EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS: MY BODY AGAINST YOUR BODY
I4-25 May 2019, Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney.
I imagined that I was awake, while still drowsing, and I enacted to myself with tenuous shadow-shapes on the screen of my slumber the various scenes of which it deprived me but at which I had the illusion of looking on. Marcel Proust[1]
At the Paris Annual Salon of 1847, Auguste Clésinger’s Woman Bitten by a Snake, caused quite a stir, scandalising the public and critics. The marble sculpture depicted a female nude writhing in pain from a snake bite, the culprit suggestively winding its way around her wrist.[2] It was not the lascivious snake that created the scandal, nor the hint of intimated ecstasy, but rather the dimpled thigh of the curvaceous figure apparently moulded directly from the model Apollonie Sabatier. So real was the effect that Delacroix referred to it as a sculpted daguerreotype, intimating its photographic likeness and hence its indexical qualities.[3] The critic Théophile Gautier went so far as to claim that the body was not a sculpture but rather a genuine body, asserting that one can almost make out blood-filled veins under the marble surface.[4]
Gautier’s suggested corporeal qualities of marble brings us to the recent photographic work of Eugenia Raskopoulos. Like Clésinger, these images render not the body itself but its indexical representation, alluded to here in the surface of the marble, the fleeting shadows of corporeal form, and traces of the hand in written form. The history of art is littered with representations of the human body hewn from marble, a large proportion being of the female form inspired from myths and legends. Raskopoulos draws on these art historical references to photographically capture the projected bodily form and its indexical trace as shadows cast across the marble surface. Any suggestion of a body is made abstract, the mutability of the shadow stimulating a continuous sense of motion. Indeed, the shadows appear as if they are in-between, fragmented, and temporal.
This sense of in-between-ness is also present in the largely indecipherable text translated from English and scrawled onto the marble with the wax of red lipstick. The initial layer of text is written in Czech—the first language Raskopoulos heard as a child, the second layer is Greek—her mother tongue, and the third is in English—each layer forming and un-forming both meaning and memories. The fragments of individual letters merge and collide with a sense of quiet violence making nonsensical transformations that the viewer attempts to visually penetrate, looking into and through the multiple layers in a failed attempt to decipher the indecipherable. While the words are seen here in written form, sound and language are also suggested in the use of lipstick as a writing implement, the repetitive forms producing a stutter or shudder across the image surface like an echo in time. Each photograph hosts different words that poetically and nonsensically relate to the body in a form of automatic writing, positioned both physically and metaphysically in an oblique manner to the shadows. Furthermore, traces of previous image-making efforts become apparent in the remnants of lipstick colour that flow into the rivers of marble-veins forming stains reminiscent of blood.
The space of the stain is mimetic as it inscribes the body into the picture as a doubling, like sunspots on the inside of your eyelids, it is suggestive of something unseen.[5] The mimetic and mnemonic qualities of the stain also resonate in the shadows as an indicator of something that lies outside the picture frame, it both doubles and disrupts. The “black bodiless stain” recalls an artistic lineage of the shadow in modernist art epitomised in the work of Brancusi, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and others. As Man Ray stressed, “the shadow is as important as the real thing,” its presence indicating an absence of the casting object, in this case the artist’s body.[6] As Victor Stoichita also alludes, the cast shadow gains autonomy from the object that causes it, entering the realm of ambiguity it shifts from causality to resemblance.[7] Forever the other to the body, a shadow is both attached and detached, fixed and unfixed in its mutability, its temporality, and in its seductive illusory qualities. It is no wonder that the shadow has attracted artists such as the Surrealists, writers from Plato to Proust, and film directors such as Fritz Lang or Hitchcock who draw on its unconscious and illusive potential.
The shadow’s otherness resonates across Raskopoulos’ extensive artistic practice, which along with the use of language renders these works as strange, alien, and other. The sense of in-between-ness is a position of marginality, embraced by Raskopoulos as a performative and transformational act that both makes and unmakes identity. As ‘self-portraits’ these works challenge our understanding of the photographic record and its performative qualities in rendering the physical form across time and space. Time, as manifested here, appears in different temporalities. First, is the time of the shadow, cast across the marble as a performative fleeting gesture, the remnants of the figural stain rendered only in the image. Second is the multiple layers of text, handwritten in lipstick over and over again. This performative gesture connects the body in motion with the surface of the onyx marble in a different temporal mode, its stain forever marking and penetrating the surface. Third, the marble itself with its palimpsest of the written form marking one temporality while its metamorphic graph marks geological time. The tension between temporalities creates a disquieting and unsettling sense of being out of time, of a plurality that stretches the moment in an uneasy way.
This discontinuous sense of time and space is manifested also in the textual neon works. Drawing on the mutability of language Raskopoulos draws on the surrealist sensibility of wordplay that transforms meaning. Being is Plural is both a nod to Jean-Luc Nancy and the recognition of multiple sets of individual and collective states of meaning and existence. For example, one can be Australian and Greek, here and not here, an individual or member of a group, the self and also the other. This oblique wordplay is also present in Colour Only Comes in One Blood, as the reworking of a vernacular phrase manipulates meaning to reference the body and racialised difference. The handwritten phrases, that are doubled as the colour bleeds into the background, also denote bodily performativity through the written text. The neon works have their own sense of motion and temporality, one driven by electric energy that pulses through the letters bringing them to vivid life.
Intimate in their physicality and visceral sense of touch these works share a bodily, personal and sexual sense of being that is itself mutable, temporal and discontinuous. They elicit the phantom shapes of Plato’s cave or Dante’s Purgatorio in which a shadow approaches the poet to affectionately embrace him and yet the poet clasps at nothing.[8] The “shadow of the flesh” is here revealed to be an indispensable quality of the body, one that cannot be grasped. While “a body doesn’t breach its shadow,” as Hollier put it, both Breton and Dante come to realise that it is the flesh that casts a shadow as both a sign, and as a potential autonomous object, that can be rendered in the photographic image.[9] Both the shadow and language of the flesh is made palpable in Raskopoulos’ works as a visceral index of the body made visible in its photographic rendition.
[1] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (London, Wordsworth, 2006).
[2] Auguste Clésinger, Femme piquée par un serpent, 1847, marble sculpture, Musée d'Orsay.
[3] Eugene Delacroix, Journal, 7 May 1847.
[4] Theophile Gautier, “Femme piquée,” La Presse, 10 April 1847.
[5] See George Baker, “The Space of the Stain,” Grey Room 5 (Autumn, 2001): 5–37.
[6] Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 194.
[7] Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 69 (1994): 110–132.
[8] Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 45.
[9] Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates.”