The World of Julie Linowes' Stain by Andrew Paul Wood
“Figuration is effaced just where drama provides its index; this means, in its fullest sense, that the more fully drama is freighted with consequences, the greater and more beautiful will be the splotch, the disfiguration, the stain.”
- Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain), Oct. 1984
Julie Linowes' multimedia installation Stain brings all the exquisite theatricality, tension, exuberance and grandeur of High Baroque art in the age of Rosalind Krauss* "expanded field" and Lucy Lippard and John Chandler's "dematerialized object.”
The popularity and success of the Baroque manner was encouraged in the seventeenth century by the Catholic Church when it decided that the drama of the Baroque artists' style could communicate religious themes with direct and emotional involvement. Linowes' lush images have similar requirements in order to explore desire from an interior, psychological perspective at the interface between conscious and unconscious experience and the paradoxes of identity through Lacanian theory.
The installation becomes (as with Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois) a stand-in for the unconscious mind, an inscape filled with surrealist images that need to be given order. The images seem random, as if excluded from a greater unknown narrative, yet charged with their own inscrutable meanings. This relates to Lacan's most important contribution to Western thought: the inversion of causality. He saw that a symptom manifests itself before the cause is diagnosed. We see the stain before we forensically trace it back to its source. Linowes' images invite us into this ourouborous paradox.
In Stain, the central concept is Lacan's concept of "the real", specifically the separation between reality as the constructed fantasy of quotidian existence and the unknowable, more authentic reality manifested only as signals (dreams, visions) from the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind, as the Surrealists well understood, is an engine for detecting patterns in random noise, a hardwired survival feature that allows for all science, religion, philosophy and art. It is the root of sentience. The fluid layers in Linowes' installation relate directly to the nature of our interior worlds.
Stain presents the furthest stretch imaginable of the Freudian Eros (love)/Thanatos (death) dichotomy of desire. At one extreme it is the carnal, the abject, the flesh, profane love, amour fou, the rape and lusttod (literally 'lust death’)—the obsessive love that leads to the destruction of the beloved in the need to possess, devour and consume.
At the other extreme, it is desire as an exalted thing, the Sublime of the Romantics, the Divine rapture of the saints (again Baroque, consider Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Theresa), the inspiration of the artist and the ultimate inexplicable expression of life and awareness. It can be Lucifer's refusal to serve God ("Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!” Milton, Paradise Lost, St Juan de la Cruz's vision of himself as the 'bride' of Christ, or the ultimate transcendence to Nirvana, Satori and Enlightenment). We are caught between the angel and the ape.
A consideration of Linowes' work from a formal perspective is also intriguing within a Lacanian context. The Lacanian idea that authentic' reality can only be hinted at by random flashes that float up from the unconscious is interesting in the context of
photography because the photograph both imparts and denies a certain Benjaminian aura of authenticity of its own.Photography has the blind, automatic tendency to assault received unreconstructed historical categories. It is also largely unburdened by art-historical baggage, despite being the reason that the Post-Impressionists began exploring fauvist color and gestural brushwork—turning painting in to a sculptural object to distance it from the mechanical eye of the camera.
Linowes' work in the international context is without question more cinematic than photographic. The Baroque melodrama and phantasmagoric operatic excess recalls Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, David Lynch, and the films of British auteurs like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman.
In Linowes' video installation, Stain, there is a dramatic space in which to pose and enact mise-en-scenes not classically bound by geometric compositions and lines of gaze. Instead, she engages with metaphysical realism, and the emotional truths on this side of the picture plane.