Barbara Campbell, Cloche,
Performance at Galerie
Constantinople, Queanbeyan,
1999. Photo: Neil Roberts

In order to engage successfully with such a wide-ranging field of social and historical concern—that is to anchor such performance projects—it is often most expedient to focus upon particularities through detailed research. In these two works Campbell approaches adornment as subject and action in two distinct ways evidencing the tenuous nature of some of our specific understandings of feminine entities, their relationship to the broader issue of the construction of subjectivity, and the need for objects to project upon and incorporate into the various social extensions of the bodily surface. Significantly, it is the propensity of self to libidinally invest in specific styles of adornment that provides the key to unraveling the complexities of such relationships in these performances.

In Inflorescent Campbell presents her body in the all too familiar but nevertheless ultimately unknowable figure of a reclining nude. Lying on a chaise longue, painted with cursive botanical motifs, Campbell fans ultraviolet light across her body revealing the patterns in rhythmic waves. The viewer is immediately struck by the question of what exactly it is confronting them when they gaze upon this strange living thing. In order to make sense of this part cycad, part homosapien the audience must rely upon their individual notion of what characterises the obviously feminine construct. This figure is identifiably feminine, the wave of light that oscillates across the body, revealing the artist’s décolletage, anchors the subject of the piece instantaneously. Yet more subtle references to the manner in which femininity can be inscribed on the body offer the viewer more productive glimpses of how corporeal inscription informs our notions of subjectivity through history.

Campbell employs several complex theoretical constructs; their full explication must be left to another occasion but brief mention should be made here. Campbell references the feminine as its relates to the exotic; that is she is concerned with how notions of femininity have been understood as or translated into corporeal objects of desire, and so how audiences across different historical moments have manifested their libidinal investment in the female body via the consumption of body image as means of ordering and controlling its power. The female body is here cipher of both connection to and difference from the viewer, but further, it is in fact different only inasmuch as we as viewer can project our conceptions of subjectivity upon it.

The botanical motifs in this work connote of course that convention of treating the raw, untamed qualities of nature as a realm of the feminine. However Campbell does not let this theoretical construct rest easily. The natural reference is challenged by the controlled manner of the performance. Campbell in her posture resembles Edouard Manet’s heavily acculturated figure of Olympia.

Certainly, any act of colonising the bodily surface though inscription relies on the purchase upon such cultural symbols for its social investment. And the female nude itself is a complex construction of such investments. Campbell’s marking of the surface raise important issues: What relations do they bear with conceptions of a feminine body politic? To what end are such iconographic references deployed? And lastly, what might be the implications or effects of appropriating such symbolism as a form of critique?

As a form of bodily objectification this performative representation fails dismally. The audience has no viewing security. Campbell returns the viewer’s gaze at intervals, watching them watching her. In these moments of caught behaviour the subject alternates between viewer and presentation. Through these fleeting moments of identification the viewer enters into a game of self-reflection, but this self-reflection is also rendered problematic by way of Campbell’s performative skill. At no time does the audience feel any strong sense of physical or psychic reassurance. Campbell outwits the viewer. She remains poised in the chaise longue confronting each viewer, disavowing any visual consumption of subjectivity via a projected bodily image. This is not an exotic other on show for a desiring audience. There is an awkwardness that comes from not being able to readily identify this presentation. Campbell’s use of the two-way gaze creates a sort of representational vacuum.

Marking the bodily surface in the manner of the tattoo, Campbell complicates the viewing perspective in order to break the linear styled narratives familiar to our conventional notions of history telling. The tattoo, according to Alphonso Lingis² is a type of libidinally charged surface inscription that he associates with the primitive over the civilised body. In appropriating the mark of the primitive, that is the tattoo, with its less refined stylistic conventions of Australian flora by botanists such as Joseph Banks and nineteenth century French naturalists, Campbell weaves a specific culturally coded social fabric from symbols and historic practices that contribute to the confrontational experience the audience is faced with in viewing this strange living thing. As Elizabeth Grosz points out; “there is a form of body writing and various techniques of social inscription that bind all subjects, often in quite different ways according to sex, class, race, cultural and age codification, to social positions and relations... these modes are no less permanent or removable than tattooing.”³ Grosz goes on to further here to develop the idea that there is nothing natural or ahistorical about modes of corporeal inscription. Rather, through such modes bodies are made amenable to the prevailing exigencies of power, so transforming flesh into particular types of body—the primitive, capitalist, white, Australian and so forth.⁴ It is just such concerns regarding bodily inscription that Campbell articulates in Inflorescent.

Social extension of the body by way of adornment is another way in which the body may be incised, marking the appropriations of its cultural requirements. In Cloche Campbell explores this idea of the body’s ability to libidinally invest in an object—its potential for incorporation within self image—by attaching a cloche hat to her head and documenting its removal by cutting it free from her scalp. Paul Schilder describes the manner in which “the body image can shrink, or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and take other parts into itself. When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick has, in fact, become part of our body. It then becomes part of the bony system of the body, and we may suppose that the rigidity of the bony system is an important part in every body-image.”⁵

In gluing the hat to her head Campbell creates a visual metaphor for the way in which our sense of identity can be both part of our corporeality and also attached to (and so also potentially removed transferred from) libidinally invested body parts and objects. This act of severing the cloche hat is underpinned by the notion of cathexis, the act of incorporating any object designated desirable by the subject or viewer into the body/self image. It is the threat of wounding the scalp (representing the collective anxiety associated with unknowable interiority of the self), located alongside a retained quality of body image that insists upon still connecting objects with their bodily origin, that unsettles an audience.

Her documentation on video of this act of psychic separation enables Campbell to heighten an experience of the historicising process by revisiting it over and over again. The video mediation (at Galerie Constantinople) of the original performance places the audience in a less threatening corporeal position. The proliferation and consumption of images in daily life informs the ease with which an audience ultimately accepts this or any event on video tape. This is challenged, however, by the hanging of the upturned hat with remnants of the severed hair so as to disrupt the viewer’s sightline to the video monitor. This installation format then reinscribes the corporeality of the original event. This hat and hair are no less libidinally invested when detached from direct contact with the bodily surface.

There is an important distinction at work in these two performances, an apparent shift in the functional value of the constitutive parts of the work. The focus of each piece alternates between first, the presentation of the object as subject through libidinal investment in objects that become a seeming self image as tableaux, and second, the viewer’s visual experience of the work in turn leading to the projection of yet another dimension of inscription from outside. Perhaps the most apt way to conceive of how such elements coalesce is through Greg Dening’s idea of talk—term he uses to describe modes of cultural interaction whereby talk is translated into symbols, presenting itself in accordance with gestures, silence, rhythm, and discontinuities.⁶

By implicating herself through direct physical involvement Campbell recuperates both these performances from the realm of self-portraiture. It is in the oscillation between the mutual inclusivity of subject and object that any possible understanding of the self lies. The viewer locates their claim to an authentic subjectivity via their very establishment within a viewing relation, ostensibly marking the points of difference amongst social collectivity. By virtue of its desirability, this claim to truth will always be an uneasy marriage of appearances. In being, adopting, albeit momentarily, the guise of a fragment of historical reference, idea, figurative gesture, or adorned bodily surface, Campbell draws the viewer towards a fragile reality where any placement of faith in a notion of true self-knowledge is ultimately undermined.

Lisa Byrne
2000

Endnotes
1. Cloche: performance at Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney, and exhibition elements, Galerie Constantinople, Canberra, 1999. Inflorescent: performance at Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney and at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 1999/2000
2. Lingis, A., Excesses and Eros, New York, 1984. (See the chapter entitled ‘Savages’).
3. Grosz, E., Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Sydney, 1994, p.141
4. ibid., p.142
5. Schilder, P., The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constitutive Energies of the Psyche, New York, 1978, p.202
6. See Dening, G., Performances, Melbourne, 1996

© The artist &
Images courtesy of
the artist.

Barbara Campbell, Cloche,
Performance at Centre
for Performance Studies,
Univerisity of Sydney
1999. Photo: Russell Emerson

Barbara Campbell, Inflorescent,
Performance at Macleay
Museum University of
Sydney, 1999.