Mixing mediums "The Disembodied Spirit" at Bowdoin College BY CHRIS THOMPSON

In introducing the aims behind the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s current exhibition "The Disembodied Spirit," curator Alison Ferris explains that the appearance of ghosts in the world often means "that some aspect of life, for better or worse, has shifted or been transformed; the ghosts in contemporary art are beckoning and cajoling us, with some urgency, to look more closely at the current state of human affairs."

Two decades ago, German artist Joseph Beuys, whose work is included in this exhibition, was beckoned by an interviewer to go on record to describe his own paranormal encounters. He described a recurring visitation by a figure who was "like a stranger, an angel. The same figure often came later on."

Was it an immaterial figure, the interviewer wanted to know? "Yes, but it was just as visible and real as you are sitting here."

And did it ever explain who or what it was? "No," Beuys answered, "it just made itself recognizable. Once very pale, almost not there at all, a translucent being. And another time completely black from top to toe, but with an almost identical message. I have to deal with it constantly, every day."

An utterly unorthodox and refreshingly risky exhibition, "Disembodied Spirit" uses a thoroughly researched inquiry into the history of 19th-century spirit photography to craft a series of thematic points of entry into considerations of modern and contemporary artists like Beuys and many others whose works make use of a range of forms of "disembodiment." These include everything from images of ghosts and angels to real and metaphorical "visitations," from documentary images of ectoplasm to instances of telepathic communication and, as with the works of both Beuys and Bruce Nauman, artful faux levitation.

The Spiritualists and those in their orbit were quick to glimpse the possibilities that the new medium of photography posed for exploring (and, often, in true American huckster style, peddling) the otherworldly realms that lay on the yonder side of normal experience. In the first of the show’s several galleries, one stretch of wall shows a photographic series documenting the phenomenon of ectoplasm, also known as "teleplasm," the strange white viscous discharge that mediums spontaneously produced, usually painfully, from their body’s orifices during their work with the spirits.

Conveniently, the camera was the only way that this substance could be recorded, since exposure to light caused its instant disintegration. In one of the images, a frothy flow issues forth from a stocky woman’s mouth, the image of a spectral face hovering on its gooey surface. In another frame, the ectoplasm attached to her face looks something like a wad of hardened plaster, now bearing the image of a vengeful soul. On the wall opposite the ectoplasm studies hang two photographic portraits by Ann Hamilton, both from a series she made with a tiny photographic apparatus she held in her mouth. When she opened it for a split second, she produced a photographic negative, each showing an ethereal face surrounded by darkness.

Taken together, the 19th-century spirit photographs, Hamilton’s portraits, and the series by John Baldessari, "Strobe Series/Futurist: Girl with Flowers Falling From Mouth (for Botticelli)," cohere around a theme of orality and image-making that seems to have been devised explicitly in order to deal with these particular images. In the case of this constellation of works, the mouth becomes a site of supernatural encounter, marking the point where the otherworldly is translated into forms that become intelligible to the this-worldly.

Always just one step ahead of the chaotic play of histories it draws from, "Disembodied Spirit" succeeds precisely because its organization has grown out of such responsiveness to the visual and conceptual dynamism of the works themselves. Its sensitive curatorial strategy even includes spatial puns, as with the placement of Leighton Pierce’s digital video "The Back Steps," the text plate for which is hung next to the back staircase leading down to the final gallery.

This shuttling between the here and the there that happens in the now is borne out in Hamilton’s own suggestion that the photographic enterprise entails capturing a trace of the encounter with the other. Two galleries later, this encounter recurs when, in his "Poltergeist" project, Mike Kelley enlists the painful phenomenon of ectoplasm-production as a metaphor for the physical and psychical changes, the forms of self-estrangement and self-haunting, that characterize adolescence. As his work makes clear, what comes to take shape in the exchanges between the works and us as their interlocutors is a testament to the inevitability that any encounter with the paranormal must be aestheticized in order to be represented.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida once noted that what prevents skeptics of telepathy from taking it seriously is their inability to practice it. Until the day comes when telepathy is democratized, in order to make public our private encounters with ghosts, spirits, and angels, we must trade our experiences in images, tales, or testimonies. These acts will always require the use of forms of representation — image-making techniques and technologies and the works of art that they produce, narrative and dramatic strategies and the fictions and performances that they enable.

Just this past summer, the blessed Virgin Mary went to great trouble to stage a public haunting in the window of a Milton Hospital in Massachusetts, and the best that the hospital’s faithless spokesperson could come up with was that her visage owed to the accidental creation of condensation between two panes of glass caused by a broken seal on the window. You couldn’t choose a more explosive explanation; Bible fans know full well that broken seals mean but one thing: half an hour’s silence at first, perhaps, but then it’s all angels, trumpets, revelation, and judgment.

The audience in Boston was ready. Thousands flocked to the hospital’s parking lot. Some interpreted Mary’s presentation, heralded by the lesser-known appearance of a spectral cross on one of the hospital’s chimneys, as an anti-abortion statement. Others read it as a call to pray for an end to war. In an Archdiocese deteriorated by scandal, many heard in it an urge to stay strong and keep the faith. Most interestingly, everyone seemed to offer visual analyses, some quite sophisticated: "It uses a sort of chiaroscuro approach," one woman explained, "so you see Our Lady in lights and shadows . . ."

Nevertheless, some were disheartened by the image’s fuzzy resolution — the inevitable danger accompanying the Virgin’s choice to keep it real and to go low-tech to reach the masses. "I really was, like, baffled," one woman admitted, "like, oh, I came here, I waited all . . . for this? For some reason I don’t have the impact that I expected. I prayed, regardless, just in case."

Apart from restating Pascal’s wager in a South Boston accent, her words stage a contradiction that is essential to the phenomenology of the visitation, and integral to the existential and aesthetic charge of "Disembodied Spirit": It is the very nature of the supernatural that it cannot be fully revealed by the forms offered by the natural world, nor can it make itself fully intelligible to the perceiving human subject. And yet the uncanny power of the paranormal and its visual culture comes out of the heart of this contradiction. As Ferris reminds us, once we are "lured into the representation of the ghostly, we find ourselves engaging with memories, stories, histories that, while they may not necessarily add up, can not easily be forgotten."

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"The Disembodied Spirit" is at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, in Brunswick, through Dec. 7. On Oct. 30, art and media historian Tom Gunning will give a talk, "Ghosts, Apparitions, and Visual Illusions," at 7:30 p.m., in Kresge Auditorium of the Bowdoin College Visual Arts Center. Call (207) 725-3725.