Christine D’Onofrio: “Real Tears” at Deluge Contemporary, curated by Wil Aballe
Real Tears (2018), the work that lends its title to
the exhibition, consists of three stands (like music stands), each featuring a
hologram projection of the image of a different crumpled tissue. Are the
surfaces of the holograms themselves stained with weeping, or is that sheen just
fingerprints left by touchy-feely viewers at the opening? I read that they
represent tears shed by three living generations of women in the artist’s
family, although this story, in tandem with the formality of the stands, could also
be taken for pataphysical persona-apocrypha. The aura of subjectivity in the
work’s titling-as-testimony is implicit rather than explicit, a history
gesturally sketched by proxied proof. The sense is of the subjects’ being
worried, pulled, plucked and balled, simultaneously present-tense and remote in
rainbow air-quotes, their definition elusive in the translucent capture of the
medium’s elision.
On the facing wall of the gallery are two iterations of Unfinished
Jokes (Feminist, 2012/2017 & Male, 2017), in the form of
openers without punchlines, printed on posters arranged in stacks, recalling
the ‘endless supply’ prints of Félix González-Torres. The stack on the left reads, “A feminist, a lesbian, and
a nun walk into a bar”, while
the one on the right asks
the question, “What did one male artist say to the other male artist?”
That the jokes are posed sans answers (the reverse sides are blank), adds tart
gravitas to their endless-ness. This comes to mean more as I move to consider
the adjacent piece, a shelf on which sits Feminist Joke Book (Lightbulb)
(2011) its accordion-fold-format presenting most all of the answers one might
ever expect to encounter to the question, “How many feminists does it take to change
a lightbulb?”
The dialogic provocation inherent in the structure of these
kinds of classic, ‘question-(repetition)-reply-
I've seen this
happen in other people's
Lives
And now it's happening in mine
Lives
And now it's happening in mine
Of course, the absence of answers to a question asked
repeatedly might function as an answer in itself, either as a pointed
demonstration to a non responsive audience, or, more interestingly, a
theoretical echo-chamber towards posterity and possibility. Asking what one male
artist said to the other (forever) might be regarded as an address to art
history’s often airless (but never heirless) dialogue, while a, “feminist, a
lesbian and a nun,” are the usual suspects when it comes to woman intellectuals
in the history of modernity – what schemes might they come up with together in
that theoretical bar? The lightbulb joke features answers both nervily absurd
and bitterly clipped (“none: feminists can’t change anything”.) Actually, while
trying to recall more of the answers, I ended up searching the joke online (the
first hit was Reddit, which was, as they say, a huge mistake – those
comment threads! I can’t help but feel that this choice, pitfalls and all, is
part & parcel of the will of the piece.)
Playing D’Onofrio’s accordion of answers reminds me of all
of the times I’ve heard myself add that sibilant terminal consonant to adjust
my phrasing of, “feminism” to “feminisms”, the dilemma of its being
subject to multiple interventions and judgements (a kind of liberation too, a
freefall through interpretive hells or heavens…) That these options or
alternatives appear in the format of a single text (sheet of paper) whose
action (unfolding) is presumptively interactive, makes their deadpan delivery
more acidly lucid. Like the light-emitting diode delivery of some of Jenny
Holzer’s Truisms, Feminist Joke Book is a text-as-visual-object-as-
Your veto is unreasonable.
Your reason is a mystery.
Your mystery is way of lying.
This concept is no longer in use.
Your reason is a mystery.
Your mystery is way of lying.
This concept is no longer in use.
Between these works (and, indeed, between a votive evocation
and theatricalized inquisition) is a video piece, Falling Woman
(2008), projected onto the gallery wall opposite the entrance. It features the
image of a figure in freefall through a blue sky filled with clouds. The figure
wears a dress, the skirt of which is blown up over its face by the air current
(only in brief glimpses to we spy fingertips or a flash of hair), exposing a
naked stomach, pelvis and legs, with feet clad in streamlined flats. It’s odd
how in describing this figure, I find myself avoiding gendering the (clearly
female) body – why is that? It seems really strange that what amounts to legs
and a vagina plummeting through space should evoke this response from me. It
may be because if I write, ‘she’, I feel as if I am encroaching on some
assurance of personhood ahead of gender, and to assume the agency of knowing anything
for sure about this female who is falling, her face cloaked, even smothered, by
the rippling fabric, I am assuming a familiarity, a confidence of outcome that
I don’t possess. As if to reinforce this point, the falling narrative, with its
stock audio whistling whoosh, is routinely interrupted by an almost blank,
still shot, in which only a tiny cluster of specs in the center of the screen
indicate some far-off action. One might suppose that this is a distant view of
the descent, so remote as to promise no impending development. Perhaps this is
what it is to be outside of the space of the blinded/obscured falling figure, a
contemplative but wholly uninformative point of view. Between these intervals, she-just-keeps-falling,
at closer or farther distances, the softly modeled relief of
dress-over-the-face becoming something consolidated as a fetish, as in the non-finito
narrative of Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave, or the ambiguous cruelty (either
sadistic and masochistic, depending on whether you regard or relate) of
Magritte’s hooded Lovers.
Some variations of the fall feel almost easeful and others
very hapless-seeming, less a dread, dead drop than a soft panic of awkwardness
blossoming into the headlong rush of having no tools whatsoever to address the
situation; a kind of social/vestibular horror combo one would feel in media
res of a falling dream combined with an at-work-with-no-pants-dream. So
very odd and suspenseful and titillating and funny are these sequences, that I
am loath to find evidence of a loop. But there is a moment when the pelvis
twists in a baroque diagonal from vertical to near-horizontal, as if momentarily
miming that familial mascot of the male gaze, Courbet’s Origin of the World,
and a little passage of music appears, like a sentimental leitmotif that I am
not sure one should take at its word. Is it a moment of poignant comfort or nostalgic
trance? Is the body partaking of its space in a way that reorients falling
through to falling into? Does the fragmented descent from from
towards towards contain an attitude of plateau, whose momentary horizon orients
lyrical transit within the contour of its unending conundrum?
The space of the fall is really well crafted, technically speaking.
I am reminded of the way the term, “holding space” is used as a signal of
non-judgmental support, here dramatized into a fiction of radical commitment:
just how much space can you hold, when a true crisis arrives, or when you
realize that your idea of “holding” something is, from a different perspective,
the madly willful insistence on an intersubjective state of grace? This notion
of falling, stripped of the sidebars of memory or taxonomy that form the
video’s altarpiece wings, becomes paradoxically heavier in recollection, as if
the suspense of that figure was becoming more urgent now with myself as witness
partaking in its pilgrim plight, an unknown unknown.
A statement on D’Onofrio’s website concludes, “As feminism asks for a liberation
of identity, liberation only exists when it does not know its end.” There is,
in the moment of the loop’s catch, a question that might arise as to whether
the moment of horizontal ease or invitation the body provides is a kind of
narcissistic fishing or a reflection of liberation; that only in this moment of
staging the end in terms of a terminal velocity, ambivalent or hysterical,
self-obsessed or authentically invested, does the potential of the figure as
affect become a subject and not an object. I feel that my own staging of
uncertainty as a passionate brink is a bit of moral cowardice on my part, but
I’m infatuated by the dilemma of the image and its drama and their seamlessness.
It’s a credit to the work that this marriage, so compelling in itself, suggests
at once an opaque, figural placeholder for two words I am in palpable, culpable
and wholly regrettable flight from defining: art and feminism.
John Luna
