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Inner and outer nature: The video art of Mathilde Rosier

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Inner and outer nature: The video art of Mathilde Rosier

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Content INNER AND OUTER NATURE: THE VIDEO ART OF MATHILDE ROSIER by Heika Lucienne Burnison A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Heika Lucienne Burnison ii EPIGRAPH “As we don’t have any more faith in utopias, the art that evokes a form of sublime could play a role of substitution. I constantly wonder if the poet is as ridiculous as he seems to be…” – Mathilde Rosier 1 1 Mathilde Rosier, Passionate Belief (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006), 10. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have produced this piece without the generous aid of Tim Page, Sasha Anawalt, David James, and my family; infinite gratitude. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Epigraph ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures v Abstract vi Inner and Outer Nature: The Video Art of Mathilde Rosier 1 References 24 Appendix: Mathilde Rosier Short Biography 27 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Mathilde Rosier, To S. Freud, 2005, watercolor on paper, 108 x 89cm 5 Figure 2. Mathilde Rosier, Le Vierge Aujourd’Hui [The Virgin Today], 2005, stills from a color video, 2 minutes 7 Figure 3. Mathilde Rosier, Lac [Lake], 2004, still from a color video, 5 minutes 8 Figure 4. Mathilde Rosier, view of the installation for the video projection Entr’acte [Intermission], 2003, Hotel pod Jeleniem in Cieszyn, Poland 9 Figure 5. Superimposed still image from Mathilde Rosier’s Every Day the Same, 2002, 16 minute video 11 Figure 6. Rosier’s doppelgänger, dancing to Caribbean music in her 16 minute video Every Day the Same, 2002 13 Figure 7. Mathilde Rosier, All The Time I Walk With Time, 2010, still from a color video, 15 minutes 15 Figure 8. A projection of the performance All The Time I Walk With Time (Dir. Mathilde Rosier, 2010) at Rosier’s exhibit “The Oceanic Feeling” at Galerie Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany. 17 Sep 2010 – 6 Nov 2010 16 Figure 9. Mathilde Rosier, About Sun-God Choreography 4, 2010, watercolor and gouache on paper, 42 x 58.5cm 17 Figure 10. Mathilde Rosier, Three Masks, 2010, watercolor and gouache on paper, 157.5 x 232cm 18 Figure 11. Mathilde Rosier playing the piano, which had secret speakers inside playing another track, during her tri-part performance of A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin, 1 Nov 2008 20 Figure 12. Mathilde Rosier, installation view of Reverie du Promeneur Solitaire (1), 2008, acrylic on canvas and gouache on paper, 150 x 250 cm, at A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin, 1 Nov 2008 21 Figure 13. A view behind the ‘set’ of A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin, 1 Nov 2008 22 Figure 14. Mathilde Rosier, Boxes of Birds (pink birds), 2007, boxes, gouache on paper, 55 x 52 x 100cm 29 vi ABSTRACT This essay offers an in-depth analysis of the creative practice of the French contemporary artist Mathilde Rosier (b. 1973), focusing specifically on her video works from 2001 to 2010. Rosier produces drawings, paintings, videos, sculpture installations, theatrical performances, and musical compositions that hover between the boundaries of truth and illusion, consciousness and unconsciousness, and the mythic and the (post)modern. Rosier’s inherently phenomenological work draws from Surrealist, Symbolist, and Romantic histories of art, but re-configures these movements’ aesthetic and philosophical concerns within a postmodern discourse by situating her viewers in the unstable position of historical self-awareness. Dream logic, perceptual deception, archetypal imagery, and mythical symbols frequent recur in Rosier’s practice to confound relations between history and the present, and between the object and its simulacrum. This text investigates many of these connections and the ways in which Rosier complicates them, while identifying the distinctive work that her art performs for its spectator. 1 Inner and Outer Nature: The Video Art of Mathilde Rosier In Paris in the early 1930s, the Surrealist author and theorist Antonin Artaud called for a new model of theatre, what he termed a “Theatre of Cruelty,” in which spectators would be shaken from their passive daze and included in an active experience that blurred the distinction between fiction and reality. By creating fissures in the fabric of realism via specific formal and performance devices, or “cruelty,” Artaud’s theatre would introduce new anatomies of reality to viewers wherein their secret fears and subconscious desires could be activated and extracted. 2 Artaud’s thespian ideas soon bled into the rapidly evolving medium of cinema, and invited avant- garde filmmakers to explore (and explode) the boundaries of representation––namely the effects that such anti-realist constructions of reality had on the psychologies of their viewers. Artaud announced, “The human skin of things, the derm of reality – this is the cinema’s first toy. It exalts matter and makes it appear to us in its profound spirituality, in its relationship with the mind from which it emerges.” 3 This impulse to re-connect the spectator with more primal understandings of human (un)consciousness and perception echoed throughout the Surrealist project since it officially began in 1924 with the publishing of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism. 4 But Artaud’s desire to shape theatre and cinema into “a transgressive force, located on the boundaries between materialism and spirituality, between the consciousness and the subconscious, […] and between 2 James Magrini, “Towards an Understanding of Antonin Artaud’s Film Theory: The Seashell and the Clergyman,”(2009), Philosophy Scholarship, paper 11. 3 Antonin Artaud, Collected Works (Volume Three), trans. Alistair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), 21. 4 See André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1972). 2 fiction and reality,” smoldered in the margins of the avant-garde and, though never extinguished, was soon overshadowed by transient trends in the respective mediums. 5 Ninety years later, the influence of Artaud’s writings appears (most commonly alongside Bertolt Brecht’s) within a vast array of postmodern theatre and film practice, though often twice or three times removed. It was not until the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren made the thirteen-minute film Meshes of the Afternoon with her husband Alexander Hammid in 1943 that Surrealist concerns in cinema officially moved into the second half of the twentieth century and thus into their second incarnation. Leaving much of Surrealism’s desire for political disruption and materialist social transgression behind, Deren transferred and translated the movement’s Freudian psychoanalytic elements to a more personal, psychically constructed cinema. And though Deren and Hammid did not consider themselves Surrealists (Deren even published writings that criticized aspects of the Surrealist project 6 ), Meshes became a model in the vanguard of an experimental filmmaking practice that explored the inner perspectives, or latent content, of the artist’s mind. 7 The film, constructed in spirals of multiple realities, employed similar types of psycho-erotic symbols and dream logic as the Surrealists, but for a notably different goal: to form a complicated portrait of an interior, psychological adventure. Avant-garde cinema’s view shifted subtly, yet importantly, from the external to the internal. 8 5 In the words of Lee Jamieson, “The Lost Prophet of Cinema: The Film Theory of Antonin Artaud,” Senses of Cinema, 27 Aug 2007. 6 Bill Nichols, ed., Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 17-8. 7 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6. 8 See P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, third edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), specifically chapter 1: “Meshes of the Afternoon.” 3 Today, some sixty years after Meshes emerged, in a post-cinematic art world of instant hand-held video and cell phone cameras, few contemporary artists search for such primal, universal understandings of human perception and cognition as those briefly mentioned above, and are instead seemingly consumed with mechanical reproduction, form and materiality, conceptual theory, and the constant flux of an ever-blinking popular culture. But the work of an emergent contemporary artist offers a much welcomed contrast to a postmodern art landscape rife with self-referential, stylistically regurgitated, and hyper-political content. The French-born Mathilde Rosier (b. 1973) is one of few creative figures working today attempting to reconnect a post-movement, post-everything viewer with several of the more universally accessible and applicable modes of Surrealist (as well as certain aspects of Romantic and Symbolist) practice. Just as Deren’s Meshes transferred and transformed Surrealism’s desire to excavate strange and illogical states of mind into a more intimate autopsy of her own creative and female identity, Rosier’s art draws from a reservoir of both intuitive and historical sources to reveal (and obscure) inner and outer realities. The result is an evolution in the contextualization of these art-making discourses, one that renegotiates the use and application of each to create new meanings for a contemporary audience. The artist’s multi-media oeuvre––which encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture installations, theatrical performances, musical scores, and non-narrative videos––presents ethereal, mythical subjects that frequently recur and comingle between mediums in order to present unearthly atmospheres that exist somewhere between dreaming and waking, between fiction and truth. Accordingly, Rosier’s diverse body of work puts pressure on the distinctions between what we perceive and what we know, and challenges its viewer to enter a realm of the subconscious while simultaneously remaining aware of the constructs of representation. These potent dualities, or phenomenological couplings, in her work arise most often via the 4 juxtapositions of mirrors, dawn versus dusk, two-dimensional versus three-dimensional space, and symbolic archetypes or mythical imagery. The artist’s video art especially combines a formidable mixture of Artaudian-Brechtian reflexivity with references to Surrealism, Symbolism, and Romanticism to show us how cinema can embody multiple modes of consciousness while filling in the gaps––the cognitive grey matter––between perception and understanding. Yet, most notably, Rosier’s art complicates rather than complements its relation to these canonical influences, which have become stylistic palimpsests––as she situates her viewer in the precarious position of historical self-awareness. The artist recognizes that we can no longer return to these eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century movements without acknowledging the manifest and latent ways in which they have influenced social consciousness. Freud’s writings, in particular, have permeated popular culture to such an extent that any contemporary artwork attempting to draw from his original concepts seems anachronistic. Rosier considers these influences openly and consciously––as opposed to seamlessly––by presenting them not as primary sources but as historical references, both artistic and social; her work comments on these movements rather than fitting neatly within them. This is precisely the self-awareness at play, for example, in her dreamy watercolor drawing To S. Freud (2005), which presents a large snail crawling onto a bed and admits with its title (and with tongue somewhat in cheek) just how heavily we have relied on the psychoanalyst and his theories to explain the phenomena in our lives. Rosier doesn’t attempt to conceal her links to this figure and the movements that appropriated his theories, but rather underscores them in re-presenting the archetypical symbols commonly found in dreams throughout her works. Thus, without the murderous, anarchist violence of her Surrealist ancestors, yet with a subtle form of theoretical aggression all her own, the artist pulls her viewer into an often-illusory dream world of myths, spirits, and emotions without succumbing to sentimentalism or nostalgia. The artist notes, "I am 5 opposed to the sentimental aspect of Romanticism, and I keep a distance from the Romantic images that I use... I deal very much in the realm of emotions, but this is in order to master them rather than to let the spectators lose themselves in them; this form of Romantic sentimentalism is a dead end.” 9 Figure 1. Mathilde Rosier, To S. Freud, 2005, watercolor on paper, 108 x 89cm Still, despite her sense of historical self-awareness, Rosier’s methods of artistic conveyance are predominantly primal and experiential, as opposed to determined and theoretical, and an almost Thoreauvian desire to re-connect with nature surfaces in nearly all of her work. The artist attempts to move beyond these historical traditions and the Freudian analysis often utilized within them not by deconstructing each coded symbol she creates, but by allowing the oneiric experience of her work to wash over herself and the viewer. "I reach a point where logic is 9 Personal written correspondence with Mathilde Rosier, 16 Mar 2011. 6 not enough, when other forces are governing what's happening between me and the subject,” she notes. Instead, Rosier ‘awakens’ her viewer by injecting her work with a perceptual slippage–– creating experiences that hover between two and three dimensions, between consciousness and unconsciousness, and thus between fantasy and reality. Nature as a Mirror Rosier’s two-minute video work Le Vierge Aujourd’Hui [The Virgin Today] created in 2005, for example, shows the interior pane of a darkened window in front of which Rosier sits. The amorphous white clouds of a duvet are behind her, peeled open from her recent rising. The artist stares motionless into––and, as the sun rises, out of––the window while her reflected image slowly collides with the emerging verdant landscape beyond the glass division. Eventually, her shadowy figure dissolves completely, and the viewer sees only a lush meadow at the break of day. Le Vierge Aujourd’Hui’s multi-perspectival image allows an otherwise imperceptible visual doubling, or superimposition, to occur within the film frame. But the camera’s collapsing of three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image carries complicated spatial implications: is Rosier actually inside, or out? Her figure (or its image) appears on the same plane as the exterior nature, but the film’s inclusion of the interior window pane (as well as the nebulous shape of the white bed reflected in the background) serves as a reminder that we are in fact inside and thus apart from it. As the emerging daylight makes the interior reflection no longer possible, and the woman’s image begins to dissolve and merge with the outside, the viewer wonders whether Rosier, or her image, was there to begin with at all. Is it her ghost that appears at the window? Is she dreaming? Rosier further enhances this gauzy atmosphere with the film’s title: a reference to the Symbolist poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé. 10 10 See Stéphane Mallarmé et al, Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford University Press, 2009), 66. 7 Figure 2. Mathilde Rosier, Le Vierge Aujourd’Hui [The Virgin Today], 2005, stills from a color video, 2 minutes The artist’s five-minute video work Lac [Lake] (2004) similarly uses nature as an illusory mirror, though in more formally literal ways. The film’s image is split down its middle––with each half displaying the same space of a lush Versailles-like garden, only at slightly different moments in time. Trees sway identically in the wind; ripples skim the two surfaces of a large lake in the park synchronously. Lac is an open book with two sides of the same image on either page, and nature takes on both beautiful and deeply ominous forms. In this filmic equivalent of a Rorschach test, a man and a woman wander on the left and right halves of the image respectively––their bodies existing in the same space of the park but divided by both time and the central spine of the frame. They try to connect, but they fail. The architecture of the frame in Lac, as in Le Vierge Aujourd’Hui, creates a fissure between two halves of the same whole that yearn to reunite in nature. 8 Figure 3. Mathilde Rosier, Lac [Lake], 2004, still from a color video, 5 minutes In addition to its ability to project Man into nature and reflect his image within it, Rosier’s visual and theoretical mirroring is also about a latent perceptual deception. In the eight- minute work Entr’acte [Interval] (2003), for instance, the artist sits at a grand piano in the conservatory of a house in the countryside, gently striking single keys as night turns into day through the open French doors behind her. The video installation, which was a collaboration with the contemporary artist Paulina Olowska and pays homage to René Clair’s famed 1924 Surrealist film of the same name, presents Rosier and several companions (one slouched in a corner chair, others frolicking outside) as dreamy post-party sleepwalkers lingering in the interim between night and day. But Rosier actually shot the video in the early evening as afternoon moved into dusk, and played the work for viewers in reverse. Further adding to this illusion, the artist projected the site-specific video in the interior of a decaying baroque hotel (Hotel pod Jeleniem in Cieszyn, Poland) such that the architecture of the diegetic room in which the film takes place and the architecture of the exhibition space merged. The video’s projected landscape became part of the perceived interior of the hotel as the space of the image proposed a greater depth than the empty room in which it was shown. Entr’acte exemplifies the perceptual offering and subsequent 9 denial that much of Rosier’s work performs, while calling attention to the plasticity of the filmic surface as well as to the architecture of the room in which such images are illuminated. The result is a deceptive play between two worlds––the imaginary and the real, the image and its surface, and tangible versus intangible space. Figure 4. Mathilde Rosier, view of the installation for the video projection Entr’acte [Intermission], 2003, Hotel pod Jeleniem in Cieszyn, Poland Every Day The Same A work of Rosier’s that conjures a more direct connection to Deren’s Meshes and its Surrealist roots is the video Every Day The Same (2002). In this fifteen-minute piece, doubling and deception take on more corporeal forms in the very bodies of Rosier and her male look-alike. Like Deren’s film, Every Day The Same uses a cyclical, looped narrative to confound the 10 viewer’s understanding of reality and its relationship between cause and effect. In the non-linear narrative, Rosier and her doppelgänger (played by her nearly identical brother) embark on an illogical journey that witnesses Rosier’s death and rebirth not once but twice per cycle. Rhythm and repetition, like in Luis Buñuel’s Surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (1962), pose both potential escapes from the looped narrative and inevitable failure for the characters, who slip between unity and difference throughout the film. 11 Every Day The Same opens with a shot of several cows in a grassy field just after dusk. Ominous music, composed by Rosier, immediately establishes a suspenseful tension, and the camera cuts to a wide view of a long dirt road. A figure in white walks slowly from the deep space of the frame toward the camera, and as it nears, we see that it is Rosier. Behind her a car’s headlights emerge in the distance. The vehicle stops as it reaches her, and she exhibits no surprise. This has likely happened before. Suddenly, loud clicking and thumping noises sound in the grass near the cows; someone is approaching. The camera assumes the eyes of a hunter. A bird screeches and the now hand-held camera shakes and cants its angle. An unrecognizable figure moves back towards the car, gets in, and drives away. Suddenly, Rosier is lying face up on the grass––arms sprawled and eyes closed. Is she dead? Or merely sleeping? Her entrance into a trance-like state signals a second level of the dream-narrative to commence––recalling the multiple narrative iterations that “telescope” and unspool like Russian dolls in Meshes of the Afternoon. 12 From complete darkness, a face similar to Rosier’s slowly comes into focus and fills the frame. It stares straight ahead, completely indifferent, and drives further into the darkness. The 11 For more on Buñuel’s narrative repetition in The Exterminating Angel, see Paul Sandro’s “Putting the Squeeze on Thought: Buñuel’s Naturalism and the Threshold of the Imagination” in Buñuel: The Transcultural Imaginary, ed. Gaston Lillo (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2003), specifically pp. 37. 12 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7-13 11 face is Rosier’s. Or is it? It’s her male counterpart. The man drives to a house that doesn’t seem to be his, and inspects a pink bedroom (likely hers) once inside. As soothing Caribbean music takes over the soundtrack, he dances awkwardly––still silent and stoic––at the foot of the bed as if in a trance. There is something uncomfortably funny about this moment, which also puts the viewer in a state of unease. 13 Figure 5. Rosier’s doppelgänger, dancing to Caribbean music in her 16 minute video Every Day the Same, 2002 A small drawing of a seashell hangs on a wall near the corner of the room, and as the man dances the camera cuts to a shot of a tropical beach with two snails on a piece of beach wood in the extreme foreground, causing their scale to be drastically distorted. With these repeated objects, Rosier returns us to an archetypical symbol––that famous emblem of the mystical 13 Mathilde Rosier, Passionate Belief (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006), 55. 12 Fibonacci sequence, which potentially holds all of the secrets of the universe––to remind us of the intensely rich significance inherently woven into the organic matter of our daily lives. The following morning the male twin sets out, driving through sunny green landscapes before reaching the shores of a river. A sea snail on the bank catches his eye, and he places it in his pocket. He then sees Rosier sitting at the edge of the water. Their indifferent faces stare blankly at one another––like mute animals––and eventually superimpose, recalling Ingmar Bergman’s famous superimposition shot of Alma and Elisabet in his film Persona (1966). 14 After several minutes of peaceful, stone-faced contemplation, the camera moves to the river, in which Rosier suddenly lays face down, motionless. The man drives away and the narrative circles back to the cows and dirt road from its beginning. Rosier’s film implies that this cycle will continue for all time, ending and beginning ‘every day the same’. Deeply interested in Haitian voodoo, ecstatic rituals, and primitive forms of dance, Maya Deren injected her filmmaking practice with these anthropological influences in an attempt to re- connect her viewers with the more primal sources lost in the march of civilization’s progress. Rosier is interested in much the same, and though she doesn’t deny or exclude emblems of development and industrialization in her work (automobiles and instruments appear repeatedly in her videos), her subjects are more interested in exploring the quiet corners of nature, where humans can intersect with animals and the elements. A brief moment in Every Day The Same epitomizes this spirit when Rosier’s camera captures a monkey running across a telephone wire along the side of a road. The animal nervously scurries along the metal and plastic as if it were a tree; but it’s not. It should seem strange––almost absurd, really––but it doesn’t. By incorporating the metrics of its era, namely large jumps over space and time, the contrast between wilderness and architecture, and between industry and animal, Every Day The Same propels the trajectory 14 Ibid, 48. 13 that Deren and her Surrealist influences delineated while pulling the dialogue into a postmodern era. The mystical aspects remain present (though not identical) across these projects, but Rosier’s work rightly acknowledges the social and technological complexity that’s ensued in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Figure 6. Superimposed still image from Mathilde Rosier’s Every Day the Same, 2002, 16 minute video All The Time I Walk With Time The artist’s most recent, and perhaps ambitious, project to date combines the artist’s pre- existing concerns with cyclical conditions of time with live performance and mythic imagery. All The Time I Walk With Time (2010)––a multi-part artwork conceived and directed by Rosier–– uses ancient Egyptian imagery in combination with a filmed performance to commemorate an 14 historical theatre in Germany on the eve of its demolition. Designed in the 1950s by Paul Stoher, the Mönchengladbach Theatre once enjoyed a great popularity, but as the mid-century’s golden age of theatre came and went, it, too, was soon abandoned. It had not received an audience for over ten years by the time Rosier began her project. 15 In All The Time I Walk With Time, Rosier combines a vocabulary of historical iconography with the immediacy of a transient dance performance in order to contrast and comingle an historical sense of time (as in Jung’s notion of the Collective Unconscious 16 ) with the ephemerality of the now (time as continual loss). At 8:30pm on May 31, 2010, a figure dressed all in white, with the falcon head of the ancient Egyptian Sun God Ra as a mask, reticently tap-danced from one side of a stage to the other in the Theatre of Mönchengladbach taking on the character of a live hieroglyph. The grand performance space was completely empty except for two other performers who were also dressed in white while seated on either side of the proscenium. On the left side of the stage sat another falcon-masked Ra––a percussionist determinedly beating on a drum between his legs––while on the right side a third masked figure with an owl’s face sat on a dining chair, positioned at a forty- five degree angle to the theatre’s empty seats. For safety reasons, no audience members were allowed in the building during the last performance before its demolition, leading Rosier to screen the show’s footage for a small group of spectators within the shopping mall next door later that same evening. The dancing Sun God quickly tapped out a frantic rhythm while moving slowly across the stage like a nervous and unsure animal, all the while pushing itself further and further away from its drumming twin and toward the stoic, motionless owl. Two human arms jutted and 15 Personal written correspondence with Mathilde Rosier, 14 Feb 2011; and Press Release for “All the Time I Walk With Time,” printed by "Transfer France - NRW, Am Anfang war ich am Ende - Au debut j`étais au bout," Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Moenchengladbach, DE. 16 C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious Vol. 9, second edition, trans. R.F.C Hull (New York: Princeton University Press, 1968), see section I. 15 hinged, reached and recoiled, as the figure danced on a two dimensional plane akin to those iconic images that have traveled to us through time from the tombs of ancient Egypt. Throughout the performance, Ra’s figure stared unwaveringly at the hundreds of empty seats––its body in an ecstatic frenzy, moving both in place, and across space, at once, but its paper head locked frontally like a set for the stage of a play. Rosier’s small camera crew watched from the back of the auditorium, filming the entire fifteen-minute performance on video. Several months later, on September 17, 2010, Rosier opened her exhibition, “The Oceanic Feeling,” at the Galerie Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany in which she showcased the filmed performance in conjunction with a series of watercolor and gauche drawings depicting both the event’s choreography and its mythical imagery. 17 Figure 7. Mathilde Rosier, All The Time I Walk With Time, 2010, still from a color video, 15 minutes 17 All The Time I Walk With Time (Dir. Mathilde Rosier, 2010); Galerie Kadel Willborn website; and Press Release for “All the Time I Walk With Time,” printed by "Transfer France - NRW, Am Anfang war ich am Ende - Au debut j`étais au bout," Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Moenchengladbach, DE. 16 In the ancient Egyptian religion, the Sun God Ra was believed to travel by boat, in his two “barques,” from east to west each morning to bring the sun over the earth. Every evening, Ra navigated the waters of the underworld, vigilantly averting threatening demons and obstacles, so that he might return from the west to the east for the solar rebirth of a new day. 18 In All The Time I Walk With Time, Rosier’s three mysterious figures compose a constellation of meaning rendered through the tapper’s similarly linear travel through space. The falcon designates the origin of the dancer’s carefully drawn out, frenetic journey, and the seated owl marks his terminus. Figure 8. A projection of the performance All The Time I Walk With Time (Dir. Mathilde Rosier, 2010) at Rosier’s exhibit “The Oceanic Feeling” at Galerie Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany. 17 Sep 2010–6 Nov 2010 18 Rosalie David, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 90-1. 17 Figure 9. Mathilde Rosier, About Sun-God Choreography 4, 2010, watercolor and gouache on paper, 42 x 58.5cm With this one-off performance and its subsequent exhibition, Rosier sought to reference the Romantic sense of eternal unity with nature that Freud and Romain Rolland described in their 1927 correspondences to one another as “the oceanic experience.” 19 All The Time I Walk With Time and its ancillary exhibit “The Oceanic Feeling” deploy historically iconic Egyptian symbols in order to perform a sort of ‘archeology of the mind’ through which “the past becomes the unconscious of the present choreography of displayed objects,” as Rosier describes. 20 The vast empty space of the theatre’s black interior suggests both an inner psychological space (via its secluded architecture) and the eternal expanse of the cosmos (via the symbolic journey of gods 19 William Barclay Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), see specifically “Part I: The Freud-Rolland Correspondence”; and Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1962), pp. 11-20 20 Mathilde Rosier, “Oceanic Feeling” Press Release, 17 Sep 2010, Galerie Kadel Willborn website. 18 through heaven and the underworld). With this performance and video work, Rosier uses dance as a ritualistic form of ecstatic expression while also limiting her performers’ bodies to the artificial boundaries of the stage––thus conflating the two-dimensionality of theatrical staging and hieroglyphic imagery. The resulting ‘artifacts’ of her choreography and performance offer a compelling coalescence of modern and ancient history framed by the confines of contemporary artistic practice. Figure 10. Mathilde Rosier, Three Masks, 2010, watercolor and gouache on paper, 157.5 x 232cm A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty Rosier often exploits the perceptual limitations of cinema and theatre by situating nearly all of her work between the representational conditions of two and three dimensions, thus traversing the boundary between the fictional and the real. The artist may place a two- 19 dimensional piece of paper, standing in for a bird, for example, within a three-dimensional cage for a gallery installation that provides the ultimate trompe l'oeil. 21 As such, her viewer constantly slips between a state of utter confidence in the veracity of her reality, and a complete suspension of such belief. The artist’s tri-part performance-exhibition A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty (2008), in particular, hovers between the mystical “oceanic experience” of the Romantics that Freud tried to explain, and the intellectually induced emotional alienation espoused by Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. 22 At 8pm on November 1, 2008, Rosier took seat at a piano in front of a packed-in audience at the Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin to play the first of three acts of her multimedia show. During the introductory concert, three poodles rendered in watercolor on paper were pinned to her long white skirt, which cascaded down the piano stool and grazed the stage floor. Rosier calmly stroked the keys while a pre-recorded track emanated from speakers hidden within the instrument. The eerie effect disoriented those in the audience who noticed the musical incongruities, and by the end of the first act the viewers were properly prepared, via subtle hypnosis, for the rest of the performance. 21 See “Portfolio of Mathilde Rosier,” Galerie Kadel Willborn website, for examples of such installations/artworks. 22 See Lee Jamieson; James Magrin; for more on Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, see Arnold Aronson’s American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (London: Routledge, 2000), specifically “Chapter 3: Theories and Foundations,” 36. 20 Figure 11. Mathilde Rosier playing the piano, which had secret speakers inside playing another track, during her tri-part performance of A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin, 1 Nov 2008 After the “doubled” concert, Rosier revealed to the audience one of her large-scale paintings, Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (1), titled after a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 23 The canvas portrayed an uncanny constellation of gargantuan butterflies set against an earthy mountain landscape; the insects’ images were flat and frontal, like the mounted specimens so common in entomological displays in a natural history museum. Five minutes later, the artist invited her audience backstage to see what mysterious events had occurred behind the curtain. Those who were curious (or brave) enough to venture past her various props and traverse the fictitious threshold of the stage found cardboard boxes filled with beautiful pink paper parrots, 23 Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire [Reveries of the Solitary Walker], written between 1776 and 1778. 21 resting silently in their handmade beds. These birds, like so much of Rosier’s work, were subject to a theatrical flattening of form as well as a displacement of nature’s elements. A screening of her 20-minute video work Le Massacre Des Animaux [The Massacre of the Animals] (2001) completed the choreographed evening, and sent spectators home under a special spell caused by an unearthly combination of nature, illusion, and quaint intimacy. 24 Figure 12. Mathilde Rosier, installation view of Reverie du Promeneur Solitaire (1), 2008, acrylic on canvas and gouache on paper, 150 x 250cm, at A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin, 1 Nov 2008 24 Jaime Schwartz, “Mathilde Rosier @ Silberkuppe, Review and Interviews.” Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Berlin, November 2008. 22 Works like A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty illustrate how Rosier’s tenuous dream-like reality exists in the spaces between two-dimensional stage sets, three- dimensional objects, and the psychological states of their viewers. The artist uses theatre’s exploitation of ‘perception as perspective’ to destabilize our understandings of everyday objects and symbols, offering a parallax––simultaneously hyperconscious and unconscious––view of the world. As illustrated, Rosier’s characters often engage in elaborate and ecstatic rituals that aim to re-establish a primal connection with their natural surroundings. The civilized world is full of illusion, Rosier cautions; nothing is what it seems. Figure 13. A view behind the ‘set’ of A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Gallery Silberkuppe in Berlin, 1 Nov 2008 23 Rosier’s work has been described as “decidedly un-contemporary” or “out of time” because of its refusal to locate itself comfortably within contemporary art-making discourse. 25 However, Rosier’s art appropriates imagery from the past while eschewing a maudlin sense of nostalgia in order to construct complex juxtapositions between memory and history, consciousness and unconsciousness, the mystic and the modern, and the eternal and the transitory. In other words, the artist invokes a type of visceral timelessness in her projects––while at the same time grounding her work in the present moment by making reference to both the postmodern collage of contemporary art-making practice and a number of still-relevant influences from the past. Through this thoughtful approach to history, what was once the past becomes relevant to our own contemporary moment. Rosier’s art similarly grazes the precarious boundary between a welcome beauty and a saccharine oversaturation of sentiment while toying with Freudian references to the brink of cliché. But she does not cross that threshold. Instead, the artist invites us into her sensual world of resonant symbols and alluring illusions in order to create a fissure in the fabric of perceived reality, while exploring the subconscious architecture of the mind. Rosier’s art powerfully conveys to us that, in order to understand the world in all its physical and metaphysical dimensions, we need to look backwards as well as forward––outward as much as within. ––END–– 25 Elena Filipovic, “Petit Journal #65: Mathilde Rosier: "Find circumstances in the Antechamber”; and the introductory essay in Mathilde Rosier’s Find Circumstances in the Antechamber (Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2010). 24 REFERENCES All The Time I Walk With Time. Dir. Mathilde Rosier. 15 minute video, 2010. Aronson, Arnold. American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History. See specifically “Chapter 3: Theories and Foundations,” on Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre.” London: Routledge, 2003. Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud: Collected Works (Volume Three). Translated by Alistair Hamilton. London: Calder and Boyars, 1973. ArtFacts.net: http://www.artfacts.net/en/artist/mathilde-rosier-18450/profile.html Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1972. David, Rosalie. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Duke University Press. Accessed 16 Mar 2011. http://theater.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/9/3/6 Dunand, Françoise and Christiane Zivie-Coche. Gods and Men in Egypt: 3000 BCE To 395 CE. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Entr’acte [Intermission]. Dir. Mathilde Rosier. 8 minute video, 2003. Entr’acte [Intermission]. Dir. René Clair. 22 minute film, 1924. Every Day the Same. Dir. Mathilde Rosier. 16 minute video, 2002. Filipovic, Elena. “Petit Journal #65: Mathilde Rosier: ‘Find circumstances in the Antechamber.’” Accessed 2 Dec 2010 <http://tinyurl.com/2ajfevw> Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1962. ---. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Trans. A.A. Brill. New York: The Modern Library, 1995. Galerie Jeu de Paume: http://tinyurl.com/26ok4la Galerie Kadel Willborn website: http://www.kadel-willborn.de Harrison, Charles and Paul J. Wood, editors. Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, second edition. MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 25 Jamieson, Lee. Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice. London: Greenwich Exchange (Student Guide Literary Series), 2007. ---. “The Lost Prophet of Cinema: The Film Theory of Antonin Artaud.” Senses of Cinema, 27 Aug 2007. Accessed 15 Mar 2011. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature- articles/film-theory-antonin-artaud/#9 Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious Vol. 9. Second edition. Translated by R.F.C Hull. New York: Princeton University Press, 1968. Lac [Lake]. Dir. Mathilde Rosier. 5 minute video, 2004. Le Vierge Aujourd’Hui [The Virgin Today]. Dir. Mathilde Rosier. 2 minute video, 2005. Les Massacres des Animaux [The Massacre of the Animals]. Dir. Mathilde Rosier. 20 minute video, 2001. Magrini, James, "Towards an Understanding of Antonin Artaud’s Film Theory: The Seashell and the Clergyman" (2009). Philosophy Scholarship. Paper 11. Accessed 15 Mar 2011. http://dc.cod.edu/philosophypub/11 Mallarmé, Stéphane, et al. Collected Poems and Other Verse. Oxford University Press, 2009. “Mathilde Rosier.” Video of Mathilde Rosier giving a walk through of her exhibition “Find Circumstances in the Antechamber” at Jeu de Paume, Paris, France. Video posted 02/23/10 on DailyMotion by Jeu de Paume. Accessed 15 Dec 2010. <http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xccf6q_mathilde-rosier_creation> Meshes of the Afternoon. Dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. 14 minute film, 1943. Parsons, William Barclay. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Persona. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. 83 minute film, 1962. Press Release for “All The Time I Walk With Time,” printed by "Transfer France - NRW, Am Anfang war ich am Ende - Au début j’étais au bout." Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Moenchengladbach, DE. Accessed 15 Dec 2010 <http://tinyurl.com/26ye44o> Proctor, Hannah McConnell. “Poodles in the Wilderness.” 18 Sep 2008. Culture Wars. Accessed 15 Dec 2010. http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/ article/poodles_in_the_wilderness/> Rosier, Mathilde. A Play for the Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty. Three part performance. 1 Nov 2008. Gallery Silberkuppe, Berlin, Germany. ---. About Sun-God Choreography 4, 2010, watercolor and gouache on paper, 42 x 58.5cm. 26 ---. Boxes of Birds (pink birds), 2007, boxes, watercolor and gouache on paper, 55 x 52 x 100cm. ---. Find Circumstances in the Antechamber. Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2010. ---. Interview for the exhibition "Cosmetic Relief.” Accessed 2 Dec 2010. http://www.kunstaspekte.de/index.php?tid=17924&action=termin ---. Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (1), 2008, acrylic on canvas and gouache on paper, 150 x 250cm. ---. Passionate Belief. Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006. ---. Personal interview by Heika Burnison. 23 Oct 2010. Pasadena, CA. ---. Personal written correspondence with Heika Burnison. 14 Feb 2011. ---. Personal written correspondence with Heika Burnison. 16 Mar 2011. ---. “The Oceanic Feeling.” Exhibition at Galerie Kadel Willborn. Karlsruhe, Germany. 17 Sep 2010 – 6 Nov 2010. ---. “The Oceanic Feeling” Press Release, 17 Sep 2010. Galerie Kadel Willborn website. Accessed 14 Mar 2011. http://www.kadel-willborn.de/press_english.php?id=48 ---. To S. Freud, 2005, watercolor on paper, 41.5 x 57cm. ---. USC Roski School of Fine Arts MFA Lecture Series, moderated by Charlie White, 19 Oct 2010, Los Angeles. Sandro, Paul. “Putting the Squeeze on Thought: Bunuel’s Naturalism and the Threshold of the Imagination” in Bunuel: The Transcultural Imaginary. Edited by Gaston Lillo. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2003. pp. 33-46. Schwartz, Jamie. “Mathilde Rosier @ Silberkuppe, Review and Interviews.” Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Berlin, November 2008. Accessed 15 Dec 2010. <http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/mathilde-rosier-silberkuppe-review- interviews/1668> Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, second edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. ---. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, third edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 27 APPENDIX MATHILDE ROSIER SHORT BIOGRAPHY Mathilde Rosier was born near Paris in 1973 and raised in suburb on the outskirts of Versailles. At the age of sixteen, she travelled to Manhattan with her parents, who waited endless hours for their daughter in the cafeteria of the Museum of Modern Art as she wandered through the sprawling galleries. “That was a shock,” Rosier remembers. “The American art in that museum, and in New York. After that I read about the history of postwar American art, and I think that’s how I got interested in art for the very first time; a year after that I started to paint.” 26 In 1991 Rosier began studying economics at Paris Dauphine University because, as she says, “I was good at mathematics…and wasn’t yet sure of what I wanted to do,” but soon realized that she shared little in common with those around her. “Psychologically, it didn't feel good for me,” she says. “But I’m glad I took that journey. I'm glad that I did it––to open my mind.” 27 While at Dauphine, Rosier independently organized her first art exhibition in the upper floor of a jewelry boutique in front of the American Embassy in Paris. Friends and relatives bought many of her paintings, and Rosier used the small amount of money to travel to Mexico. 28 After matriculating in 1994, Rosier spent time in Paris making art––living and working on the small amount of funds that the French government offers the unemployed; she had little sense of her future direction. “I am not even sure this could be possible today––living poor in Paris. I was rather happy though, and never thought about the future strangely enough. I thought 26 Personal written correspondence with Mathilde Rosier, 16 Mar 2011. 27 Personal interview with Mathilde Rosier, 30 Oct 2010. 28 Personal written correspondence with Mathilde Rosier, 16 Mar 2011. 28 it would be okay somehow.” 29 In 1997, Rosier began studying fine arts at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, where she studied under Christian Boltanski and Jean Marc Bustamente, who she felt could help her better understand an artist’s purpose in the world. “Even though I entered the school as a painter, my first concern––the thing I really wanted to learn more than a technique of painting–– was, what is the place of the artist in society? Coming from economic sciences, I had a certain distance from the idea of being an artist, I felt somehow concerned with the social, economic, and political implications, or non-implications of it.” 30 Today, the artist looks more to non-Western cultures, and specifically their histories of ancient ritual and myth, for knowledge and inspiration. “I'm more interested in other cultures now because I feel like I know this [western] one very well already; it's very familiar. And while I get great pleasure in looking at something like [a Renoir]––a lot of joy––I'm not learning anything from it.” 31 India, different parts of Africa, and Haiti have been particularly inspiring for the artist when examining our contemporary relations to nature and the cosmos––relations which Rosier feels have been alarmingly weakened, especially in western cultures. Things like modern medicine, digital communications, and information technologies have dramatically increased the quality of our lives, the artist admits, but at the same time Rosier wonders what we have lost in this process of rapid evolution. “I think we could stand for a bit less [of those things that disconnect us],” she says. “Perhaps now there is too much.” 32 Since joining the German Galerie Kadel Willborn in 2002 and Milan’s Gallery Raffaella 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Personal interview with Mathilde Rosier, 30 Oct 2010. 32 Mathilde Rosier, USC Roski School of Fine Arts MFA Lecture Series, moderated by Charlie White, 19 Oct 2010, Los Angeles. 29 Cortese in 2009, Rosier has exhibited her work in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States––and has participated in the Art Basel fairs in both Switzerland and Miami. 33 The artist lives both in Berlin, Germany and the Bourgogne region of France. Figure 14. Mathilde Rosier, Boxes of Birds (pink birds) 2007, boxes, gouache on paper, 55 x 52 x 100cm 33 For complete information on Rosier’s exhibition history, visit ArtFacts.net: http://www.artfacts.net/en/artist/mathilde-rosier-18450/profile.html

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Asset Metadata

Creator Burnison, Heika Lucienne (author)

Core Title Inner and outer nature: The video art of Mathilde Rosier

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 05/02/2011

Defense Date 04/01/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archetypes,dreamworld,Freud,Mathile Rosier,Maya Deren,Myth,OAI-PMH Harvest,postmodern art,romanticism,Surrealism,symbolism,Symbols,unconscious,video art

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Page, Ellis Tim (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha M. (committee member), James, David E. (committee member)

Creator Email burnison@usc.edu,hburnison@mac.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3830

Unique identifier UC1165209

Identifier etd-Burnison-4353 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-456497 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3830 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Burnison-4353.pdf

Dmrecord 456497

Document Type Thesis

Rights Burnison, Heika Lucienne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu