Archive Project 23: Allan deSouza

The Project Series
Project 23: Allan deSouza

Painting With an Eraser
By Eve Oishi

While The Lost Pictures series appears to be the most personal of Allan deSouza’s work, shaped around images and memories of his childhood in response to his mother’s death, the themes of the body, space, and the paradoxically intimate and alienating power of photography are of a piece with much of his earlier work. These recent images, however, center the body of the artist firmly within the frame of vision if only to accentuate its remoteness within the personal geographies of memory.

DeSouza’s earlier photographic series Threshold (1996-1998) and Terrain (1999-2003) depict physical space as empty of people yet entirely sculpted by human desire. In Terrain, dense cityscapes are built out of trash collected from the streets of lower Manhattan, and painterly landscapes reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be molded out of sprouts of eyelashes, fingernails, and melted wax. While the artist appears to take the role of invisible creator in these miniature worlds that he builds and then photographs, he inserts his own body into the pieces in the form of the physical detritus—ear wax, fingernails, etc.—that contours the strange yet familiar topographies. In his 2003 collaborative performance piece Will **** for Peace, deSouza with artist Yong Soon Min reenacts the 1969 Bed-In of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, making obvious use of his own body and inviting viewers to cut pieces of the artists’ wigs to construct messages of peace. In The Lost Pictures, the viewer is invited into the work through the familiar frame of the artist’s autobiography, yet it is precisely the deeply personal nature of the work that lends it its strange and unsettlingly distant quality. In this series deSouza has again constructed topographies of painstaking beauty, artifice, and detail, yet the terrain in these pictures is his own memory.

DeSouza began the process with family slides, taken by his father during the artist’s childhood in Kenya. The images are mostly of the artist and his three siblings although two are of his mother. The images chosen are typical of the moments usually memorialized in family photos: family outings to the beach and at home with their grandmother, scenes that affirm and witness the family unit within domestic and public space. After making the slides into prints, deSouza taped them onto various surfaces around his house where they gradually became worn and splattered with the debris of daily life. Placed in areas of particularly high daily use, such as the kitchen and the bathroom, the images were rubbed away from the pressure of feet, dishes, and water and coated with food, toothpaste, bodily fluids, and hair. DeSouza enhanced this effect in some photos by laying strips of tape on the bathroom mat and transferring the collected dust, fibers, and hair onto the photo, leaving and cutting away the tape in patterns. He then scanned the photos and digitally manipulated the color, contrast, and lines of some of the pictures before blowing them up to 40 by 60 inch prints.

The final images evoke a similar response to deSouza’s earlier work: the pull between opposing poles of familiarity and strangeness, beauty and horror, intimacy and distance. Like much of his other work, these pieces are concerned with questions of proportion and scale, but the use of the body in this series—the intractable incongruity between the hazy, indistinct form of the artist’s childhood body and the immediate viscerality of blood, hair, and semen marking the surface of the pictures—grapples more acutely with the simultaneous power and impossibility of photography to overcome death. These images link the very process of art and representation with the notion of the abject, defined by Julia Kristeva as the horror of the impure and the improper figured as the body turned inside out. She writes, “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.” While the abject embodies the limits of human understanding and the inevitability of death, its presence also provides a reassurance against death’s encroachment on the body: “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.”

In The Lost Pictures series, the confrontation with death is signified through the abject viscera of the body contrasted against the impermanent and fading photographic image. At 40 by 60 inches, The Lost Pictures are significantly larger than deSouza’s earlier prints. One effect of the pictures’ large size is that the surface of the print predominates over its image. The closer one gets to the picture, the more obscured the image becomes. What becomes clearer, however, are the textures of the surface, in many cases, the result of deliberate yet haphazard erasure. For example, in Harambee! the photograph was taped in the artist’s shower, allowing the stream of water to wash away the image. When the image is blown up, the marks of what is missing produce a painterly effect that layers absence over presence, as if painting with an eraser.

In contrast to the pictures of the artist and his siblings, which are distinguished by the haziness of their original image, there are two striking photographs of the artist’s mother, in one of which she stands before a white car, the other before a background of rhododendron. These are remarkable for the clarity of their image and the vividness of their color. The images in these photographs were not obscured as much by daily physical contact; deSouza etched tiny lines and patterns over their surfaces with the eraser tool of his Photoshop program. The extraordinary detail of these threadlike scratches suggests a painstaking and laborious contact with the image surface that can only be understood as an act of love. Perhaps this is why, unlike the other prints, the act of erasure in Car and Blossom results in an accentuation of the image instead of an obfuscation. It also testifies to the desire behind the process: the different investments in the memory of his mother—both his memory of his mother and his mother’s memory—and of himself.

Through the artist’s manipulation, the prints become a meditation on the physical object of the photographic medium. The swirls of hair in Beach evoke brush strokes in a painting and underscore the aesthetic artifice of the image. But the unstable physicality of the medium is also the most accurate representation of the process of memory. Already removed from the original place and time it was taken, the photograph is continually retouched through contact with the detritus of daily life.
The end result, like all photographs, is never a faithful representation of a scene; rather it becomes a reflection of the process through which the past is preserved, forgotten, and revised within memory. The fact that the photographs depict the artist as well as his family, and the fact that the household debris on the surface of the photos issues from both deSouza and his partner, accentuate the collective nature of this process. Through this work, the internal terrain of memory itself is externalized and made strange, reenacting the “fog” of his mother’s “internal vision,” as deSouza describes it in his essay in this catalogue: “that complex amalgam of memory, imagination, and projection . . . this place where the self resides.” Just as deSouza’s earlier work used photography to question the political and social construction of space, this work attempts to combat the alienation/loss of forgetting/death through a conscious reenactment of the sticky process of memory.

The themes of memory and forgetting are also addressed in House, the one piece of sculpture in this exhibition. DeSouza began by building a scale model of his childhood home out of an old wooden dresser drawer. The fact that he was unable to find the house on his recent trip to Nairobi, the passage of time, and his mother’s faulty memory and unreliable narration, meant that the model, based on the artist’s memory, bore only a passing resemblance to the actual house, as deSouza later discovered through consultation with family members. After building the 32 by 48 inch model and painting it white, deSouza burned the exterior and slowly covered the ruins in layers of wax into which were mixed charred matches, hair, beard shavings, and bodily fluid. He then began to excavate the house, removing some of the wooden frame and surrounding the foundation (now almost entirely made of wax and altered again in layout from the original model) with shards of wax. Although explored through a different medium, House enacts the same attempt to produce a physical reflection of memory. By taking an original (and imperfect) representation of the past and subjecting it to the decaying, ruinous, and preservative forces and artifacts of daily life, deSouza gives a material and corporeal presence, not to the past, but to the process through which the past remains alive in the present.

In this sense, the organizing aesthetic genre of this series, both the prints and the model, can be said to be the still life. Just as deSouza writes that photographs literally and figuratively “save time,” they also still and distill the movement of time. But the friction with the quotidian functions of the household also reveals the nature both of memory and its physical evidence—the photograph, the model—as mutable and evolving, as all the same, still life. Through the various layers and processes of manipulation, multiple inflections and narratives rise to the surface of the pictures. In Beach deSouza and his three siblings play in the water as the silhouettes of their mother and an uncle hover on the distant shore. The triangulation of the shadowy forms suggests a drama, but the unusual perspective (taken from the water looking into shore) and the obscured outlines of the image keep any definitive interpretation out of reach. In Fountain the four children are again shot from behind, so that the audience’s point of view is aligned with theirs. But what they appear to be focused on is a large spot of blood (the result of the extraction of the artist’s wisdom teeth) that looms over their vision like a sun. The movement of perspective, the suggestion of motion upward, outward, and forward, is redirected back into the most internal of bodily cavities. Likewise, the impulse toward nostalgia, prompted by family photos, is re-routed through the unfamiliar and the unheimlich.

As in deSouza’s earlier work, The Lost Pictures is fundamentally concerned with dislocation, and these prints draw together themes of geographic and temporal dislocation with the internal dislocation of memory. Born in Nairobi to South Asian parents (his mother was born in Kenya and his father had emigrated from India), deSouza relocated with his family to London at the age of seven, moved again as an adult to New York, and currently lives in Los Angeles. While much of his work is an exploration of “the multiple consciousness of being in the wrong place,” particularly in the shifting variances between cultural and geographic constructions of race, history, and nationalism, The Lost Pictures transposes the dislocated perspective of the nomad, the immigrant, the diasporic subject onto the individual’s position within his own history and body. Whereas the immigrant is often figured abjectly as the repellant waste of the civic body, both foreign and familiar, this series engages the simultaneously alien and intimate nature of memory as it constructs a sense of self through narratives of the body’s travels across time and national borders. In this sense, deSouza, as both artist and subject of his work, takes up the position of “deject,” a term that Kristeva defines as “the one by whom the abject exists.” The deject, she writes, is a “deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray.”

While The Lost Pictures is focused on the intimate images of family, deSouza’s diasporic perspective lends a global political inflection to all of his images. In his previous cityscapes, such as the 2003 Everything west of here is Indian country, he depicts the grand projects of imperialism using the street-level flotsam and jetsam of urban living. Colonial histories are present, or course, in the geographic trajectory of deSouza’s family: the South Asian presence in Kenya is a result of Britain exporting its colonial subjects from India to build railroads in its African colonies. Two of the pictures in this series, Harambee! and Tomorrow, were taken during celebrations of Kenya’s Independence in 1963, events that fêted the country’s optimistic future through icons of technology and progress such as, ironically, the railroad. Interestingly, the figure of the conductor with which the children are posed in Tomorrow is a life-size cardboard cutout, calling attention again to the function of artifice within photographic images.
DeSouza writes that the act of taking photos of the sites of his childhood in Nairobi was an attempt to see for his mother. In The Lost Pictures, the viewer sees (for) the artist. He is both the object and the manipulator of our vision. Ultimately, the power of these images comes from the communal nature of this struggle with and against memory. It is the medium that both separates and connects the artist with his mother, with his past, and with his audience.
 

Eve Oishi is associate professor of Women's Studies at California State University, Long Beach. She is currently completing her book The Memory Village: Fakeness and the Fictioning of Family in Asian American Literature and Film.