The course leader for the MA Contemporary Art and Professional Practice, and Art Design and the Book, presents the outcomes from her current research at the Minories Galleries, in Colchester. The exhibition runs until the 16/07/14.
Cinzia Cremona’s installation – The Other Person (2009) – consists of a duvet and a pillow that are displayed in a dark room. It is one of the first pieces the spectator encounters. In an almost sculptural fashion, the disposition of the two objects, missing the wooden frame and the mattress, reminded me of a place where someone had just slept. The woollen fabric reveals the form of the former sleeper, yet there is no one there.
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Cinzia Cremona, Before You Now, (2013)
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The made up bed no longer appears as a mark left by someone else, but almost as an invitation to share the experience with the persona acting in the piece. This process of emancipation – from lucid viewer to active participant of the work (Rancière, 2009) – only happened in my mind as the gesture that formed the folds of the bed sheet left me dubious: in lying on the floor, I could disturb the piece.
Nevertheless, staying within this confine environment and chiaroscuro created by the photons coming out of the television screens, I turned around to see the two other filmed performances by Cinzia. Slightly different is their disposal; none of these pieces featured a second apparent component other than the videos themselves, each of them immersed in their own acoustic world. I picked up the headphones and dived into a very different encounter.
Before You Now (2013) challenged my apprehension of the act of performing presented in the piece. Even though the direct question alluded by the artist draw upon notions of identity and visual reality, another process occurs whilst undergoing the conversation. In a similar way that Bertolt Brecht encountered the performance of Mei Lei in 1935 and discovered what he later described as the Estrangement Effect. In this context ‘the . . . performer does not act as if, in addition to the three walls around him there were also a fourth wall. He makes it clear that he knows he is being looked at. . . . The audience forfeits the illusion of being unseen spectators at an event, which is really taking place.’ (Brecht 1961: 130) Even if my experience was restricted by the use of the camera, my ‘dialogue’ acquired veracity the more Cinzia questioned my role as a viewer. And the fourth wall, the glass of the television screen, had been dropped between the artist and me.
The longer I stayed, the dark room progressively became a layering of experiences: as an active viewer, while I remained listening to a particular video, I could decide to break up my gaze to look at another piece. This dystopian effect emphasized the last confrontation of the show. In Are You Talking to Me? (2011), a conflict zone appears between two distinctive selves apparently belonging to the same person. Filmed from two vantage points, the screen is divided in two parts both featuring the artist who seems to be sitting in front of a computer screen. The noisy image and grainy sound are reminiscent of the lack of quality of a ‘poor image’ (Steyerl, 2009) often used in contemporary digital culture. Here in this particular work, the conversation no longer happens as an interaction between performer and viewer but between those two distinctive personas created by the artist.
The exhibition left me with a bewildered feeling. Even if I am familiar with the screen-based life, which takes over our daily activities, I still sensed one of the question asserted by Cinzia if whether or not I was within or outside the screen. Façade or true character, the constant dichotomy of the works challenged my virtual reality.
Bibliography:
Brecht, Bertolt and Bentley, Eric., "On Chinese Acting" in The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1961)
Rancière, Jacques., "The Emancipated Spectator" in The Emancipated Spectator, London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2009.
Steyerl, Hito., "The Poor Image" in e-flux journal, no. 10, November 2009.
