|
Time travel/sex/terror/puns. Suzanne Triester's lavish multimedia installation Dying for your sins combines these motifs in a gleefully warped choose-your-own-adventure tour through a virtual Bavarian castle. The result is paradoxical. Here, kitsch not only promises to amuse and divert, it frustrates and challenges expectations of entertainment and gratification.
Positioned just off centre of the middle of the room and displayed on purple plinths, the monitor, hard drive and video projector form a control centre from which one commences a tour of the castle. One of the plinths is mysteriously empty, evoking those inexplicable props in Sci-fi TV that serve no discernible function, but somehow still add palpably to the futuristic atmosphere. To begin the excursion, one takes a seat on a splendid red velvet cushion and, thus enthroned, expects to be entertained and diverted without too much personal effort. A computer is, after all, a machine designed to make tasks effortless and Triester has ensured that the audience is surrounded by manifestations of kitsch, that art form described by Clement Greenberg as asking nothing more of the consumer than their money. Plinths, cushion, the apparently solely decorative oil paintings facing the monitor - everything implies easy and ready access to un-mindful pleasure.
Behind the monitor, the video projects events within the castle onto a wall. This is the point where expectations of effortless gratification begin to be frustrated. The video projection is a skewed rhomboid, and by distorting the image on the wall, Triester refuses the possibility of straightforward and obvious viewing. What's more, though anyone entering the installation is able to witness the tourist's progress through the castle, it's not possible to see the video projection when facing the monitor. The paintings across from the monitor, Entering the Kitchen (II) and Entering the Kitchen in reverse (II) are representations of paintings that might be made if, after visiting the castle, one decided to make a painting of what was inside. The paintings are ultra-coloured, denoting virtual space and linking the historical castle (once owned by Ludwig of Bavaria and the archetype for Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle) with the contemporary virtual experience. They reflect each other, as though there were a double-sided mirror between the works. The images don't, however, copy each other evenly - things are not as simple as anticipated.
The castle and its various rooms are inspired by adventure games such as Wolfenstein 3D, and resonate not only with the hyper-real sensibility of the game, but with the garish aesthetic of the archetypal Bavarian castle that inspired it and with the weird and uncanny look of the fairground haunted house. Rooms are eerily lit by chandeliers, and are filled with Gothic furniture and spooky writing on the walls (cryptic messages and various puns). Language and plays on/with meaning and references to sexuality crop up throughout the work, starting with the pun in the title: dead for your sins - but longing to sin. The jaunt through various rooms and activities is directed by words, and these don't always correspond with the meaning expected of them. The puns on the kitchen floor, for instance, (kitsch 'n sink/string/sex and so on) provoke amusement and nervous laughter in the haunted house. On the walls, more sexual innuendo as DONUT dissolves into SALAMI through a series of horizontal lines, raising the question of what lies in between the words and undermining the seemingly easy pleasure of a cheap joke. More distance is placed between the superficial pleasure desired when approaching visual kitsch and its (hoped for) effortless attainment.
Dying for your sins goes beyond the straightforward, shoot-the bad-guys-and-make-your-escape narrative form of the computer game with its obvious route to satisfaction, and it far exceeds the haunted house in its capacity to provide dysfunctional surprises. As Calinescu argues, kitsch culture fits into that category of things that are the flip side of boredom (perhaps like techno adventure games?) undertaken with the certainty of maximum enjoyment for minimum effort. Dying for your sins, however, doesn't fit conveniently into this category - it requires a degree of intellectual exertion, patience and concentration if one is to take pleasure from it. The virtual tour guide, represented in hypertext commentary, is by turns solicitous('Would you like to go for a walk in the castle grounds?'), and engagingly whimsical (if the invitation to walk in the grounds is accepted, a vibrating image faintly discernible as a garden landscape is presented, together with the commentary: 'What you have seen after spinning around the castle whilst nodding your head'). Occasionally the tourist in the castle is abandoned altogether, for instance when viewing the STATES OF PERPETUAL excitement/paranoia/abandonment screen, or in the bedroom where confrontation with spinning, screaming swastikas takes place. It is necessary to make a choice uninformed by text or other clues; to rely on intuition used to dealing with the obvious; to step, or rather to click, into the unknown space. Linear progression is abandoned and the results aren't easily anticipated - it isn't possible to foresee the next room in the castle, the next picture viewed, or the next character met.
When, at the free sticker page, it seems as though some sort of tangible consumable reward will be granted from the kitsch visuals, one's desire for instant gratification is again frustrated - the stickers must be enjoyed on the screen or in the imagining of their possibility. (If you visit Triester's Would you recognise a virtual Paradise if you saw it at http://www.va.com.au/parallel/ an earlier version of the sticker page is in the archives section and it is possible to print from there.) The poster that at first seems reminiscent of a souvenir, perhaps a postcard or a travel poster, can't be accessed either. Upon closer inspection, it proves to be the work of Triester's alter ego/creation Rosalind Brodsky, founder of the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality. The content of the poster further blocks the path to straightforward visual gratification, filled as it is with images of vibrators topped by St. Basil's Cathedral and London's Tower Bridge, referencing time, travel and sex. More complex and diverse enjoyment is achieved. Brodsky was invented for previous shows and now invades more recent pieces. In the castle, Triester has put Brodsky in her place (in a drawer in the dressing room) but allows the viewer to try on her suits, creating still more by-ways to travel as one dresses in the electric suit for visiting Carnaby Street or reads Rosalind's biography before satisfaction, in the form of completing the game, is achieved.
Adding more depth to the superficial easiness of the kitsch aesthetic is the castle's function as a space with multiple strands of history floating through it, both past and future. As well as being a virtual space in the exhibition, it has a historical and multiple other. The frozen bodies in Entering the Kitchen (II), are taken from an episode of Dr Who where the inhabitants of a dying planet freeze themselves to await a time when their planet will be habitable again - the future. The vibrators topped with St Basil's and Tower Bridge are also rocket-like, thrusting forward (or backward) through time and space like Rosalind. In this space, the historical and cultural fetishisation of the Holocaust is given kitsch treatment, and is thus diffused. And at the same time, the sinister environment of the castle, with its rooms overstuffed with treasures evocative of the wealth stolen by the Nazis during WWII, indicates the horror that lurks behind the symbol, and thus avoids trivialisation.
The confusion of spaces and times, the eclectic mix of subject matter and the non-linear movement through the work stand out in Dying for your sins. The humour and playfulness with which Triester combines these disparate elements leads to pleasure achieved not only through the obvious visual gratification afforded by kitsch, but also by the effort and thought that the viewer is compelled to give this impressive work.
Thanks to Suzanne Triester for the interview.
References
Clement Greenberg, Avant Garde and Kitsch, 1939.
Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity, London, 1977.
© Catriona Murtagh
MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is the journal of
Experimenta Media Arts