| Karin Campbell
by Caroline Levine
Karin Campbell’s "Looped Tear"
The West has a love affair with certain legends. Among
these is the story, repeated many times over the centuries, of sculptures come to life.
There’s Pygmalion, for example—whose sculpted woman was so beautiful he longed
to see her breathe. There’s Shakespeare’s Hermione— the wronged wife who
pretends to be a sculpture come alive to astonish her husband who has thought her dead for
twenty years. And in Catholic churches and shrines around the world are sculpted Madonnas
who have been said to shed tears. These weeping statues underscore the Madonna’s
humanity—even in the form of stone or wood, Mary suffers so much that she cannot be
contained in iconic stillness. Feeling is simply so powerful that it breaks out of the
inert material to become life.
Karin Campbell’s video, "Looped Tear,"
invites us to dwell on the delicate boundary between the still tranquillity of sculpture
and the feeling dynamism of life. Campbell’s tear—like those of grieving iconic
Madonnas—is both lifelike and impossibly unreal. The defined contours of the
artist’s profile evoke the stillness of stone. The trail of the tear heightens our
perception of the curvature of the bone structure beneath the skin—the sculpted
qualities of the face. But then the sculpture moves: the eye blinks and the tear falls.
Why does the still figure move? Why does it melt into
tears? We imagine the tear to be the proof of feeling; it captures the idea of an internal
life of irrepressible sadness; it is, we might say, the quintessential sign of life. And
yet, Campbell’s loop, its unending circuit from eye to ear, becomes dangerously
interesting in itself, the very passage over the cheek its own sculptural journey rather
than the expression of a sorrow. Indeed, since the impassive, motionless profile betrays
no other expression, it becomes tempting to detach the tear from its very soul as the
expression of grief. There is no bursting with this tear, no wailing, no sobbing, no
urgency, no pressure to erupt.
Campbell’s tear does not so much express as it
travels. It draws our attention to its composed and dispassionate passage, defying all
attempts to read the most familiar sign of feeling as a genuine, an authentic index of
emotion.
Thus Campbell might be said to turn the tradition of
sculptures come to life into its opposite: expressive life turned still, tranquil, artful.
And yet, this piece, like its precursors, maintains the delicate boundary that all of the
legends adopt—the fragile line between life and its sculptural image, a line so
permeable that it always invites us to want to cross it, to see it collapse. This tear may
not be so different from its legendary forerunners, gesturing to the power of sorrowful
life to break through stone and wood and film.
Does Campbell’s serenely looping tear mock the
grieving Madonnas or mimic them? Perhaps, as it balances in the in-between, it does
precisely both.
Caroline Levine is Assistant Professor of English at
Rutgers University in Camden. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
aesthetics, and is currently working on a book about legal battles over works of art and
literature. Her most recent critical essays have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, Women’s Writing, and Victorian Literature and Culture |
