critique
Nancy Princenthal, 1998
“Nancy Busch: Liquid Measures”
[In immersive technology,] Eyes and mouth, long accepted as the last refuge of intimacy, will be integrated in a feedback logic which is not ours, but that of machine.—Friedrich Kittler
The fact that “the computer doesn’t think” means that the price for our access to its “ reality” is also something that must remain unthought.—Slavoj Zizek
Truth is water. Attraction makes it open.—Susan Howe
It is very hard to consider liquids outside of time. Though their physical properties can be specified as precisely as solids, they rely for their perceptual meaning on mobility. In this respect (and of course in others), liquids are on the side of organic life. Somewhat more surprisingly, they also lend themselves, in consequence, to the same symbolic languages as electricity, which is equally incompatible with static representation. What’s left in the middle – the entire world of statics, of solid, stable, inanimate objects from the mechanical to the geophysical – is what is most amenable to conventional kinds of depictions, two-dimensional and in the round. And if half a millennium of illusionistic imagery has accustomed us to still images of mobile life, nearly a century of moving pictures have slowly shifted visual habits and expectations. Hence, at the millenium’s close, it is beginning to feel comfortable to consider our bodies as amenable – even inherently suited – to electronic capture; its pulses, vibrations and wavelengths have, after all, been part of our self-descriptive vocabulary for a long time.
Nancy Busch’s “Liquid Reality” certainly makes this assumption. An environmental installation, it surrounds the viewer with abstracted water
Imagery, rendered in linear patterns that swell, drop, dissolve and interpenetrate in mesmerizing repetition. These patterns are executed against an undulating red ground, and projected on all four walls of a square, black-walled chamber, big enough for comfort but small enough to create an experience of considerable intensity. The imagery is augmented by a sound track of thin ethereal music that seems to circle the room, its oscillations alternately spacey and oceanic. Unambiguously sensual, allusively erotic, Liquid Reality is also quite evidently the product of computer-generated technology. Its creation, production and projection, both visual and aural, all rely on digital equipment. Busch says her intension is to “make the physical and virtual worlds mesh,” and to suggest that the technologies the “disenfranchise the individual, ironically create the opportunity to find oneself.”
This installation follows an extended body of work in which Busch took a slightly more traditional approach to the resolution of interior states with abstract form. A 1996 installation titled “Metaforms” involved drawings on vellum, related in their reductive sinuosity to linear elements of “Liquid Reality”. Hung from the ceiling throughout the exhibition space, the translucent drawings were shadowed by silhouettes of lance-like elements, leaning against the wall and extending well into the room. Pendulous shapes made of sheer stretch nylon stuffed with lumpy cloth cylinders were attached with wire and ceramic insulators to the tops of rusted pipes, which Busch called (with a characteristic bit of punning wordplay) re-sceptres. At once overtly phallic and inescapably (if non-specifically) feminine, these radically unstable forms, and the insistent physical embrace that their installation comprises, evoke the groundbreaking work of a few artists associated with Surrealist imagery and feminist politics, notably Louise Bourgeois and Annette Messager. The ominously proliferating breasts, phalluses and hermaphroditic genital combinations of Bourgeois’ work from the 60’s on, and Messager’s more recent forests of poles from which stuffed stocking- parts hang bristling with references to femininity and childhood, all bear closely on Busch’s current work. But these two French-born artists are both deeply involved with issues specific to the cultural and personal construction of femininity. Busch’s focus is – much like, for instance, Bill Viola’s videos, with their elemental, fire
and water imagery – significantly wider, less narrative and less analytic.
The exuberant, almost pan-eroticism that Busch’s work sometimes achieves is perhaps most evident in “b-it’s”, which is also part of “Metaforms” installation. This video, projected within a steel conduit inside a black box, is a swirling, throbbing tissue of glistening red that puckers rhythmically at the center, creating a sensual experience that is less physically engulfing than “Liquid Reality”, if not more modest. But it is not univalent, for in “b-it’s” as throughout her work Busch proceeds by conjoining polarities: fixed and mutable, hard and soft, geometric and organic. A particularly memorable formal juxtaposition was achieved in the 1993-94 installation, “biolitos”, in which cast concrete cylinders were lined with panty hose “membranes”: the mouth of each cylinder was covered with a taut scrim forms by the sutured waists of three pairs of stockings. Some were pitted near the center, like fruit, by the tops of a triad of long dangling legs; in others, the legs were pulled upward. In previous work, similar disjunctions took the shape of metallized soft forms coiled inside steel cones (“unOne”), matched with similar cones whose tops were derived from manhole covers (for the installation of “inside-out”, 1991), or, earlier still, of soft forms combined with heating and cooling conduits.
Busch, who was born in the United States but has spent much of the last decade in South America, has learned first- hand about negotiating opposites and dissolving boundaries. Journeying repeatedly from northern hemisphere to south, she has experienced on a personal level the migratory existence encouraged by a global economy and supported by a electronic connectivity – a “net” that is, at present, for many people just a promise. But Busch likes border conditions, in which vitality is as much latent as manifest. Having jumped into her life as an artist midstream, following a distinguished career as a writer and art director, she has the luxury of working in a way that is raw, open and omnivorous, and at the same time supported by considerable intellectual and technical sophistication. Most residents of contemporary culture occasionally have the sense that reality has become a little fluid. But few have the spirit or means to find that occasion for the kind of uninhibited, inter disciplinary, multi-sensory celebration that Busch achieves.
NANCY PRINCENTHAL
