ANN VERONICA JANSSENS
What happened in that mist room in Lisbon, what happens in Venice in the Belgian pavilion, is an exploration of all the ramifications of the notion that perception is always - before all else - a performance. The history of art would have accustomed us to this had it paid more attention to what art did, rather than to what it "said" to the art historian. Instead, that discipline has developed modes of "reading" art that fail to do justice to the performative aspect of all language, including visual language. By reading motifs "off the page" as Freud warned us not to do, the disciplinary methodology of iconography has closed itself off from non-figurative art. Worse, it has closed off the long history of art, with its emphasis on figuration, from the kind of art that is represented here as contemporary.
What can I say, then, "about" Janssens' work with mist? Say, if I am not to perform my experience of it, as have tried to do in the narrative with which began this text? I am in Venice, now, in the center of painting in its most prestigious tradition; the center of representational painting and sculpture, bound to church and state, religious and worldly power, money and market, Venice, where art seems forever, with its monuments of human accomplishment which the entire world is interesting in preserving, in saving from time's devastation. And it is in this museified city by the relentless sea that Janssens offers the insight that art is performative, therefore temporal; that no event of art can be reiterated, for time goes on; that repetition is always a citation in differentiation, an intervention that transforms both original and copy and destroys the foundation of that distinction.
Janssens' installation is one element in an ongoing project that can be conceived of as a laboratory in which everything that happens when we perceive (art, but also everything we don't consider art) becomes an object of experiments. All the experiments she conducts have in common the performance of duration that my story of the mist room tried to convey. Deceleration might be the key word through which to approach her works. They entrap the viewer, body arid soul, in an experience so unsettling that something really shifts in one's physical being in the world. This is how her art performs - by requiring us to perform it. It is impossible to document, catalogue, survey it. Not only is each piece an intervention that does not last; but the work as a whole is an ongoing project that cannot be stopped in arbitrarily selected moments of objectification. All I can do to convey a sense of it is present a small number of these interventions, or aspects of them. In the end, then, the Venice installation will have been an entrance into the work of which it is, in a sense, a detail.
The body and its activity in the performance of perception are Janssens' discourse, in which she engages the history and philosophy of art. Her mist as the sign /cloud/ is one example, and it is an extremely powerful and encompassing one. In order to suggest that her vocabulary, while rigorously non-figurative, is extensive, subtle and rich, I will now develop another medium through which she positions her work in and out of the history of art. In her sculpture Le corps noir, another sign is deployed, which, again, is fundamental for the self-experience of the body in space. This time she reworks a figurative emblem from baroque art: the mirror.
Le corps noir is a deep black, perfectly round, hemispheric Perspex bowl hung on a wall. The shiny material mirrors the viewer; the spheric form inverses the mirror image. It is the most unsettling mirror I have ever looked into. […] What we see in Le corps noir is an invisible space that teases the viewer, who is thus somehow induced to want to know whether the sculpture is convex or concave, two- or three-dimensional. As a result, faced with this shiny, crystal-clear yet invisible space, the viewer is incited to move around it, to want touch it while being unable to do so. By making the viewer move to find out whether the sculpture is concave or convex, the sculpture recedes and eludes grasp, moves itself, as its visual field turns out to be the space that envelops the viewer. It, not the viewer, incorporates.
When I saw this work, I could not help but stick my hand out to feel the shape. It turned out to be concave; the body was just a bowl. But the moment I stepped back again, nothing told me whether what I knew factually about that fleeting moment through my body could still be known in the abstract space left behind when I retracted my hand. There was a frightening discrepancy between the visual and tactile perception, which forcefully made a meta-critical point. Seeing, the work argued, is not observation from afar, even if seeing up close is not possible either. Distance precludes seeing. But the issue is not the old positivistic claim to true knowledge through observation. As the need to touch and the subsequent ongoing frustration demonstrated, the issue is that seeing cannot decide between incorporating space and being incorporated into it. The act of seeing gobbles up the body.
In Venice, a work such as the mist installation, which uses light as medium or material, receives an additional environmental highlight-c'est le cas de le dire-from the unique light of this city of water. If you are not sensitive to its varying qualities of light, an important part of the magic of Venice is lost on you. Janssens has intervened in Venetian light before. In 1988, in her work Casa Frollo, été 88, she piled up eighteen panes of glass on a windowsill of Casa Frollo. The old stone of the sill belongs to that Venice the world must preserve. Old stone, cracked and uneven, with a colour only Venetian sunlight can paint. The pile of glass panes contrasted with its smooth, shiny surface. Totally flat, crack-free. […] The sides of the panes were not polished, so that the rough edges sculpted the blue into a variability that echoed the waves of the water beyond it. Meanwhile, the sun intensified the blue, while casting a shadow that began to draw a magic carpet. The material of this flat painting/drawing: light, shadow and the underlying old stone. The rough side of the pile announced the waves beyond it. Which was repeating which? The water, now, appeared as a product of Janssens' pile of glass. For it was its rough side that first drew attention to the nuances of colour produced by irregularity, so that the waves could only repeat the glass' work.
Two other works by Janssens deploy light to raise the issue of our relationship to space and sense perception in different but complementary ways. The 1996 flat circular piece Aluminium gravé remains rigorously two-dimensional and non-figurative. The only element that "engraves" the plaque with design and depth is light. The light emanates from the center, in rays that grow wider but also thicker as they become more distant from the center, but as in Le corps noir no stable position is offered from which one can view the rays at leisure. Even an attempt to stay still, which already makes the viewer aware of the body's involvement in looking, invariably fails. The tiniest movement of the eye - the pulse of blood or the need to humidify the eyeballs - already changes the rays. The very simplicity of the form, its flatness - which concentrates the perceptual problem on the light alone - sharply disturbs the act of looking and unsettles the self-evidence with which the viewer occupies space.
Janssens' installation Représentation d'un corps rond (1996) is a foundational work. It questions the relationship between viewer and space in a much more dramatic, but equally pleasurable, way. This work - which, like the Venice installation, is even more difficult to reproduce in a photograph than Le corps noir and Aluminium gravé - consists of a conic projection of light starting at a center a mere 10 centimeters in diameter, and extends across a room 30 meters wide. Visitors cannot help walking into the work. But walking loses its innocence right away. The cone turns for three minutes, then stops. The work has no physical object to sustain its effect, only light. Yet its title contains the word representation.
The sculptures that Janssens makes refuse to yield to the pressure of objectification. As a result, they not only deploy time as medium; they are time, ontologically. No experience can be reiterated, no point of view can be selected for privilege. Janssens' brilliant work Aquarium makes this point abundantly clear. In a glass cube filled with a mixture of water and alcohol, a perfect sphere floats. It never stays in exactly the same place, for it floats freely; yet it doesn't change, it never loses its perfect shape. The sphere consists of silicone oil, and all it does is float. The tiny movements suggest it is the viewer's eyes that make it move, as if it responded to the viewer. You hold your breath, hoping or fearing that the effect of your gaze will become visible.
Unlike the Venice mist installation, here you can stand outside the aquarium. But that is only one way of being with this work. Through the clear liquid, the clear glass, the clear silicone oil, the world around you is visible, as if in a photograph. But you can also catch a glimpse, in the sphere, of a reversed, upside-down reflection of your own mirror image surrounded by the space you are standing in. Once this has happened, the dizziness commences. Where you are, who you are, has lost its innocence. You are (in) the photograph.
Janssens' pieces with glass and mirrors invoke transparency, not as a self-evident illusion but, on the contrary, as what makes perception not self-evident. All these works make the body feel the need to perceive in order to be, act, perform. In 1987 she lined the Altenloh room of the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels with a plinth of mirrors. The mirrors were placed obliquely, but the angle was small, barely visible in itself. The viewer walking on the floor of the room saw her feet separate from her body. Immediately, walking became something to be learned anew; an effort, not "natural" movement. Again, then, the body was affected by perception. Perception was no longer an aid but a performance that took all your energy and concentration. The time it took to adjust and walk again was part of the work.
Mieke Bal, "Ann Veronica Janssens, Light in Life's Lab", in Ann Veronica Janssens. A Different Image in Each Eye, La Lettre Volée - Laurent Jacob, 1999, pp 89-102 (excerpt)