[Page 4: The Underskin of the Screen: Performing Embodiment in
Through the Looking Glass, an installation by Cris Bierrenbach
by Cynthia Bodenhorst]

Looking to Love: the Indifferent Look

The image exists in the domain of the social. Looking, apart from being a subjective activity, is an interaction, a mediation between the individual and the collective, and a form of socialization. A driving question in this essay is how to recover a notion of the subject as a self-conscious, embodied, and political agent whose look is accountable for the world she/he sees.

So far, I have argued that the aesthetic choices that Cris Bierrenbach deploys in her installation, rather than a symptom of the disappearance of the body in the era of the screen, work through a corporealization of surfaces as a way of re-imagining alternative subject positions. The transformative potential of the installation relies on conferring ideality—rendering marginalized subjectivities and sexualities culturally legible and worthy of idealization—by stirring the subject to take a loving look. In this manner, this work contributes to an understanding of the politics of visual representation as an ethics of the subject within the field of vision, while reclaiming the screen and the skin as performative and collective sites.

In the smaller and shorter version for e-misférica, the artist returns the installation to where it should perhaps dwell: the original and intimate spaces of computer monitors.30The installation is conceived as an open system of signification where the spectator is predicated as a "part of the picture." It is in the look where agentive transformation might occur within the normative field of representation.31 This transformation hinges, in part, on the acknowledgement that as subjects we depend on "the other" for meaning. The looking-self is both libidinally sustained and irreducibly incomplete, which can lead either to idiopathic identification—to cannibalize the other within the self—or heteropathic identification, a subject that dares identification with another as other, thus locating "the self at the site of the other."32 The installation's formal choices work through what can be explained as triggering an identificatory failure that enables the latter form of identification; our look, usually aligned with the position of mastery and the representational coordinates of the camera/gaze, is exposed as "the other" along with the concomitant fantasy of such an alignment.

Furthermore, the corporealization and displacement of the screen and the disjunction between what we hear and what we see truncates the smooth operation of the screen as a site for narcissistic identifications or normative representational fictions. Cris stages the disappearance of the idealized body while presenting her voice imbued with a sense of mystery; this readies the viewer to translate her artistic endeavor without residue into emotion. For a moment the world is transformed into inner space where our heart stops distinguishing between the "outside" world and its own beating.

To encounter the installation is to face a visual breakdown. Instead of seeking to incorporate the ideal or reject alterity, the eye is engaged in an act outside the confines of the self and the economy of visual transactions through libidinal investment. A void gives the viewer the opportunity to renegotiate the relationships between self and other, and between self-sameness and self-other. Here lies the ethical dimension of Bierrenbach's project at the level of a conscious second look and an intensification of unconscious desire.33 Our desires and phobias that occur as normative projections upon racially, sexually and economically marked bodies are transformed when through conscious agency we dare to look again.

Bierrenbach's performatic technology relies on this seductive promise of mutual transformation, where both artist and spectators come together in the temporality of the event's unfolding. Here is where the social character of her performative practice joins the ethical, as it works within the "public space of appearance."34 The installation thus presents an aesthetics of the subject-in-the-making as an alternative to identity politics, usually based on the idea of a collective essence. Instead, the installation provokes a solidarity that cannot rely on difference, but is predicated on indifference with respect to the properties of the subjects' singularities.35 And here is when we return to the artists' face as a tactical staging of what I mean by a singularity in indifference. Her face is the face of "the other;" it stands for the graph in "whatever face" where "human nature continually passes into existence."36 The installation highlights inessential and performative singularities as extensions of each other's existence. Cris Bierrenbach offers her transforming face as a lovable singularity to return "the self" and "the other" asneither universal nor essential, but as intelligible and communicative singularities, subjects-in-alterity, constituted in otherness and through desire.

Through the Looking Glass enacts subjective resolution through the positing of love and permanent irresolution as viable subject positions. In this way it operates against normative projections of sexual, racial and class difference that deny the constitutive alterity and exteriority of others and of the image. It insists in productive and asymmetrical looking: a seeing seen that re-inscribes the other as the locus for loving identifications. This "revisionist look" is an indifferent look, as it lacks self-interest and it does not seek to re-establish difference, irony, or looks with disdain; instead, it takes into account the necessity of every subject to be seen in order to "be." This indifferent look is a willful act, interested in seeing the other in-difference, "as such;" it is thus actively looking to love.37

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Cynthia Bodenhorst Paredes is an Ecuadorian critic, curator, and video artist whose work has been presented in conferences and exhibitions in Latin America and the U.S. She is completing a graduate program in Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she is currently doing research on art, public space, and contemporary forms of sociality. Her interests and critical practice focus on Latin American art, new media, and performance theory.