Mechanical bodies, as well as the observation of them, had by now come to be seen as infected by the virus of subjectivity. . . (Robert A. Sobieszek)
It is always suggestive to consider what wish fulfilment would look like, taken to its final outpost of historical perversity. It has been observed that the radical feminist Wages for Housework campaign got its way: the last two decades have witnessed a massive return of domestic servants to middle-class households around the world: this is wages for housework in times of grotesque social inequality. While engaged in plotting such playful inversions, would it be any more otiose to invoke the conscious austerity of post-modern dance – with its precepts of no eye contact, no drama, no emotional appeal – and see its fulfilment in the persona of today’s erotic entertainer?
In this film by Megan Fraser, the dancing woman is an index of the industrialization of erotic expression. More apt would be eroticized expression, with the erotic as a filter or flavour that occurs across milieus from advertising to music videos to weekend clubbing to fitness regimens, a glossy grammar that saturates the relations between things. It’s a filter like the ‘colourblasts’, the industry term for the hyperactive colour switcher, which generates angular rhythms between the dancer’s movements and the lighting in the film. The dancer frames her face again and again, structuring the film’s temporality with a bodily auto-montage. The poses change constantly but the face remains – variations of a pout, with challenge in the eyes – congealed intensity, the workplace mask of affect. It may help, looking at this face, to think of affect as a threshold between an apocryphal interior and an incidental exterior, the real shift in ‘structures of feeling’ heralded by ‘performance’ as the basic condition of contemporary work. Total industrialization creates total opacity.
A semiotic atrophy takes place, homogeneity of surface which beckons, but is impermeable, like the face. The equivocality of the ‘professional erotic’ leads to a reflection on apparatus: the mode of production of subjectivity, the modality of affect in labour, the face as coding machine, the film as coding machine. The dancer’s face evokes the anaesthetic: the default setting of her features mirrors the filmmaker’s embrace of the default in the manufacture of the film: setting the lights to default, not intervening in the gestures or garments of the dancer. Her face, for the dancer, is likewise a ready-made.
This defaulting on subjectivity, conversely, also brings out excess: how much is just enough for a performance to be legible, for a performance to work. The issue of excess movement, from time-motion studies in the factory to labour-saving devices in the progressive kitchen to the appropriation of ‘tasks’ by the Judson Church dancers, dovetails with the idea of control (of labour, of affect), and the one of abstraction – a purging of habit, a rigorous materialism. The eroticized has eliminated all excess movement, while retaining the promise of excess as the residue of the erotic. The film responds to this extreme codification, but not with its own ‘filmaction’ structuralist counter-code. Instead, the film accompanies the dancer with another abstract machine, ceding its own compositional agency to her. Breaks in identification replace cuts, and the semantic function of units of montage is carried out by blocs of different colour in rapid succession. As in Fraser’s 2007 Tour d’Ombres that makes up he first part of the exhibition, which was filmed in Corbusier’s model city in Chandigarh, India. The film is an artifact of the collaborative dynamic between the filmmaker and the performer, a performer who is being filmed ‘at work’ but by virtue of being filmed can no longer be said to be working. Here collaboration becomes the word for a series of displacements which are directed at the ‘communicability’ of an action, and its signifying and material force. In both cases, the film resulted from extended discussions and rehearsals with the subject on-screen, with the clear divergence that in Tour, the person in portrayed in his work environment, while in the current film, the space of the performance is deliberately void of contextual markers. Fraser’s role as an author, or the building renovator and dancer’s roles as performers, become elided by the generic, thus enigmatic, quality of the actions that we see. Such a ‘communicability’ as Giorgio Agamben writes, is the only unifying force among subjects of language; it consist of the potential to communicate: the common as a negative capacity, much like the shadows that seem to acquire architectonic roles in the Chandigarh film.
The vertigo between overcoding and an unreading forms the spine of the film. A de-composition of representation, especially one as given as this, may be the prerequisite if the hope is to construct an image. This image may feed on its excess as it evokes an economy of signs which is recognizeable, but at the same time there is an excess that is singular; not an intangible self but an insolent, workless affect.
Marina Vishmidt
Megan Fraser graduated from the MFA at Milton Avery Graduate School Of The Arts, Bard College, New York in 2008. She has participated in exhibitions and film programmes at Vilma Gold (2009), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2008), Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid (2008), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2008), Koelnischer Kunstverein, Koln (2006) and The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (2005).
The International Project Space would like to thank the Elephant Trust, the ICA London, The Peoples Theatre, Vilma Gold, Mark Korda Gregson, Davis Rhodes, Insight lighting, Edmond Cook and SLV film studios for their kind support in the realisation of this exhibition.
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