| Karin Campbell
by Jon McKenzie
On Tears: Karin Campbell and the Genealogy of Crying
What are the mechanics of weeping? Does crying have a
lexicon? a grammar? a history? Is it infectious from one age to another? And what triggers
the passage between cries of sorrow and wails of joy, and between holding back the tears,
faking them, and really letting go?
Karin Campbell’s recent video work raises such
sensitive questions. On the second floor of PS1, in a gallery devoted to its Special
Projects Program, one encounters "Looped Tear," a large video projection rising
from floor to about eye level. It’s a close-up of the artist’s head, in profile,
looking upwards with her nose just touching the upper edge of the image. A tear forms in
the outer corner of her eye and slowly slides down her temple. At this scale, the tear is
huge, the size of a tight fist, and as it rolls over the cheekbone it glistens brightly
before moving into the hollow and right down into the ear which gently catches it. Another
tear—the same one—emerges from her eye and begins its silent fall. Over and
over, eye to ear, eye to ear, an endless fountain composed of a single tear.
"Looped Tear" is the most recent in a series of
works in which Campbell explores crying as a process, a medium, an all-too-sensitive
condition of life-death. For her 1996 video "Lexicon of a Cry," she uncovered a
language of crying—sobs, wails, shudders, moans, etc.—and set about composing
with it, writing up different cries, rehearsing each one, and then performing them
"live" before a video camera.
If "Looped Tear" suggests that crying is endless
and "Lexicon of a Cry" that crying breaks itself into a vocabulary, then
together these two videos lead to this unsettling thought: crying is a primordial yet
futural language, uttered from birth to death to birth, in that strange passage we call
life, carried along at great risk from one generation to another. All other languages and
art forms are, perhaps, merely translations of this endlessly broken cry.
Crying all too often gets a bad rap: it’s commonly
read as a sign of weakness, lack of control, or emasculation: "boys don’t cry,
only girls and sissies do.…" Under the right circumstances, however, even the
tears of "real men" can reveal a sense of authenticity, the gravity of a
situation, a concrete index of that thing we still call "humanity."
Campbell’s achievement in "Looped Tear" and "Lexicon of a Cry"
lies in the way she elicits powerful feelings of authenticity, gravity, and humanity
through a delicate combination of artifice, levity, and technology. Sometimes it is the
lightest touch that affects us the most profoundly.
Might crying have a history? The German theorist Peter
Sloterdijk has suggested that aristocratic and modern societies can be distinguished as
two different ecologies of pain—the former characterized by the many suffering for
the few, the latter by the many rising up to demand democratic pain relief (access to
healthcare, welfare, safe working conditions, etc.). While modernity and its industrial
revolution have arguably lessened suffering on a wide scale, its utopian strains have also
promoted the belief that pain, suffering, and even death can be totally overcome. Bereft
of God, we deified the Doctor; the tears of worshippers became the tears of patients.
If such genealogical musings are on target, we might ask:
what characterizes the emerging, postmodern ecology of pain? Bereft of utopian narratives
of Endless Progress and the Absolute Absolution of Pain, are we left with only the
possibility of cynical tears? I certainly hope not. If pain cannot be totally negated,
might not the primordial cry instead be somehow affirmed, socially as well as personally?
From this perspective, the AIDS Memorial Quilt can be read as a social exploration of
postmodern pain relief, a collective endeavor to cry, to mourn, to affirm the suffering of
AIDS victims.
Campbell’s crying videos work on a more intimate but
no less important scale. If pain is indeed ecological, social, and historical, it
nonetheless instantiates itself discretely and personally. To deconstruct the mechanics
and lexicon of crying as Campbell has done is not to dismiss them—far from it. It is
to expose oneself to arche-crying, to the pathos of life-death, to the disastrous
imperative that Maurice Blanchot formulates with these words: "Learn to think with
pain." It is this cry that Karin Campbell affirms and gives herself up to.
Jon McKenzie teaches multimedia at the University of the
Arts (Philadelphia). His published essays include "Laurie Anderson for Dummies"
and "!nt3rh4ckt!v!ty." McKenzie’s first book, Perform or Else: From
Discipline to Performance, is forthcoming from Routledge in June 2001. |
