ALICE DURIAUD; OUR LIVES, OUR PLEASURES:
DEATH RACE 2000, THREADWAXING SPACE • NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Document of an Unfinished Story
It is never easy to make the material
of one’s emotional life, one’s prosaic trials and tribulations,
one’s moments of anguish and/or eye watering passion (the two are
so closely sistered with each other), the direct subject of one’s
work. In the spring of 2001, the question of how a woman artist (in the
following case, a video maker) can manage to integrate the rift between
the demands and the yearnings of her body and the urge to immerse herself
ascetically in the study of that which brings her peace and succor—images,
words, films—still seems all too pertinent.
We have passed uneasily through the era
of “autobiographical speech” as a political act, conceived
as a straightforward and objective recounting of things as they were and
are. Emerging from a fervent need to assert the dignity and importance
of one’s “difference” from the norm (as a woman, as
a “cultural other”) it used to be that the “infecting”
and messy presence of autobiography was treated with suspicion and outright
hostility by the bastions of art for its own sake. Nowadays, we are flooded
with testimonials and archived personal and family histories, with countless
modes of autobiographical utterances, and with a self-conscious blurring
of documentation and fiction that is practically de rigeur in the field
of “experimental” video and filmmaking. Indeed, the “purely”
testimonial voice in the context of Contemporary Art has come to seem
naïve: these times are more complex and confusing, it seems.
Nevertheless, many artists, liberated
by the advent of digital technology, are making videos and films which
continue to address, potently and with a great sense of urgency, autobiographical
themes as a means of locating their “otherness” vis-á-vis
the majority (of course, the binary opposition between “minority”
and “majority” is no longer solidly defined or taken for granted).
In a broader sense, they tend to describe the multiple confusions that
have emerged in our lives between what is real and what is simulated;
between our sense of “ourselves” and internalized projections
on the part of others which we have integrated as if they were our own
originary impulses, which they sometimes are.
There is a still a stake in trying to
sift through what one must claim as one’s own, and in discarding
what has been violently and erroneously foisted upon one, without falling
back onto the rigid coding of essentialisms. After all, the here and now
matters and the material world effects itself upon us in palpable, often
hurtful, often exciting ways: it is more than just a gauzy hall of mirrors
as some would like to have us believe.
An artist who has embroiled her work in
the eye of this storm is Aline Duriaud. New York based (she has lived
in Brooklyn for the past seven years), she is British born, with a mixed
South Asian and French background. Although trained in sculpture, she
is principally a video maker. Her most recent piece, Our Lives, Our Pleasures
was a single channel, half-hour video that was projected as part of the
recent “Death Race 2000” show at Thread Waxing Space, curated
by Rachel Lowther and James Dawson-Hollis.
The screen is dissected into quarters,
which play out four discrete but related narratives. Duriaud features
prominently as “Juliette Janvier”, a New York City Dominatrix,
along with a rather stunning and frightening woman, the self titled “Goddess
LaRouge”, and a man who is identified only as DH. The video unfolds
like a kind of scrapbook with soundtracks and visual scenes overlapping
and commenting upon each other. It includes documentary style interviews,
low-tech demonstrations of sadomasochistic sex, clips and stills from
Juliette/the author’s previous videos, and Cassavetes style dialogues
between characters which might, or might not, be staged.
It is not specified to the viewer whether
the video maker’s alternate persona is “real” (ie does
she genuinely moonlight as a Dominatrix?), nor do we know whether the
other characters are actors or not. The video skirts a line that makes
it difficult to tell whether or not it is an elaborately staged fiction.
One suspects that Our Lives, Our Pleasures is a liberal mixture of the
real and the fake. Although there are moments of grotesque and poignant
humor aplenty (for example, the scene when DH tells Juliette/the video
maker: “You’re a woman in a foreign country, trying to get
a Green Card and engaging in marginal work. The odds are stacked against
you and you’re going to have to fight. This is America; you’d
better get over feeling depressed.”). The tone is not tongue in
cheek. There is no self reflexive wink to the viewer. None of the characters
come across as trying to package themselves as wannabe celebrities or
objects to be consumed and bought, though the “subject” matter
of the video—in as much as it concerns a Dominatrix and her colleagues—ostensibly
concerns itself viscerally with the linkages between desire and commerce
and the manner in which one has to make some concession to the mechanisms
of capital (after all, “This is America”).
Indeed, the video is not seductive, in
the conventional sense of the word, nor is it a documentary about sadomasochism
per se, though we learn plenty about the nuts and bolts of the commercial
S/M scene via interviews conducted by the video maker and via reproductions
of that industry’s advertising in the form of stills pulled from
magazines and video covers, which punctuate the narratives. Our Lives,
Our Pleasures is aggressively low-tech and sometimes confrontational (the
clip-within-a-clip from Juliette’s Human Ashtray is one example
that comes to mind.) Although there are plenty of opportunities for voyeuristic
viewing on the part of the audience, it manages to prevent itself from
falling into the trap of bizzaro eye candy in the name of critique. In
other words, one gets the feeling that there is something dense and real
at stake here: a real struggle for pleasure, autonomy and self-determination
as well as an uneasy celebration of the freedom slash bondage (pun intended)
that “America” supplies.
In one of the four narratives, filmed
in a spectacularly and deliberately unglamorous manner, Juliette alternates
between tying up and interviewing a man who we presume to be DH (he appears
more prominently in another segment) who is heard mainly off camera. This
is the segment whose audio track is hardest to make out. With the camera
focused on herself, Juliette/Duriaud asks: “What’s the difference
between seeing a professional Dominatrix and being in a relationship with
one? How does that affect your fantasy life? Simultaneously, on another
segment of the screen, DH is lecturing a street clothed Juliette about
the impossibility of the choices she has made in coming to the US and
trying to carve out a life for herself as an artist.
“Goddess LaRouge” appears
mainly in interview with Juliette (or is it the video maker appearing
as “herself” in this case?). Her dialogue ranges from the
outrageous to the quotidian. She also appears in two “fetish videos”
with Juliette that are excerpted throughout the main video. Always wearing
in a mask of some sort, she talks about the specificities of being a transsexual
Domina who suffers the indignity of constantly being asked for “straight”
sexual services (“Women like me generally get their cocks sucked
to make a living, and I have a hard time explaining that a Dominatrix
doesn’t do that”), and she brings another layering to the
blurring between what is real and what is constructed. Again, in keeping
with the general thematic of Our Lives, Our Pleasures (the very title
is both ironic and touching), the presence of LaRouge is not titillating
and she is not filmed in an “ethnographic,” distancing manner.
She talks articulately about the pleasure and craft involved in her work,
as well as how it is a means to funding her completion of a college degree.
She plays up to the camera, but she is not presented as an object for
our perusal, rather, as an individual caught up in the web of her own
desires, her struggle to establish a unity between how she sees herself
and how the world sees her, and the need to make a living.
Our Lives, Our Pleasures is structured
as a kind of mesh that mirrors the web which all of its characters are
caught, in their fight for self-determination. The video undermines illusions
of “the artist as lone beacon divorced from the vulgar workings
of society’s machine” but does not find resolution in giving
oneself up for sale to the highest bidder. It plays out like a series
of splintered mirrors in which the characters are seen, and into which
they look, attempting to sort out the best way to proceed without losing
their humanity.
Duriaud’s video work uses autobiography,
and the conventions of both documentary and narrative. A video made while
participating in the Whitney Museum Study Program in ‘98, Meanwhile,
In . . . tells the story of her upbringing in an unnamed Gulf State, and
the dislocations she encountered as “not completely European”,
in an environment where Western expatriates segregated themselves from
the “natives” and from the Asian laboring class. Composed
of staged interviews, and stills from old yearbooks and photos, and filmed
in a mock documentary style which is more playfully staged and clearly
“fake” than Our Lives, Our Pleasures, a first person narrator
describes a vaguely remembered schoolmate, Amber, who might be a character
from a teenage romance. The tone becomes increasingly ominous as we are
told about Amber’s propensity for wandering off the “American
Compound” and the repercussions of her actions. Another, shorter
video, Pleasures of Autobiography, is based on George Bataille’s
cult novel The Story of the Eye: a narrative is recounted by a first person
female voice who might or might not be impersonating George Bataille.
Accompanied by a series of eerie stills pulled from what look like faded
travel books, and by reconstructions of scenes from the novel, the story
details the outrageous exploits of an unnamed protagonist who travels
from one country to another to fulfill his/her deviant fantasies.
Duriaud has talked about her interest
in constructing a mode of autobiographical speech which is not “simply
testimonial,” but which addresses her own dislocations across race
and gender while embracing “the restorative power of narrative”,
and “the powerful conjunctions between fantasy and the real which
are sustaining”. In particular, she has discussed what she calls
her “. . . problematic relation to “French-ness,” which
I regard with equal measures of desire and resentment. The legacy of French
Post-Structuralism has provided me with a vocabulary with which to explore
“transgressive” desires, though I am critical of any notion
of “universalized desire,” but as a woman and moreover, as
a woman of mixed racial heritage, I have found myself forced to analyze
and confront the cultural biases entrenched in the work of writers like
Bataille, while simultaneously wanting to claim their language as my own.”
Duriaud is currently working on a musical
about a counter intelligence agent, and on making her feature length film,
American Virgin, about a writer who becomes convinced that he has Multiple
Personality Disorder.
Laurence Sarpault
New York, New York
2001