ENGLISH

Reflections on Candice Breitz "Rorschach Series"
by Octavio Zaya

The photographic work that Candice Breitz has produced since she moved to New York two years ago, though diverse in its strategies, might be read cumulatively as constituting a complex resistance to analytical closure; her projects are, in general, deeply invested in an exploration of the parameters of various genres and modes of re-presentation. Her work appropriates, erases, fragments and juxtaposes; most often to circle around issues of difference, through an inevitably futile attempt to in-corporate all difference. At the same time, her work has always remained open to that which is 'other'. On the one hand, this resignation to otherness surfaces in her willingness to embrace approaches as diverse as photomontage and performative photography (by means of which she implicitly acknowledges a certain sense of alienation from her own gesture or index, which is never understood in her work as something which simply 'belongs' to the artist); on the other, and perhaps more significantly, the work opens itself up to the otherness of the viewer, whose gaze always holds the potential to destroy the artist's attempt at intentional communication and, with it, the possibility of a work which might relay meaning transparently. As such, Breitz's works seem to be forever in the process of a completion which they never reach.

In the 'Rorschach Series' (1997), a recent body of work that Breitz will exhibit in New York this coming fall, these issues are foregrounded even more strategically than they have been in prior work - the series is, in many respects, a logical extension of her earlier explorations of the incomplete nature of any image, and of the exhaustion of the notion of direct communication. Breitz first started to explore these ideas with the 'Ghost Series' (1994-96), in which she literally whited-out the faces and bodies of black South African women on pseudo-ethnographic tourist postcards, not only to accent the ghostliness with which such images are already imbued (in their elision of the subjectivity of the women imaged), but, more importantly, to exacerbate the appropriative laws which inscribe these presences as fetishized, foreign and primitive absences. In this series, Breitz re-covers and systematically amplifies specific practices of projection, identification and appropriation, acknowledging these as practices which belong to the assumptions of pernicious cultural fantasies of 'whiteness.'






The 'Rainbow Series' (1996) pushes this set of practices even further, presenting the viewer with a polymorphously perverse version of the surrealist exquisite corpse. The Rainbow People gesture deconstructively at romanticized notions of hybridity, as much as they resign themselves to the general impossibility of coherent subjectivity (since the subject is arguably always 'hybrid'). Specifically, the images challenge the South African post-apartheid mythology of a 'Rainbow Nation.' We might read these images as an ironic enactment of the construction of a homogeneous subject, effected through the violent and Frankensteinian de-composition and re-composition of bodies which can never escape the fragmentation and disfigurement which taunts them in their desire for wholeness. While Breitz could not be accused of deliberately equating the desires inherent to mythologies of coherence (be these individual or national), with the mythology of desires which structures the pornographic effect, she is inclined to messily stitch the two together - so that at times these photomontages may be read as symptomatic of racial and cultural strategies of leveling and erasure, while at other moments, they suggest the possibility of an alternative pornographic imagining, one which can not be easily reduced to the dialectic of male consumer and female consumed. The 'Whiteface Series' (1996), which was produced at around the same time, relocates these issues in a fictive and performative acting out of the scopic compulsions of representation and appropriation. Here, through a more direct confrontation between body and camera, Breitz seems to liken the complex and ambivalent narratives of projection and identification to rape; not necessarily so as to imply that representation itself operates as the reification of the generic pornographic message, but so as to explore the workings of certain objectifying and commodifying forms of expression.

The kaleidoscopically raced, gendered and cultured narratives generated by Breitz's erotically loaded and sexually explicit photographs and photomontages, violate socio-political and disciplinary limits in their translation of found material into meta-pornography. Viewed as a continuous body of work, her images take pleasure in exploding the terrain of representation open to a multiplicity of readings and fantasies, which transcend the critical rhetoric out of which they emerge, reiterating once more the excess which drives both desire and representation. Though Breitz's work is clearly informed by a feminist agenda, her refusal to offer a neatly packaged didactic message has incurred the wrath of many viewers, who have insisted on taking her work at 'face value.' In her informal 'Notes on the Rorschach Series,' Breitz suggests the impulses that lead to her arrival at 'The Rorschach Series:'

"People were always asking me, in relation to the 'Rainbow Series' or the 'Whiteface Series,' "What are you trying to say?," "Do you think pornography is good or bad?," "Are you trying to glamorize hybridity or critique it?"

It is perhaps in response to such questions, that Breitz embarked on her new series, in which she takes wry recourse to Warhol's earlier project of making his own 'Rorschachs' (as if to evoke the inadequacies of the standardized and generic set used in clinical situations). This latest series by Breitz configures the relationship between the work of art and the viewer (one which is projective and overdetermined for Breitz) with an unprecedented `legibility,' at the same time that it revels in its tongue-in-cheek illegibility. Warhol poured paint along the center of horizontal canvases, folded them over, and then stamped on the fold to create his blots (routines which parodied Pollockís pouring of paint onto the horizontal canvas). While Pollockís signature drip seems to be of little interest to Breitz in her return to this genealogy, the mirroring strategy which makes her 'Rorschach Series' so compelling, clearly emerges out of a fascination with Warhol's series of the same title. Like Warhol, Breitz seems to invite the viewer to read into her work. Unlike Warhol, who stated in an interview - with characteristic faux naiveté - that all he could ever see in Rorschach blots was a "dog's face or something like a tree or a bird or a flower," Breitz is clearly set on nulling and voiding any possibility of innocence for either viewer or artist. She is more than attentive to the fact that what the shrink hopes to elicit - at least in the popular imagination - when he places the little black Rorschach silhouettes before his patient, is the projective transference of sexual fantasies, desires and obsessions.

"So, I decided to cut to the chase and make the latent content of the Rorschach test manifest, by using pornography instead of black paint or ink to make my 'Rorschach Series.'"

As in the 'Rainbow Series,' her medium is photographically enlarged and reprinted photomontage. Breitz's experiments with recontextualized photographic fragments belong to a tradition of feminism-informed photomontage, a tradition which has been driven, at least partially, by the desire to transform perspectival conventions.

"I made these works by simply taking a fragment of a porn image, mirroring it on a Xerox machine, and recomposing it alongside this reflection of itself... But, now an ankle seems more like the head of a penis and an elbow wants to be entered and the swell in a butt starts to look like a double-nipple. There's no denying the fact that these are still overtly sexual images, but while they seem erotic, we no longer know where to insert our fingers and penises, or which hole is the vagina and which hole is only a mirrored armpit."

In the 'Rorschach Series,' the elements of the photomontage seem - at first glance - to cohere into a formally harmonious composition (unlike the works in the 'Rainbow Series,' in which fragmentation prevails); this despite the obvious seams and bits of tape which Breitz does not bother to remove before the photomontages are rephotographed and enlarged.

"These are ridiculously low-tech images, which stubbornly insist on resistance to the technologies of spectacular culture, resistance which at this point is, however, clearly futile."

Here, the earlier sense (in the 'Rainbow Series') of a provisional juxtaposition of different modes of experience and systems of meaning (the sources of which were brutally evident), gives way to a different kind of tension. While the pornographic source-images remain fragmented here, they are overlaid with an urge towards far less specific and recognizable patterns of association and contiguity. In lieu of the anthropomorphic Rainbow People, we are presented with symmetrical corpse-like lumps, fleshy bloats, mutant post-human remains, which seem to allude more to science-fiction and genetic engineering (clonings gone astray), than to the pornography from which they are gleaned.

"I like to think of this work as somehow being a 'take' on the culture industry's dedicated production of ever more alien aliens. But here, the alien - or, that which is 'other' - is implied to be much closer to home, lurking within your own naked body, and maybe not as easy to imagine away as that ëotherí that is safely contained in the realm of fiction."

Here, the naked body is rendered disturbingly unfamiliar; it is emptied of readily discernible traces of identity. In short, it seems that the subject has vacated its premises entirely, leaving those premises perversely and frighteningly available to the projections of the viewer.

"Photography, being a medium of serial production, carries a complex set of issues with it. I'm not sure exactly how or whether the images operate to evoke this complex set of issues, or, whether this is in fact just my set of issues (one can never be sure with a Rorschach!). Nevertheless, one of the things that tends to remind us of our existence as organic beings, is the asymmetry of our biology: for example, that one breast is slightly larger than the other, or that there is a freckle on one cheek but not on the other. When a cross-section of human is mirrored, the effect is a symmetry which somehow renders the body eerily ornamental, strangely reified. What seems increasingly apparent with phenomena like cloning, is that we may not be able to continue viewing the realm of mechanical repetition and production as functioning strictly in opposition to the realm of existence and reproduction. This is a possibility that has preoccupied thinkers on the left and the right, one which is perhaps most readily available to us in the genre of science fiction (in the form of the cyborg or automaton, which is - in a sense - only the corollary of the too natural monsters which also inhabit this
genre - the latter being frightening because it is too 'natural,' and the former, because it is too 'cultural'). In a way, the poles evoked by the monster and the robot, that is - reproduction and production - the figurative and the mechanical - the excessive and the minimal - the nidiosyncratically gestural and the numbingly repetitive - the Pollockian and the Warholian, are fused in the 'Rorschach Series.' I hope that the series somehow retains the sense of ambivalence which haunts the issue of the mechanically-reproduced human subject across the political spectrum of artists and thinkers who have taken this thematic up in their work."

Breitz's overdetermined 'Rorschach' composites defy the binary opposition that might order our conceptual reflection upon them. They are neither subject nor object. Rather, they are the unstable mean between the polar extremes which they evoke, the chasm in which opposites like interiority and exteriority - or subjectivity and objectivity - mingle uncertainly, moreso because the actual chasms between the separate halves of Breitzís 'Rorschachs' remain blank (a thin white meridian prevents the left and right sides of each image from fusing into each other, confounding our expectations of the Rorschach motif). The effect is a double enfoldment: that which is the `sameí constantly threatens to replicate itself as that which is 'different.' Yet despite this threat - or, contrary to this promise - difference and identity never quite collapse - and fusion, or resolution, is thus constantly deferred. Breitz's 'Rorschachs' flicker, fold and double into prosthetic creatures and geometric ornaments in turn. They cohere waveringly, prompting reflection both on the desirability of the consumer object and on the threat of the abject subject, both on serial production and on organic re-production. At the nsame time, by means of their seriality, they subtly mimic the limited and predictable combination of human parts that structures (yet never seems to quite exhaust) pornography as a genre.

"The Rorschach blot suggests - somewhat deceptively - that you are 'free' to project exactly what you would like to project. Of course, while the reading of an image always involves a degree of projection, this is not the same as saying that the viewer has the freedom of thought to make the image mean just anything. The viewerís projections are limited not only by my delimitation of pornographic bodies as the content of the blot, but also by the space of the gallery (an arena in which the conventionality of representation is made patent), the historical moment, and the so-called 'baggage' bought to the image by the viewer. Though we are aware of some of our baggage, we are also all carrying invisible cultural, social and political baggage without even knowing it. I cannot accept responsibility for every reading which might be projected onto the work, for, not even the artist - to whom some extraordinary powers of insight have been ascribed historically - can be expected to account for invisible baggage."




The substance of Breitz's 'Rorschach Series' lies - not so easily retrievable - in its formal and conceptual folds, in its counter-utopian commitment to a viewer-work relationship which cannot be predetermined (by either Breitz or the viewer). Which is perhaps another way of saying, you can't always get what you want, but you can usually see what you need.

(All bold text is commentary by Breitz, extracted from a taped studio visit in addition to the artistís unpublished '(Notes on the Rorschach Series.')