CONSCIOUSNESS FROM THE GROUND UP.

Future's Eve

by Anna Gaskell

New Langton Arts

San Francisco, California 

April 4-May 5, 2001

At the entrance to Anna Gaskell's installation at New Langton Arts in San Francisco was a Goethe quote that read, "up or down, it's all the same." This fluid perception of the physical world, in which time might be suspended, reversed or infinitely replayed, is central to this installation. Future's Eve featured a new film and two series of intimate pen and ink drawings, all circling around ideas of feminine identity, the myths of creation and the nature of time. While the new work expands upon themes of her earlier photographs, gone are the young twins in pinafores who enacted troubling excerpts from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. She has moved beyond the familiar character and stories of the 1996-97 "Wonder" series to explore new terrain, finding the basis for her narratives in a complex range of texts and fictional characters.

New Langton Arts began its plans for this project four years ago, when the curatorial staff first approached Gaskell about creating an installation. In keeping with its mission to cultivate experimental artworks, New Langton commissioned her to create a film. At that time, she had made only one film, but this project enabled her to focus her efforts on the medium and now, as the installation opens in San Francisco, she has produced six films. Her work in film is not as widely known as her photographs, partly because she has shown the cinematic work more often in Europe. Future's Eve, the title a clever twist on L'Eve Future, the 1886 science fiction novel by Auguste de Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, presents one in a series of four related films. The film plays out an oblique, cyclical narrative, in which the viewer is abruptly drawn in as the central character. Unfortunately, only one of the four films was shown here, its powerful imagery immersing the viewer intensely, but only momentarily, in this spare install ation.

The film itself is approximately three minutes in length, set to loop continuously. Viewed in an enclosed rectangular space, the narrow configuration of the gallery proves to be perfectly proportioned for the experience that plays out on film. It is very dark as the film opens, complete blackness projected within an equally black space. Tight circles of light begin to appear, sporadically. As patches of light accumulate the formations materialize almost as cellular patterns viewed under a microscope. Piece by piece the bright areas dilute the blackness until the sky above is visible and our orientation becomes clear. The view is from the bottom of a grave, looking up, as the dirt that covers us is slowly removed, handful by handful. The ground is shooting upwards, out of the grave, being caught by small, outstretched hands. Clods of dirt fly frantically, as if perhaps viewers are digging themselves out of the grave. But the child's hands at the mouth of the grave are complicit in this process. Impossibly, th ey catch each piece of dirt, the earth meeting precisely with the open hands as it flies haphazardly out of the grave. Eventually, the sky begins to emerge, then a tree, and a brief moment of elation. And then cruelly, the film loops, and we are submerged underground again, but this time quite knowingly.

The film continues its sinister loop, covering and uncovering the person or object that is buried. The loop is brief, allowing little information or time to imagine anything but the darkest outcome. From within the tight confines of the space, instincts take over and we can only read this sequence as we experience it physically. As it loops the structure eventually reveals itself--that the film is run in reverse--and the small hands that are now eagerly grasping the flying bits of ground are the same hands that covered the grave over. Subtle editing draws out the moment in which the hands drop (and now catch) the earth, and is sped up again as the hands dash out of sight. For the space of those few minutes, the anonymous hands become our only link with the outside world, the promise of air and life.

Gaskell skillfully measures her narrative, forcing the viewer to fixate on the minimal details of the film, watching over and over again as though we really might be powerless to interrupt the sequence of events. The film is quite deliberately void of sound, the artist choosing not to impose her own voice on the entity that is symbolically emerging from the ground. The silence only heightens our sense of isolation of being buried, unburied and then buried again. In a printed interview that accompanies the exhibition the artist maintains that she sees this as a hopeful image, saying, "I imagine someone in that grave. Not necessarily a dead or dying person, but something emerging and being given another chance or a first chance to become something new, something different." She perceives the constant loop as a means of preserving time, of repeating a particular moment in an infinite circle. It would appear that the act of emerging from darkness, if repeated enough times, will have more of an impact than the ex perience of being submerged underground. Here the metaphor of Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole is continued without her tangible figure. The hole that: Alice found herself in was a place of discovery, where all rules are indefinitely suspended; here, too, the artist begins her work deep within the earth, where the imagination can play the story out in any number of directions. Her precarious narrative leaves that space in the ground for each viewer to experience--with anticipation or dread.

Throughout her work Gaskell consistently draws upon fictional narratives and fairytales as the starting point for her images. She borrows from existing stories so that she might reconstruct the language and the narrative, frequently turning it upside down in the process of making it her own. The central character from Alice in Wonderland, which inspired the brilliantly colored and suspenseful imagery of the "Wonder" series, yielded narratives that were by-and-large familiar. Even when taking unexpected detours into the brooding recesses of Alice's psyche, the photographs were basically constructed around recognizable themes from the story. But now, having established her working method, her imagery is growing increasingly unstructured, based only very loosely on her personal readings of the texts. Rather than reenacting a specific scene from a narrative, her new work borrows the general mood or sensibility from her sources. In the case of Future's Eve, the Villiers novel was only one of several works she rea d that explored the nineteenth-century construction of the ideal woman or automaton. She also found her material in the fairytales of E. T. A. Hoffman and Hans Christian Andersen. Engrossed by the stories' obsessive detail and the characters' perverse desire for technological innovations, Gaskell began working simultaneously on several bodies of work, exploring the absurd and all-consuming desire to make a human, in this case a woman. While a female automaton constructed by a male engineer or scientist is a fairly common theme as these stories go, the notion of a woman artist seeking to recreate her maker is somewhat novel. And the consciousness that is slowly dug out from the grave is intended as her own female construction of sorts. As in much of her work, she employs the small hands of children in the film; their role doubles for that of the artist, who is equally intent upon unearthing the entity that created them. This new direction might be inspired by science fiction, but it reveals something closer to a deep-seated personal investigation of her physical matter. In its more oblique narrative form the film lacks the immediacy of her earlier photographs, its intended exploration of creation being overwhelmed by the associations of betrayal and death. As enigmatic, haunting images this kind of ambiguity is effective; but as a narrative sequence the thread of the idea is too easily lost.

Her extensive reading generally inspires furious bouts of drawing, which in turn provides the direction for her meticulously constructed photographs. The pen and ink drawings are intensely private renderings, and the artist very rarely shows them. This installation was accompanied by two series of seemingly unrelated drawings: one toying with the sexual associations of women's lingerie and the other fixing on the serene but slightly sinister form of what appears to be a nurse's cap. In this context, the drawings expanded upon the psychological tension of the film, and the artist's delight in ambiguous narratives. The larger of the two series, some 30 sketches of stockings and delicate undergarments, were clustered together salon-style in one corner of the gallery. The arrangement, like the film, denied a precise beginning or conclusion. Simultaneously eerie and childlike, the sinewy drawings fixate on an elongated pair of scissors threatening damage to pantyhose and underwear. Sometimes a figure appears wear ing the stockings, but more often it is the stockings alone that do battle with the scissors. The female figure appears herself occasionally, peering out through her own hands, pinching herself or pulling her hair in great distress; sometimes her impossibly long fingers find an opening in the seam of the pantyhose where she might pull herself through. She appears caught in the anguish of emerging or defining herself. Replaying the private ritual of the scissors poised to cut the garments, the drawings purposefully suspend the precise moment in which the action might go either way.

The drawings actually provide a vehicle for the artist to work out her ideas and pre-visualize her imagery while at home in New York City, as she tends to do much of her shooting in Des Moines, where she grew up. The ready availability of props and locations are much easier to come by in Iowa, where the artist is recognized by the local residents and welcome to use private homes and grounds for her constructions. When making photographs, she tends to work alone with her young models, but as a filmmaker, she relies on the assistance of a film crew. The process of making even a very short film requires a team of six or more, prompting her to assume the directorial mode on another level. In terms of the installation, the focal point of which is the film, the inclusion of the drawings seems somewhat tangential. Even so, it is a guilty pleasure to have a glimpse into the artist's unguarded musings, ideas that will ultimately be refined into the silent, cunning forms of her photographic imagery.

This film will be installed at the Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany later this summer along with the other three films that comprise the series. It is quite likely that the complete installation will make the full complexity of the artist's exploration of time, memory and creation all the more apparent. As the first showing of her work on the West Coast, this experience of her absorbing imagery seemed far too brief.

DIANA GASTON is an independent curator and writer based in San Francisco.