Suzanne Banning: the real woman under the lens
After
the previous editions of “Art World”, I have continually introduced “Art for
Society” art in America. Today I want
to quietly go back to the domain of the kind of “for life and for appreciation”
pure art. Perhaps Suzanne Banning is
the one who is more typical, worthy recommending.
As
an audience or a critic, since seeing her work for the first time, I have been
led into a strange, mysterious and completely female world. In addition to being beautiful, they are so
philosophical, illusory, fatalistic, and fragile, like epiphyllum,
transient, and brilliant, and spectacular.
Sharon Kopriva, a sculptor whose expertise is expressing religious and
life-death themes, made an installation assembled from animal bones, human
skeletons and Suzanne loved it and took a picture with it. I got the picture from Sharon (picture 1):
reader can tell that Suzanne is a beautiful woman with a sunny disposition. This is indeed the exterior feature of
Suzanne. But her appearance cannot
represent her whole person; her art is the more important part of her. But in her works people will never see this
kind of near-perfect appearance, even though she uses herself as model. Even so, this very occasional daily life
pictures reflect through images the ideas Suzanne tries to express all along:
beauty and the contrast and dependency of death, and the transience of beauty
and the fragility of life.
We
cannot use traditional criteria and terminology to judge Suzanne. Almost all images in her work are unfocused,
blurred or twisted and improperly exposed.
Most professional photographers like to use expensive cameras, because
the lens has a high resolution, the focus system is precise, or when picking
digital camera always select the kind with the biggest resolution and CCD, the
clarity, delicacy, richness of layers of pictures are what they are after. Although in special expression vocabulary of
modern photography as, photographers will occasionally use borderline-blurred
image to emphasize the photographed subject.
But in most cases it is just a highlighting or complimentary
method. To Suzanne, it is the whole
idea. In recent few years, all her
works were taken by digital cameras, and most of them are self-portraits. The Camera and the subject (very often the
artist self) are always in the state of mutually moving, she pushes the shutter
almost randomly and spontaneously, but also confidently captures the
instantaneously disappearing moments.
She watches the immediate feedback on the expandable display screen and
continuously adjusts the angle, speed, and direction; her body and the lens are
always moving in relation to each other like an organic whole. When the picture is blurred, she will move
slower, when the focus becomes too focused, she will move the lens faster. Consciousness and meditation are the
inspiration source in the process of Suzanne’s’ creation process, they are also
the required course of deeper self understanding and self-discovery. Sometimes, some strong emotions, covered by
and suppressed by daily life, are recovered this way. That may be the true self of an artist.
When
Suzanne is creating art, music is never absent. Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, K’s Choice and Bjork are her
favorites. Irresistible melodies and
tempos guide her into semi-awake state, which is her deeper self. Listening to music, she sings and dances
while being totally wrapped in the vortex of emotions. When creating a series with a theme, she
will dress herself up according to her plot, even being naked; sometimes plays
the pertinent video, let projectors send the lights with kaleidoscopic colors
on her body. When she moves her body
slowly and moves the lens quickly or suddenly stops it, she astonishingly
discovers how one person can have so many faces and the existence of limitless
possibilities. “When I saw how my
method can change the shape of reality and even create a completely new
reality, I cannot help feeling stunned”, she told me.
In
addition to her self-portrait series, Suzanne has two more famous series, and
each has been shown as a solo exhibition.
One is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, the other one is “Pele, Goddess of
the Volcano”. The former is based on a
poem with the same name by nineteenth century great British Poet John
Keats. This poem is well-known and I
have read it in my youth. It’s about
how an over-romantic knight was trapped by the love for a beautiful witch and
became her prisoner without complaints or regrets. She was so beautiful, strikingly gorgeous, very perverse,
unpredictable and ruthless that almost every man was driven to despair, was
overwhelmed with love and hatred, but still could not leave her. In the West, there has been a lot of
literature and art expressing this charming witch and that pitiful knight, this
is a story that should be passed down.
Suzanne told me that she also started reading Keats’ poems at age
fifteen, and immediately loved them.
Suzanne was originally from the Netherlands, which is the birthplace of
oil painting and J. Vermeer, and an occasional English class in high school
planted the creative fountain lasting this future artist’s lifetime. But in Suzanne‘s series she never includes
the knight. She just wants to express
the charming witch in the knight’s mind. That is the mix and switch of beauty
and evil, also a very philosophical life sentiment: beautiful things are not reliable, things in human life change
instantaneously and life is so fragile, only with a tolerant and generous heart,
one can accept it all. Suzanne thinks
that our continuing moving forward in life depends on it.
In
“Pele Goddess of Volcano”, she played the role of Pele, and in some pictures
she added her specially-invited supporting actor. Three pieces from this series were displayed in 2006 at the Shanghai
Art Museum in “Houston Contemporary Art Exhibition” and they caused very strong
reactions among young audience. Pele is
a Hawaiian Volcano Goddess in the local legends. Suzanne has been to the main island several times and she felt
the mystery and marvel of Pele. This
Volcano Goddess lives in Kilauea, one the most active volcanoes in the
world. In the last twenty years, it has
erupted almost every day. But she also
has moments of calmness, when she is so alluring and gentle, but when she
erupts, she is as powerful as a thunderbolt and makes people tremble with
fear. In this series of Suzanne’s work,
she once again searches and interprets the complex female character, with some
bewilderment, doubt, and introspection.
Tori Amos, known as “Witch with red hair“, is one of her most favorite
singers. Because she has experienced a
series of traumatic events, the early works of Tori always show a mysterious
and fleeting temperament, and often involves the emotional confusion between
men and women and investigation of the violent cases existed among women. The CD “Boys for Pele” is considered to be
Tori’s darkest album. When it was
created, Tori was the same age as Suzanne now, early thirties, but that was the
darkest time in her life. She came to
Hawaii to seek instructions from a Shaman to learn the native legends and
folklores, and began to re-evaluate her character and values. When Suzanne listens to “Boys for Pele”, she
always deeply and strongly feels the pain and anger from Pele, she cannot help
but feel sympathetic, and thus the fountain of inspiration springs up. She puts a documentary by National
Geographic, “Volcano”, in the DVD player, and projects it onto her body,
unpredictable colored lights add a layer of variation and complexity between
moving lens and moving subject. With
this hard to capture uncertainty, Suzanne lets herself melt into the burning
lava, freely expresses Pele’s calmness and elusive sadness in sleeping and
wildness and unstoppableness when erupt.
In
social modernization when women have gradually entered the main stream, the
female rights movement and feminism trend have never stopped, nevertheless they
mostly stopped at the exaggeration of the legality and reasonableness of
female’s being acknowledged as social gender and the elevation and expansion of
social status; there was rarely anyone like Suzanne, who introspectively,
profoundly, even subconsciously searched and expressed the characteristics of
the female self from a female angle, then looked for females social position
and life value. To Suzanne, women’s
beauty, kindness, caprice, and even evil are all innate, arranged by the
creator. Men and society must learn to
accept these qualities, just like stated in the preface, this is a kind of
Mercy, just like that sentimental knight had for that beautiful witch, the true
love and tolerance. I think most men
lack this kind of “Chivalry”, and most women don’t admit that innate traits
(especially negative ones), even consider chivalry as discrimination and
prejudice; maybe they don’t understand, it’s possible that this kind of denial
is just the fatal obstacle to the struggle to obtain and develop social
rights. Social progress and liberation,
or women’s liberation in the true sense, do not depend on how rich, successful,
or commanding significant social influence but in whether is it possible to
realization of rights and freedom of a true woman.
On
this, her view is unique. In her work,
she neither involves the serious social-political topic like social identity
confirmation of woman and social value standard of women nor fanatically
proposes how women should go into society to compete for profits and
equality. She is more inclined to use
introspective and anatomical methods to study and understand the complex and genuine
women’s world and their human characteristic from below the social appearance
as a woman, then obtain the maximization and internalization the realization of
female self value. At the beginning of
this year while I was in Houston, Suzanne invited me to go to Houston
Contemporary Art Museum to view Pipilotti Rist’s visual art special
exhibition. She had seen it several
times. I could not wait and ended up
going alone. I finally understood why
Suzanne loved her. In her series,
Pipilotti, an internationally renowned visual artist, has unusually deep
revelation and uniquely insight on contemporary women. In many ways, she is similar to Suzanne.
The
whole exhibition hall is divided into many projection rooms with huge screens
occupying three walls, several projectors played simultaneously from different
locations, plus special audio effects, the imposing momentum are breathtaking,
completely flooded you with the world she constructed. I was especially impressed with several
pieces: one has a theme related to ocean and sky: pounding waves and open blue
sky, occasionally dive into ocean floor, watch the world of fish and sea weed;
this is a symphony of unrestrained, total freedom. The other one is an assembled art work: a tall tree branch of an
old tree shaped like a fawn’s antler stretching from the corner of the wall and
children’s toys and gifts hung all over the branches, and several movable
projectors intermingledly played author’s work of photographed scenes with
special meanings. Moving visual pictures,
branches, and hanging gifts projected images weaved into each other,
overwhelmed a person’s eyes, it is full of dreamlike temptation and pure
childlike fun. Next to it is a
documentary of behavior art: a tall slender beautiful young lady, holding a big
baseball bat and beating on the windshields of parked cars on the street. She is so careless and cynical, sometimes
taking pleasure in other’s misfortune and with expression full of anger. Passerby and policemen, some with confusion
and some with sympathy, but nobody stopped her. Through special effect, every strike of deafening noises of glass
breaking forcefully impacted audience’s heart.
The walkway led to individual rooms was a big open space and was also
unlit. I constantly heard a woman’s
voice off and on, sounded like wailing, sometimes pleadingly crying, but it was
not clear where the sound came from.
Following the sound, I eventually saw an egg-sized hole on the floor
with lights coming through, and under the hole there was a display screen, a
naked female was yelling at the hole, fireballs were shot towards her, burnt
toward her but she did not make any attempt to avoid them and insistently stood
there crying for help and pleading towards the hole. I could not make out which language she was speaking, but I could
hear a few English words, like “help”, “save me”. I guess that is “Hell” to expressing “fear” and “saving of the
soul”. The overall theme for the
exhibition is “Wishing for synchronicity”.
Synchronicity in English often means “sound and image in sync” in
video-audio work, but here, what the artist “wishing” for apparently was not
only the minimum art requirement but also a double meaning, very possibly being
the simultaneously happening of all unrelated aspects of a woman. Suzanne agreed with my interpretation and
told me that she like the last one the best, the title is “Selfless in Lava
bath”.
In
real life every man has the opportunity to meet women, but almost no men can
claim that he really understands women.
I am afraid that even women, for the most part, don’t understand their
own kind. This is why there are so many
artists and writers, including scholars in the world are working diligently on
this. When I was writing this article,
Suzanne discussed on the net with me about the connection between Keats’ “La
Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Nabokov’s “Lolita”, she also told me the news of her
creating a new series “Lolita”. She
sent me pictures of some of her work finished but not exhibited yet. I chose three pictures to share with
readers. I believe this series will
become a very important series in her career.
Therefore, I want to spend some ink to talk about the literature
“Lolita”, I am sure it will be very helpful to understand Suzanne’s thought
process and the meaning of all her works.
American
author Vladimir Nabokov, originally from Russia, wrote this novel in 1940s, and
it was published in Paris 15 years later, immediately created a sensation. The new edition was published three years
later after he came back to America and it became the best seller of that
year. The story was about a love story
between a middle-aged man and a 12 year old precocious young girl. It made the
top ten banned book list in the 20th century for its “offensive to
public decency”, yet at the same time, it was considered one of the greatest
novels in the century. It was published
the first time in China in 1989, more than 10 years after revolution
liberation, after overcoming many obstacles.
Including Taiwan’s publishers, there have been eleven different editions
by eleven publishers. The word count
ranged from 220,000 to 350,000, the word count in most recently edition
published by Shanghai Translation Publisher.
Consequently, there was serious public discussion of how 130,000 words
coming out of nowhere suddenly.
Conjectures are that the discrepancy is due to abridgement, avoidance of
pornographic descriptions, etc. and opinions vary. In fact, regardless whether it’s due to abridgement or leaving
out the pornography, or the big interest of different editions, I am afraid
there is only one issue, that is a lot of Chinese set their eyes on one word
“obscenity”.
Few
years ago, English literature professor Azar Nafisi, originally from Iran,
published a novel causing a sensation.
The novel is “Reading Lolita in Tehran” which narrates a story in which
the author led seven girls secretly to read eight banned Western novels under
the regime of Khomeini in the eighties.
Lolita is one of the eight novels.
To author it is to protest against violence, since she viewed Lolita as
a helpless sheep swallowed by a big sex-pervert, just like Iranian people being
brutally trampled on by the centralized government… When I was reading the
above message, I could not help protesting the injustice against Nabokov. Can it be the whole meaning of this great
literature work? Can Nabokov, who has
deep thinking about the complexity of human nature, be so boring and shallow? Or is it the unique dark and narrow psyche
in Oriental race originated from sediment accumulated from history? Or more generously is it a cultural barrier?
When
I met Suzanne and discussed on the net the above issue, she sent me a lot of
useful information, including the scanned draft of the most complete English
edition of Lolita’s relevant chapters.
I discovered that the information includes the voluminous detailed
annotations from an expert in “Lolita”, Professor Alfred Appel, Jr., one of
Nabokov’s old students. This is the
most authoritative edition and before it was published Nabokov had personally
examined, approved and confirmed it.
These annotations provide great help to the understanding of many deep
meanings in double-meaning and rhyming with style in the book.
Lolita
definitely is neither an image of pure and gullible girl, nor a coquettish and
precocious seductive woman. This is a
“primary model “with a long historical origin, it has been reflected in
different formats in a lot of literature.
Aforementioned Suzanne’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” originated from
English poet Keats’s namesake poem “la Belle Dame sans merci”. The poem’s title is in French and the
content is in English and Keats borrowed the title from a namesake poem by a
French poet Alain Chartier in 1424.
According to Alfred’s explanation, Lolita is the mutated entity of the
“La Belle Sans Merci” in Keats’ poem, and just “wearing an American-styled
mini-skirt”. Nabokov translated Keats’
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” into Russian in 1923 and published with his “Road to
Heaven” collection. Apparently “La
Belle Dame Sans Merci” has been an attractive topic in West from the beginning
of time. It can be traced to ancient
Greek legends three thousand years ago and in the stories of even earlier the
primitive people. What is a woman? Who dares to say that he can state it
clearly? To men, it is always an
unsolvable puzzle. She mesmerizes men,
so that no matter how ruthless merciless she treats “him”, just like the
“knight” in Keats’ story who was tortured to become “haggard” and “death-pale”
from Char Lon Jen’s interpretation, “he” still loves
her to death. Infatuated by the
twenty-year junior Lolita, Humbert was turning life upside down. To avoid the worldly suspicion and
criticism, he had to take her all over the country, never stay in one place for
long. And eventually, he killed for her
and was sent to prison. And Lolita was
often stubborn and messing things up, overbearing, and rough with him, but
Humbert had no complaints. Even in
desperate situations he still sentimentally cared about Lolita’s childhood
happiness. What kind of human feeling
it is? And what kind of magic power
Lolita has? Nabokov thinks Lolita is a
type by herself which cannot be explained by human nature. Lolita is a “Chosen Creature” created by
God and he used a special term to call her
“Nymphet”. I looked it up in Oxford
English-Chinese dictionary, the definition is “sexy (especially precocious)
young girl”, other English dictionary all have very superficial definitions,
for example “an amoral woman”, “ a very young, sexy and attractive girl”,
etc. In his annotations, Alfred made a
lot of textual research from the angle of word roots. He declared “Nymph” means the “most original, basic and primitive
thing” in mythology and zoology; In Greek mythology, it means “a half-human,
half-goddess beautiful girl living in the mountains and river, they seduce men,
but can also kill men, if men peek at their bodies, men will go
blind”. According to the legend, there
are several thousand Nymphs, and they can live over nine thousand years, etc. So it is never sufficient and very
superficial to understand the image of Lolita from the realm of sociological or
moral layer. The meaning in Nabokov’s
novel could suggest that we should search the complexity and uncertainty of
female gender traits from the origin of human history and hidden human nature;
and hold the mentality of acceptance and inclusion, this is helpful to
understand Suzanne’s special angle to analyze and express women. The series of “Lolita” she is working on,
provides significant support for her previous work (like “Pele, Goddess of the
Volcano and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”).
It is also a logical development.
Suzanne is extremely excited about it.
She said that she used a lot of butterfly images in the “Lolita”
series. DVD projectors project all
kinds of moving, unpredictable and ever changing butterfly patterns on her
body, in the mean time she dances like a butterfly herself. Because “Nymph” has another meaning” –
chrysalis; and its extended word “Nymphalid” means “nymphalid
butterfly". In Chinese
“Nymphae" means “labia minora“.
You cannot help but remember that through the ages many famous
literature and folklores butterflies are always associated with women, sex and
love, like Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly “, “Lian
San Bau and Ju En Tai’s ending when they died for love and turned into
butterflies, etc. In entomology
publication and dictionaries, mentioning of butterflies always indicates hidden
sexual meaning: temptation, seduction, and sexuality; a butterfly also symbolize
“attractive fairies and witches”, “They are shape-shifters. The difference is that butterfly mutated as
a phase of growing process, but witches can change at will”. Therefore, In “Lolita”, Nabokov described
butterflies in many places, Suzanne understands tacitly on this point.
In
every piece of Suzanne’s work she uses same women, but with different
face. They imply the multifaceted world
of women. This is why Suzanne asked me
to see Pipilotti Rist. She is the key
to our understanding Suzanne. Maybe
Suzanne, like Freud, his special interest in human subconscious and hidden
desire even they are hard to appeal to other people or denied by other people,
but it exists and has profound cause and effect in human science. In her works, we can clearly see her
genuinely, sensitively and delicately capturing that top layer’s flow of
feelings and awareness, they don’t have direct connection with human reasoning
and social theories. It is possible
that Suzanne is intentionally avoiding the incompatibility of both.
In Suzanne’s “Artist’s statement she wrote the following paragraph: “Plato said that our soul is trapped in our body, our body is the prison, and the soul is always trying to escape. Most the time, the jailed people always hope to escape to a free place because only in there your “self” can be expressed. For this, I have established a principle for myself, that is, let things develop naturally and safely in the realm of this state and I walk with the tempo I felt. Luckily, I did not lose myself in the end. In real life, people always try to categorize things and affairs, then by understand them or consider to accept them …“ After reading this, we seem to see Suzanne’s helplessness (resignation) and loneliness, and feel certain kind of sadness, cannot help but remembering French great thinker Rousseau’s statement ”Man is born free, but everywhere he is in shackles. “