I
To start with, an intense image: a yellow riverboat (christened “The Joyce”) sails the Lagan River in Belfast, passing beneath a bridge, turning majestically towards a group of people crowded together on one bank, waiting. When “The Joyce” comes into view, a tune issues from the boat’s sirens, normally used for navigating rivers and seas, for giving signals and broadcasting songs. This is the same clarion call that closes the final funeral scene in Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958). Susan Philipsz’s Victory (2001) is at once a sound intervention and an ephemeral event destined to remain in the memory. The fleeting instant of the collective coming together as a community and an acoustic reinterpretation (a type of recollection) of an adventure film that we have all seen at some point in our lives, especially during childhood. Faithful to the film, the quality of the sound is similar to that of trumpets or Viking horns. Victory is a song of lamentation—a funereal tonality, on this occasion exempt of narrative, whose yearning becomes a collective celebration. Songs of lamentation mourn the disappearance of a loved one and restore the memory of a vital moment that has faded in time. In a similar way, strategies of evocation are recurrent, repeating and reinventing a past event that the subject needs to fix by anchoring it in the present. Through a tune, a poem, a rite the past suddenly becomes present to us, albeit in thousands of images and broken fragments; ruins of a state of things restore it symbolically. This is not the first time—nor will it be the last—that the artist has employed evocation for poetic ends, going over her personal and biographical world until she reaches and touches upon an enlarged collective memory.
In “Mourning and melancholia”, Sigmund Freud describes the labour of mourning working in conjunction with that of melancholy.[1] Both partake of an equivalence. Mourning is the reaction to the loss of a loved person or of an abstraction that stands in for him/her. As in mourning, melancholy arises from the loss of the loved object. That object might have died, or may have simply faded as an object of love. The difference is that, in mourning identification with what is lost is transitory and the libido is left free to seek other objects or to return to the self, while in melancholy the loss is chronic, becoming depression; since the loss—often of the subconscious order—is not clear to the subject. As Julia Kristeva has written, the radiation to which the melancholic subject is submitted is that of a “black sun”, whose rays transfix him/her in unproductiveness and total inhibition.[2] It is here that the female voice opens the way to reconsidering an ensemble of subjective operations: projection, negation and rejection, fantasies, longing and loss, melancholy and other “maladies of the soul” (to use Kristeva’s expression).
In Philipsz work, mourning and melancholy act in close proximity with commemoration and homage. In Returning (2004), a silent 16mm film, the camera observes pedestrians passing in front of the monument to the co-founder of the German Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht, in the Tiergarten, Berlin. Autumn bathes the scene in a golden light. Many of the passers-by pause to read the inscription on the monument and then continue on their way. The actions of the passers-by might also be symptomatic of a Benjaminian melancholic gaze, which maintains that only because the past is dead we are able to read it and understand it. But, while melancholy is seen as unproductive, mourning becomes a productive force, able to restore the past. In fact, mourning and homage might share another fundamental principle: both are rooted in the essence of socialism, in its history and aesthetic visual imaginary.
But the labour of mourning is one of memory and of marking loss. This may be perceived explicitly in The Dead (2000) wherein the short story of the same name written by James Joyce in 1906–07— and later immortalised in the well-known film by John Huston, posthumously released in 1987—is the trigger for introspection into the depths of inner thought. The Lass of Aughrim, the song heard by Gretta Conroy (the female protagonist played by Angelica Huston), which brings back to her the loss of the love of her youth, is sung by Philipsz a capella. In the film, the song catapults Gretta back through time in a dreamlike state under the attentive gaze of her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann).
Philipsz’ installation is a completely black 35mm projection with the song repeated over and over again at regular intervals. The silence between Philipsz’s renderings of the song and her breathing become an invisible presence that imposes itself on the listener, translating the real time of the recording into the physical space, showing the passage of empty time. This interval recalls the scene on the stairway between Gretta and Gabriel, when Huston pauses for the complete duration of the song that is heard, reframing the empty space between the two characters. Both the Irish director and the artist invite us to experience duration.
But Philipsz’s more recent version of The Dead can also be seen as an adaptation of the final sequence of Huston’s film, with the snow falling from the night sky directly onto the camera lens and Gabriel’s oscillating thoughts on mortality and on life’s ephemeral nature. With Philipsz, as the 35mm film plays through its loop, white specks appear like flashes of memory. These white marks increase with the deterioration of the film and sound, to become an evocation of Huston’s sky with its flurry of snowflakes, in a beautiful metaphor of mortality. It is enough to think of the final moment when the screen is completely white, covered in snow, to realise that there is no return. But besides, the blind image, the projection acts as an opaque screen to which one returns time and again: an empty space to fill with personal memories, or simply to recall some of the most emotive scenes of Huston’s film.
Philipsz’s installation, The Dead, simultaneously provides us with a split between the film sound and the image. This conflict, produced by the uneasy coexistence of image and sound in the cinematographic medium, here undergoes a radical questioning of their ontological conditions. This separation between what is seen and what is heard is one of the installation’s central elements, as in Huston’s scene on the stairway where the regimes of what is visible and what is audible remain disassociated and split.
On the one hand, there is blindness as a metaphor of vision, or the reduction of the image to its degree zero, total darkness: the blindness of the observer. On the other hand, there is Philipsz’s voice as a break of the opacity of the darkened room, reconciling the spectator with him/herself in a hall of mirrors, amidst narrative and filmic reverberations. In this space, recollection is an acute exercise for introspection. Solitude and the passing of time are both objects of reflection and a physical experience. In the darkness of the cinema, one nevertheless feels authorised to make all possible projections, all identifications.
The presentation of The Dead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, in 2001, had a special resonance, as this was Joyce’s city, and it evoked the writer’s connections with the cinema and his passion for music. Similarly, Philipsz has suggested the possibility of this work being projected in a commercial cinema, inserted amongst the commercials and trailers that precede the feature film, in a similar way to the first screening of the work The Dream of a Thing/El sueño de una cosa (2001) by Philippe Parreno. Introduced unexpectedly at a moment of group reception, the blind image and the phantasmal soundtrack can only produce a hole in the spectator’s consciousness.
The black projection screen works here as a metaphor for a blank page; an incursion into the art of storytelling. The text (the song) remains on an imaginary level and must be rewritten every time, like an infinite narration without beginning or end, like a children’s story whose message becomes more solid each time it is told and whose raison d’être resides in its repetition. The text (the lyric, the story) changes form each time it is enunciated, creating a blank, silent space to be filled with new stories and memories. This art of storytelling illuminates the blank spaces for the construction of new subjectivities. They are materialised through new narrations.
II
Repetition—singing over and over again, listening and hearing one’s own voice—has an effect that, in psychoanalysis, is related to the acquisition of subjectivity. With the song’s repetition, we identify with the voice and with the imaginary body tied to that voice. It is through repetition that the child (in lullabies and in fairy tales) loses his/her fear of the outside and becomes an autonomous subject. This is the true purpose of the loop in Philipsz’s work. The loop is a mechanism that, in its infinitude, becomes an emitter of the eternal return, penetrating consciousness though the unhurried, cyclical and soothing effect of the sound. The loop is a technique of repetition, at once asserting identity and difference. Every time that a song is sung repeatedly, it asserts itself; but at the same time something different emerges. Repetition thus becomes an allegory for alterity. Its ontology—its method and technique—lies in introducing the object (the song, the ballad) to an endless process of re-writing, re-reading and re-singing. As the artist herself says, “repetition for me is a way of extending a form into another context where it can be used for different purposes, like Radiohead being sung a capella by an artist and then being installed in a bus station. It can also be a way of measuring very delicate differences between similar forms, as when I have re-installed the same works in different contexts, which can subtly change its meaning each time.”[3]
The fact that Philipsz always starts out from already existing songs, moulded to her own personality, strengthens this condition of repetition as a strategy that is close to appropriationism. In psychic terms, such appropriation may be understood not as a form of colonialism, but instead as a means of liberating the other to be him/herself. Within phenomenological and psychoanalytical parameters, appropriation also opposes the fetishism of attempts to have or to possess. In its turn, this ‘repetition’, this alterity, operates in tandem with other process of identification.
For example, when in The Dead she adopts the first person singular, taking the position of the singer, which takes us back to the origin of the Irish token song The Lass of Aughrim, in which a woman’s voice laments her abandonment by her lover after she has become pregnant, Philipsz is reminding us of the position of Gretta in The Dead.[4] On hearing a song, and identifying with the singer, we also identify with an imaginary group of listeners, with an absent community. Identification is a movement that proceeds from the inside outwards, while appropriation acts in the opposite direction, from the outside inwards. Both function as narrative methods of approaching what is hidden, as the unveiling of the self. What is at stake here is a question of identity. If there is a need for identification, it is because there is no a priori identity. As Chantal Mouffe has put it, “the history of the subject is the history of his/her identifications and there is no concealed identity to be rescued beyond the latter.”[5]
In the case of the female condition, as has been emphasised by different feminist theories of representation, this process of identifications over time with other women acquires a sense of radical alterity. In them are encountered mechanisms of unconscious defence through which the subject places herself in the place of the Other in a game of mirror reflections. An example of these psychic processes, between the singular and the group, between “one” woman and “many” women, can be found in the
recent work From the Beginning (2007), where one of the songs reinterpreted is The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, composed by John Cage in 1942, with words chosen from a longer passage in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
Now evencalm lay sleeping; night
Isobel
Sister Isobel
Saintette Isabelle
Madame Isa
Veuve La belle
Are these the names of one and the same female multiplicity? Are they mechanisms for naming the alterity of the female? In The Dead this projection of one woman onto another coexists with the radical difference that accompanies an identification of the male figure with the woman, or of the female’s identification, via the voice, and not via her image as one would expect. This, the voice, is of the order of the phenomenon, or the phenomenological. In her book The Acoustic Mirror, the theoretician Kaja Silverman explains the power of naming through the materiality and physicality of the voice as something essential for the constitution of the subject. The voice has the faculty of joining names to things and of bringing to us the “body” of the speaker. In docudramas, films and documentaries the main distinction arises from whether the voice is male or female. In cinema, the voice-over normally represents a disembodied authority (predominantly male) that speaks from above and imposes itself on the narrative image. For Silverman, too little attention has been paid to the fact that sexual difference is an effect of the dominant sound regime in the cinema and not only the so-called ‘scopic regime’, and that the female voice can be seen as an element that distorts the celebrated representations and functions of the female body as object of male desire.
As in a film where the image and the sound have split apart, the soundtrack in Philipsz’s The Dead, is a voice-over of the narrator, a female voice that produces a difference in the previous logocentric orders. A voice which enables the male listener to identify with, but not to possess, the woman’s body, a maternal voice. The scopic regime of the gaze, which has been present in the cinema since its origins, depends on particular notions of gender: the specularisation of the body of the woman, the identification of the man with this very specularity. In this respect, the loss of the object that we alluded to above would be associated with the female subject as a symptom of the male condition. In the case of Philipsz, the negation of the image of the woman within the very field of visuality established by the cinema is, at the very least, an act of radical questioning. Projections and fantasies are common in this phase of libidinal reciprocity. Here, the sense of “projecting” is as literal as it is symbolic. How does this idea of projection function within the artist’s work? How can that which is emitted outwards rebound on the veil of a black screen and return to the depths of consciousness? For Silverman, “watching a film is a constant process of projection and introjection (…) Film theory has noted that introjection plays a vital role in determining the viewer’s relation to the diegesis, since ‘secondary’ identification is effected in large part through the incorporation of character representations. Those representations are taken into the self, and provide the basis for a momentary subjectivity.”[6] Projecting the voice in space is similar to projecting a moving image in the cinema. Indeed, the sculptural quality of sound has even more of the capacity to encompasses and fill an empty space, measuring it, appropriating it, symbolizing a provisional possession. It is not in vain that the devices for transmitting sound become an integral part of Philipsz’s installations (trumpet-like loudspeakers in Wild is the Wind [2002], or the physicality of the 35mm projector in The Dead as an inescapable presence, with its whirring noise incorporated as an associated sound). In this context, projection is simultaneously a rhetorical trope, a mechanism of emission and a simile of the imagination working in the symbolic space of dreams and longings, as well as in the physical space reached by the sound. Those prominent objects are the emissaries of the voice, of the speaking body; they are the vehicles whereby the voice assumes a physical dimension. Can they, or should they, also be interpreted and conceptualized within this logic of male and/or female differences?
With respect to the subjectivising condition of loss for the subject, Silverman has written that “Cinematic projection consequently provides an invaluable metaphor for conceptualizing the involuntary nature of the sexually differentiating projections (…) They are the effect of a constantly renewed Oedipal structuration, which resituates the loss of the object at the level of the female anatomy, thereby restoring to the little boy an imaginary wholeness. This externalising displacement is further secured through the forced identification of woman with lack.”[7] But the break with the visual field does not end here, instead in a subtle way The Dead directs attention to an invisible enunciator, to the fact that the black film, like a dark mirror, and its spectators are addressed by an unseen Other. The female subject is constructed through identification with dispossession and loss, while the male, on the contrary, is constituted through his fixation on the phallus. This identification could be threatened by the disappearance of the object in question. It is almost impossible for a self-aware (male) subject who is excluded from authoritarian vision, discourse and listening to sustain a pleasurable relationship with the symbolic order. These connections with loss orchestrate a large part of film theory while at the same time giving form to the
representations of the woman in the state of lack. The discursive formation that aligns the body of the woman with the male gaze situates her on one side of vision, and him on the side of the spectacle. In an earlier work, Strip Tease (1998), the artist explicitly deals with this condition of gender representation, creating a live situation with a typical cabaret atmosphere, a “Lynchian” soundtrack and a glamorous scenario of glitter and spotlights. However, the strip tease never takes place; there is no stripper, only a delay of and a play with male expectations of scopic pleasure. Here is another review of the empty space of representation to be completed by the subjectivity of the observer, whether male or female.
III
Female voices. Maternal voices. Spectral voices. Sounds of the past reappear again and again and, in the absence/presence of the body, refer us to memories, recollections, but also to spirits, ghosts, specters—literary figures of disembodiment and transfiguration. Spectrality works in this context as a metaphor that reconciles the past with its spirits because, as Jacques Derrida would write, this being-with specters’ is also a politics of memory, of inheritance and of generations.[8]
Set up as a site-specific installation in the cemetery of the Berlin-Mitte, Follow me (2006) once again introduces this component of memory and gazing at the past. The song in question, again interpreted a capella, is Happenings Ten Years Time Ago, the first single by the Yardbirds featuring the future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. The song speaks of reality and illusion, and the disembodied voice might suggest spectral figures caught in time.
Happenings ten years time ago,
Situations we really know,
But the knowing is in the mind,
Sinking deep into the whirl of time.
Sinking deep into the whirl of time.
Walking in the room I see,
Things that mean a lot to me.
Why they do I never know,
Memories don’t strike me so.
Memories don’t strike me so.
Following the immaterial line of all Philipsz’s work, Follow me intervenes acoustically to mix an existing space with its own history, which it must confront. The place is the cemetery of Alter Garnisonfriedhof in Berlin. With the date ‘1722’ inscribed at its entrance, this is the resting place of an estimated 5,000 people, including mass burials of victims of the Second World War. Walking through the place, one cannot abstract oneself from its strong influence; instead, the imagination wanders in the midst of an atmosphere of peace, beauty and tranquility. In a similar way to Returning, this cartography of mourning, set amongst the heartfelt monuments of Berlin-Mitte and of the Tiergarten, gives shape to an ideological and political map—and at the same time a sentimental and personal one—of the city where the artist lives, symbolically indicating two places charged with history and also partaking of an homage and a tribute. In this respect, Returning and Follow me, amongst other works, possess characteristics attributable to the function of memorials (preserving memory and restoring the past) but, thanks to their light, modest and anti-monumental form, they are closer to the genre of the private monument, which sutures a debt pending between the subject and the lost object by way of a personal gesture.
The voice, as a phenomenon, is the trace of a presence, a sign of the sensible, of existence. The corporality of a specter is not equal to its ghostly image. Derrida says that once the spirit comes to be distinguished from the specter, the spirit acquires form and is incarnated as spirit in the specter. Or, alluding to Marx, the specter is the paradoxical incorporation of the future body, a phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit, since it is not known whether it is alive or dead, or if it is undead. Spectrality, already present at the start of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, “a specter is haunting Europe,” is also a phenomenon of repetition, since a specter is always a (re)appearance.[9] Its comings and goings cannot be controlled because it always begins by coming back, returning, like the spirit (and the future figure) of the cofounder of the Communist Party of Germany.
Derrida also links the appearance of the specter with the labour of mourning since this work means “to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead.”[10] His Specters of Marx refers to those that remain in a state of wakefulness, those that guard a corpse or a semi-corpse, but above all they are those that hold an endless conversation with other spirits and other voices throughout time and history; for example, those of Trotsky, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Liebknecht.
IV
Follow Me introduces a significant acoustic technique in the effect that it produces: echoes and reverberations, as well as overlapping voices. The echo and the reverberations of the sound are like the multiple and ungraspable reflections of a constantly moving mirror. Its qualities are those of a deferred representation, faithful and yet ungraspable. The echo is an effect of delay in space and time, a message that is repeated and falls silent; the nervous effect of a form projected in space-time.[11] The echo is a sign that seems the same in its repetition, and is at once something different, the expression of something still alive or already extinguished, between life and non-life. In this respect the echo resembles the specter, the absent presence of a loss, invisibility that somehow manifests itself; it is of the phenomenological order, undeniable in its existence. Throughout Susan Philipsz’s work, we find this spectral condition of the echo, and also of the reflection. In the installation made on the occasion of the Münster Skulptur Projekt, The Lost Reflection (2007), loss and reflection once again become the basic conceptual axes around which projections of subjectivity rotate. Based on the recollection of a song learnt at school—the famous Barcarole from the opera The Tales of Hoffmann by the composer Jacques Offenbach, based on several stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, who is both hero and male alter-ego in this opera—Philipsz adapts the sung passage to the characteristics of a small lake in the German city. In 1951, the mercurial opera was also made into a phantasmagoric filmed adaptation by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressgurger (working as The Archers). Hoffmann (a poet) dreams and fantasises about the story of three women (a robotic doll, a greedy Venetian courtesan, and an aspiring opera singer who sings herself to Death), whom he loves and loses. In one of these tales, “The Tale of Giulietta”, the namesake steals Hoffmann’s reflection in an enchanted mirror, thus capturing his soul; meanwhile Giulietta’s reflection takes on life and begins to sing in her embodied form. Philipsz starts from this scene, set in a gondola coursing along a Venetian canal, translating her personal adaptation to a small lake in Münster, and on separate tracks recording both the part sung by Giulietta and that sung by her reflection. They call to each other from opposite banks of the lake, endlessly losing themselves in a game of mirrors, where only the voices remain and where their own images appear to have vanished into the water. Here we encounter a mirror that no longer reflects, but breaks up the bodies of the singers (soprano and mezzo-soprano both interpreted by Philipsz), leaving only their voices with their echoes in the wind.
The lost reflection of the installation’s title is equally that of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale, which inspired the opera by Offenbach, Das Verlorene Spiegelbild. The referential wealth of Philipsz’s work invites the spectators/viewers to formulate comparisons between successive adaptations over time: from literature to opera through cinema, up until the use of sound and sculptural installation in the field of contemporary art.
Together with repetition, the question of adaptation is vital, since any adaptation (in literature, music, theatre or cinema) supposes a re-interpretation subjected not only to the subjectivity of the author but also to the characteristics of the medium. We could speak here of re-enactments or performances, or simply of a performative interpretation, that is, an interpretation that transforms what is interpreted and returns it to the world as something that maintains a link with a past element but that now, in its renovated form, appears as something unrecognisable to us, or simply new. The artist seems to want to contribute to this mirror-world where everything resembles itself and is different at the same time, where identity and difference mutually distance themselves in an infinite process.
As in her adaptation of one of the masterpieces of the history of rock, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) by David Bowie, which is sung in its totality by Philipsz a capella, theme after theme, without instrumental accompaniment, until it generates complete estrangement from the well-known songs of the original record which become totally unrecognisable. Ziggy Stardust (Pork Salad Press, 2004) is a CD with the eleven songs of Bowie’s record in versions by Philipsz, where even the original cover of the Glam-rock Extraterrestrial coming (in the record cover, Bowie is already on Earth…) down to Earth in a nocturnal London street is interpreted. It is no accident that we can see this CD as another homage by the artist to a cult pop object that, when it was released in the early 1970s, became the inspiration for innumerable films, musical shows, theatrical representations, quite apart from the numerous interpretations of the real identity of Ziggy Stardust. And to Bowie’s identification with this fictitious character we should now add that of Susan Philipsz. The bisexuality of the character of Ziggy introduces an already more than explicit re-inversion of the gender orders. Here, identification easily takes place, not with, but between the different (male/female) genders. This is emblematic of another constant within Philipsz’s work—the act of repeating, adapting and creating her own versions of songs sung by male singers, such as the tormented leader of Radiohead, Thom Yorke, in songs like “Airbag” and “Pyramid Song”.
The Lost Reflection, with its original source in opera, and Ziggy Stardust (in Philipsz’s CD version) are further related to the fictional idea of the extravagant theatrical show (present in Glam-rock romanticism, with its nostalgic gaze directed at the past; the film by Powell and Pressburger) could even be classified as Glam-rockopera), which sustains all types of identifications, gender projections and reveries of the self. Her practice not only involves treating the self as a subject, but casts subjectivity
as an effect of experimentation with the auditory phenomenological realm.
This superimposition of numerous voices and genres is already present in Wild is the Wind (2002)—whose song of the same title by Nina Simone was later adapted by Bowie himself—which became the origin of a sound installation at the Wind Comb sculptural ensemble in San Sebastián. The volume of the sound was set so as to make the spectator draw closer to listen in more detail. “With my work I’m trying to bring an audience back to their environment, not the opposite. What I’m trying to do is make [you] more aware of the place you’re in while also heightening your own sense of self. So the siting of this work is very important, the site becomes the visual element.”[12]
Being conscious of the self in the setting this is the greatest effect of Susan Philipsz’s work. The emotional and psychological properties of sound can be a mechanism for the individual becoming conscious of him/herself. Besides being an art of repetition and adaptation, Susan Philipsz’s art is thus an art of perception and reception: the precise moment when the listener becomes aware of his/her own existence and becomes conscious of him/herself. By reinterpreting a song, adapting it, creating her own version of it, repeating it, a difference blossoms, a distinction and a ponderous gap that may arise even within the universality of the most communitarian of calls to action: The Internationale.[13]
(Translated from the Spanish by Robert Curwen)
NOTES
1 See Freud, S. 2005. ‘Mourning and melancholia’ in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. London: Penguin
Books, pp. 201–218.
2 See Kristeva, J. 1989. Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.
3 See Philipsz, S. 2007. Skulptur Projekte Münster 07. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walter König, pp.104–113.
4 A “token song” is a ballad in which an object is divided in two by two lovers, for example a ring or a necklace, as a proof of their eternal love.
5 Mouffe, C. 1993. The Return of the Political. London/New York: Verso, p. 76.
6 Silverman, K. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 23
7 Ibid., p. 24.
8 See Derrida, J. 2994. Spectres of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York/London: Routledge.
9 Derrida, Op. cit. p. 11.
10 Derrida, Op. cit. p. 9.
11 See Andreasen S. and Larsen, L.B. 2003. ‘Inside the Echo’ in The Echo Show. Glasgow: Tramway. This is a catalogue for an exhibition in which Susan Philipsz participated.
12 Philipsz, S. 1999. Artist’s text in Resonate (exhibition catalogue) Belfast: Grassy Knoll Productions, p. 9.
13 In 2000, Philipsz created a sound installation for Manifesta3 in Ljubljiana where a single loudspeaker broadcast, at ten-minute intervals, an audio recording of her voice singing The Internationale a cappella.
