Poetics of Deconstruction by Lynn Turner;

Author:Lynn Turner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Animotion

For Schneemann, every morning the awkward analogue camera was there ‘just to see’, without determination over the image (and without the now-habitual glazed gaze of a selfie captured with the high resolution of the now-ubiquitous camera phone). She had it there, ready to hand, by the bed, ready to turn towards her cats as well as towards herself. Schneemann is in the photographs, she signs: quickly read, and without the insight of the theoretical work drawn upon in this essay, Infinity Kisses would be legible as autobiographical work as it is traditionally and simply identified – as an index of that which is ‘my own’, and legible within an artist’s work known for its investment in the personal, in experience, in a ‘hand-touch sensibility’. But does that hand point back to the signing subject, and point her out, point for point in her naked truth? ‘Nudity perhaps remains untenable’, remarks Derrida, his own desire for naked words, for ‘words from the heart’ having been revealed to have been a dressage of sorts.160 Nudity cannot be held in the hand, gathered in a moment of presence. Schneemann’s nudity precedes her: ‘nudity’ clothes the performance works more readily associated with her name as a form of signature. She is always partly concealed, as are her cats, and this is not a violence that could be avoided according to a more ethical representational strategy that would complete the picture without exclusion. Despite Derrida’s caution, he warns readers that we not be able to decide for certain whether his story was true or fictional, since the telling and the reading of that story will always redraw its contours. Texts of whatever context cannot police their own borders.

If the mirroring function within Schneemann’s works was perhaps less clear in the first version of Infinity Kisses, where the smaller images were abutted against each other and mounted as one totemic grid, in the subsequent versions of much larger prints, the effect is magnified. Glazed, they reflect viewers as well as other prints. In Schneemann, the trope of the mirror is no trap of the same. The eye of the camera is a frequent trope for the ‘I’ of a directing subject (as Schneemann well knows, given her derailment of this authority in her Eye/ work). Here each blink of the shutter releases an other image – image after image of – what? As Cixous writes, ‘Woman with cat? Or Woman belonging to cat? Or Cats? Or Woman? Or Women? Or the foreigner?’161 Who mirrors whom? Infinity Kisses is not reducible to the too-available and pitying cliché of older women clinging to the company of cats as poor substitute for the men they can no longer attract. We must take account of a mirror of technical reproducibility, a mirror that iterates – a point reiterated by the various articulations of these photographs, re-cited in different contexts when Schneemann uses her own work as a found object. In so doing she emphasizes their range beyond realism. Their eyes are shut in most images.

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