e v e ry o ne c ar r ies a shad ow / insan kendi gĂślgesinde y aĹ&#x;ar
“i posses all i need”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
Rebellion of the Repressed Other
For three thousand years, under the tyranny of patriarchal culture, the feminine was devaluated and repressed. According to psychiatrist C.G. Jung, all that is repressed and isolated from consciousness do not disappear. They remain stored in the part of the psyche known as shadow. Further, the repressed cannot be contained indefinitely. It will always return. Lale Tara’s recent photographic mise-en-scène is a quintessentially ambitious doppelgänger narrative that marks the return of the repressed. The doppelgänger functions as a product of shadow projection: an embodiment of the repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, forbidden desires, and socially tabooed (primitive) instincts and impulses. It reveals the dark shadow archetypes in women’s unconscious within the framework of sins like, wrath, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony. Lale Tara justifies these sites of sin and waywardness by morphing them into a phenomenal field of emotion. This she achieves by staging a dramatic moment that reveals how one feels now. Consequently, the subversive characterizations become the metaphors for fear, pain, desire, frustration, anger, passion, envy, etc. Harumph! Aren’t these human experiences inhabited in all of us? Hence the artist compiles her latest images under the title “Everyone carries a shadow”. The essence of the title lies in Jung’s doctrine of shadow, where he wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”1 He further wrote, “…..if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy.”2 Projection of real human emotions, desires and fears thus lends greater verisimilitude to the fictional events of the narrative and enables the viewer to ponder the human psyche more objectively. The luminance on the images resembling the dramatic lightening of Baroque reinforces the alternative realities and heightens the potential grandeur; the theatricality and an elliptical narrative within a series join the photographs. Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall can all lay a claim to influence. Lale Tara’s staged photographs designates a rare female double, an already “other” in a phallocentric confine, as the protagonist of the narrative. A female license for doubling has always been overlooked, or perhaps even deliberately marginalized. Thereby, a female doppelganger version in her images generates an uneasy perplexity and anxiety in its viewer, furthermore by rendering explicit a radical alterity within the divided states of the psyche of women. In an essay titled, “The Uncanny”, Freud labeled the appearance of doppelgänger as uncanny which he connected to the queer feelings one gets from dolls. Further in the essay, reflecting on the iconic use of doll in primitive cultures, Freud suggested that the doll functioned as a kind of a magical double for the individual, an assurance for immortality.3 In art, since
nineteen twenties, the doll has been a projection figure, an object trouvè, used by surrealist artists to thematicize the relation between representations, mediality, perception and credibility primarily via the media of photography and film. The strategic deployment of a life-size sex-doll in Lale Tara’s photography to pose a manifest double of her increases the complexity inherent in such relational thematization. The interplay of different media intentionally subverts and destabilizes photography’s indexicality. The ambiguous cross-references, according to Belting, paradoxically help to emphasize one medium on the evidence of another via counter references.4 The bodies which we see in the photographs, like any human hybrid, exist in a purgatory of flesh and plastic, emotion and stoicism, the real and unreal. With their narrative function they open up new voyeuristic and fetishistic possibilities but they do not de-historicize themselves from the master narratives of Marxism and Psychoanalysis. They provide opportunities to discuss the changing interactions between women and dolls, organic and inanimate constructions of capitalism. The murderous inclinations and sexual desires imposed on them exemplify the association of femininity with nature and the primal forces of the unconscious, while their technological origin makes them “surface without substance, a creature of style and artifice whose identity is created through various costumes and masks that she assumes”.5 The power of adornment and juxtaposition of dolls with real alienated, abandoned locations blur the dualities like, woman/doll, real/ counterfeit, fantasy/fetishism, and beauty/ephemerality, whilst simultaneously creating a vulnerable space that successfully confronts the new dynamics of social positioning of women and the struggle between identity and commodity. Lale Tara instigates the construction of female identity by unfurling the images of women from her phantasy and distilled mostly through nineteenth and twentieth century art and literature. Whether posed as powerful, assertive or vulnerable, these rebellious women always act in defiance of the rigid gender constructions of femininity. Their fascination is a function of their capacity to represent clusters of energies which have been disavowed in order to create and stabilize an inhabitable field of identity. These disavowed (‘othered’) energies are like anti-matter to identity- they threaten to destabilize it catastrophically.6 This, however, makes them highly attractive, since as Bersani observes, only the decentered subject is available to desire.7 These political processes of identity production through disavowal and canalization of desire acquired by Lale Tara confirm and consolidate her identity as a radical female artist. The protagonists in “Porneia” and “Salome”, particularly revives the notion of women’s shadow that spawned in fin-desiècle art and culture, expressing fears of women’s tyranny,
wantonness, madness, and sexual licentiousness that bring men low to an extent that poses danger to the whole civil society. Doppelgänger in “Porneia” is the only female that directly confronts the viewer’s gaze probably to declare the rebellion. Essentially corrupt and bestial, with serpent-like hair forming a part of her anatomy: commonly legs, thighs and loins; she is a personification of Eros. “Salome” on the other hand has a more feminist approach. Lale Tara challenges the blood thirsty, sexually charged Salomes of Bonnaud, Moreau, Breadsley and other male fin-de-siècle versions. Her Salome, a partially nude woman with blond short hair, is sitting beside a severed male head placed on the platter but she lacks a gaze of a crazed sexual hunger; woman’s lust is missing. Instead, her poker face and gesture apparently accommodates the conflicting needs onto the same character, the need to rebel, and the need to suffer punishment for this rebellion. Shrewd irony and female politics is further apparent in twisting and turning the gaze by subverting the traditional gender constructions. For instance, the male in “Card Players” is wickedly framed as the more passive figure, visibly vulnerable to the powerful, sexually assertive and threatening female figure. The figures of royal men and women in the wall paintings in the background seem to act as mute witnesses not only to a unified card game but also to the fall of the patriarchal empire. The more aggressive rebellious impulse is satisfied in “I woke up as replica” by conveying the disgust of transformation into a masculine form as if doppelgänger have transformed into some Kafkaesque character, something to be locked away from the world. But this isn’t it; the work has a more subversive overtone. The painting hung on the bedroom wall and horse on the table suggests that the image is a reconstruction of the transformation of Gregor Samsa, the male protagonist of Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis”, into his doppelganger and moreover into a male sex doll. This new form of existence given to a man is an obvious satisfaction of the misandrous impulses since it rips him off his “traditional male role” and “culture of machismo”.8 The potential fright such a transformation stir up in man, can be acknowledged from Weininger’s writing: “no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection in a mirror, but no man would be able to spend his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Or can this fear, the fear of the doppelgänger (female is characteristically devoid of this fear) be explained “biologically”, “Darwinistically”? One need only mention the word doppelgänger in order to call forth acute heart palpitation in most men.”9 “Everyone carries a shadow”, an image that convincingly shares the title of this latest oeuvre, epitomizes Lale Tara’s forte of constructing an emotional quagmire by rendering the mist of pain and emptiness inside oneself more profoundly to pervade the scene and engulf us into her tale. The setting up of doppelgänger as a warrior layered with snazzy accoutrements,
reconstructs our memory of gladiatrix of a bygone era: a symptom of corrupted sensibilities, morals and womanhood. She is still suffering but this time not by external but misery caused by something internal: convincingly, envy- the most primitive and fundamental of emotions. In the unconscious envy festers like a sore and turns into something much worse: uncontrollable, incomprehensible hatred. Infested with selective blindness and skewed perception, it can lead one to commit the sin of rebellion. Consequently, the feminism of this protagonist is rooted in pain, struggle, broken relationship and desire. The vulnerability evoked in the images like, “My name is pride” is also evident of doppelgänger’s underlying penchant for deception. The protagonist is sitting in a secluded garden; staring at her shoved off hair, she seems intent on selfdestruction, and nonetheless she is whispering “My name is pride”. By using tools like Halberstam’s “shadow feminism” we are positioned to view her vulnerability not as her weakness but as personal and political power.10 Though self-abnegation runs counter to the logic of liberal feminism, this image reveals representation of strength that exists outside of patriarchal mandates of dominance. Characteristically, a doppelgänger narrative almost always ends with death of either side of the self but the artist asserts to continue her obsession with doppelgänger in a complex symbiotic relationship. This acknowledgment turns us to interpret the image, “Requiem of a sin”, metaphorically. Is it a requiem for just a murder? Or, is the deceased body placed on the altar of the ruined, abandoned location, a metaphor for a dead moral self? What if doppelgänger has committed a sin of killing off its conscience and is a morality-free zone now? Gasp! We could only shudder at a thought of what this darkest double can make us encounter in future. Dwelling upon the triumph of sin, many such alternative realities meticulously planned and staged in Lale Tara’s latest photographic oeuvre bring forth the tendencies that run counter to the dominant cultural canons of a society. Whether her dopplegänger narrative grounded in the uprise of dark
feminine gives heebie jeebies in its true Freudian sense or not is subjective but it certainly never let the viewer get away with a simple Jungian translation: “Everyone carries a shadow”. The rebellious protagonist engaged in a task of projecting the hidden aspects of personal and collective unconscious exemplifies just how dark and dense a shadow can become if ignored and repressed for a long time. Ambitiously treading the line between history and contemporaneity, between cultures, between different artistic media, between self and other, “Everyone carries a shadow” becomes a discursive space where the disavowed realities of emotional dysregulation are projected. Each image, in its own unique ways, throws the lid off our own Pandora’s Box and returns us to an encounter with our own heart of darkness- that area which has been silenced by culture. Dr. Vaishali Sharma May 2013 References 1. Jung, Carl G., 1938. Psychology and Religion. Psychology of Religion: West and East. CW11. P.131. 2. Jung, Carl G., 1968. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 1934. 2nd edition. Trans R.F.C. Hull. Ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Bollinger Series XX. New York: Princeton University, p.3-41. 3. Freud, S., 2003. The Uncanny. The Uncanny. 1919. Trans. and ed. David McLintock. Penguin Classics Edition. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., p.123-162. 4. Belting, H., 2005. Toward an Anthropology of the Image. Anthropologies of Art, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, Yale University Press. http://www.lucite.org/pdf. 5. Felski, B., 1995. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University press, p. 4 6. Austine, S., 2004. Desire, Fascination and the Other: Some Thoughts on Jung’s Interest in Rider Haggard’s ‘She’ and on the Nature of Archetypes. Harvest: International Journal for Jungian Studies, Vol.50 (2). 7. Bersani, L., 1986. The Freudian Body-Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbian University Press, p. 66-64, 112-113. 8. Gilmore, David G., 2009. Misogyny: The Male Malady. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 10-13. 9. Weininger, O., 2005. Sex and Character- with Interlinear Translation. 2nd edition. Trans. Robert Willis, p. 267-8. http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/ geschlecht.pdf 10.Halberstam, Judith J., 2011. Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity/ Radical Passivity. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
“salome”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“card players”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“anna k.”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“idle possesions”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“po rneia”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“pride”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“i woke up as a replica”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“everyone carries a shadow”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“we are all seeds”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“requiem for a sin”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
“once i was me”
K APAKTA / ON THE COVER
“everyone carries a shadow”
FOTOĞRAF / PHOTOGRAPHY, C-PRINT, DIASEC, ED OF 6 + 1AP., 120 X 180 cm + 100 X 150 cm, 2012
Yayınlayan / Published by Artı Sanat Üretim Hizmetleri Ltd. Şti. Abdi İpekçi Caddesi Kaşıkçıoğlu Apt. No:42/2 Nişantaşı, İstanbul, Türkiye T +90 212 291 77 84 F +90 212 343 69 35 E info@artxist.com W www.artxist.com
Koordinasyon / Coordination Yasemin Elçi Grafik Tasarım / Graphic Design Mehmet Uluşahin
Renk Ayrımı, Baskı ve Cilt / Color Seperation and Printing MAS Matbaacılık A.Ş. Hamidiye Mahallesi, Soğuksu Cd. No:3, Kagithane, 34408, İstanbul, Türkiye T +90 212 294 10 00 F +90 212 294 90 80 W www.masmat.com.tr
Bu katalog, 10 Eylül — 19 Ekim 2013 tarihleri arasında x-ist tarafından düzenlenen Lale Tara’ın “İnsan Kendi Gölgesinde Yaşar” adlı sergisi nedeniyle 1000 adet basılmıştır. This catalogue, of which 1000 were printEd., has been prepared by x-ist on the occasion of Lale Tara’s exhibition “Everyone Carries a Shadow” shown between September 10 — October 19, 2013.
10 / 9 — 19 / 10 / 2013