Opaque projections

Ulf Rollof, Katarina Weslien, and Krzysztof Wodiczko@ICA@MECA

By Chris Thompson

“BACK-UP,” detail from the installation by Katarina Weslien, 2001.

It has all the markings of a good metaphor: at the end of a long, dark hallway, you’re met by a thick, heavy black curtain that dares you to part it and enter what beckons behind it. Do you step through it? Take the road less traveled, and all the clichés that come with it? How unsettling could it be? It’s only art.

Standing on the reality side of the curtain, where it still means something to compare art with life, a series of strange sounds seep out from in there. Sometimes inaudibly and sometimes so loud you can hear them from the gallery entrance. A dragging digital voice stutters, seemingly about to lead into a pulse of techno. But as soon as the sound becomes familiar enough to make a guess at what comes next, it changes into something else. A long quiet spell is disrupted by shrill and disturbing calls for “MA-MA! MA-MA!” as if from a bird engineered to speak with a human voicebox.

We’re still outside. Several black-and-white reproductions of hands performing shadow-puppetry, printed directly onto the hallway wall, form a line leading right up to the edge of the netherspace on the other side. What they represent — ordinary hands being transformed into strange hookbilled birds, apelike profiles, and fang-toothed goblins animated by firelight — conjures up a nighttime storyteller’s world. We remember huddling in the dark, wired on that childhood cocktail of sugar and adrenaline, telling and hearing stories about the surrounding ghosts that you hope don’t dare to enter the flashlight’s perimeter.

But we’re adults.

The images on the wall seem to allow us to say this to ourselves. They’re diagrams, after all, providing not enchantment but its opposite: explanation, illustration, showing exactly how these monsters are made, plainly in black and white. But as we move past them to pull back a corner of the curtain, the line of monsters seem now to line up behind us. Maybe that’s what it means to achieve adulthood: the ghosts and demons live inside our heads now.

Katarina Weslien gave her installation the title “Back-up,” a phrase that calls to mind a number of possible meanings that compound each other. To be “back-up” is to lie prone, exposed and vulnerable. To “back-up” is to stop and step back, as if to reverse direction, return to a place we’ve been, and revise a mistake. Another shade of this connotation is retreat, to back-up in the face of a perceived threat. And finally, back-up is overflow resulting from an excess that is more than a system can bear.

Toni Morrison has written about the annual flooding of the Mississippi river as an act of what she calls “rememory,” the river remembering itself, calling forth its past into life in the present. “Back-up” seems to be open to all of these possible readings. But the notion of overflow may be among the most important to Weslien’s piece, which coheres around the exploration of memory, what it is and how it works.

She says: “The past lies buried within the present. What are the obstacles to memory and how do we know what we know? How is memory stored and retrieved? What form does the past take in constructing the present?”

It is quite often the case that artists’ explorations of memory deaden rather than enrich our experience of their work. This is because the bulk of such explorations deal not so much with memory as with nostalgia, focusing upon experiences that are decidedly those of the artist her- or himself. Such works make maps of personal and private worlds in which we as spectators seem to be there only as necessary participants in its therapeutic completion.

In Weslien’s work we find something very different. The video, projected on a scrim stretched tight across the columns in the gallery, consists of footage she shot on a return visit to her native Sweden. Behind the scrim can be seen a series of strange architectural vitrines that she has constructed, full of range of objects she has collected and sealed inside them, at various stages of decay. Flat square panes of glass, and empty glass bottles that she had specially made, are mounted to two of the back walls. A timed slide projector beams images out across and through all these surfaces. The components of the piece have their origin in her own experience, to be sure. But the effect of all of the currents they put into play moves our experience across the threshold of nostalgia, into a more dynamic environment where the workings of the experience of memory itself can be examined.

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Tijuana Projection” navigates similar thematic terrain, but on a much more politicized way; also using video projection, but on a much more monumental scale. The ICA exhibit is actually a recording of a live performance in which recorded testimonies from six Mexican women were projected onto the globe-like exterior of El Centro Cultural de Tijuana for a large public audience. Tijuana today is the center of a string of factories that have been built in recent years by multinational corporations in order to take advantage of the cheaper Mexican labor force. Ninety percent of the labor force consists of women from throughout Mexico. “This presence,” Wodiczko explains, “whose force is so central to the social economy, usually remains hidden from view, as does their testimony.”

“Tijuana Projection” makes these testimonies quite literally unavoidable. Writ large across the front of the center of Tijuana’s cultural community, the faces of these six women speak of the trials that they must face with the radical transformations of Mexican society in the global economy. It happened that it rained on the night that this piece was shown. At one point in the recording, as the spectators milled about under umbrellas, the projected woman spoke about the sexual abuse of her friend. She began to cry. The sudden connection between her tears and the rain falling from above brings home the impact of Wodiczko’s work. We are able to live as we do because of the lives lived by these women, because we are insulated from having to hear them tell us about what exactly that entails. The title of the piece itself, “Tijuana Projection,” plays upon this projection of American illusions and fears about the world lying just south of the border.

Ulf Rollof’s work explores the relationships between borders of a different kind. His strange human-animal-vegetable hybrids operate like the watercolor counterparts to the soundtrack of Weslien’s “Back-up.” Rollof uses watercolor’s fluid properties to explore the blurry boundaries between a range of living forms, human, animal, and vegetable. Each image seems to cycle through every season’s colors, marking the unfolding of time, change, and flow between life-forms.

This concern is reflected in Rollof’s online display. It offers users the opportunity to explore Rollof’s entire body of work to date. The site provides multiple navigational tools in order to do this, but perhaps the most fascinating is a kind of timeline-map Rollof has invented. It doesn’t conform to real-life geography at all, but rather re-shapes the world map in terms of his own life, experiences, and work. The map is oriented around three trails, one for Rollof’s life, another for world events significant to it, and a third for the sequence of his works — which draw from both other trails. As the mouse moves across the map, so do a pair of crosshairs that, every time they encounter a significant node on any of the three trails, call up an icon that can be clicked for elaboration.

This map clinches what exactly it is that, for all their differences, these three artists share in common. This is the act of cultural cartography itself: making maps that are sufficiently complex to engage the political and ethical issues these artists address, and sufficiently seductive to keep us engaging with them after we step out from behind the curtain.

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art and can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com