I suppose I should begin by introducing myself: I’m Colombina, a sophomore here at Amherst from Austin, TX. I’m an Art history major and for the sake of my well being and this blog itself, I try to inundate myself with as much art as possible. I’m interested especially in theories of art and architecture and the social history of art. My hope is that this blog works as means to let people on campus know about events related to art and performances, as well as what I think about the art world in the pioneer valley and beyond. Please feel free to respond, argue and questions my articles to your hearts content, I’ll be glad to get back to you. Welcome to the Visual and Performance Arts blog. 

       I’ve prolonged writing this entry so that I could first attend the Rappaport lecture in Contemporary Art by Eve Sussman. Eve Sussman is a well known video artist working today out of Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in museums and theatres in Turkey, Greece, Spain, Croatia, the U.K. as well as in the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. Though she has completed projects in 8 mm film that explore the idea of surveillance, at the lecture in question she showed her work on what are called tableaux vivants. She described an interest in the quartered screen, closed circuit videos that show surveillance footage from grocery stores, gas stations and train and bus terminals. The idea is that when looking at these screens one can see many moments in real time all at once. Sussman installed 12 of  her own closed circuit surveillance cameras in a train station in Istanbul. The cameras were positioned in various locations within the station while the images were projected onto a space created within the station itself. The screens showing the footage from each of the cameras were set between screens onto which words of a story Sussman created were projected.  As the world outside of the cameras changed, different images aligned with the words at any given point in time. The images and narrative synthesized as a product of the viewer’s own imagining. The idea being that the main character as introduced by the text could be whoever happened to be in front of the camera at that time; the viewer is given text and an image and inevitably links the two together. This project also dealt with the fact that a person who witnesses the space onto which these images and words are projected was presumably outside of the station beforehand, thus their image could have been projected into the space moments before the arrived in front of it. This conflation of viewer and viewed seemed to me to be one of the most interesting aspects of Sussman’s work, not to mention she aptly incorporated the idea of a “surveillance gaze” in her later tableaux vivants.

Traditionally a tableau vivant is a precursor to performance art; the term describes a group of people in costumes, positions and settings similar or identical to a painting or imagined portrait. Typically, the performers do not move or speak and are meant to resemble a painting as much as possible. Sussman introduced her own interest in this form of performance in a short 8 mm film about a person trying to steal the well known Velaszquez painting, Las Meninas from the Prado in Madrid entitled 89 Seconds at Alcázar. Though we don’t actually see the person with the painting in hand, we know for sure that they remain captivated by it’s image, as we look from their perspective at the painting itself. The painting (below) depicts a self portrait of Velasquez on the left as he paints a portrait of the royal Spanish court.

The painting is perhaps most well known for it’s illusionistic portrayal of the king and queen in the back of the composition. They are rendered as a reflection which suggests that if the scene were real they would be positioned in the viewer’s space. Inspired by this illusionism, Sussman created a tableau of her own. She built an identical set, and hired actors dressed in identical costumes to act as the characters in the painting. She constructed a narrative around the painting itself and let the actors delve into the psychology of each historical figure. She then filmed the interactions between the characters as they moved about the set as well as photographed them  at the exact moment their positions matched those of their counterparts in the painting itself.

Sussman repeated this process with Jacques Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women. The myth of the Sabine women essentially goes like this : Romulus founded Rome only to discover that the city itself was inhabited mostly by men. In order to populate the city the Roman army went to the neighboring town of Sabine and captured women that would become the wives and mothers of the future Roman empire. The men of the Sabine town attacked Rome in an attempt to reclaim their women, however these women adapted to their lives as Romans and formed bonds with the Roman people. They were in a sense no longer Sabine women and explained this to their former families. The story, however misogynistic, is essentially a redemptory tale of how these women as wives and mothers ended a conflict between the two cities. Sussman reinterpreted the story as a five act musical-video set in the 1960’s. The film has no dialogue but does employ an original score and chorus of 800 voices. After doing research on the fashion, politics and social and cultural undercurrents of the time she took as inspiration a Bobby Kennedy photograph in which he appears with about 15 other men in white shirts and ties, for the costume for the male characters in the film and looked at riot footage as inspiration for the choreography. Though I experienced less of this film than of 89 Seconds at Alcázar, I found this work to be less successful and less in keeping with the ideas of surveillance as explored in Sussman’s earlier work. No doubt, both projects were huge and costly endeavors and I applaud the artist’s effort to revive and recontextualize these works of art. It’s not often Amherst students are able to meet with an artists as successful and well known as Sussman; she has a lot of support and many resources in her arsenal and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

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