The Dead Man is (Not) Dead:
On Hauntings and Invocations
Eliza Tan
Thirty thousand nights of ghosts beyond. Beyond that black beyond. Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost...he all but said ghost loved ones. Waiting on the rip word...The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone...The unaccountable. From nowhere.
Samuel Beckett A Piece of Monologue 19791
In a darkened corner of a room, a man is hanging from a noose. Dead - or not quite dead, the apparition sways almost imperceptibly: the ghost manager said to have hung himself behind what used to be a pornographic theatre. Elsewhere around the building, more spectres manifest - an undead cast called forth from old rumours circling Cornerhouse in Manchester, the location of Juhana Moisander's site-specific video installation. Glimpsed through a peephole in the wall is the ghost of a maintenance man who used to inhabit a room where a mattress and a pile of pornographic magazines were found, alongside a witch's hat and bottle of baby oil. An unkempt street vendor, who used to pimp his wife from his burger van outside the house in the 1990s, haunts the walls of Cinema 1 alongside his bride who floats beside him, her mocking gaze fixed on the observer.
Juhana Moisander - The Manager, The Maintainence Man, The Burgerman, The Bride Loop video projection at Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2010
Cast in the expanded form of what Russian writer Maxim Gorki effusively dubs 'the kingdom of shadows'- cinema, Moisander's masked projections are uncannily seductive. 'What, has this thing appeared again tonight?' (Hamlet, I.I.21).2 The doubtful spectacle animates our 'disturbed relation with the dead', a visual materialization of more abstract terms: repressed memory, time and forces of
repetition, reality and its doubling in the imaginary.3 An 'other' consciousness that returns only to evade a name, the thing entices us to pursue it since it unfixes rational frameworks of perception and privileges our experiential, desire-driven reception of the aberrant encounter.
Unabetted by the viewing conditions of the black-box and by plot sequence, Moisander's 'ghosts' occur as dislocated frames jettisoned from the visual seriality of the conventional motion picture, while furthermore distending and destablizing the mimetic function of the theatrical stage. Moisander's earlier installation, escape II (2006), makes for another apt example. Three digital cut- outs of the figure of a man stand in successive arrangement, simulate a moving image of the character as he puts on his hat. As disembodied theatre, Moisander's extended play on the (non)objecthood of the cinematic image traverses also beyond white-cube discourse and the symbolic parameters which the gallery (designed to enclose the spectrum) structures around the object. Variously appropriating the formal parameters of the cinema, theatre and gallery, the 'thing', the work of art, here returns in another form.
Juhana Moisander - escape II Spotlight, digital prints mounted on board, wooden door. Characters: 15 - 25cm, door 18cm, 2006
A mediator between art and cinema, the medium of "expanded cinema" is in itself an other consciousness that quite literally plays up on the uncertainty of its own 'thingness' and objecthood. Underlying ontologies of the self-enclosed image and spectacle, alongside psychologies of spectatorship and repetitive processes of 'becoming', replace material concerns. "Expanded cinema" might be in this way said to fold over a preceding impulse towards the work of art's dematerialisation as fore-grounded by conceptual practices of the 60s, otherwise shadowed by Guy Debord's proclamation: "Cinema is dead. There can't be film anymore. If you want, let's have a discussion." (Hurlements en faveur de Sade 1952)
In comparison, Ming Wong's video works, such as Life and Death in Venice, assume the guise of "global cinema" in order to engage notions
of historical haunting, performative doubling and alterity across multiple indices of personal and cultural identity. Embodying a self- consciousness that locates 'East' and 'West' alike as sites of internal alterity, Life and Death in Venice mirrors as much an 'inside' subjectivity as it invokes an 'outside' perspective. Wong typically plays all the roles in this Visconti-inspired video. Intriguingly enough, the artist's persona/s inadvertently becomes the singular visage - a screen that sets off an infinite mirroring of 'otherness'. There is no doubt that a large degree of self-gazing (that is paradoxically self-cancelling in its circularity) takes place here: Wong's dying Aschenbach is haunted by, and likewise ghosts the loss object of his youth and moment of 'arrival'. This is projected onto our porcelain-skinned, beautiful boy Tadzio, of course, through whom his repressed desires find sublimation.
Ming Wong - Stills from Life and Death in Venice 3 channel video installation, 16:08 mins, loop, 2010
It all takes place on location at the Venice Biennale, towards the end of Wong's presentation at the Singapore Pavilion, where Venice now appears as an abandoned ghost town. In one such image of dereliction, ripped posters of Wong's Life and Death in Venice flap about in the wind, signalling the post-reality of the spectacular event. Both characters foray around the Biennale exhibits, which in turn become art objects absorbed into the spectrality of Wong's video set. Tadzio is seen haunting the Icelandic Pavilion, above which is the Singapore Pavilion. In a separate frame at the same location, Wong appears as himself, yes, the real slim shady indeed. He sits at the piano, imperfectly rehearsing Mahler's adagietto, expressing all the precariousness of an inner state of mind that follows the artist's arrival at a seminal marking point in his career, again, this plays out as if a sublimated return to oneself was the driving end of his filmic process.