///////Lucy Cotter about Kristen Cooper
Wandering through the streets of Global Nowhere
I first saw Kristen Cooper’s work in the form of an e-mail containing a short message accompanied by three thumbnail images. The first two (of a curtain hung outside a house, and a silhouette in a lit window) left me thinking about something Frederic Jameson wrote when he was trying to get to grips with a new kind of ‘decentred subject’, navigating their way through the urban ‘hyperspace’:
Postmodernism, I think, went on to abandon something even more fundamental, namely the distinction between the inside and the outside¹.
I ate my dinner (it was already late) and went to bed. As I slept, I dreamed I lived in a fictive space, consisting of two rooms adjoined by a short staircase. The first, which appeared to be a few floors off the ground, was completely bare except for a single window. A couple, looking for a place to sit and talk in the night, had curled up on the sill with a bottle of wine and a little nightlight. Although they had occupied the façade of my house, through a reversal of space, they were in fact inside, unknown to themselves. Knowing that the flick of a light switch would alter everything, I left the room in darkness and climbed down the steps into a second space three times its size. A harsh white light flooded the room, blinding me momentarily. Suddenly realising I was at ground level, I turned to the windows (which were the size of the walls) and saw that in the darkness of the night I could be seen fully from the street. I threw myself to the floor, trying to remove myself, even momentarily, from the public gaze. I needed some place to reconsider my options, but there was no-where to go. My inside had become the outside.
It is rare to be confronted with one’s own subjectivity. Jameson never described the way the skin crawls when the subject realises there are no alternatives to a reality which is un-real, uninhabitable. How can I make a space available to me? Where can I go besides the obvious no-where? These questions have long haunted the social margins, but they directly confront the artist now, in the age of globalisation. As culture and economy implode, where can I stand that is not the conveyer belt? Where can I feel my agency, restore some sense of being able to brush against, engage with, effect society at a level that is deeper than the superficial, the spectacle, the sign? In all of her works Kristen Cooper is searching for this. In ‘Untitled’ (2002) it is through barter. The viewer is allowed to take any object they choose, once they replace it with something of their own. If I give something I value to you, what will you give to me? Can we talk, can we exchange? In ‘In the Window’ (2003) and ‘Moving Out’ (2004), it acts as an invitation to invade her private space, domestically and in the public domain. ‘Moving Out’ consists simply of a single curtain, found inside the house, now transposed onto the exterior of the window. Yet a complex web of possibilities is constructed as outside becomes inside and the object intended to create invisibility now draws attention to itself as visible. Does this curtain invite response or close down any last possibility of witnessing activities within the house? Only one viewer has the courage to pull back the curtain – to demand access to the inside. In Cooper’s installations, there is always a surface between the public and the image – a curtain, a screen. But she points to the real, and at times the real ruptures the screen of representation. Hal Foster described how the punctum breaks through the screen and ‘allows the real to poke through’.²
A veiled social critique lurks beneath the often beautiful exterior of Cooper’s oeuvre. In Nature Demised, Gustav Metzger speaks about a moment in the 1950s when the production of colour newspaper supplements and television images created the illusion of bringing nature into the living room. We often see reality and compare it to representation and not the other way around. Metzger suggests that ‘As people see the facsimile of nature in colour, the need to experience Nature diminishes; one has it right in front. But this switch is not felt as a loss; rather it becomes a gain.’³ When we watch the mesmerizing image of fish moving through lit waters in ‘The Summer of ‘67’(2003), how long does it take us to realise that the fish are real - projected from their physical presence only a few paces away? The means of representation (an overhead projector) is turned on itself to re-present the real (a fishbowl) as real. In ‘Channel 5’ (2003), birds placed between a projector and a screen, create a live performance which strangely simulates a TV image. It slowly dawns on us that we no longer expect the real. It pokes through our expectation of representation. In Cooper’s works, the real returns as an unexpected beauty, inspiring a sense of loss which might potentially readjust the media-saturated mind.
There is a certain irony in the fact that ‘Guardian’, an installation consisting of several aviaries, was installed in a Ministry of Education building (Hoftoren, The Hague), surely a direct inheritor of post-Enlightenment thinking. Man’s Triumph over Nature through Knowledge. The tall cage-like birdhouses were pushed against the seamless glass walls of the shiny new building, an embodiment of Jameson’s un-navigable hyper-architecture. The birds can be seen through the glass but they are inside the building, not outside the windows. They are separated from their natural habitat by a screen, which allows freedom to be visible yet unattainable. Cooper co-ordinated her temporary function as ‘bird-tender’, to fuse into the banal routines of the building. She pushed her bird-tending cart to the water-font at the exact time that the cleaner walked past with her cleaning trolley – every day for two weeks. She opened and closed the aviary curtains at the moment the security guards changed shifts. Once, Cooper overheard a heated discussion on whether she was a worker or an artist. Should the artist take this as a sign of success? Cooper’s presence highlights the dichotomy of labour in a post-industrial world, where some visibly undertake the physical real time labour of cleaning, while others surf virtual space in no time behind closed doors. Yet, there is a danger of depending on the hierarchical position of art and the artist for the effects of this intervention.
Who is the guardian of what and in whose interest? Who is going to re-educate the Ministry of Education? Cooper doesn’t ask these questions directly. But she constructs a situation which could precariously avalanche into the unravelling of a narrative that is usually tightly bound. There is a strange undercurrent in the relationship between the birds, nature, knowledge, captivity, exotic display, (post)Enlightenment education and the division of labour within an apparent ‘hyperspace’. Cooper never allows the work to enter the political, but she is instinctively aware of the limitations of the personal. She does not ‘stand in’ for the symbolic and depoliticise the every day in the process. It is precisely this understanding and acceptance of the tight bounds within which subversion is realistically possible that I find disconcertingly fragile, yet laden with hidden potential. There is talk of the potential of ‘weak power’ to inform the future.
When are my five minutes of fame? With ‘In the Window’ (2003) Kristen Cooper implies from the outset that the only time left to me (if I am lucky) is the time it takes for the lights to turn from red to green at a busy intersection. The artist’s image only exists when car-drivers (contemporary flaneurs) stop and look at her. She lets the viewer invade her space for that moment alone, to see what, if anything, she can make happen. Cooper, silhouetted, is seen ironing a dress, watering the plants, hanging decorations. You will not see something special. She’s showing you rather something un-special because you are too bombarded with competing images of special, extra special, buy me, special offer, to take in that banality – which for Cooper is the only subjectivity we are left with. But it is not without hope for meaning.
Cooper stumbles on the political in her undertakings but her subjectivity is never centred enough to claim social or political agency as such. If this is a weakness, it is surely not her own, but of the post-political culture in which we all live. In a time of no political or social alternatives, there is a riddle in Kristen Cooper’s work and the world outside it, waiting to be solved: How can we read the conundrum of postmodern subjectivity which the age of globalisation presents, so that it does not spell the same in both directions? This is a riddle we face now as artists, and as individuals.
From Subject, the graduation booklet of Kristen Cooper
¹ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 19??, p. 98.
² Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA and London, England, 1996
³ Gustav Metzger
Wandering through the streets of Global Nowhere
I first saw Kristen Cooper’s work in the form of an e-mail containing a short message accompanied by three thumbnail images. The first two (of a curtain hung outside a house, and a silhouette in a lit window) left me thinking about something Frederic Jameson wrote when he was trying to get to grips with a new kind of ‘decentred subject’, navigating their way through the urban ‘hyperspace’:
Postmodernism, I think, went on to abandon something even more fundamental, namely the distinction between the inside and the outside¹.
I ate my dinner (it was already late) and went to bed. As I slept, I dreamed I lived in a fictive space, consisting of two rooms adjoined by a short staircase. The first, which appeared to be a few floors off the ground, was completely bare except for a single window. A couple, looking for a place to sit and talk in the night, had curled up on the sill with a bottle of wine and a little nightlight. Although they had occupied the façade of my house, through a reversal of space, they were in fact inside, unknown to themselves. Knowing that the flick of a light switch would alter everything, I left the room in darkness and climbed down the steps into a second space three times its size. A harsh white light flooded the room, blinding me momentarily. Suddenly realising I was at ground level, I turned to the windows (which were the size of the walls) and saw that in the darkness of the night I could be seen fully from the street. I threw myself to the floor, trying to remove myself, even momentarily, from the public gaze. I needed some place to reconsider my options, but there was no-where to go. My inside had become the outside.
It is rare to be confronted with one’s own subjectivity. Jameson never described the way the skin crawls when the subject realises there are no alternatives to a reality which is un-real, uninhabitable. How can I make a space available to me? Where can I go besides the obvious no-where? These questions have long haunted the social margins, but they directly confront the artist now, in the age of globalisation. As culture and economy implode, where can I stand that is not the conveyer belt? Where can I feel my agency, restore some sense of being able to brush against, engage with, effect society at a level that is deeper than the superficial, the spectacle, the sign? In all of her works Kristen Cooper is searching for this. In ‘Untitled’ (2002) it is through barter. The viewer is allowed to take any object they choose, once they replace it with something of their own. If I give something I value to you, what will you give to me? Can we talk, can we exchange? In ‘In the Window’ (2003) and ‘Moving Out’ (2004), it acts as an invitation to invade her private space, domestically and in the public domain. ‘Moving Out’ consists simply of a single curtain, found inside the house, now transposed onto the exterior of the window. Yet a complex web of possibilities is constructed as outside becomes inside and the object intended to create invisibility now draws attention to itself as visible. Does this curtain invite response or close down any last possibility of witnessing activities within the house? Only one viewer has the courage to pull back the curtain – to demand access to the inside. In Cooper’s installations, there is always a surface between the public and the image – a curtain, a screen. But she points to the real, and at times the real ruptures the screen of representation. Hal Foster described how the punctum breaks through the screen and ‘allows the real to poke through’.²
A veiled social critique lurks beneath the often beautiful exterior of Cooper’s oeuvre. In Nature Demised, Gustav Metzger speaks about a moment in the 1950s when the production of colour newspaper supplements and television images created the illusion of bringing nature into the living room. We often see reality and compare it to representation and not the other way around. Metzger suggests that ‘As people see the facsimile of nature in colour, the need to experience Nature diminishes; one has it right in front. But this switch is not felt as a loss; rather it becomes a gain.’³ When we watch the mesmerizing image of fish moving through lit waters in ‘The Summer of ‘67’(2003), how long does it take us to realise that the fish are real - projected from their physical presence only a few paces away? The means of representation (an overhead projector) is turned on itself to re-present the real (a fishbowl) as real. In ‘Channel 5’ (2003), birds placed between a projector and a screen, create a live performance which strangely simulates a TV image. It slowly dawns on us that we no longer expect the real. It pokes through our expectation of representation. In Cooper’s works, the real returns as an unexpected beauty, inspiring a sense of loss which might potentially readjust the media-saturated mind.
There is a certain irony in the fact that ‘Guardian’, an installation consisting of several aviaries, was installed in a Ministry of Education building (Hoftoren, The Hague), surely a direct inheritor of post-Enlightenment thinking. Man’s Triumph over Nature through Knowledge. The tall cage-like birdhouses were pushed against the seamless glass walls of the shiny new building, an embodiment of Jameson’s un-navigable hyper-architecture. The birds can be seen through the glass but they are inside the building, not outside the windows. They are separated from their natural habitat by a screen, which allows freedom to be visible yet unattainable. Cooper co-ordinated her temporary function as ‘bird-tender’, to fuse into the banal routines of the building. She pushed her bird-tending cart to the water-font at the exact time that the cleaner walked past with her cleaning trolley – every day for two weeks. She opened and closed the aviary curtains at the moment the security guards changed shifts. Once, Cooper overheard a heated discussion on whether she was a worker or an artist. Should the artist take this as a sign of success? Cooper’s presence highlights the dichotomy of labour in a post-industrial world, where some visibly undertake the physical real time labour of cleaning, while others surf virtual space in no time behind closed doors. Yet, there is a danger of depending on the hierarchical position of art and the artist for the effects of this intervention.
Who is the guardian of what and in whose interest? Who is going to re-educate the Ministry of Education? Cooper doesn’t ask these questions directly. But she constructs a situation which could precariously avalanche into the unravelling of a narrative that is usually tightly bound. There is a strange undercurrent in the relationship between the birds, nature, knowledge, captivity, exotic display, (post)Enlightenment education and the division of labour within an apparent ‘hyperspace’. Cooper never allows the work to enter the political, but she is instinctively aware of the limitations of the personal. She does not ‘stand in’ for the symbolic and depoliticise the every day in the process. It is precisely this understanding and acceptance of the tight bounds within which subversion is realistically possible that I find disconcertingly fragile, yet laden with hidden potential. There is talk of the potential of ‘weak power’ to inform the future.
When are my five minutes of fame? With ‘In the Window’ (2003) Kristen Cooper implies from the outset that the only time left to me (if I am lucky) is the time it takes for the lights to turn from red to green at a busy intersection. The artist’s image only exists when car-drivers (contemporary flaneurs) stop and look at her. She lets the viewer invade her space for that moment alone, to see what, if anything, she can make happen. Cooper, silhouetted, is seen ironing a dress, watering the plants, hanging decorations. You will not see something special. She’s showing you rather something un-special because you are too bombarded with competing images of special, extra special, buy me, special offer, to take in that banality – which for Cooper is the only subjectivity we are left with. But it is not without hope for meaning.
Cooper stumbles on the political in her undertakings but her subjectivity is never centred enough to claim social or political agency as such. If this is a weakness, it is surely not her own, but of the post-political culture in which we all live. In a time of no political or social alternatives, there is a riddle in Kristen Cooper’s work and the world outside it, waiting to be solved: How can we read the conundrum of postmodern subjectivity which the age of globalisation presents, so that it does not spell the same in both directions? This is a riddle we face now as artists, and as individuals.
From Subject, the graduation booklet of Kristen Cooper
¹ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 19??, p. 98.
² Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA and London, England, 1996
³ Gustav Metzger