychic and spiritual. Lapis placed in a humble enamel bowl filled to the
brim with water casts a luminescent light across the harsh silver of a
stainless steel sink, transforming these dull metals into iridescent
sheets of pearly blue. Taking on the hard light of their matter, the lapis
becomes almost crystal-like, losing its habitual opacity and obdurate
texture and sparkling with a delicacy more familiar to the diamond. Small
droplets of water surrounding the bowl lend a sense of dynamic
transformation, of water turning to gas and evaporating into the air or
hardening to become ice. These subtle details suggest a transformative
potential suspended somewhere between the material and immaterial. It in
this space of possibilities that the wider significance of What I
brought with me to changing perceptions of migration and national
identity can perhaps be assessed.
Notes
1. Gayatri Spivak is perhaps best known for voicing
such concerns, cf Elizabeth Gross ‘Criticism, Feminism and the
Institution: an interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’ Thesis/Eleven
10/11 pp.175-87
2. These criticisms have often come from debates amongst feminists in the
US. For an account of its complicated history and responses to Irigaray’s
writings cf Tina Chanter Ethics of Eros, Irigaray’s rewriting of
the philosophers (New York and London, Routledge, 1995) pp.21-46
3. Judith Stewart ‘Thinking is my fighting’ in Stewart, Rogoff
et. al strangers to ourselves (Hastings Museum and Art Gallery,
2003) pp12-15
4. Rose Frain ‘The tic-toc and the infinite mmmmmmmm’ Women’s
Art Magazine no.62 Jan/Feb 1995 p25
5. The rising cost of increasingly sophisticated medical technology is
beyond the means of existing allocated funds from public taxation. Unlike
other European states, no insurance premium is paid for healthcare, money
is taken from directly from a general tax on wages of 7%. Access to
healthcare is underpinned by citizenship and different regulations and
costs apply to migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers or those with
residency rights in the UK.
6. This is a term coined by Benedict Anderson in his seminal study of
nationalism as an ‘imagined’ entity that transcends the
specifics of geographical boundaries or actual location. Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London
and New York, Verso, 1983 revised and extended edition 1991)
7. Will Hutton The State to Come (Vintage, Random House, London
1997)
8. Stuart Hall ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’
in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (eds.) Dangerous
Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis
and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1997) pp.173-187
9. Paul Gilroy Joined-up Politics and Postcolonial Melancholia
(London, ICA Diversity Lecture, 1999) p. 2
10. ‘On Becoming strangers’ Ghabriel Gbadamosi in strangers
to ourselves (2003) ibid pp. 78-81
11. delivered as a conference paper at the University of California, Santa
Barbara May 1984 reproduced in Liz Wells (ed) The Photography Reader,
(Routledge, 2003) pp.138-145
12. originally published in Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18
13. Email to author, November 2003
14. Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses (London and New York:Viking
Press,1989) pp. 1-3
15. cf Homi Bhabha’s interpretation of The Satanic Verses through
hybridity in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,1994) pp.
223-226
16. In conversation with the artist
17. cf ‘Some thoughts meanwhile’ Rose Frain in strangers to
Ourselves ibid p. 89
18. ‘The tic-toc and the infinite mmmmmmmm’ ibid p. 25
19. Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)
20. Cf Julia Kristeva (translated by Leon Roudiez) strangers to
ourselves (Columbia University Press, 1991) pp. 84-85. Leaflets
accompanying these installations make this explicit
21. This is a term used by Walter Benjamin in his notes on the arcades
project, cf translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin The
Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1991)
22. Anderson Imagined Communities (1991) p. 24
23. Carrier, James G Gifts and Commodities, Exchange and Western
Capitalism since 1700 (London and New York: Routledge) pp.30-31.
24. Hilary Robinson ‘Sissy Grafitti and Sappho Fragments new works by
Rose Frain’ Women Artists Slide Library Journal March 1990 p.
24
25. Rose Frain AN magazine for artists August 1998
26. cf Kristeva ‘Women’s Time’ (1977) reproduced in Kelly
Oliver (ed) The Portable Kristeva (Columbia University Press,1997)
p. 355
27. ibid pp. 366-368
Copyright text: Amna Malik, November 2003. All images © Rose
Frain
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 17, 2003
