OPENINGS: BONNIE CAMPLIN
BONNIE CAMPLIN’S WORK STAGES A FRACTURED, contemporary take on the “conversation piece,” the genre of intimately scaled, informal group portraits that were popular in Britain in the eighteenth century. Like the historical painters who portrayed families and cliques in naturalistic but subtly idealized ways, engaging in such common activities as attending a hunt or a musical party, Camplin makes use of art’s double-edged capacity to fictionalize a personal milieu and simultaneously construct that milieu as a situation of meaningful communality. A close circle of relatives, friends, and fellow artists feature as subjects and collaborators in her works. Her London living space doubles as her studio, and she utilizes low-budget, demotic, readily available means and media—cut-up magazines, home video–editing effects, costumes made from secondhand clothes, props adapted from found objects—in an ongoing, improvisational process that is without clear beginning or end.
Although there is no discernible boundary to her art, Camplin’s practice does have a central thread weaving through it, articulated most clearly by meticulous photo-based pencil drawings depicting moments from her own life. Some of these works (which have been the focus of solo shows at London’s Cabinet Gallery, one in 2004 and the other earlier this year) show family scenes—Camplin posing with her dad and sister at a seaside amusement park, for instance, all of them attired in mock-Victorian fancy dress. Others are self-portraits of the artist as a young woman, costumed in self-styled nightclub looks. By undertaking the time-consuming endeavor of transforming casual photos into hand-drawn pictures, the artist meditates on her history while speaking broadly to issues of the construction and display of the self. It’s a consideration of self-representation that Camplin has opened into a wider conversation—one that negotiates between the ubiquity of mainstream imagery and the specificities of shared, private language—in her many collaborations with a group of peers including Mark Leckey, Lucy McKenzie, Enrico David, and Paulina Olowska.
From 2002 until 2004, Camplin was a member of Leckey’s musical-performance collective donAteller (described in seductively pop terms in one early flier as a “luxury line in performance inspired by the speed, thrill, glamour of contemporary life”). She appeared with the group as the feminine yet androgynous counterpart of cosinger Ed LaLiq, both of them mannequin-like in makeup and hot pants. Camplin also coproduced and costarred in the video montage LonDonAteller, 2002, in which she and LaLiq inhabit a baroque, self-destructing vision of London—the city as a site for decadent, performative display.
DonAteller’s theatricalization of mass media’s feminized image-realm, as well as Camplin’s preoccupation with the self-portrait and with social ritual, has segued fascinatingly into a series of recent collaborations with Olowska. These stem from what the artists have described as their shared political interest not only in feminism but in the adjectival quality of “femininity”; that is to say, in negotiating the problem of essentialist readings of gender by treating the “feminine” not as an autonomous quality but as a decorative addition—one with unique aesthetic capacities that they, as women, can exploit. This attitude is evident in a number of works they have produced together this year: in the sweet nostalgia for modernist ballet of A like Akarova, a collaged animation that pays homage to the works of the titular dancer-choreographer; and in Spectators Only: A Shadow Play, in which they perform simple actions—drinking wine, conversing, walking together—behind a screen showing atmospheric film clips that provide landscaped settings for their figures, visible only in silhouette. Camplin and Olowska envision their joint projects as a kind of open dialogue. Rather than represent a consistent shared sensibility, the pair engage in a process of mutual exploration, skipping between imaginative identification with representations of femaleness and an awareness of their own capacities for self-staging. Thus, in their “shadow play” (which debuted in May at the Wiels Center in Brussels), they literally inhabit the film medium, effectively transposing the ordinary activities of friendship into the realm of art.
In their exhibition on view at Portikus in Frankfurt last June, a similar kind of transposition was expanded through the installation Salty Water/What of Salty Water. At the opening, the artists dressed up to “play themselves,” sitting and chatting in a boat they had found. This vessel, through associations with fishing and seafaring pertaining in particular to Olowska’s hometown, the port city Gdansk, Poland, had prompted the installation’s theme of exchange or trade between two professional female artists—the term professional being one that Camplin and Olowska have pointedly used themselves in describing the nature of their collaboration. At Portikus, in other words, a knowing critique of the way artists become living capital was coextensive with the feminist concerns evident in the pair’s previous projects. The artists were not literally represented in the works on view, but the objects and images—some found, others made—alluded to this doubled critique obliquely. In addition to fragmented images of women’s feet in high-heeled shoes, busts of female heads, and a wall painting that resembled an ’80s homage to Eva Hesse (made by spray-painting through a fishing net), there was a series of drawings of prostitutes posing in archetypically alluring attitudes. Presented in a darkened gallery, these works were partially but dramatically illuminated by a roving searchlight. The elements combined to suggest a trawling of culture in the service of a commerce-focused reorientation of myths of femaleness, whether of stereotypical sexiness or of the moon goddess symbolized by water. At the same time, Gulliver’s Travels–like shifts in scale among elements of the installation (for example, between a sculpture of an absurdly oversize Edwardian hand mirror and a delicate female bust on a plinth) drew attention to the artists’ romantic bewitchment by the atopian potential of the gallery as a real-time equivalent of filmic space: a site, that is, for pure invention.
Indeed, Camplin’s interest in the potency of feminine artifice is mixed with a fascination with witchcraft and the supernatural, qualities that resonate, in turn, with the creative possibilities inherent in the manipulation of film and video. This melding of concerns recalls another vocabulary of symbolic gestures and mythical invocations, one similarly manifested via objects, performance, video, and sound—that of Joan Jonas. Jonas’s alter ego, the masked “electronic erotic seductress” Organic Honey, seems to haunt Camplin’s 2003 video Get Me a Mirror, in which Camplin appears as three simultaneous, monochromatic “ghosts”—blue, green, and red, respectively. Wearing only underwear, heels, and a mask, she dances in a dark space; gradually, one realizes that the footage is running backward. Toward the end the three image layers come together, restoring the artist to full color. Get Me a Mirror, with its vision of self as technological afterimage, connects in turn with Camplin’s Special Afflictions by Roy Harryhozen, 2006. This film finds a group of fairground sideshow characters, played by the artist’s friends, helplessly repeating behavioral tics generated by exaggerating a variety of cinematic special effects. For example, as Camplin has described it (using the video-editing lingo for slow motion), “John Prolong is slow in his delivery; he is ‘time-stretched.’” Like Jonas, Camplin invokes affinities between the narrative faculties of her medium and the ancient tradition of the female storyteller, a figure brought up to date literally and metaphorically through an exploration of split consciousnesses effected by contemporary technologies.
As these two works begin to suggest, Camplin’s practice, despite its mercurial nature, is anchored at its core by a stubbornly slow and even at times reversed momentum that drags against the urban environment in which she and her characters are embedded. In the case of her drawings, the laborious industry they require might be seen as a form of resistance to the speed of the life Camplin invented for herself in her twenties. (The name of the London club night she ran for a time, Harderfasterlouder, suggests the pace.) This resistance is equally pronounced in her film projects. Unafraid of the seductive surface of things, she makes art that is nevertheless haunted by a creeping horror that threatens to eat away at beautiful images. Sometimes this horror erupts as a kind of digital entropy—sound undergoes slurred manipulation; sequences are broken down into stills. Her video Good Health, 2003, consists of a series of motionless swimming-pool scenes, sun-bleached with the nostalgia of holiday snapshots. The static atmosphere lies somewhere between Chris Marker’s La Jetée and a photo-romance from a teen magazine. Halfway through, the images begin to rapidly play back in reverse, until the two protagonists (Camplin and her friend Sarah Churchill) vanish. The sound track of children laughing and splashing, occupying an aural dimension uncannily at odds with the visual one, is simultaneously, and just as brutally, distorted and erased by sonic interference during the rewind. And in Cancer, also 2003, pixelated disintegrations created with rudimentary video-editing effects parallel the monologue delivered by a male professor, in the style of a public health broadcast, on the subject of the multiplication and division of diseased cells.
With Cancer, Camplin cleaves apart habitual associations between vitality and mobility or death and stillness—something that might be said of her practice as a whole. Her work stages lived experience as a continuously interrupted process of negotiation and reflection on relations between self and others, threaded through a conflicted attachment to images. Refusing to let either art or reality dominate her world, Camplin conjures self as image, and makes images that are, like flesh, subject to decay.
Catherine Wood is curator of contemporary art and performance at Tate Modern, London.
