2002

“I maintain, that it is sensibility,
which makes the mediocre actor;
extreme sensibility the narrow-minded actor;
cold spirit and head the great actor.”

Denis Diderot - The Paradox of the Actor

A dark room - in the middle hangs a row of six back projection screens. Faces can be seen on these apparently floating projection surfaces faces, six video portraits of weeping women. Each one’s weeping is different: quietly sobbing, artificially exaggerated, affected or hysterical. Each projection has its own soundtrack, a speaker above the screen conveys the corresponding sounds of weeping, in the room these overlap.

This installation is devoted to drama as the technique of the reproduction of expressions of feeling. The video sequences show actresses weeping in front of the camera. To act means to be one’s own medium. The media of film and video, however, give the impression, that the actor-interpreter embodies him or herself. Through the doubling of the media (acting and recording) the viewer is supposed to forget the fact of the media. Hence for this installation the room is darkened like a cinema. The screens placed in the middle of the room can be viewed from both sides, so that the media production itself becomes the object viewed. The mediality of recording and reproduction is put at the centre of the installation. A play between forgetting and foregrounding the media.

Weeping imparts feelings, it communicates an emotional state. On the one hand the distance between feeling and expression of feeling is a characteristic of weeping, on the other the loss of self-control.

The actresses weep. They reproduce this emotion. Detached from narrative embedding this work concentrates on the dramatic techniques of weeping. The attention of the recipient is intended to be directed towards the question, whether s/he is here confronted with authentic eruptions of feeling or with the mimetic rendering of eruptions of feeling. Here it is a matter neither of a competition in weeping nor of a typology of weeping, but of a tightrope walk between the authentic emotion of a feeling (naturalness) and the portrayal of an eruption of feeling (artificiality).

To hide the intentionality of weeping, is to make the viewer forget dramatic technique, and to declare the mimetic portrayal created by the acting to be the truth. Here essential questions of dramatic art are turned into a general question about the mediality of feelings. It is not a product (weeping), which is displayed here, but its dramatic reproduction. Hence what is important for the individual sequences are not the most realistic expressions of feeling, but the transparency of the reproduction process. It is not eruptions of feeling, which become evident in the installation, but the mediation and indirectness of feelings. The mediation operates on three levels: The weeping is a mediation of feelings. The actresses function as media, which try to lend this mediation of feeling a mimetic representation. The media used in the installation - video recording and projection - suggest, precisely by way of the temporal and spatial distance between actors and viewers, an immediacy, which allows what is represented to be forgotten as representation. The arrangement of the media in the room, however, is intended to prevent such forgetfulness.

(Theo Ligthart)

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