Nelson Henricks - Prix Robert-Forget 2024

The dessert and the integration of a disappearance

One of the most powerful video treatments of the question of the invisible is certainly Thierry Kuntzel's La desserte blanche (1980). This work shows us a body as it takes on shape in the tension between the materialization and dematerialization of the image, which causes the body to disappear while, at the same time, preserving it within a blank, white screen (like some retinal afterimage or imperceptible mnemonic picture).  This tension confers on the body a potentiality that develops through its repeated failures to stabilize the visible, because such failures are what enable the body to take shape at some future moment.  This means that, if the female body, as the dematerialized body of metaphysics, is presented here as incapable of acceding to the plenitude of the visual of representation,¹ it is also what continues to affirm itself in the image--since the disappearance of the body is always, to use Laurence Louppe's term, "reversible."  A body affirms itself, expands, changes and moves.  Meanwhile, something invisible is at work on behalf of its future.

In a recent book entitled Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Peggy Phelan goes so far as to advance an aesthetics of the visible which depends upon the insertion of the invisible into representation. Indeed for Phelan, representation becomes subversive only to the extent that it disrupts the functioning of the visible through an "integration of disappearance."² Why is this so?  Because for Phelan it is important to show that something is always lost or excluded in the process of constituting a representation.  She concludes by stating that this something which haunts the fringes of the representational visiblelike³ a ghost is slated to remain irremediably lost, it cannot and must not be seen or named, since it is--and this is why it is excluded--what threatens the subject with "self-absorption" and "self-annihilation."⁴

The effectiveness of such a theory of representation resides in the fact that it breaks with the concept of representation as the  truth of the visible, and conceives of the visible in terms of contingency and invisibility.  But it is also problematic insofar as the exclusion effect remains intact.  What does this mean?  Just this: that, by affirming the need to preserve what is excluded within the field of the invisible, Phelan indirectly supports the law of heterosexuality which divides people into subjects and non-subjects, a practice in which the subjectivity of the one is articulated through the rejection of others: heterosexual women, gays, lesbians.  My question is, therefore: is it possible to produce a representation that integrates the invisible without again making it impossible for certain subjects to attain to self-actualization?  Thus it is with Thierry Kuntzel's La desserteblanche: by employing the reversibility of disappearance to produce a female body, representation resists the simple re-abjection of the other.

How to learn to live like a coyote

So what about Murderer's Song and Conspiracy of Lies? I would say this: the invisibility of the former can no longer be fully assimilated to that of the latter.  The enigmatic dimension of Murderer's Song, its share of invisibility, has been inserted by the narrator in an attempt to produce an identity different from the one proposed by official representation.  Conspiracy of Lies proceeds in an opposite manner, producing a reversal that seems to me to be crucial, particularly when one contrasts it with the notion of invisibility developed by Peggy Phelan.  It is, to be more precise, crucial to the extent that the video attempts to confer visibility, to shed light upon, a secret character who is gradually revealed in his homosexuality.  One must be attentive to what is disclosed here: the "queer," as a category that representation must exclude in a society where the prevailing norm is that of heterosexuality.  Such a convergence (homosexuality, invisibility) sexualizes the secret of the enigma, politicizes the invisible and abstains from simply re-consolidating the invisibility which it integrates.  But let us also attend to the fact that Conspiracy of Lies does not simply confer visibility or shed light upon the "queer"; indeed this operation is made highly problematic in the final sequence where the narrator, in a voice-over, explains how existence is indissociable from lies.

"All of my life, I have never said the right things.  There was never a poetry of eloquence in my speech, never a clarity in my voice because there was never any clarity in my thoughts.  (...) Always a hesitancy, always a trepidation.  (...) There is no truth.  Nothing so absolute as to be an ultimate truth.  Only the half truths or lies we conspire with to continue our existences.  Our conspiracy of lies."

Thus at the end of Conspiracy of Lies the viewer is made to doubt the truth of the narrative.  Is the author of the documents honest?  Did he lie to himself while writing these texts?  Is the anonymous box itself a hoax, a mise en scene originating with the video artist or the author himself?  In a more recent video, Emission (1994), one of the final sequences shows a close-up of trees and leaves that problematizes the intelligibility of the image.  This opacity is reinforced by Henricks' text, which recounts the story (told to him by his mother) of how coyotes pretend to be dogs and use this stratagem to lead dogs astray and devour them at their leisure.  Conspiracy, Emission... We can never be sure of the authenticity of any creature; the visible is never a guarantor of truth.  And the same holds for the invisible.  This failure is crucial, since it marks out the space of a different subject who affirms itself within a not-exactly-what-the-visible-reveals.

The evidence of being "queer"

In an essay entitled "Film and the Visible",⁵ Teresa de Lauretis maintains that the insertion of "positive images" of lesbians and gays in film does not modify the conditions of the visible (of "what can be seen.")  In order to produce a new social subject, it is, she says, imperative to "represent the problem of representation" of subjectivity and homosexual desire.  Likewise, Joan Scott's The Evidence of Experience⁶ reveals how difficult it is to produce representations simply for the purpose of bringing a different experience to light.  The evidence of experience thus becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring the various ways in which difference is constituted.⁷ The danger, she affirms, consists in presenting homosexuality as "repressed desire (experience denied), made to seem invisible, abnormal, and silenced by a 'society' that legislates heterosexuality as the only normal practice."⁸

The shedding of light upon the "queer," the fact of "coming out of the closet," is a more complex process than it may seem.  For it always runs the risk of reaffirming the "queerness" (in other words, the strangeness) of the "queer."  In Epistemology of the Closet (1990) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick clearly demonstrated that homosexuality is not merely one cultural "secret" among any number of others.  It is rather (and more so than Judaism) the secret of the twentieth century.⁹ If, as Foucault shows, secrecy and knowledge became interdependent categories during the nineteenth century (since then knowledge has been a form of disclosure of the secret), the secret to be confessed--yet never completely, so as to ensure the continuity of knowledge--is first and foremost sexual and gradually consolidates itself as homosexual.  In this regard, Sedgwick maintains, the closet (the secret, the non-recognized, the invisible) is a "shaping presence" of homosexual identity.¹⁰

This is why Nelson Henricks' video works simultaneously draw upon the impossibility of making anything fully visible as well as the desire to make what is invisible visible.  It is important to remember this: the visible, as what can be seen, what can actually be perceived by sight, must somehow fail, fall short, if it is to present not only a "different" subject but a subject that, while appearing to be actualized in the image, fails to attain stability through this same actualization.

The nameless

There is only one way of fully comprehending this ethic, and it consists in playing the question of the invisible off against the two other major themes that appear throughout Henricks' videos: I mean communication and the search for identity. These thematic interactions are richly contrasted in Legend, Emission andShimmer, the three videos that correspond most closely to the self-portrait as defined by Raymond Bellour in his theory of video aesthetics:

(...) the self-portrait appears as an endless totality wherein nothing is given in advance.  For the artist says to us: "I will not tell you what I have done, but I will tell youwho I am."  Makers of self-portraits start with a question that attests to an absence from themselves; theirs is a question that can have any number of answers.  They move, therefore, without any transition from emptiness to excess and have no clear idea of where they are going or what they are doing. Meanwhile the autobiographer is content with a limited plenitude that compels him to adhere to the program of his own life.¹¹

Let us note, first of all, that in Henricks' videos wandering goes hand in hand with failed communication insofar as the latter can be seen as the inability to establish a real exchange between a sender and a receiver.  And this holds forLegend (1988), a work that could be described as the artist's first self-portrait.  The video begins with black and white images of Henrick's childhood home of Calgary.  These distorted, low resolution images, made weaker by electronic interference, transmit radio "noise" (as opposed to sound).  The story that follows them suggests that this is not simply a technical problem; rather, the images are a manifestation of the difficulty of reaching the receiver.  The narrative refers to the many borders that structure our existences and establish communication (with its polarity structure of sender-receiver); it touches upon ideas of territory (the Prairies), of nation (Canada), of family and love relationships.  Hence the recurring images of maps and family photographs that are piled up and juxtaposed in ways that recount the process of framing, delimitation, removal and possession of the other.

Remember that there is no exclusion without borders, just as, without them, there is no self and absence from self, no dominant or dominated culture.  And there is no better exponent of this state of affairs than the sequence in which we see a man in the process of destroying a wall, that most mundane and consequently most insidious of borders.  These images unfold in tune with a song performed by Henricks, a song that denounces a national consciousness colonized by American culture: "I am not an American.  This is not my dream.  This is someone else's dream and I can't wake up.  There are other things I want to dream about (....) I'm lost in America."  The product of the border (whether this be architectural, national or sexual) always partakes of the "nameless."  Henricks again, in a voice-over:

"(...) certain people are not allowed the luxury of names, certain people are cut out of the family photo albums, they are never mentioned at the dinner table; they have entered the realm of the nameless (...) They have no name, I have no name, I have no place to be.  That night I went for a walk, I never stopped walking.  Restlessly searching but not searching, trying to find you, trying to find a place to be, because I have no name, because we have no name."

This passage is crucial since it transforms the nameless into a strategy of displacement, of incessant travel that will continue to have a place within Henricks' work.  It explains why we soon see him walking, suitcase in hand, along a railway track that stretches across the Prairies.  This--being a nomad--is what being nameless means.  Indeed, in Shimmer (1994) Henricks says: "Sadly I admit, I only think when I am in motion.  Keep moving.  It is the only way we will ever get finished."  The Prairies are, therefore, the origin of an identity in the making, and if they are its origin it's because the origin is lacking, because it produced non-recognition instead of recognition, an absence from self instead of a self.

The ghost embodied, or: for whom does the visible exist?

Thus Emission: the video begins with a sequence in which the camera moves slowly around a man.  A voice-over (not Henricks') launches into a brief narrative: "There was a man who could feel ghosts.  He could not see them but he could hear them as they passed through his body (...)  He said: let me be you eyes and ears, your tongue, nose and hands."

This video embodies the transmission (of light, the voice... what is transmitted through waves).  It inserts the body into the process of communication.  Not only does it begin with the desire to embody ghosts, but it also makes use of a mime to communicate with gestures and poses, as opposed to words.  The video is, as well, the site of a series of bodily transmissions in which the actor is called upon to project outside himself, not electromagnetic waves, but bodily fluids (sperm, milk).  Thus, when water passes from a woman's mouth to Henricks'--to be transformed, in the process, into milk--it in received in an out-of-sync fashion, as if to make way for the alteration of the message, the alteration of sexual difference.  Not only is the liquid ejaculated by a woman's body, but it is feminized through its metamorphosis into milk upon contact with a male body--a form of alteration that is prefigured in the cross dressing sequence where a man wearing a dress assumes feminine qualities while attempting to subvert the dichotomy between the masculine and feminine: "Let me be the female character because it was always I who wanted to take the perfect symmetry of this famous view andtear it to ribbons."

Embodying the invisible (ghosts, electromagnetic waves, the homosexual) means, therefore, developing a form of communication that orchestrates and is orchestrated by the body and sexuality; it also means that communication thus embodied becomes what enables us to hear the ghostly invisibility to which the initial images refer.  The invisible is, therefore, not only a site of oppression, it is also what can engender a new subjectivity.  However, in order to accomplish this--the initial sequence of Emission is revealing in this respect--in order for invisibility to engender "novelty," it must be defined from another perspective.  For the invisibility of ghosts that Henricks seeks to embody is no longer, strictly speaking, "queer" invisibility designated as such by the heterosexual order. It is the invisibility of what stands in for the apparitional, from the perspective, that is, of a "queer."  In other words, a sort of invisibility of invisibility.

This is why it is fascinating to see how, withShimmer (the video that immediately follows Emission and its displacement of the viewpoint of the invisible) the work no longer focuses on the problem of communication but, instead, on the observation that a "contract" now connects the narrator and viewer.  It is as if Henricks could henceforth assume that a viewer were listening, having learned, from one video to the next, to recognize the narrator's voice.  The video artist makes use of this contract to relate, not only someone else's dream, but his own as well.  It is a dream in which he can hear ghostly voices from his childhood (his grandmother's, his father's).  From the very beginning we see Henricks placing a glass against a wall to hear these invisible and foreign voices, voices we do not hear but that Henricks will try to make us listen to: "I have to tell you something and you have to listen; you listen and I don't know why.  But I want to tell you and you want to listen.  (...) In a dream, I saw this: my grandmother (...)  She said: here they are, your relatives."

A little later a light blots out the screen, then gives way to the narration of an experience of recall, a reminiscence that takes place as the camera begins to travel more and more quickly over his grandmother's quilt.  This object engenders a memory because it is not only an object from the past but one that is an integral part of the present, being contiguous with the body.  Thus the ghostly becomes indissociable from Henricks' body:

"Memories, rushing up from deep inside you.  Erupting out of your bones.  Streaming down your nerves and up your spinal cord to the base of your brain.  (...) I see a hundred years in a flash.  My lover kisses me.  We are rolling on my grandmother's quilt.  (...) The body turns inside out.  (...) Grandma, grandma, what can I remember about you?  I remember you in the words I say and the gestures I make."

In this passage we see articulated all the complexity of the body's relation to knowledge, memory and identity. Henricks' neurobiological availability allows him to be permeated by the invisible and to receive a memory that is strictly his own. This embodiment of the invisible (of his grandmother) displaces the absence from self of the nameless. So what is the invisible according to Henricks? It has as much to do with a mystery that can never entirely be deciphered, with the namelessness of the Prairies, with the "queer" excluded from the field of visibility, as it has with a receiver who does not listen to it, and with a ghostly element that resides within him but that "we" do not hear. With Emission andShimmer, invisibility has moved by means of an embodiment of communication. It has, as it were, turned back like a mirror toward the viewer who did not see that the invisibility of the one is not necessarily the invisibility of the other.