Annie Abrahams’s Experiments in Intimacy
What makes for a livable world is no idle question. It is not merely a question for philosophers. (…) Somewhere in the answer we find ourselves not only committed to a certain view of what life is, and what it should be, but also of what constitutes the human (...). (Butler 17)
Annie Abrahams: In fact, all my work emanates from one big question: how can we live in a world that we don’t understand? (Chatzichristodoulou, Annie Abrahams n/p)
Annie Abrahams
1 Annie Abrahams was born to a farming family in the Netherlands as the eldest of five daughters. As it was not socially acceptable for her to study arts at the time, she chose to become a scientist: Abrahams holds a PhD in biology, a science that sought to understand the world, and which her father could accept as a profession. Her love of Dostoyevsky, and her colleagues’ contempt of his literature in the aftermath of May ’68, directed her towards retraining in fine arts (Chatzichristodoulou, Annie Abrahams n/p). Abrahams has been based in France since 1985. Her artistic practice most often employs networking technologies: she produces networked performances, net.art pieces, collective writing projects, videos, as well as installations and performances in physical space. She started using technology in her work around 1991; her first telepresence piece took place in 1996 in a gallery in Holland. Her works have been exhibited and performed internationally at institutions such as the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, Centre Pompidou in France, Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and many other venues (Abrahams, “Please Smile On Your Neighbour In The Morning” n/p). This article discusses Abrahams’s networked performances following her first solo show in the UK, If Not You Not Me, which took place at the HTTP Gallery in North London in February and March 2010 (HTTP n/p).
Shared Still Life/ Nature Morte Partagée
2 In visiting Abrahams’s show at the HTTP Gallery last winter, I found it inspiring in its subtle, low-tech sensitivity of inter-connectedness. Amongst the new works created for this exhibition, Shared Still Life/ Nature Morte Partagée, appeared to be the central piece. This was a telematic installation that connected the HTTP Gallery in London with Kawenga - territoires numériques in Montpellier, France. The piece was extreme in its simplicity, almost stark nakedness: a table, a cloth, a plant, some fruit, a clock, a dictionary, and an LED display were more or less the objects that formed the still life composition. There was also paper, marker pens, crayons, and blu-tack, inviting visitors to contribute paintings, messages, marks, and written traces. Visitors could compose their own messages for the LED display, as well as interfere with the installation in any way imaginable since there were no instructions telling us what we could and could not do with the still life or, indeed, our own presence in front of the camera. Visitors unavoidably became actors in this piece: to reorder the objects on the table one had to stand in front of the camera contributing fragments of one’s body (a turned head, a hand, one’s back). As the still life was shared (people in London could see the still life in Montpellier and the other way round), new LED messages or re-orderings of the still life arrangements at one site provoked responses at the other.
3 Abrahams’s piece cannot be described as innovative: Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz created the first telematic “public communication sculpture”, Hole-In-Space, in 1980, using satellite technologies (Electronic Cafe n/p). Hole-In-Space linked the two coasts of the United States for the first time, bringing together people from New York City and Los Angeles in life-sized, televised images. Since the emergence of the Internet, telematic art and performance has become widely accessible and rehearsed, with iconic works such as Paul Sermon's Telematic Dreaming (1992) and Telematic Vision (1993), and performances by the Chameleons (UK) and AlienNation Co. (USA), amongst many others (Sermon n/p, Dixon n/p, AlienNation Co. n/p). With skype and other internet telephony protocols linking us to dispersed family and friends, teleconferencing has become a commonplace feature of our everyday lives.
4 What is it then, I asked myself, that makes Abrahams’s piece –so simple, almost “basic”– poignantly relevant today? To me, it is the very stark simplicity and understated nakedness of Abrahams’s work that makes it moving in its subtle, and often futile, attempt at interconnectivity. Abrahams’s Still Life is commonplace, messy and malleable; it is about the inconspicuous trivia of everyday life, time passing by, and people crossing paths in fractured, desperate or indifferent attempts to communicate. Shared Still Life is about the few achieved moments of intimacy –banal and humble though they might be– as much as it is about the many connections that fail. This everyday quality opens up Abrahams’s piece to movement, dust, miscommunication, shared absence –and network failure.
5 I spent more than an hour playing with Shared Still Life at the HTTP Gallery. It was no more or less interesting than real life. I observed. I interfered, changing things to my liking. I hoped for a message, a sign of life on the other side, some response. It didn’t come. I sent more messages. I ate some of the composition’s fruit. I made balls of paper and threw them at the beautifully arranged tablecloth. I added the peeled skin of my fruit in the mess. I smiled at the camera while consuming the last slice of the Shared Still Life’s mandarin. Nothing happened. Nobody told me not to touch (or, indeed, consume) the artwork. Nobody prompted me to interact with it either. Finally something happened. “Tu es là?” (“Are you there?”), I had written on the LED display. “Oui, oui, je suis içi” (“Yes, I am here”), came a message from the other side. Someone was there. Someone rearranged their own still life composition. Someone was trying to talk to me. Too late –I didn’t really want to respond any more; I didn’t want to have a dialogue with this someone.