Once upon a time someone might have sat in a kitchen chair at
the table...a mother, a daughter, perhaps the whole family gathered for a meal. Adriane Little’s installation, Phantom Pains of
Amputation violently severs everyday objects from that nostalgic
familiar scene as well as from the fabric of memories that might
have provided a link to past experience. The installation evokes
the comforting scene only by denying access to it; it preserves
it only by negating it. A severance as violent as an amputation,
repeated, incorporated into the work of art. The seven chairs,
painted in sterile, hospital-like white paint, are empty, or almost
empty: they hold the script instead of bodies. Arranged in an eye
shaped semi-circle, they embrace absence in a perfect geometrical composition. Someone might sit on them, even though
these objects do not invite intimate contact; in fact, their haunting aura arises out of almost brutal denial of intimacy. A simple
gesture of sitting down becomes an act of usurpation and obliteration. The body of a stranger would deface the writing on the
chair, erasing thus the anonymous trace left by another body. As
the compulsively repeated enigmatic line-- “mother can’t stop
the writing on the walls”–suggests, these chairs are imprinted
with the trace of the lost maternal body. Within the context of
the installation, the chairs unfold into substitute pages, whose
emptiness is so unbearable that it has to be covered and yet
preserved at the same time. On this substitute page, a single
sentence writes itself, can’t stop writing itself, until it covers
all the chairs twice over. In a parody of self-reflection, writing
turns upon itself, writes upon itself, almost obliterating its readability. Another startling gesture of the refusal of access: the
circularity of self- reflection, which should make the subject at
home with herself, turns within the space of the artwork into the
impersonality of a line erasing itself in the act of repetition. And
we, the viewers, cannot stop reading. By going in circles, we
extend the line into infinity...unless we violently interrupt its unfolding by sitting down. The installation catches us in the movement of the compulsive repetition of a traumatic event, both
re-enacted and transformed into the visual rhythm of the poetic
Phantom Pains of Amputation
(Home), 2004
Videoo Stills
composition in space. The traumatic past, which the installation
evokes, cannot stop repeating itself, invading and eroding the
lived present, traumatizing the subject again and again, and yet
evading cultural and personal memory. The traumatized subjectas Freud suggests,i and the numerous trauma theorists repeat
after him-- continuously relieves the painful past as a present
occurrence, just as the patient continues to feel the pain in her
amputated limb. The traumatic event, which has failed to register itself in the lived experience, destroys the very distinction between the past and the present, between the experience and its
memory. According to Cathy Caruth, the temporal predicament
of trauma can be described as a belated or missed experience,
which, because it shatters the very possibility of experience,
does not stop repeating itself.ii In the installation, the traumatic
repetition of the maternal loss compels the reproduction of the
identical chairs and the movement of writing itself. How can we
read this strange sentence-- “mother can’t stop the writing on
the walls”-- turning upon itself and against itself in the process
Phantom Pains of Amputation, 2004
Installation View
of its endless replication? Is it the mother who, like a ghost, is
compelled to write as if against her will, who can’t stop writing
the symptomatic effects of her disappearance? Or, on the contrary, is it something else that writes itself despite the mother’s
wish to stop it? Now that she is dead, the writing is on the wall,
for all to see, she can’t stop it, can’t hide the secret any more.
Like a line written upon another line, the sentence doubles itself
internally, one sense excluding and evoking the other, a replication enacting the conflicting relation between writing and the
maternal body. What kind of traumatic secrets does maternal
absence reveal, what kind of revelations does her death make
impossible? Displaced into the space of the gallery, the “writing chairs” both hide and betray painful maternal secrets to the
gaze of the viewers. A defiant disclosure that jealously guards
the impossibility of its revelation. As if in a supplement to the
obscurity of the writing on the chairs, the revelation of the secret
comes from the artist’s statement, an exorbitant text which exists both within and without the space of art: “While investigating
mother can’t stop the writing on the walls
(Hebrew), 2004
the death of my mother, who died when I was seven [I discovered] the erasure of Jewish identity within my family.” In her
statement, the artist speaks about the contradiction between the
hidden, unknown Jewish identity of her mother and the Serbian
Orthodox tradition in which she was raised: “The contradiction
between these realities has left me as a cultural orphan.” This
exorbitant confession links in a metonymic sequence a personal traumatic event–the death of the mother-- to other traumatic
events of the catastrophic Jewish history. Behind the script of
this personal loss we uncover the remains of immigrant scripts,
scripts of diaspora and the loss of cultural belonging. In contrast to the directness of the statement, the composition of the
installation evokes the traces of these multiple scripts of loss.
One superimposed upon another, only through an insertion of a
foreign language, Hebrew, it turns out upon a closer inspection
of the writing on one of the chairs. Instead of a revelation, an
awkward rendition of the English sentence into Hebrew signals
an inassimilable foreignness despite the clumsy fidelity to the
Phantom Pains of Amputation
(Public Library), 2004
Video Stills
literal sense. This act of translation, word by word as it were,
betrays the traumatizing secret of the hidden Jewish identity of
the dead mother by writing it in the language unknown not only
to the daughter but also to the mother herself. Although not
passed from the mother to the daughter, the broken transmission of the hidden identity cannot stop writing itself, cannot stop
bearing witness to its erasure. The intrusion of the foreign writing disrupting the compulsive flow of the native tongue makes
us speculate about other languages, for instance Serbian in the
case of the artist, obliterated by the bottomless melting pot of
English. Languages no longer spoken, lost somewhere in the
second or third generation of immigrants, who willingly or by
necessity subjected themselves to the colonizing power of English. Which one of them is the mother tongue? Was there ever a
single mother tongue? These questions undercut any nostalgic
fantasy of cultural belonging without alienation, of maternal intimacy without separation, and yet they also indicate the artist’s
search for a different mode of the relation to the maternal body
Phantom Pains of Amputation
(B’Nai Shalom), 2004
Video Stills
and cultural memory, to difference and similarity, to foreignness within and foreignness without. Perhaps this different
mode the mother/ daughter relation can be called an interval or
proximity, to use Luce Irigaray’s terms,iii the terms, which suggests both nearness and disconnection, contact and division. In
the context of the installation, such proximity is created through
the configuration of image, objects, texts. At its center is the juxtaposition between the video panels resting against the wall and
the composition of the chairs. If we look at the chairs, read their
text, and especially if we sit on them, we cannot see the video
panels, but we hear nonetheless its sound. And if we look at
the video, we leave the chairs behind, but we see one of them
reappearing again on the screen, this time next to the figure of
the daughter sitting on the curb of the sidewalk. The video is
thus positioned as both an improper instance of and a substitute
for “the writing on the wall,” to which the text on the chairs so
obsessively refers. This filmic writing on the wall inscribes the
daughter’s proximity to the empty maternal space, and at the
Installation View
same time repositions that proximity in the virtual public space, in
the midst of the anonymous traffic of cars and strangers. In one
of the video panels, we see the silent daughter sitting in front of
a funeral home, reading a book about Jewish rituals. Perhaps
she is learning about different funeral rites, which should have
been performed but did not take place. The image of the daughter facing her personal and cultural losses is repetitively defaced
by the passing cars. In another video panel, her silent reading is pierced by screams of a small girl that could be read as
coming from one of the houses in the background–it is the ignored voice of another that echoes one’s own past. Through
the juxtapositions of its divergent elements and media, the installation enacts different modalities of proximity: intimacy/ indifference, nearness/otherness, connection/separation, neither
one nor the other. As the artist puts it in her statement, “I remain
neither Serbian nor Jewish nor daughter but exist as the remnants and residue in between.” What happens when the repetition compulsion of the traumatic loss is repeated in the work of
mother can’t stop the writing on the walls
(English), 2004
art? Adriane Little’s installation both participates in this painful
compulsion and at the same time transforms it. By absorbing
traumatic repetition into its own configuration, Phantom Pains of
Amputation, confronts us with the necessity and the impossibility of translation. Traumatic event and its symptomatic inscription on the body; the displacement of the bodily inscription
on the skin of the chair; one language interrupting the flow of
another; the scream and the text, the image and the text; all of
these instances are acts of translation. They repeat, betray, and
transform the loss into a prosthetic “installation” of an impossible experience. And thus perhaps make mourning and proximity
possible.
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo
Notes:
i Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1961) 12-13.
ii Cathy Caruth, Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1996) p.4.
ii Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 14-19.
Phantom Pains of Amputation
(Colonial Memorial Chapel), 2004
Video Stills
DVD – Phantom Pains of Amputation
Initial Preview (labeled start here)
Extending Viewing / sound
Gallery Walkthrough
Phantom Pains of Amputation
(Home);
(Colonial Memorial Chapel);
(Congregation B’Nai Shalom);
(Library)
(Serbian Orthodox Church)
all original running times 7-minute loop
Phantom Pains of Amputation
(Serbian Orthodox Church), 2004
Video Stills
Adriane Little is a visual artist and educator who received her M.F.A. from
the University at Buffalo, where she currently teaches. Her work investigates trauma and ritual through an interrogation of a presence and absence
of the maternal body. The translation of this space is both literal and metaphor or the architecture of an ephemeral maternal space that is embedded within what she calls the matrilineal ghost. Her recent solo exhibitions
include Call Home Mothers Dead at Big Orbit Gallery and When Ready to
Use Again Soak in Buttermilk at CEPA Gallery within the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery’s expanded Biennial Beyond/In Western New York for 2005. Her
work has also been included in several group exhibitions; including Normal/
Abnormal: Bodies and Minds at Woman Made Gallery and a 3-person exhibition at the Harris Gallery – University of LaVerne, LaVerne California that
is upcoming in the fall of 2005.
This catalogue been printed to accompany the Exhibition Phantom Pains of Amputation on view at the Carnegie Art Center from March 25 - May 15, 2004. This
event is made possible by the Tonawandas’ Council on the Arts, the members of
the Carnegie Art Center, the City of North Tonawanda, Hadley Exhibits, Inc., the
Allentown Village Society and in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts
(a state agency). The artist would also like to acknowledge artist and intellectual
support from Jolene Rickard, Gary Nickard, Joan Copjec, Deborah Jack, Reinhard
Reitzenstein and Sylvie Bélanger. Catalogue Design: Adriane Little, Documentation: Soyeon Jung and Adriane Little, Installation Assistance: Jason Sokolowski and
Jenn Ward. Essayist: Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. Printed by DPI Communications,
Inc., Buffalo NY. © Carnegie Art Center, 2005.
Carnegie Art Center
Tonawandas’ Council on the Arts
240 Goundry Street
North Tonawanda NY 14120
www.carnegieartcenter.org
additional information and
artwork can be found at
www.AdrianeLittle.com