Archive Project 10: Anne Bray & Molly Cleator

Holly Willis' Essay | Images from the Exhibition Anne Bray & Molly Cleator Home Page | Archive - Spring 2001 Home

Holly Willis' Essay

Welcoming their differences in age, background, outlook, and even discipline, artists Anne Bray and Molly Cleator have built a body of work founded on contradiction. Early on, they pledged themselves to exploring their amusingly complete and utter dissimilarities (one likes tea, the other coffee; one is from the East Coast, the other from the West; one favors the intuitive, the other the cerebral; and so on). As a result, their collaborative practice-embodied in bold video/performance pieces exploring power, the role of media, and the very ability to express critical ideas-has always brought together the personal and political, the theoretical and practical. Rather than assuaging the contrasts, Bray and Cleator have exacerbated them. They push against each other and, in the collision of scabrous differences, find places for fruitful contention and dialogue.

Schooled in the traditions of conceptual art, feminist art, and postmodern theory, Bray and Cleator met in 1983 when they found themselves on opposite sides of a wall dividing a studio space. They both had been enrolled in the New Forms and Concepts Program in the Art Department at UCLA, and Bray was working in video and public art, while Cleator was doing performance and installation work. Both were interested in very tangible social issues, but Bray tended to approach them intellectually, while Cleator worked from her gut, looking at the world from a perspective that would acknowledge an embodied, visceral response in tandem with the theoretical. Shouting back and forth to each other across the wall, they eventually uncovered the stunningly long list of divergences between them, and realized that these fundamental contrasts might form an interesting foundation for collaboration.

And indeed, they have. Over the last decade, the pair have built a remarkable body of work that mines very real social issues with intelligence and wit. Take their installation Easy Chair, Electric Chair (1992), for example. The piece incorporates two electronically rigged wheelchairs with small monitors situated to seem like heads of otherwise invisible people. Cleator's face adorns one, and Bray's appears on the other. The chairs whirl and twirl in the exhibition space, with sensors and software determining their direction. The onscreen faces speak, offering competing riffs on television. Overall, the conjunction of video, performance, and installation nicely embodies the principles under scrutiny. The wheelchairs are like strange cyborgs, unusual amalgams of human and machine that forcefully illustrate the influence of media, suggesting that it speaks as much through us as to us. And yet the piece also asserts a way of slipping into a position of power, of stepping into the frame and becoming the revered spokesperson. But the key to the piece is in the dueling commentaries. They are interesting in themselves, but more importantly, they offer two diametrically opposed points of view that are similar only in their shared description of alienation.

With their 1994 piece titled What Can I Say? Bray and Cleator continued to limn the powers of contradiction when they questioned their own attitudes about economic power, invisibility, and the institutional role played by wealthy women, by working directly with supporters of Los Angeles art museums. Mixing their own perspectives with those of their wealthy subjects, most of whom remain completely invisible in the circuit of power and control that rules the exhibition scene, Bray and Cleator brought to the foreground an uncomfortable side of power. Although these women wield a certain degree of power due to their social and financial status, as older, white, wealthy women they are also ignored or deemed fundamentally uninteresting. Once again, Bray and Cleator explored the tension between their disparate points of view, pondering the spectrum of personal responses to these women, as well as the political perspective that would so utterly silence them.

In more recent projects, the pair have begun to consider the idea of projection, both in the filmic sense and also in a more philosophical manner. In Double Burning Jagged Extremities (1998), for example, three large, billowy female dolls seem to rise up on a slow intake of air, and then deflate in exhaustion with its release. On their tremendously tall bodies, Bray and Cleator project a series of appropriated movie images showing women being brutalized, creating an extraordinarily visceral scene that is all the more potent because of its size and immediacy. In their abundance and shared codes, the snippets of film footage confirm the frightening circulation of cruelty, and in their projection on the female forms, become a manifestation of the ways in which the female's role is precisely to act as a screen or place-holder for the identity projected onto her. The dolls designate the blank nothingness attributed to the category of the female. It is perhaps no mistake, then, that a performance version containing this piece in 2000 was titled Weight and Volume, offering a connection to Luce Irigaray's essay Volume-Fluidity. Irigaray's scathing article describes a system of hysterical fantasy that relegates feminine subjectivity to nondifferentiation and nothingness. "She is patient in her reserve, her modesty, her silence," writes Irigaray, "even when the moment comes to endure violent consummation, to be torn apart, drawn and quartered..."

Irigaray's portrait might also illuminate Bray's and Cleator's Dis Miss War Party (1999), a brilliant piece of media manipulation that uses four video projectors, a live sound mix by A.R.M. (incorporating sampled medieval chants and Elizabethan lute and drum grooves), and a disco ball. Pairing images of the tortured heroine from Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc with images from the more recent film Elizabeth, Bray and Cleator show how the narratives of both female figures begin in the same place, with an incredibly powerful female caught in a system that does not know what to do with her; but these narratives gradually diverge. One woman's life culminates in torture and death, while the other's becomes a pageant of highly codified, aestheticized displays of power. The impact for the audience in seeing the incremental parting of ways onscreen in some ways embodies Bray's and Cleator's entire project-what do viewers do when faced with this sort of total opposition? While we may feel inclined to bring them together, to find closure or a solution that will reconcile the two extremes, Bray and Cleator instead urge us to contemplate the space in-between.

With their current project, Bray and Cleator use the fruits of an extensive research trip taken last summer to continue exploring issues of power and representation. The piece invites viewers to move under the skirt of a gigantic female, on top of which are projected video and photographic images. We step into a space that is both comforting and totally taboo; it is at once much ado about nothing and the source of everything. Indeed, with this new installation, Bray and Cleator have found an incredibly rich terrain. There are the obvious cultural references-think of the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe holding down her fluttering dress (and later unsuccessfully fending off an infuriated, jealous Joe DiMaggio, who beat her badly), for example. Or consider the myth of Baubo, the playful goddess who inspired a grieving Demeter to smile by pulling up her skirt and offering a flash of her vulva. One might even find a connection to Plato's cave, a womb-like cavity illuminated by phantom, illusory projections. There is also the very daunting threat of seeing what Freud described as a wound, and what Lacan designated as nothing but absence, lack, nothingness. And indeed, Bray and Cleator are flirting with the very core of gender and representation, inviting us to cross back and forth over the boundary between the visible and invisible, and to reckon with our own cultural phantoms and the fundamental fear that what we will discover is precisely the unrepresentable. But don't expect resolution! Bray and Cleator remain committed to their contrary natures even here; in place of a singular point of view, we find once again a sometimes contentious, sometimes exhilarating multiplicity and contradiction.