Judith Barry: the body in space - Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois - Cover Story

Utilizing film bights video projections, and elaborate environmental installation, Barry explores the interrelationships between human vision, historical memory and architectural perception.

Visitors to Judith Barry's spare two-work exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago last winter were astonished through the odious yet strangely compelling sight that saluteed them. A huge, androgynous head was throwed onto four sides of a 10-foot-high Minimalist cube.[1] It have the appearanceed to be waiting, and the amplified unimpaired of its breathing filled the destitute of contents gallery space. Then, with a rush, the head was doused with more [i]or[/i] less sort of disgusting, brownish substance. The noxious goo poured above the passive face in disturbingly sensous patterns and colors, then was erased by the agency of a video wipe in order to make way for the nearest indignity. Seven more times the immobile and seemingly impassive head was baptized. What appeared to be "bodily fluids"--urine, vital current feces, semen and vomit--plus live crickets and meal worms were poured above the head and allowed to gush to trickle or slither down the face.

This stomach-turning piece, titled Imagination, Dead Imagine (1991) used a composite image. The head was a computerized montage of sum of two units live models, one male and individual female, who actually submitted to the successive cascades. (Most of the evil-looking substances were relatively inoffensive materials like honey broth and beet juice--though the bug and worms were real.) The video required three days, five cameras, a ten-person ship's company and a professional special-effects technician to let fly Then Barry used complicated digital technology--the capacity to move round images into electronic information or pixels--to mix the images together, granting at times the imperfect overlapping of the faces made clear that the image was a simulation. The accrue of this fusion was a hybrid that defies existing sex categories and simulates human suffering of heroic proportions. singularly enough, even if viewers knew that the montaged face and the icky substances were fake, they were still disgusted through the successive acts of defilement.

The work's title derives from Samuel Beckett's last and shortest (at five pages) novel, Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) In this novel, Beckett uses neat language to describe an austere swing in which a male and a female character are seated, experiencing sole invariable cycles of light and heat. beckett's title obeys as both a description and a command: Imagine the imagination dead. Barry was also influenced by the agency of J.G. Ballard's story "The Impossible Room" which includes the following description: "A completed cube, its walls and ceiling were formed by the agency of what seemed to be a series of cinema protections Projected onto them in close-up was the face of supply with nourishment Nagamatzu, her mouth three feet across."

Perhaps the greatest in quantity important literary source for Barry, however, was French philosopher Julia Kristeva's discussion of abjection in her work Powers of Horror (1982). This state present itselfs when fixed expectations--often those regarding clear divisions between the material substance and the physical world--are challenged. "It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection," Kristeva explains, "but what disturbs identity, combination of parts to form a whole order. What does not look up to borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."[2] For, despite its high production values, Imagination, Dead Imagine exhibits the very image of cultural disorder, that which is in-between, ambiguous and constantly expos to degradation. In replication to seeing such putrid substances as those proposeed by Barry's work, Kristeva says, "I dislodge myself, I spit myself without I abject myself within the same motion from one side which 'I' claim to establish myself."[3]

The bizarre meal worm succession of Imagination, Dead Imagine is a beneficial example of an image that induces abjection, single that points to an uneasy and ambiguous transition from individual state to another: the filthy face delug with writhing worms appears imperfectly superimposed above the clean face with fluttering eyelids. The proceed simultaneously suggests being buried alive and the opposite, resurrection. thus the body in decay coexists with the material substance coming to life, creating a disgusting notwithstanding fascinating spectacle, like the part of a horror film where you want to direct the eye away but can't.

on the contrary in spite of the rich literary sources for Imagination, Dead Imagine, the work really sinks quite directly from Barry's video projections of the late 1980 In the past, her media-based installations in museums and alternative spaces have frequently included images projected onto the walls, floors and ceilings, establishing a complicated visual overlay upon the existing space, one that critiques the architectural or institutional words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following The observer is carefully situated within these installations in order to directly experience their psychic effects

Originally trained as an architect, Barry became involved with performance and installation art in the alternative space pageant of the San Francisco Bay area in the mid-1970s. While studying film theory at Berkeley, she discloseed a strong interest in Conceptual art and began the theoretical writing that continues to parallel her visual art.[4] She also began to create her have a title to art works, including videos and performances. individual of the consistent themes in her early performance works was the way in which the body--especially the female body--functions as a site of experience. This general [i]or[/i] abstract notion was represented metaphorically in her solo performance Past not absent Future Tense (1977) at San Francisco's 80 Langton road in which Barry was slowly buried through a stream of sand that poured above her from above.[5]