Losing Oneself A woman – the artist herself – is borne up horizontally by a crowd, raised to the light, to a shower of gold. Is she a contemporary Danae ? Little David, who behaves like a little macho man, is an unmistakable allusion to the Old Testament figure who vanquished Goliath, the giant . In a series of drawings, American artist Chloe Piene introduces us to characters from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, which speaks of love and hatred, pain and death . Death is omnipresent in Piene’s work. Her drawings not only present death as a skeleton confronting a living person (as in Holbein). Rather, the dance of death occurs in one and the same body, some parts of which disintegrate down to the very bones. She borrows from Mannerism its foreshortened perspective, adding to the push and pull of her buoyant figures; her drawing style is reminiscent of Egon Schiele; her death theme is inspired by Symbolism and Fin-de-siècle “Black Romanticism” (Mario Praz). Timelessness is the result of such a wealth of cultural and art-historical references that perhaps obliterate one’s view of contemporary elements. Young people dancing wildly (or involved in a ritual fight?) are “moshing,” Danae is “surfing the crowd.” The skull and other macabre elements are, by the way, also emblems of Heavy Metal culture. Art for people with an art-historical education? Art for Goths? Perhaps these questions are themselves expressive of the range of Piene’s work. This artist practices a form of surfing cultural history that is modeled on the Hypertext, an associative information system originally intended to connect all the knowledge of the world so that each part would be accessible to anyone anytime and anywhere. It is a system in which neither image, language nor writing obey chronology or linearity or any kind of spatial homogenization, but are individually available regardless of context. Piene belongs to a generation of artists who grew up with the so-called new media, with the Internet, electronically generated virtual reality, interactivity, and who integrate these experiences into their art. In an interview with herself , dated September 23, 2003, Chloe Piene describes her fascination with a character from the Kalevala who is related to Ophelia: “I made a whole body of drawings, mostly of a character named Aino who drowns herself in a river, her way of getting out of a bad engagement. For that I took pictures of a little girl in various awkward positions, so as to transform her into a buoyant corpse, submerged. I have always been fascinated by the idea of transformation and a kind of altered grace under water.” Drowning is a recurrent motif in Piene’s art, even in such contemporary guises as “stage diving” and “crowd surfing.” In scientific literature on cyberspace the word “immersion” denotes the phenomenon of becoming part of virtual reality, a different world. Immersion is only likely to occur if the space surrounding our physical body can be closed out. Chloe Piene robs her figures of any spatial anchor, be that in a dark space or on the white sheet of paper. She prefers them to grope blindly about a prison, the “mosh pit,” a grave, the dark, thereby exposing them to spatial viscosity. Elsewhere swimming, floating figures cling to the opaque vellum as if it was a TV screen. Immersion aims to abolish the difference between reality and a fictional world. The amazing recent surge in fantasy literature and films may be explained by the quasi-innate human ability to lock out one’s immediate surroundings and immerse oneself into past eras and other levels of reality. In her interview with herself Chloe Piene notes, “It seems that fantasy is every bit as important as reality to you,” and continues, “Fantasy clothes the unseen. Because that which is not seen definitely exists, in powerful ways. We feel it but cannot see it. We see it but do not understand it – as is the case with fantasy and dreams.” Media-assisted immersion into a different world does not necessarily lead, as is often claimed, to a trivialization of our physical experiences, or even to a “disembodiment” of the subject. The influence of certain media may well result in a new definition and expansion of how we experience our bodies. Several of Chloe Piene’s drawings represent a disproportionate Homunculus, a human figure that illustrates the extent to which the sensorimotor cortex is relevant to individual parts of the body – a direct reference to the artist’s concern with how we perceive it. Elsewhere in her “interview” she explains her disdain for bodybuilders: “I’m really into the body that is the result of work – not weightlifting just to get big but the weight that is lifted for the sake of making something else, something outside of the self. The carpenter guy uses tools to build a house – that energy is then returned and put back into him as increased muscle and bone mass. So the structure of his body, the shape of it, ends up corresponding directly to the structure of the house he built.” Like the house that changes the carpenter, the electronic media have transformed the body – the principal motif in Chloe Piene’s art – into a hypersensitive interface. According to Marshall McLuhan electricity is the medium of contact, “electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile.” Hence, the voice in most of Piene’s video works, though anchored in the subject, gains a strange kind of autonomy from the body. Virtual reality does encourage tactile perception. It contributes towards the rehabilitation of previously repressed feelings, including the self-satisfaction analyzed in Lee Triming’s essay, which in the cyberworld can be the result of a phantasmagorical interactivity, even though this may sound paradoxical. The amazing aspect of Chloe Piene’s approach is that she feeds the insights and physical experiences gained in virtual reality back into the more traditional media of drawing and video. Rejecting a totally electronic environment, she prefers to seek immersion in the reality of the sheet of drawing paper. In her interview with herself the artist reveals that “… when I draw, I lose myself, I really lose myself, so that the drawing completely takes over. When that happens any sense of a story, or characters, including mine, just goes. Same thing in the mosh pit. Or when I have an orgasm. I am practically blind.” Cyberculture has formed the body as an instrument of tactile experience of the world, both real and alternative. Put back into the traditional artistic media, this body reveals a whole new range of possibilities.
Bernhard Fibicher
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