09
The Haunting of a Viewer
The viewing of art is a personal and transformative encounter. Informed by our past, the present moment is shaped not only by the current exhibit, but also by our previous experiences that haunt our awareness. The current exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), Hauntology, explores this temporal relationship. The term hauntology, coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1993, is explained in the exhibition description as “the logic of the ghost.” Referring to the manner in which Marxism “haunts” post-communist Europe, “hauntology” has penetrated the music and visual art worlds as artists explore the ways in which the past haunts the present and future. Bringing a variety of media together, BAM Director Lawrence Rinder and artist and musician Scott Hewicker selected pieces of work, including many recent museum acquisitions, which represent a form of hauntology. At times, the expression is visual, audio, philosophical, and even political.
My first impression of the exhibit, with limited knowledge of hauntology, was of a confused and random assemblage of work. Examples from a variety of time periods, styles, and geographical locations come together in a seemingly illogical manner. The show may alienate the public, as it is difficult to relate to or derive a cohesive sense of meaning from it.
What initially appears as inaccessibility, however, may be a tactic to engage a wider audience. Haunting is being confronted with the past, and is thus a personal and subjective experience to different viewers. By providing a diversity of work, the exhibit is able to reach, and therefore haunt, a larger number of audience members.
The work that inspired the most profound reaction in me was Carina Baumann’s Untitled, a photograph printed with translucent white film on aluminum. Baumann’ s work certainly captures the idea of haunting; her oeuvre is composed of photographs taken by nothing but the light of a full moon, displaying nearly imperceptible, ghostly images. Exploring ideas of mortality, the artist describes her subjects as “reduced to a minimum to become barely visible to further emphasize the notion of loss.” This aligns with my personal idea of haunting: spending the current moment trapped in considering what has been lost in the past, haunted by ghosts that are not actually present, yet still have emotional presence.
Grouped with Roger Ballen’s Twirling Wires and Miller Updegraff’s The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Baumann’s work finds a cohesive home within the black and white palette, a welcomed refrain in the otherwise cacophonous collection. The piece Untitled appears, initially, to be a minimalist grey canvas. Upon deeper inspection, however, a face surfaces that meets the viewer’s gaze with its own piercing stare. Many features of the subject recede into the background, intensifying a sense of glow from the reflection in the eyes. Age and gender are indiscernible, yet an air of sadness is evident. An emotional narrative unfolds before the viewer, with the down turned mouth expressing sorrow, and the moist appearance of the eyes matching this vulnerability and adding a sense of desperation.
Just as it is difficult for the viewer to identify the face in an immediate way, it is difficult to determine what exactly is immediacy, after all, in the presence of this work. The face appears to be that of a ghost, existing outside of this moment. The eerie sense of the photograph, the dark tones, and silent suffering of the face have an immortal feel, as if this being is no longer a part of our world, yet meets our gaze. Derrida called hauntology “the persistence of the present past.” The face persists into the present, meeting us on the picture place, yet seems to be from the past with its ghostly facade. The sadness of this face that is no longer with us evoked my own sadness over those who are no longer with me. I felt haunted by my own past in that moment.
Inspiring this strong of a reaction, hauntology has more than just a homophonologic relationship with ontology, the study of being, existence, and reality. Art has the ability to transform our notions of each of these, and Baumann’s work in particular allows for this: my state of being was shifted by the presence of a ghost who seems to exist in a separate, yet simultaneous, reality. Perhaps as the viewers go through the exhibit, one of the works will bring a part of their past into their present reality as well.
Sources:
Baumann, Carina. “work.” Carinabaumann.com. 2009.
Baumann, Carinna. Untitled. 2008-2009, Berkeley Art Museum.
Hewicker, Scott and Rinder, Lawrence, Hauntology, Jul 14-Dec 5 2010.
Jenny Byer is a senior in the Visual Studies program at CCA. Growing up in rural Michigan, Jenny dreamed of a world that had more to offer than endless reinterpretations of how to paint the Great Lakes. Her mother describes her daughter’s art school years in New York and San Francisco as “getting as far away as she can without falling in the water.” She has found her home in the Bay Area art scene and hopes to write and teach about it some day.
© 2010 Humble Pie Magazine