How does the citational quality, the placing and character of the work, affect the viewer? The citational character of the work holds true to the root of its Latin origin ‘to cite’ which comes from citare, ‘to set in motion’, ‘to call’ or
‘to summon’. Hence citation and interpellation, the summoning of the sub-ject, are closely connected.20Althusser’s term of ‘interpellation’ drew atten-tion to the ideological nature of subject formaatten-tion and the emergence of identity through language and discourse.
I shall [then] suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it
‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals … or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects … by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ [original emphasis] 21 The citational quality of interpellation is obvious in this much-quoted pas-sage of Althusser’s definition of his concept.
What particular quality did this ‘hailing’ assume in my installation? The exhibition at Zement had aspects that are already existent in classical sculp-ture as well as in installation as suggested by Potts. This is to do with the nature of the encounter staged between the viewer and the work and the
‘resulting interplay … between focused and dispersed apprehension’.22 Conventionally hung prints, or pictures in frames, tend to invite ‘focused apprehension’. The emphasis is on the viewer’s gaze, which is attracted by and to the framed object with the surrounding space functioning as a neu-tral envelope.23Installation interpellates the viewer in a different way. The viewer could be said to be ‘called’ from all sides and he or she is bodily positioned in the space as opposed to the emphasis on sight in a conven-tional display. The boundaries of what constitutes the work and the space overlap and may even collide. Therefore, Potts can speak of an ‘interplay … between focused and dispersed apprehension’.
In addition to this general feature of installation, the hailing or constitu-tion of the viewer was played out in the exhibiconstitu-tion at the Zement Gallery in a specific way. This is because my pieces had a hallucinatory quality. In the two large wall pieces, White on White and Grey on Grey, this quality was achieved by printing in duotone colours. The result was that background and pattern are not visible in one glance. Depending on the viewer’s posi-tion, a different pattern and a differently coloured background come into focus (Figures 6 and 7).
In a more sculptural hanging piece, Virtual 9, the ‘interplay … between focused and dispersed apprehension’ operated in another way. The piece consists of nine Perspex panels (each measuring 71 cm x 71 cm), which were hung in a row. The position of the screen-printed pattern that was repeated on each of the panels shifts from one panel to the next. The strength and hue of the semi-transparent colour also vary slightly. The effect of the hung piece was that the swirl of linear marks that appeared to the viewer seemed, at first, to consist of a chaotic mass (Figure 8).
238 Ruth Pelzer-Montada
19. Potts, p. 17. As already indicated, this ties in with Butler’s sugges-tion that discourses tend to hide ‘their citationality and
20. Salih notes this in her introduction to Judith
23. For a more complex analysis of this
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Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead 239 Figure 6: Grey on Grey, detail, side view.
Figure 7: Grey on Grey, detail, front view.
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Only from a certain position, when the viewer positioned himself or her-self at a particular distance from the work, did a relatively stable image, extending deep into space, gradually appears (Figure 9).
Apprehension in these works is problematized; its performative nature becomes obvious due to the difficulties the viewer experiences.
240 Ruth Pelzer-Montada
Figure 8: Virtual 9, detail, screenprint on nine perspex panels, overall dimen-sion 71 x 71 x 240 cm, 2003.
Figure 9: Virtual 9, installation view, screenprint on nine perspex panels, overall dimension 71 x 71 x 240 cm, 2003.
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The disorienting, if pleasurable, effect of the work also alludes to the rela-tive loss of control the viewer or subject experiences through its constitu-tion within cultural practices.
Fundamental to achieving a hallucinatory effect is the use of serial rep-etition. Briony Fer in an essay on female artists of the 1960s (Hesse, Bourgeois and Kusama), notes the connection of serial repetition, as in Kusama’s work, to the hallucinatory. She also comments on how such art
‘places the subject or spectator, how it might incur the coming-into-being of the subject – in particular the feminine subject’.24 Its effect is described by her as both an intensification of ‘bodily affect’ at the same time as a ‘blanking or effacing of the subject’.25This ‘blanking’ or ‘efface-ment of the subject’ is connected in Fer’s psychoanalytically informed interpretation to a particular kind of anthropomorphism. Fer’s comments can be applied to an explanation of the effect of the prints in the exhibi-tion. The particular anthropomorphism or ‘mimetic compulsion’ invoked by her, draws on Surrealist writer Roger Callois’s ‘model of mimicry’.
Mimicry explains the
way an insect which changes colour through camouflage does so in order to become invisible; as it disappears, it loses irreparably its distinctness. Rather than a sign for its surroundings, camouflage acts as a negative signifier, a sign of non-being, which effaces rather than produces connotational value.
This has nothing to do with ‘the art object carrying associations to or con-noting things in the world’ but refers to ‘the spatial lure of objects’ and ‘the coming-into-being of the subject in the scopic field’.26
The two large wall pieces could be said to demonstrate an anthropor-phism of this kind. Ostensibly a reference to decorative schemes such as wallpaper and the implied idea of art as wallpaper,27the shape and colour schemes in both works attempt a sort of camouflage: printed on flat poster paper rather than quality artist’s paper, the sheets form a smooth surface with the wall. The colour scheme extends the play on the work as being identical with the wall, being an addition or even an adornment, or alternatively, an interference, a disturbance. The most basic interference with a white wall is a mark. Grey could be considered its archetypal colour.
The colour scheme in both White on White and Grey on Grey makes refer-ence to this. Physical make-up and the siting of the works perform both an appearance and a non- or dis-appearance; the works oscillate between wall decoration, interference/noise and camouflage. More specifically, the intri-cate repetitive pattern of these pieces with its ‘see-it, now-you-don’t’ quality, as already described, constitutes the viewer in a way which Fer has noted as being characteristic of hallucinations, as ‘that swing between an intensification of vision … to a kind of blanking’ or ‘effacing of the subject’.28
It is this swing to which the second part of the title of this article: ‘how pictures come alive or play dead’ alludes. As Alex Potts has said of installa-tion art and its relainstalla-tionship to the viewer:
Installation has become part of the general fabric of things in contemporary culture, and in a way, art feeds on this situation … lulling us into mesmerized
Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead 241
24. Briony Fer, ‘Objects
27. It was only after my Frankfurt exhibition that I came across an article which included a description of changeable wallpaper in the Prada shop in New York designed by Rem Koolhaas: ‘This immense space … is the site for an installa-tion in the artistic wall (the width of the block) can also be
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fascination with the spectacle … at the same time stopping us short, inducing us to reflect on the enticements and disenchantments involved … it engulfs us at the same time that it can make us aware of the framings and closures that are also part of the substance of contemporary, consumerist spectacles.29 In this way, such work – instead of being wholly entrenched in the specta-cle, or totally resisting it – can be shown to have relevance within a broader cultural context.
Summary
I have shown how the application of theoretical insights – the ‘post-production’ of the title – as a form of documentation can assist an artist in elucidating a process that was initially approached in a mostly pragmatic fashion. Nicholas Davey’s idea of a hermeneutical aesthetics was drawn upon to justify the viability of this endeavour. The concept of performativity has been deployed to trace the cultural significations of the medium, the exhibition venue, the particular works in the exhibition and the place of the viewer. Special consideration was given to the hallucinatory quality of the work and the role of repetition with regard to the performative constitu-tion of the viewing subject. In this way, the work is deemed to funcconstitu-tion as participating in as well as resisting the wider cultural trend of spectacular commodity production and consumption. It is suggested that the insights gained through such theoretically inflected documentation or post-produc-tion become foundapost-produc-tional for further practice, both for other artists and myself. This is equally true, whether post-production relates to the practice of theory or artistic practice, ideally both. In a future article, I plan to inves-tigate the particular way in which post-production feeds into production both theoretically and practically.
References
Althusser, Louis (2000), ‘Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects’ (1969), in Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman (eds), Identity: A Reader, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 31–38.
Béret, Chantal (2002), ‘Shed, Cathedral or Museum’, in Max Hollein and Christoph Grunenberg (eds), Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture (exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Tate Liverpool), Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. 78.
Birnbaum, Daniel (2001), ‘From the White Cube to Super Houston, Five Shows in the Portikus’, Parkett, 63, pp. 187–93.
Buchloh, B. (1984), ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, 30 (Fall), pp. 82–119.
Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge.
—— (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York and London: Routledge.
Davey, Nicholas (2005), ‘Aesthetic f(r)iction: the conflicts of visual experience’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 4: 2 + 3, pp. 135–49
Derrida, Jacques (1993), Memoirs of the Blind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges (1999), Ähnlichkeit und Berührung, Archäologie, Anachronsimus und Ähnlichkeit des Abdrucks, Cologne: Dumont.
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29. Potts, p. 19.
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Fer, Briony (1999), ‘Objects beyond Objecthood’, Oxford Art Journal, 22: 2, pp. 25–36.
—— (2001), ‘The Somnambulist’s Story: Installation and the Tableau’, Oxford Art Journal, 24: 2, pp. 75–92.
Foucault, Michel (1977), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Kwon, Miwon (1997), ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity’, October, 80 (Spring), pp. 85–110.
Osborne, Peter (1996), ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, in Peter Osborne (ed.), A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, London and New York: Routledge.
—— (2001), ‘Installation, Performance, or What?’, Oxford Art Journal, 24: 2, pp.
147–54.
Potts, Alex (2001), ‘Installation and Sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, 24: 2, pp. 5–24.
Salih, Sara (2002), Judith Butler, London and New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Mark C. (2000), The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Suggested citation
Pelzer-Montada, R. (2007), ‘Post-production or how pictures come to life or play dead’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice 6: 3, pp. 229–243, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.229/1.
Contributor details
Ruth Pelzer-Montada is lecturer in Art and Visual Culture in the Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art and practising artist with focus on printmaking/installation. He is completing a practice-led Ph.D. at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, on the significance of repetition in relation to the theory–practice relationship. Contact: Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution House, 78 West Port, Edinburgh EH1 2LE.
Tel.: 0131 221 6174 Fax: 0131 221 6163
E-mail: [email protected]
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JVAP_6.3_06_Art_Plezer_.qxd 12/13/07 11:11 AM Page 244Journal of Visual Arts Practice Volume 6 Number 3 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.3.245/1