Images are powerful – their ability to shock, move and placate us can attest to this, along with their gift of infiltrating and populating the unconscious. Also, and perhaps because of this, they are highly ambivalent – an image does not inherently mean anything, it has meaning attributed to it through memory and experience. Roland Barthes’ symbiotic notions of Studium and Punctum are useful here in order to better articulate this.
Barthes’ Studium relates to an image that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. I mean this in the sense that he is referring to an image that is an archetype; a template; a field of common symbols. However something must inspire you to look at it. Thus the punctum is the element of the image that is purely subjective; it exists within the studium but transforms it into a personalised image: through the punctum the viewer can take possession of the image in the sense that it becomes a site of personal engagement: The punctum transforms an image into a psychic object.
According to Memory (after Houdini) engages with how images can be both universal and intensely personal at the same time. Not directly referencing Houdini himself, but rather the imagery (and drama) from the 1954 Paramount film ‘Houdini’ starring husband and wife team Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, According to Memory is a two edged sword – it attempts to embody a memory of an image that in turn has been reproduced from what one can only assume are photographs, some newsreels, writing and imagination. This, combined with the tendency of Hollywood films to base their imagery along aesthetic principles rather than historical veracity, means According to Memory is the memory of an illusion. An ironic twist perhaps, considering that memories are often images remembered from real experiences, but also one that illustrates that images inevitably imprint upon the viewer a certain type of experiential truth. Thus the lineage of illusion is a long one. Just as Houdini himself utilised illusion, and Hollywood too counts it as its stock in trade, so too Honey in turn uses the embodied illusion of the pseudo hologram to evoke both this lineage but also the essential unreality of images that inform our conscious reality.
So Honey, while suggesting in the title that these projections consist of an exteriorisation of her personal, inner world, is simultaneously utilising images that exist as common currency in the visual economy. In that way a 3rd party is implied in this transaction – the viewer, and helplessness and passivity, along with the implicit voyeurism of this activity is suggested. This condition perhaps follows from the conundrum of the image itself: an illusion that is at the same time real. We can see Houdini is dying; we can see his wife frantically trying to save him – why don’t we smash the glass and save him? Our presence is ambiguous, just as the presence of Houdini is both real and imagined: we must use our imaginations to piece together the fuzzy features of the body and its sporadic movements – we must suspend our disbelief. Walk around the tank – the body disappears at certain points. The illusion changes, it distorts, but we want the illusion to exist as much as we want Houdini’s wife to find him and save him, but our desires can only extend as far as our gaze.
The separate projections of both Houdini and his wife form a relationship between each other and that can be articulated by the viewer as a narrative. This too informs our interpretation of the imagery. The narrative is quite simple: Houdini is dying; his wife is trying to save him, forever. According to Memory reconstructs those last breaths and elaborates on the tension by creating an interminable limbo. Thus a tension that would normally exist within a narrative flow is distilled and condensed into a condition. However this creation of tension is not mere stylistic showcasing, as it encompasses themes that Geneine Honey has explored in previous works.
In her Bunny (2001) series of still photographs, exhibited at Linden Gallery in Melbourne in that same year, a series of post-argument situations between a couple are set up and photographed. However the woman in these photographs (played by Honey) is wearing bunny ears, a surrealist tactic that illustrates that even the most personal of situations – in this case a romantic hiccup – requires a culturally codified response. It asks the question: where do these ideas come from? How do we learn this behavior? Is it really appropriate? The common element between these two works is that they explore ideas around romantic relationships, and how the public play-acting of relationships affects our behavior in the actual relationships these dramas are meant to imitate.
According to Memory explores a different element of romantic relationships insofar as it explores the tragic dimension to love. It emphasizes the absolute aloneness of an individual (we all die alone, after all), and perhaps how the desire to be loved privately can mean having recourse to very public postures, or alternatively the desire to be loved publicly can lead to a very private loneliness. In a way, the tragic tension of According to Memory is based around representing a breakdown of communication and connection between a romantic couple when public needs clash with private ones. Ironically, Honey makes it easy for us to identify these issues by signposting the characters in this drama as archetypes of the tragic love affair. Thus there is an elegant and subtle alignment between form and content in According to Memory (After Houdini). The visual trickery of the optical illusion and images made ‘from memory’ carries with it issues regarding the existence of the original and the copy, in themselves similar concerns when comparing personal relationships to archetypal romance and ideals of
behavior.
Postscript:
:: Honey creates this immersive and haunting environment, suspending time and tension, through the use of glass, water, projection devices and optical illusions ::
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