Stripped Meeting Meeting Stripped Devi Meeting Stripped Devi

Cunt Meetingstrippeddevi S Meeting Stripped Devi Music En 1 Meeting Stripped Devi Seeing Feminism in Exile; The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoum

Cunt Meetingstrippeddevi S Meeting Stripped Devi Music En 1 Meeting Stripped Devi

IV. Exile: A Light Sentence?

After Measures of Distance, there is a marked change in Hatoum's work. It turns away from visual representations of physical figures and forms and, in Guy Brett's words, "bec[omes] inseparable from a questioning of the act of seeing, the exchange between artist and viewer, that takes place when a work of art is exhibited." [65] The "distance" between Hatoum and her materials has increased and the "measurements" are not subjective but seemingly impersonal and objective. The severity of earlier pieces returns, but appears in more menacing, abstract, and institutionalized forms. Except for the hypothetical possibility of the viewer's physical presence, the body is absent. These installation pieces represent spaces, structures, and institutions—spatial manifestations of power and victimization—more than they represent images of power and victimization. The viewer is compelled to project the "rhetorics of the body and its trajectories" in-to and on-to these spaces. [66] The exchanges Brett refers to are imaginary and lead viewers to think about whether these pieces refer to actual spaces on identifiable maps, whose bodies they imagine to be placed within them, and why.

Short Spaces (1992, figure 6) is an exercise in reduction and bare material essences. In Short Spaces metal bedsprings have been placed in three rows and hang from the ceiling. Hatoum has hooked these bedsprings to a pulley so the rows move up and down in an alternating pattern. This invisible mechanized power suggests a deliberate directing of space and a detached organization of bodies. Beds are made for people to use, but in Short Spaces there are no references to people besides the beds themselves. She only allows human subjectivity, perception, and physicality to enter through implied references to the body and through the viewer's imaginative participation. They have been stripped to their barest, most brutal sense of form so they are much less beds than they are metal grids that suggest beds. In her essay on the Modernist grid, Rosalind Krauss writes: "...the bottom line of the grid is naked and determined materialism." [67] To whom do these determined forms refer? If we are asked to imagine people inhabiting these spaces, are they reduced and stripped to their basest material forms as well? Short Spaces suggest the traumatic, mechanized regularity of the women's physical labor and the circumscribed spaces in which they are forced to live. Devi's "Doulouti the Bountiful" might come to mind: its representation of the enslaved prostitutes increasingly forced to take clients according to the mechanized demands of the capitalist clock, but we have to remember that this connection is tenuous. Devi's story is just one of many narratives we can bring to Short Spaces. Because of its barrenness and brute materiality, this work makes imaginative projection necessary but difficult. Perhaps viewers are meant to leave Short Spaces wishing for a particular situation to ethically respond to, but also questioning their own complicity in structures that render others invisible. Judgments about guilt and innocence are suggested but not definitive, which makes the piece produce severe and, at the same time, reflective effect.

Many of Hatoum's installations turn viewer's expectations upside down. In The Light at the End (1989) Hatoum puts viewers through an experience that relies on their own hopeful expectations of and idealistic associations with the idiomatic expression The Light at the End. This is phrase we might use to describe trauma's narrative trajectory; it is also a representative of the packaged phrases used to justify and continue war. The Light at the End is a cruel literalization of this phrase and thus suggests the dangerous potential behind habitual expectations of benevolence. Upon entering The Light at the End viewers are enticed by the glowing bars of yellow light that emanate warmth from a far corner of the installation and reflect off of the deep-red walls. When reaching the end of the dark installation room viewers encounter the threatening heat of a grill that, made to fit a human body, suggests torture. Light at the End becomes a spatial and linguistic line that can be crossed in language but cannot be crossed in actuality without severe harm.

In his often-cited essay, "Reflections on Exile" Edward Said is appropriately melancholic about exile. He writes that exile's "essential sadness can never be surmounted." [68] Adamant about the dangers of romanticizing exile as a privilege, he is also cynical about art's ability to redeem exile or make it comprehensible. Said does, however, posit exile as an "alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life" that can model "the practice of noting the discrepancy between various concepts and what they actually produce." [69] Said's words on exile seem most applicable to the various ways in which Hatoum's work defamiliarizes the ideological structures of sight: "Seeing 'the entire world as a foreign land,' Said writes, "makes possible the originality of vision." [70]

Exploring exile's imaginatively compelling dimensions runs the risk of representing it as a privilege and as art a haven away from political realities. Hatoum's work doesn't give into the privileges of art that easily. Perhaps the most dramatic and successfully ambivalent of her pieces from the 1990s, Hatoum's installation Light Sentence (1992) evokes the risks of not seeing the political reality of exile or the reality of politics generally. Light Sentence is another evidence of Hatoum's talent for suggesting structures and consequences of power without explicitly referring to political particularities, and it enables the viewer to reflect upon her imaginary associations.

Light Sentence is also a meditation on language and the symbolic order. It offers an image for transcending this order's restraints, but such transcending relies upon one's own relation to ideological, political, and geographical demarcations and strictures. Viewers enter and see the piece through the map of their own subject position, and perhaps their own innocence. One might expect a Light Sentence to be an easy punishment that can be lived through without much damage or loss. But in her piece, Hatoum literalizes the light and undoes any sense of ease. The only "light" is a bare light bulb that moves up and down in the middle of an installation space in which stacks of wire cages have been placed in a U shape. We can associate these mesh lockers with various sorts of "sentences": prisons, housing projects, animal cages, and perhaps, the syntactical orders of language itself. Comparing the "minimal units" of architecture to sentences, Jameson writes: "these 'sentences'—if that is what a building can be said to 'be'—are read by readers whose bodies fill the various shifter-slots and subject positions." [71] Because the cages signify punishment, the light suggests continual surveillance or a mechanized imitation of a rising and setting sun that never disappears. Light Sentence is dangerously close to a "life sentence." The aural and written similarity of these phrases, as well as their significant differences, may point to something particular to the exile's experience. In some senses, the relatively light sentence of exile—away from immediate physical danger—and the life sentence of exile are inextricable. The exile is caught in a disorienting multiplication of herself, a paradoxically restraining freedom that is both estranged from and founded upon the site of loss.

As the light bulb of Light Sentence moves up and down, never giving an indication of who or what operates it, the grim light it emits creates a vast pattern of light and shadow on the wall. In an essay entitled "Mona Hatoum: Some Any No Every Body," (a title that suggests an ambivalence about multiplicity) Desa Phillipi's description of "Light Sentence" becomes caught up in the temptations of pleasure Hatoum's work offers: