Amelie Chabannes: Double Portraits and a Fourth Hand

Curated by Richard Klein

March 24 to August 25, 2013

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Chabannes

Amelie Chabannes: Double Portraits and a Fourth Hand

Many artists pin images and other ephemera that have either influenced them or caught their interest to their studio walls. Amelie Chabannes’s workspace is not unique in this respect, but a visitor who focuses on the gridded mosaic of digital photos (all trolled from the Internet) lining one wall of her studio might be perplexed by the juxtapositions: the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001; artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay performing Breathing in/Breathing out (1977), where the two artists locked their mouths together and exchanged each other’s breath until passing out; rock core drill samples from Kane, Utah, made by the US Geological Survey; the last photo of British mountaineers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine before they disappeared on their attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924; and Oskar Kokoschka’s painting Self Portrait with Doll (1921), which pictures the artist with the life-size effigy he had made of his lover, Alma Mahler. The common thread running through these images is that each represents a persistent, and in some cases disturbing, preoccupation with an extreme idea: the Bamiyan Buddhas show the end result of religious fanaticism; Abramovic and Ulay, the impossibility of merging two into one; the core samples, the attempt to gain knowledge beneath the surface of the easily observed; Mallory and Irvine, the single-minded—and ultimately deadly—obsession with the world’s tallest mountain; and Kokoschka, the fetishistic result of romantic obsession.

Since the 1960s the exploration of identity has become one of the most significant subjects in art, with artists probing the complex relations between self and society that govern individual psychological identification. The territory of identity is vast, encompassing, among other things, gender, race, stereotypes, individuality, nationality, and class. In most cases, artists reflect on their own sense of identity within the context of society so as to generate subject matter; but outside the art world, identity is seen as an objective—not subjective—area of inquiry. Beginning in 2009, Chabannes began attacking identity as a subject, not through the usual autobiographical route, but rather through combining an objective interest in philosophy, psychology, and art history. Using archeological procedures as a metaphor for the processes in psychology that uncover and expose the self, Chabannes made art that fused sculpture with performance, treating the spaces that contained her efforts as excavation sites that became theatres of meticulous and painstaking recovery. The debris and artifacts generated by these works stood as symbolic, recovered remains of both individual and cultural identity.

These combined interests in psychology and art history eventually led Chabannes to the opposite of the primacy of individual identity, referred to in psychology as “fusional relationships.” Fusion is defined as the desire of two individuals to become one, which is most commonly manifested in society by the popular romantic notion of “two halves make a whole,” fueled by the belief—both conscious and unconscious—that bliss is achieved through unity. But in some circumstances fusion is taken to an extreme, and the result can be the pathology of damaging dependency, or, as we will see, an attempt at a kind of liberation.

Since the time of Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, there have been a handful of notable cases where fusion has become subject matter for artists. Chabannes, because of her growing interest in notions of identity, was drawn to these examples, realizing that engaging with this history was a fruitful area that had the potential to both move beyond the self and to explore identity in an unorthodox and challenging manner. The figures to which Chabannes gravitated included not only Kokoschka and Mahler, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, but also the musician, poet, and performance artist Genesis P-Orridge and

his wife/collaborator Lady Jaye, the performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, and the British artist duo of Gilbert & George.

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To this point, her works tackling these subjects have been autonomous “drawings” done on wood panels. For the exhibition at The Aldrich, the artist has expanded both the scale and the nature of her art by operating directly on the walls of the Museum— not just their surfaces, but also down into their infrastructure. Using three walls of the Museum’s screening room gallery, Chabannes has created three interrelated works that surround the viewer: two that utilize Abramovic and Ulay as their subject, and another that uses Gilbert & George. Chabannes’s technique starts with the creation of multiple line drawings rendered from photographs that document iconic performances by her protagonists. These drawings, done with pencil on tracing paper, are flipped over onto a gessoed panel—or in the case of this exhibition, the gallery’s painted white wall—and are traced from behind with ballpoint pen so that the hard tip of the ballpoint transfers the graphite of the original pencil drawing to the wall’s surface. This process is repeated seemingly endlessly, with the drawings being moved slightly for each round of tracing, resulting in multiple, overlapping images that quake like dancers under a strobe light. This technique blurs the individuality of Chabannes’s subjects, creating a visual corollary

Double Portrait, Marina, Ulay, a Fourth Hand and the Impermanence #1 (installation view; detail), 2013

to the intent of the original performances. In Chabannes’s drawings made in this manner, however, the images frequently become so disjointed and chaotic that the original subjects are left behind, creating what the artist describes as “the fourth hand,” a reference to artist, art critic, and art historian Charles Green’s book The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art From Conceptualism to Postmodernism. The title of Green’s book refers to the timeless notion of “the hand of the artist” and how through sustained collaboration two artists can create a “third hand,” that is a new and separate creative identity. Chabannes takes this notion one step further: through her appropriation and manipulation of images that document artistic relationships, her hand literally creates a fourth identity.

Chabannes’s process, however, is based on a critical self-awareness, and she understands that fusion has the downside of flirting with a kind of immature dependency, like the needy love an infant focuses on its mother. Normal maturity leads to individuation, the establishment of a strong ego and a sense of self; as in the example of Kokoschka, the will towards fusion can lead to a dead end. In her work with well-known artistic couples, Chabannes also faces the danger of committing her own type of fusion by falling into hero (or heroine) worship, but in her process she has harnessed a major facet of individualization: destruction of authority. It is at this point where Chabannes the psychologist and Chabannes the artist come together. The movement towards the merging of the subjects in her drawings results not in harmony, but rather a violent collision where their relationship is obliterated. Chabannes is consciously smashing the iconic images she uses in order to establish a fourth hand.

The artist initiates the violence on her drawings where the inseparable collaborators are most intimate, continuing the drawing, not with a transfer technique, but with the

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Double Portrait, Marina, Ulay, a Fourth Hand and the Impermanence #1 (installation view; detail), 2013

dangerous edge of a utility knife. The “drawing” with the knife penetrates the surface, and the growing wound is augmented with the use of power tools. The process continues, gradually moving from drawing to excavation, until the surface has been breached and a void is revealed. It is at this point in the process that the photos pinned to the artist’s studio wall begin to make sense: the violent iconoclasm of the Taliban; the geological probing; the explorers who have gone too far. Chabannes herself has become an iconoclast and explorer, metaphorically challenging and destroying her artistic predecessors in order to move forward. Destruction goes hand in hand with creation, a fact that is true not just in the arts, but in natural history and scientific realms as well.

The excavated areas in Chabannes’s works function on multiple levels, not all of them obvious. Intertwined with the urge to challenge established icons is the act of destroying and going beyond the picture plane itself, an idea that has been integral to Modernism. In this way, Chabannes’s puncturing of her drawings’ surfaces recalls Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases of the 1950s and 60s, not only for their violation, but also for their tempting glimpse into the unknown. The voids that are created are dark and mysterious, suggesting that in the process of exploration one often comes face to face with the unknowable. In the case of Chabannes’s project at The Aldrich, there is the additional aspect of her willful damage to the surface of the institution: her processes of matricide and patricide are not limited to artistic predecessors, but also the authority of the White Cube, the sacred temple-like space where art is presented. Chabannes’s act of controlled vandalism might prompt a visitor to ask, “How can you let an artist cut holes into the Museum?” The answer is simple: it is one thing to picture iconoclasm, another to directly experience it. The ragged holes punched into the wall bring its violence—and its psychology—from the merely rhetorical to the real.

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It should be noted that besides her more or less traditional studio practice, Chabannes is currently pursuing a project in collaboration with video artist Antonia Dias Leite that involves recording the movement of Alpine glaciers. The voids the artist creates in the picture plane—or the voids in the Museum’s walls—are after all just analogies of destruction and exploration, while a descent into a glacial crevasse is a real experience where one is brought face to face with crushing elemental forces that put one’s actual safety at risk. Chabannes, who grew up mountain climbing in the French Alps, was drawn to glaciers by the cycle of creation and destruction inherent in their formation and movement and how their nature can be a metaphor for psychological states. Climbing along the bottom of a deep and narrow crevasse, where thousands of tons of ice are slowly scraping across ancient bedrock, one is in the contradictory position of having put one’s sense of individuality into the perspective of geological time, while simultaneously feeling very much alive in the present.

The work that Chabannes has created on the west wall of the screening room gallery is based on Singing Sculpture, the seminal 1970 performance by Gilbert & George. The two artists, whose heads and hands were coated with metallic powder, stood on a table and repeatedly performed the Depression-era song Underneath the Arches in London’s Nigel Greenwood Gallery, sometimes for as long as an entire day. Considered one of the first performance art works of long duration, Singing Sculpture was a strangely revolutionary work cloaked in a conservative nostalgia. Chabannes’s interest in this performance is based on its extreme nature, and in the appropriation of its myth she has pushed the limits of her own technique, utilizing over twenty-five separate drawings during a grueling six-day installation period. But its creation has a hidden parallel with Singing Sculpture: Gilbert & George continued performing the work, recreating it at other venues over the ensuing years, while Chabannes will periodically return to the Museum during the course of the exhibition to continue her excavation into Singing Sculpture’s ghost.

The past is not dead and Chabannes, working with the persistence of an archeologist, continues to desperately search for a way to move beyond the known. The artist states, “Altering an artwork already ‘sacralized’ by the time and virtuosity involved is definitely an act of defiance.” In Chabannes’s iconoclasm a terrible beauty is born, with its inherent risks—and rewards.

Richard Klein, exhibitions director

Ironically, given the artist’s interest in iconoclasm, the contents of her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in October 2011.

After marrying Lady Jaye Breyer in 1993, Genesis and Lady Jaye began a project to become Breyer P-Orridge, a single pandrogynous entity.

Montano and Hsieh performed Art/Life: One Year Performance (a.k.a. Rope Piece) from July 4, 1983, to July 3, 1984. The two were tied together by an eight-foot rope, but not allowed to touch for one year.

Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

The project, entitled Prelude: Surely I dream’d to-day, or did I see, also includes the participation of glaciologist Luc Moreau.

Underneath the Arches, recorded in 1932 by the British singing and comedy duo of Flanagan and Allen, explored the theme of friendship through the eyes of homeless men who slept beneath a London railroad bridge during the Depression.

Quoted from an email from the artist, January 2013.

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Works in the Exhibition

All dimensions height x width

Double Portrait, Marina, Ulay, a Fourth Hand and the Impermanence #1, 2013 Wall drawing with transferred graphite, excavation, wall debris21 feet x 9 feet 11 inches

Double Portrait, Marina, Ulay, a Fourth Hand and the Impermanence #2, 2013Wall drawing with transferred graphite, excavation, wall debris20 feet x 9 feet 11 inches

Double Portrait, Gilbert, George, a Fourth Hand and the Impermanence #1, 2013Wall drawing with transferred graphite, excavation, wall debris16 feet x 9 feet 11 inches

Courtesy of the artist and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York

Included in the exhibition is an installation of found photographs selected from the walls of the artist’s studio. Chabannes printed these images while conducting research on the Internet, and they are included in the context of her project to speak of the influences behind Double Portraits and a Fourth Hand. Images include couples who have attempted to create new singular artistic identities, explorers and aviation pioneers who have challenged boundaries, examples of iconoclasm from throughout history, and photographs referencing geological and archeological exploration.

Installation photography by Catherine Vanaria

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees

Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; Annadurai Amirthalingam, Treasurer/Secretary; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Chris Doyle; Mark L. Goldstein; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

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Exhibition support provided by Lori and Janusz Ordover, Kirsten and Andy Pitts, and Stuart and Cynthia Smith