Screen Test
for the exhibition Screen Test at Vtape in Toronto, Ontario, January 11th–February 7th, 2014
Commissioned by Vtape as part of the Curatorial Incubator v.11: Stop with the Performance Already!
See the printed version as a PDF
"The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence." —Jean-Paul Sartre
A screen test is a film-industry method to test the suitability of an actor for a potential role. Typically, the actor is provided with a portion of the script and instructed to perform for the camera. These recordings often capture visceral moments, as the pressure of the audition promotes exaggeration and disclosure. Later, multiple screen tests are compiled into a single reel and evaluated by the casting director and production crew. The intensity of the original performances is mediated by their transfiguration from flesh and blood to a two-dimensional, backlit image. Uncomfortable and grotesque I am using grotesque here in the purest etymological sense, which means to exist liminally between recognizable forms. For the case of the actor, this indicates a sensible blur occurring between the character and the person playing the character. The earliest use of grotesque in this sense came about to describe the animal and human hybrids occasionally found in the Christian frescoes of Southern Italy. [1] moments of unrehearsed performances are subdued through flattening and miniaturization. Yet the processing of the image (its compression, scaling, resolution) contrasts and complements its emotional content: errors, hesitation, and breaks in character are transfigured by the prescriptive requirements in the production of what we see on screen. The ambiguous oscillation between pure performance (the role) and performativity (the act of playing the role) produces a fragile but visible threshold joining fiction and reality.
The video performances in this program are not screen tests in this traditional sense. None were shot under the context of an audition or portray a character per se. However, each performance does reveal itself to be a test—a challenge to bridge a carefully constructed reality and awkward moments of intensely human behaviour. By enacting uncomfortable tasks for the camera, the artists featured in Screen Test ask the viewer to witness their human foibles and the subjectivities of being. The evident difficulty of enduring the tasks performed in each video betrays the authorial image of the artist and destabilizes the viewing experience. Mediated by the restraints of their medium, the artists are restored as earnestly human subjects, delivering frank and honest engagements with the camera and the viewer. Adding to this effect is an intimate, almost claustrophobic aesthetic in all seven of the works. The reoccurrence of the 'close-up' and the 'single-shot' connect a spectrum of unsettling scenarios, ranging from weeping to brutally honest monologues. When used in combination, these formal qualities create a microscopic condition. The space of the viewer is tight—pulled in and locked in—purposely brought too close for comfort. This confrontational negotiation with the image and, subsequently, the screen's condensation of fiction and reality, amplifies these scenarios into the realm of the uncanny. The axiom of the ‘screen test’ becomes evident as the more basic challenge to endure the works and engage their subversive contents.
This notion of the test, however, can be extended further. Each work could easily be reframed as an empirical study in self-inflicted trauma. This is not to imply that the artists or their practices are masochistic. Instead, they should be thought of as distinct exercises in physical and psychological distress. The traumatic aspect of each emerges in the act of viewing—in the durational nature of performance itself. The concept of trauma here shifts from its usual connotation of personal affliction to a more collective dimension, where spectatorship is key to its sensibility.This is an allusion to Jacques Rancière's idea of the distribution of the sensible, in which political regimes dictate the division between what is sayable and what is visible. I reference it here to suggest that the role of the spectator, when viewing these works, is a political one.[2] Accordingly, these traumatic trajectories are nuanced, initially obscured and revealed over time. Although, the physical peril implicit in some works make the possibility of trauma more apparent than others: in Tom Sherman's Hyperventilation (2011), the artist,isolated before the camera, asphyxiates himself until passing out. There is nothing else but Sherman in the frame, and his lunging toward the camera while rapidly inhaling and exhaling creates a pervasive anxiety. The next breath always seems to be the last before he blacks out. This action sustained challenges the viewer to remain unaffected by such a blatant, bodily gesture.
Physical distress is also central to Marisa Hoicka's Insides Out: Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes (2012) and Erin Hael's Souvenir (2013). Insides Out confronts us with on screen croppings of the artist's body, bound or encased in treacly foreign substances. Connotations of blood, mucous and feces run rampant as Hoicka wriggles and wobbles, exploring the textural and kinetic qualities of her aberrant dressings. As her body struggles to move, the viewer struggles to make sense of what is organic and what is synthetic. Souvenir shows Hael being slapped across the face repeatedly. Her assailant is never seen. No dialogue is exchanged. Only her face fills the frame, and sporadically a hand enters to strike her cheek. Although the assumption that the artist is consenting to the act makes the experience less alarming, over five minutes one realizes—watching her sideway glances, her lip clenching, her skin becoming pink—that the artist may have lost control over the intensity of her own performance.
Rodney Werden's Say (1978) presents another spectacular, ethical predicament. The artist performs as a voice off-camera commanding a young stationary actress to repeat words after him. Gradually, his word choices begin to infer images of bodily movements and sexual pleasure. As the actress's face becomes visibly more unsettled and aware of her manipulation the viewer grows equally unsettled by their complicity as witness. The question arises: who is really being manipulated here? What seems at first to be an innocent exercise takes on a perverse complexion.
This triangular power dynamic is less aggressive but equally present in Zeesy Powers' ERIN—I Will Tell You Exactly What I Think Of You (2013). Part of a larger series of videos published to her YouTube channel, I Will Tell You… is predicated on a complete stranger sitting outside the frame as the artist gives a litany of first impressions—all of them unrehearsed and point-blank. ERIN is a special case, however. Typically, the 'patron' of the performance is present. In ERIN, as Powers explains on its YouTube page, she received the request via e-mail and the message states, "cannot make it live or in person", but to "lay it on me". What follows is a parabola with vulnerability at its base and offensive at its apex. In the background, a visual stream of consciousness plays itself out using found Internet imagery. Sometimes these backgrounds strike a strange parallel with what's being said. Others are pure automatism. What results is a frantic interplay of signifiers between Powers' monologue, the assemblage of imagery flickering behind her and the invisibility of the subject matter—Erin.
Other traumatic instants exist still, in reliving painful or unfulfilled memories. Tad Hozumi's Thinking About Someone While Listening to Mariah Carey is a willful display of unabashed emotion. Hozumi, clad in headphones, thinks about someone (presumably a past romance) and alternates between a stoic stare directly into the camera and a scrunched face of teary anguish. For the length of Mariah Carey's Always Be My Baby (1996) the viewer is front-row to an emotional ride, witnessing Hozumi decompose to an intense psychological breakdown. Again, the traumatic aspect of the piece is ironically not found in the gesture itself. Watching Hozumi in mental and emotional pain is clearly difficult to 'enjoy'. Yet, our disconcert primarily arises when he gazes out uncertain of and exerted by his own performance. His effort in sustaining this awkward interaction is palpable. Crying and self-deprecation are reframed as forms of labour and the emotional potential of the piece is transfigured by the visible mechanics of its production. A sense of ambivalence towards the artificial nature of the act begins to supplant any sympathy reserved in the viewer.
In Paul Wong's Perfect Day (2007) the artist is also encountered as a desperate figure re-living a memory through music; in this case, Lou Reed's ironically somber Perfect Day (1972). Promenading through his apartment half-naked and high on a mixture of cocaine and heroine, Wong films himself on a maddening domestic quest to locate the song in his CD collection. Frequent movement of the camera evokes a sense of anxiety throughout the seven-minute video, but also suggests Wong is experiencing a kind of ecstasy in the throes of his melodramatic sequence. Accenting this are hackneyed transition filters that infuse the narrative with comic relief and satire. Each element works to envisage an inner world that is vibrantly self-indulgent, reveling in its spectacular trauma. This welcome debauchery proves to be its most radical and potentially traumatic characteristic, for it champions the narcissistic facet of art making—an exhibitionist, self-interest in continually constructing one's image.
In a medium so closely associated with publicity and distribution, the construction of identity in video performance supposes alterity. It relies on a parlous splicing of spaces and times, a bifurcation. Again, the screen should be recognized as the conduit for these congruent channels of perception. Its membranous qualities provide just enough circulation to permit different understandings of time and space to temporarily cohere. However, the function of the screen is also, ironically, to largely operate unseen, camouflaged by the very images it projects. In this way, it distracts us from its essence by its appearance. As a means of visual communication, the screen's appearance is its essence. Hidden by its two-fold condition as aesthetic artefact (a "window onto the world") and technical instrument (communication device), the screen pre-occupies the senses and distances viewers from recognizing other, equally fascinating paradoxes unfolding before their eyes.
When screened with an audience the arresting content and paradoxical junctures in these works become most present. While the screen undoubtedly privileges visuality, the presence of multiple viewers is required to visualize the properties of the work into social realities. The shared viewing space represents the final strata of tests residing in this program. The publicized screen test is a challenge to endure various forms of trauma together—a dare to maintain our critical distance and achieve reconciliation in our solidarity. Flashes of anxiety and doubt, sympathy and disinterest must not only be registered and re-negotiated on an individual level but also collectively. The shared viewing environment effaces expectations and aligns these representations as personal yet political (and therefore public) opportunities for affiliation and recognition. Screen Test calls upon both its performers and its audience to meet in the mercurial middle, at the nexus of the screen, where identities and actions are not so clearly partitioned.
Works Cited
Powers, Zeesy. ERIN—I Will Tell You Exactly What I Think of You. Posted February 7th, 2013. YouTube.com. Retrieved August 20th, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNkgP2AIqYE
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943. Washington Square Press; Reprint edition, 1992. Print.