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The Gaze of Others
Elmas Senol, 2019
Translated into English by Thomas Carville
From: “Through the Looking Glass”, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2020
We’re looking into the interior of a kitchen, it’s furnishings are an image of inviting familiarity. White-grey wall tiles form simple geometric shapes and colour match the fitted kitchen. The laid table, with blue and white checked tablecloth and porcelain dinnerware, blends unobtrusively into the understated colour palette. At the table, we’re sitting opposite a young woman who begins to serve stew from a tureen. Warmly, she offers us, the viewers, the first bowl. She fills two further bowls for guests not yet visible to us, before finally serving herself.
The scene we’re observing seems completely normal but for the unnerving stare of the woman. She looks directly into the camera and does not shift her gaze for a second. As she ladles stew, serving herself and her guests, her gaze rests unabashedly on the viewer. Carefully and gently, she performs her tasks, to not let us out of her sight.
Cut. Change of perspective. In the spot where we previously sat as viewers, the artist herself, Meike Redeker, now sits eating stew. She, too, stares straight into the camera lens. Now and then, a little stew drips from the spoon, she has to wipe her mouth, or put the spoon down again. New cuts and changes of perspective reveal to us the last two guests: another woman and a man who, like the two before, are eating stew while staring into the camera.
This continues for about two hours, without sound, in Meike Redeker’s single-channel video installation “Family Portraits” (2012). With each cut, a change of camera perspective follows and with every full rotation the table is served once more. After lunch: coffee and cake. In the evening: bread, cold cuts, and tea. Over and over, second helpings. Redeker stages an almost cliché-laden iconography of a typical German Sunday meal and creates a cinematic portrait of the kitchen as a social space, in which the specific experiences and expectations of those present meld into a choreography of family rituals. The effort with which the diners are trying not to spill or drop anything or knock anything over is tangible. Since they cannot look directly at the objects and food they’re handling, they must rely on their peripheral vision and employ their sense of touch, while their eyes remain fixed on the camera. As they do so, sometimes one can sense the strain of ensuring their gaze does not stray from the camera. As viewers, we can at least choose whether we want to endure the stare of the four diners or avoid them and focus on the dishes on the table or look at the objects in the background.
Anyone who has had a staring competition knows how hard it is to look a person directly in the eye for a long time. In this children’s game, two people stare into each other’s eyes until one blinks and turns or starts laughing. The performance artist Marina Abramović took this intimate exchange between two people to the extreme at her retrospective at MoMA in New York in 2010. For the duration of the almost three-month exhibition, Abramović sat at a table, eight hours a day, six days a week, and did nothing but stare into the eyes of each visitor seated opposite her. This gaze into each other’s eyes was enough to stir strong emotions in many of the visitors, making them smile or even cry. Abramović herself explained these reactions later, stating that people have a great need for contact with others, and at the moment of this intimate exchange with the artist the participators became intensely introspective.¹ As is so common in her performances, Abramović challenged not only herself but also her audience to cross physical and mental boundaries.
The artistic form of performance naturally creates a situational and transient interaction between the artist and the viewers, which in the case of “The Artist is Present” is a concentrated and intimate exchange between both parties. In her work “Family Portraits”, Meike Redeker evokes the same kind of intimate contact between the performers and the audience, using the medium video. Through the direct and unremitting eye contact with the diners, as well as the frontal close-up camera-perspective, we, as the viewers, cannot evade the immediate confrontation. At the same time, our ambivalent role as viewers is reflected. Does the artist invite us to assume the different perspectives of the diners, so we can participate in the meal? Or does she expose us as voyeuristic intruders? Either way, in Redeker’s work she always reflects the power structure, which manifests itself in the relationship between the filming, the filmed and the viewer. Her films implicitly investigate what role the camera can play and what sort of power one holds when creating images of others. The performers’ gaze into the camera in “Family Portraits” is consequently understood as an emancipatory action in which the observed themselves become observers.
Enduring an action defined by the artist can be considered a recurring feature in Meike Redeker’s films. In “Family Portraits”, she demands concentration, skill, and stamina of herself and the actors. The calm and uneventful meal as well as the long camera shots also require the patience of the viewers. This is not only challenged by the relentless eye contact with the diners, but also by the lengthy moments in which, for example, the fork cannot find the piece of cake, the bowl of soup does not empty, or when the loaf of bread is difficult to slice. The undeterred calmness with which the diners carry out their actions can evoke an almost unbearable sense of passivity in the observer.
Time and again, Redeker skillfully toys with the fine line between keen curiosity and tense impatience in the viewers. Her films incorporate a performative element, which takes place in a familiar, everyday environment. In doing so, for a German or, at least, Western-socialised audience, the kitchen in “Family Portraits” as well as the shopping centre in “The Disquieting Muses” (2016) can stand as a representation of the idea we have of a kitchen or a shopping centre. In the video installation “The Disquieting Muses”, five parallelly running screens show shots of the entrances of different fashion stores. There is not much to see but the hustle and bustle inside and in front of the stores. Customers come and go; pop music plays in the background and passersby rush past the stores. In each of the entrances, mannequins, silent and frozen in position, present the current women’s collection. It’s a familiar sight in every shopping centre in any middle to large German city, but it’s overlooked at the same time, due to the 24/7 excess supply of colourful consumer goods, which ultimately saturates people’s sensory perception.
The moment of confusion sets in when, from the background, a woman heads towards the entrance or, rather, exit. As is so often the case in Redeker’s filmic works, it is the artist herself. Dressed in the exact same outfit as the mannequin, she steps across the store’s security barrier, just enough to set off the alarm, and remains in position in the same pose as her soulless double. The scene gains an almost absurd quality through the direct contrast between the mannequin and the woman mimicking it. The original and the copy are intertwined in a mutual relationship and instantly evoke astonishment and agitation in the passersby. The reactions of the public and the piercing alarm do not break the artist’s composure. She withstands the glances and remarks until the physical, almost aggressive intervention of the staff breaks her out of her role, and she is taken back into the store.
The title “The Disquieting Muses” is borrowed from Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, which he painted during the First World War and of which he produced several copies after 1945. In a city view of Ferrara, the eponymous statues of Melpomene and Thalia, the muses of tragedy and comedy, are portrayed in the foreground of the picture. Redeker’s video work can be seen as a comment about this tragic comedy in which the aspiration of a modern Western society for the greatest possible individuality is ultimately saturated in mass uniformity. Global companies such as H&M, IKEA or Apple not only shape the increasingly interchangeable backdrops of people’s urban spaces but also their own appearance and the decor of their apartments. Even the attempt, as a consumer, to boycott the mass-produced products of international brands, and instead sift through flea markets, second-hand shops and vintage stores for a unique appearance is doomed to failure: in every major city, the vintage look is now part of the mainstream and fits in with hipsters and casual dressers to form the patchwork uniformity of our globally connected civilisation. Standing out to fit in, seems to be the motto. By directly juxtaposing the mannequin and the consumer, Redeker exposes this uniformity and exposes us as a willing part of the mannequin army of the major fashion brands. Ultimately, the seemingly unique is just another identity-forming expression of being an accepted member within one of the many social groups.
Our role and responsibility as consumers is also the subject of the work “The Bridge (2015). Equipped with a Hello Kitty toy camera, the protagonist of the film – played by the artist herself – seeks to take the perspective of a child to set out on an exploration tour through her kitchen. A single toy penguin in the freezer seems to be the key impulse for the adventurous animal rescue operation. A bridge must be built! What could be more suitable for constructing the bridge than wooden ice lolly sticks with the ice cream eaten off them? The protagonist begins her mission, holding the camera at the eye level of a child, whose role she has now assumed. Since, in this position, she cannot look through the viewfinder, she has to squat to see what is being recorded. This in turn means that in her waddling gait she cannot progress as quickly despite the pressing time. Again and again, she switches between steady and waddling gait and thus between her role as an adult or child. As an adult, she may lack a sense of urgency, but as a child, she certainly doesn’t have the same ability to act upon it. It turns out to be an impossible endeavour to take the perspective of another completely. At a supermarket, the protagonist piles up ice lollies on the checkout’s conveyor belt, on which a whole row of animals has already lined up. To help her eat the ice cream, she turns to passersby on the street. The reactions of adults are sobering; no one seems to understand the link between ice cream consumption and environmental threat, and no one takes the time to listen to the protagonist. Undeterred by the sceptical glances and dismissive behaviour, she keeps addressing people unabashedly and with childlike enthusiasm. The entire rescue operation seems not only naive and absurd but has been destined for failure from the outset. Ruthlessly, a car runs over some of the animals, and just when the protagonist manages to stick together the first part of the bridge with wooden lolly sticks and sellotape, the rescue operation comes to an abrupt end, as a careless passerby tramples the bridge. In quick, alternating cuts we follow the hectic goings-on in “The Bridge”. The lo-fi quality of the camera and the shaky images increase the tension of the childlike and, ultimately, futile endeavour to rescue the animals.
Meike Redeker always considers the specific qualities of the medium of film in her works. She is not interested in clean and perfectly post-produced video footage, rather in an unembellished reproduction that highlights the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, as well as the specific camera lenses and their perspectives. This is particularly evident in the work “here is where I long to be, also within and among the images” (2014). In a kind of film collage, the image-making process is demonstrated, from the individual development steps in a photo lab to capturing moving images with various camcorders and mobile phone cameras. A visual inventory of everyday items streams past us in quick succession. Coffee cups, food, cosmetics, CDs, keys, containers. In between, scenes of a woman in intimate close-ups recounting her dreams, which she sometimes is not able to remember precisely. The transience of dreams is mirrored in the transience of the modern stream of images, which rapidly move through the numerous types of devices and descend upon us.
ln the work “Scratch Yawn Hum” (2015), just as in “Family Portraits”, the artist seeks direct contact with the viewers. Not eye contact; rather, direct speech in the form of text, addresses the viewer evoking images in their imagination at first. For this, a QR code is scanned with the viewer’s smartphone on which the corresponding GIF animation is then played. The instructions on the smartphone span a relationship between the viewer’s observation and their interaction with the surrounding environment.
Time and again, Meike Redeker uncovers moments of estrangement in familiar situations or environments, challenging the expectations and visual conventions of the viewers. The artist uses her direct environment as a starting point and exploration space, in which she addresses relevant social issues. Questioning habits and what’s familiar, to expose oneself to new and unknown terrain, is the aim of “Vereine Tauschen (Club Swap)” (2018). During a one-year residency in Northeim, Germany, Meike Redeker initiated visits between different local associations. The result of this exchange is a cinematic, two-channel video portrait, in which each participating club is portrayed in the assembly room of another club. Firstly, as a group assembling to pose for a group portrait in another club’s space, and, secondly, as individual members of one association taking part in a newly learned activity of another association. Clubs are social spaces in which exchange takes place, and sporting activities or events are organised. They are, therefore, also spaces for rituals. At the same time, membership also means exclusivity and exclusion of non-members. In Redeker’s artistic work, rigid rituals and exclusive membership are discarded and swapped for social exchange with others. Behind the apparent different interests of the local chess, riding, and shooting clubs, they all, ultimately, have the common interest of getting together to socialise.
In Redeker’s work “Ophelia” (2020), the temporal linearity of the film becomes part of the artistic content. The video deals with the difficulties one faces, when breaking out of predefined gender roles. Through reverse playback, a manifesto initially recited backwards and, therefore, incomprehensible is made decipherable through the medium video. On the timeline, half-way through the video, a kind of inversion occurs, in which the two respective splices snap back to back. Notably, it is the inversion of the original video that reveals the content of the artistic message. Redeker’s artistic messages draw a universal level of meaning from the familiar spaces that directly surround us, symbolising a larger whole. Awarded the Art Prize of the Lüneburg Regional Association, “Ophelia” illustrates in a particularly poetic way how Meike Redeker conceptually uses the specific forms of expression of the medium video in the artistic message. Her filmic works, therefore, always refer to the medium itself.
¹ “This enormous need of humans to actually have contact [...] There is nowhere to go but into yourself.” Quoted from “Marina Abramović on performing The Artist is Present (2012)”, Video, YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Qj__s8mNU.