AMIE SIEGEL–OBJECT RELATIONS
During the final years of the 20th-century in Chicago, home to many imported modernisms—glass skyscrapers presenting their crisp lines and barren structural plazas to airplanes buzzing in over the lake—from Hyde Park to Evanston, graduate students heard whispers of a course in porn.
This was hardly new. Chicago was beyond modern, beyond monetarism, still swaying in the embrace of poststructuralism. From the tilted-glass-ceiling studios at the School of the Art Institute reflecting light from the lake, one could cross Michigan Avenue to the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, and join close readings of Linda Williams, Laura Kipnis, Judith Butler (this was the late 90s, after all), the occasional El train shuddering past. Courses in deconstruction, the transposition of literary theory and cultural studies, queer theory and gender studies were all the rage in MFA programs. Universities at Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Wellesley had all initiated courses in the study of porn.
But this Art Institute class on pornography about which one heard quiet allusions—sotto voce utterances in school lounges, Ukrainian Village bars, and student apartments—was not entirely concerned with theory. It was offered through the video department (video, film, and media were separate departments then—this was the late 90s, after all). In fact it wasn’t connected to the Department of Art History at all.
It was a production class.
A course in making pornography, in making porn films in particular, it wasn’t listed in the graduate program’s course catalogue, but operated as a kind of “shadow class”—one had to know the right people to have heard about it, much less sign up. Recent grads still hanging around related the rules: students who took the course were required to act in the porn they produced.
I’m not sure I ever met anyone who actually took the course, though it seemed most people knew of it. Or those who had taken the course didn’t speak of it, which I fantasized as a sign of the extreme closeness and trust that developed between participants. Whatever exposures of self, desire, and voyeurism were revealed in the class, they remained there, between its participants.The idea of the course preoccupied me— the switching roles of director and actor, exploiter and exploited (in the financial, legal sense), artist and pornographer. The main requirement—that all participants perform in the porn produced—followed the conventional structure of film production classes: students take turns behind the camera and before it; they rotate roles, experience all sides of production.
It seems to me now that this self-reflexive turn of enactment—of agitating boundaries between observer and observed, theorist and practitioner, actor and prostitute, top or bottom, film exposure and self-exposure—is what took root so firmly in my consciousness as a formal mode of artistic production: that the conditions of an artwork’s own production could raise complex questions and erase comfortable cultural boundaries.
I knew the class was the conception of Vanalyne Green, who taught in the video program then, after chairing the department. I must have asked her about the course, as she was an adviser in my final year, but I can’t recall any specific conversation. I do remember that a few years later, over a bowl of noodles near Canal Street in New York, she recalled how a particular dean had asked her to keep a “low profile” regarding the class, concerned that press and attention of the wrong sort might be directed at the school because of it.
In film, traditionally, there are multiple takes of each shot. If the take was good, the director calls out “cut” and then “print it!” instructing the camera assistant to note that take. Film laboratories do not print every take, only those marked in the camera report as “print.” Many moments of cinematic drama have been built on the distance between a director’s utterances of “cut” and “print!” as actors hold their breath in suspense, praying that another take won’t be necessary.
Scurrying down a narrow fluorescent corridor of the Art Institute’s film department in Chicago, I hear a voice cry out, “Print it!” then silence. Through an open doorway, a dozen graduate students in variously blocked postures are scattered about a black box classroom under ersatz theatrical lighting. There isn’t a film camera in sight. Instead, Yvonne Rainer stands among them, sheath of papers in hand. This is Rainer’s “Approaches to Performance” course.
Over drinks at the Rainbo Club on Damen, I ask a friend taking Rainer’s course about the exclamation I heard coming from their classroom. It started, she tells me, when a guy in the class arrived early, sat down, and closed his eyes, humming with his headphones on. As students slowly trickled in and grabbed chairs, the guy—eyes still closed and headphones still on—sang to himself a soulful rendition of the lonely, 80s-noirish Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight.” Though he was just singing along to the music he heard through his headphones, to everyone else in the room it was a doleful a cappella rendition of an emblematic rock song, and they sat, riveted, through its duration. When the song was over he opened his eyes, surprised to see everyone looking at him, some laughing, and Rainer called out “print it!”—expressing the desire to render permanent what had been a unique and estranging moment, one that she wished to hold onto, to use even, in the collective work they were developing.
From then on, the class decided that when someone did something spontaneous that was surprising, alienating, or they just liked it, they should call out “Print it!” and the whole endeavor would be noted and broken down as a performance that could be reconstituted and fed back into the body of the larger piece they were developing.
Indeed, in the middle of the public performance the class gave at the end of the semester, a guy in the audience just a few seats away from me suddenly started to sing “In the Air Tonight,” a capella. Stripped of his headphones, his bare words rang out in the matte black space. The audience shifted, feelings of discomfort, pleasure, and embarrassment palpable as they tried to reconcile his identity as audience member or performer. Then the performance shifted again and the audience’s attention was directed back to the performers before them. He stayed.
In 1979 Phil Collins came to London’s Townhouse recording studios to play drums on his former Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel’s third solo album. In Studio 2’s Stone Room, a live room with walls of soft Oxfordshire sandstone, built to emulate the timbre of recording in a castle, Collins started messing about on the drums while the mixing board’s reverse-talkback circuit was activated (talkback is a button on the mixing console the engineer presses to speak to the musicians in the recording studio; reverse-talkback allows the engineer to listen to the musicians’ responses). Engineer Hugh Padgham and Gabriel were amazed at the heavily compressed sound from Collins’s drumming, and overnight rewired the mixing board so that the reverse-talkback circuit could be recorded. Padgham and Collins used this reverse-talkback microphone recording method when they recorded Phil Collins’s single “In the Air Tonight” for his 1981 album, and the gated reverb, or fed-back sound, became a Collins signature.
In 1981, Mathew Hale told me a few years ago, he was in a “foundation course” at Winchester Art School in Hampshire, England. In those days in the UK, you could attend your local art school for one year for free, and then you could transfer and complete your degree elsewhere.
The purpose of the foundation course was to let students spend a preliminary year trying things out— fine art, fashion, textiles, music—before deciding what to focus on later. It was an open context.
Susan Hiller came as a guest artist to Mathew’s course one day, taking the train southwest from London. No one in the class had met her before. They didn’t really know about her work. “She was funky, very groovy, but not at all flaky,” Mathew reflected, “smart. A sharp hippie.”
Hiller said she was going to do something with them that came from Gestalt therapy. The class was in a seminar room. She asked everyone to lie down on their backs on the floor, and she turned out the lights. I’m going to tell you a story, she said, I’m going to tell it up to a certain point, and then you will all finish it for yourselves.
She was quite charismatic, and Mathew recalled that they all took it very seriously, lying on the floor, listening to her voice in the dark. She described you walking though a landscape, she made up a terrain and described you moving through it and that you came to a wood, and at the edge of the wood there is a fence, and a house on the far side of the field opposite. And you all know what this house looks like, she said, now I want you to go into this house. And that’s the moment when Hiller stopped, and everything split, and each student continued the story in his or her own mind, in the dark of the room. You could hear everyone breathing. It was isolated but also collective.
It went on for about twenty minutes, quite a long time, Mathew reflected, and then we were to each make a record of our part. I don’t remember if we shared them. I don’t think so. Most people wrote. I think I wrote but I also made sketches. But that wasn’t the interesting thing—it was the experience. It’s very striking how well I remember it, and the house that I invented without trying. It had the quality of knowing something in a fundamental way without being too conscious of it. A genuine impulse, which is half desire and half something serious, the thing you learn to trust or you’re nowhere when you’re making something. It had that strange quality. I think what she did was create that experience for us. Recognizing a feeling in yourself that you can trust—and it’s very real at that moment—it seems like that was what she was doing and everybody was having a very absorbed experience in the dark. It was like being a glider up in the air and then being released.
I mention this story to Susan a few years later in London. She listens to me and then cocks her head to one side. “Yes,” she says airily, “that sounds like something I would do.”
I think about the works Susan did at the Freud Museum in London, and how Mathew had described the atmosphere at Goldsmiths where he continued on after his foundation year—“there were no specific disciplines”—and how his teachers, Michael Craig-Martin, Mary Kelley, Jon Thompson—handed him books by British psychoanalysts of the “Middle Group”: Marion Milner and D.W. Winnicott. The input of psychoanalysis was strong, and people were interested in the idea of doing something for a reason that is unknown or unconscious, rather than being entirely driven by the preconceived.
I ask Mathew about whether he felt what Susan had undertaken with them in Winchester was similar to her “group investigation” works in the 70s. In particular I recall a documentation image from Dream Mapping, of people sleeping in a field, in fairy rings—naturally reccurring circles of mushrooms or stimulated grass growth whose folklore suggests those who trespass into them are in danger of being in permanent enthrallment to their dreams, rather like the protagonists of that Wim Wenders film who end up in the Australian outback, staggering about, addicted to a device that allows them to record and review their dreams, so much so that it takes over their waking life. Hiller’s group event had participants recording and diagramming their dreams over three days, blurring distinctions between shared and individual experience, dream and reality. Mathew said he was well aware of that work now, and often thinks of that experience on the seminar-room floor when he sees the documentation image of Dream Mapping, but didn’t come across the work until fifteen years after he left Hampshire for London.
A few weeks later, back in New York, I look for that documentation picture and when I find it, I am struck by several things. The first is that the image was taken during daytime—or perhaps day-for-night—and though the figures sleep in random positions in the field, the sky, grasses, farm, and animals are all clearly visible. In this Magritte-like juxtaposition of day and night, bodies take on a tinge of the performative, and the image a wave of the surreal. The second thing is that the face of the person closest to the camera is obscured by a baby crawling out of a sleeping bag. The infant lends a kind of folksy, communal charm to this particular group investigation, but also re-situates the image on a psychosurrealist plane; the baby’s presence among slumbering adults is estranging, metaphoric. Dropping off into sleep is a dropping off into the unconscious.
The last thing that gives me pause is the caption below the photograph, Dream Mapping 1974: site specific group event, Hampshire, England.” This group investigation happened in the Hampshire countryside, at Purdies Farm, just a half-hour from where, seven years later, Susan would conduct the group exercise with Mathew’s class. And 1974, that’s the year I was born—do I see myself as the infant in the picture?
On New Year’s Eve, 2010, I was at Holly Zausner’s home on 10th Avenue in Chelsea—a much-loved loft that she plumbed and renovated in 1979, carving living and studio space out of the top floor of a former tire factory whose name can still be read faintly on the side of the building: Congo Tire. A faded black-and-white picture of the building sits in the window of La Luncheonette, the restaurant on the corner. In the late 70s, a train would transit the high-line outside their window just once a week out their windows—from 34th Street down to the meatpacking district it slowly rumbled along, and back again. Now Holly’s building is flanked by new condos that “recall the finest aspects of the artists’ studio spaces of the early 20th-century” with “oil-rubbed bronze hardware, Noguchi-designed Akari light sculpture in double-height living room, individual climate control including multi-zoned central air-conditioning.” Her loft’s view of the river is now partially obscured by Frank Gehry’s monumental glacier, the IAC building, and Jean Nouvel’s “total design” condo, a sleek high-rise featuring on-site lifestyle manager and luxury attaché, situated adjacent to a city jail. Across from Holly’s front windows is the now-manicured High Line park, which looked fantastic that evening as it sat empty, pools of lit-up drifts of snow and reeds fading into dark.
A woman in a white mini-dress with a sunburst of silver sequins at the neckline sat next to me. She told me that before she attended art school in New York—and deviated into fashion and interior design—she was an undergraduate at Kent State University. I perked up—when was this? (“1979.”) Had she seen Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed? (Blank stare). I described the work’s planned entropy, so closely synced with the history that, four months after Smithson’s work was realized, brought the National Guard to the campus in a violent suppression of student protest against US invasion of Cambodia, and how the two breakdowns—of the woodshed and of the state—merged when someone painted May 4 1970 on the woodshed’s broken roof beam.
The woman mentioned that during her time at Kent State she took a course called “Kent State,” which was dedicated to the study and critical examination of those events of May 1–4, 1970 on campus. In the class, she said, they read books and articles on the period, including James Michener’s Kent State: What Happened and Why.
After the fashion people, including my neighbor at dinner, left for other parties and likely countless hours trying to hail cabs on cold street corners, my friends and I stayed to ring in the New Year together and talk into the early morning hours. I curled up on the couch and I fantasized about this in situ class where history and location doubled back upon themselves, re-enervating the debates, misunderstandings, and misinformation that still characterize much literature and scholarship on both Kent State in 1970 and Smithson’s work (a group lesson plan for an art course listed on KSU’s website misrepresents the work as having been made in 1971 “to memorialize the events of May 1970”).
Shuttling back and forth along this path, I recall that Holly, like me, went to Bard as an undergraduate. Though our experiences there were two decades apart, we shared an art history professor who taught a survey course which Holly recalled with some skepticism—“it was very linear.” Holly left Bard in the early 70s for Paris, where she went around to all the Brancusi collections—public, private, his atelier, gardens—by day, and the Cinematheque Française at night. She lived in Paris, together with an American draft dodger, until 1974.
These untaken courses and class assignments I never experienced remind me of an exercise that John Baldessari once arranged for his students. I’ve heard it told variously but remember basically this: one day Baldessari arranged for a police-sketch artist to come to his class. He left instructions for the students to give a description of their teacher—Baldessari—to the sketch artist so he could mock up a drawing of him.
In recounting the story to myself, I felt my memory was so vague that I phoned Helen Mirra in Cambridge to tell me what she remembers of the exercise, and she immediately asks me if I’ve “seen the video.”
A: Oh it’s a video? I guess I knew that.
H: Yeah, I’m pretty sure there is a video—which I saw at some point, probably from the Video Data Bank or EAI.
A: That’s interesting, it’s only been told to me as a story, not as an artwork.
H: You know my memory might be a bit fuzzy as I’m on a post-op narcotic, Percocet.
A: Percocet? Well you seem OK, so let’s just go ahead.
H: Instead of Baldessari coming in at the beginning of class the sketch artist came in and asked the students to describe Baldessari to him. He’s not in it at first, the camera is on the students. And I remember I can’t hear very well what they are saying. It’s very two-camera.
A: Really? Two cameras? One on the sketch artist, and one on the students?
H: What? It’s 1979—tube camera, not two cameras. (laughter)
A: Well it would have been a crime to have two cameras, that’s for sure. (more laughter) The thing I don’t understand is, did he get in touch with the sketch artist by phone and arrange for him to come to his classroom and just start?
H: I think he had him meet him at his office, then directed him to the classroom without going in?
A: Yeah, but then he would have seen him. The sketch artist would have seen Baldessari and known what he looked like.
H: That’s true. I don’t remember how it was set up. That’s the thing about getting it wrong on purpose.
A week later I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view the Baldessari retrospective. I round a corner and there, looped on a monitor, is the sketch-artist piece. I’m immediately struck by how haphazardly it is filmed, rather like an afterthought, and how the image the sketch-artist produces remains for a long time mostly a cartoonlike evil character rendering of Baldessari’s face—his eyes look particularly beady, not warm or jovial, and his beard menacing, like a bad guy from long-forgotten 70s chase films.
Phil Collins’s own mug, staring out from an ominous black background, is the cover image for the 1981 record on which “In the Air Tonight” appears. The album title is Face Value.
A few days later I ring up Vanalyne Green, now living and teaching in Leeds, England. I call her online. When I recount my memory of the rules of her porn class, she squints and shakes her head on my computer screen, whose image projects this motion in a stutter. “No, “ she says, “I don’t think so.”
The course was listed in the course catalogue under the title “Body Language,” paired with a vague description about “the Kantian sublime or whatever bullshit I had to write about it,” Vanalyne says. Together she and the students watched a lot of porn, viewed The Secret History of Civilization, read articles by producers of pornography, about the industry and labor and the transition from film to video in the production of pornography. She invited an actor who worked in the industry to visit the class, “walking down the hall at the Art Institute—he was just bionic. Such a different physicality than art students,” she recalls. And of course, they made their own work, which was to be a piece of pornography, “whatever that is.”
I ask her again about the rule concerning the students needing to switch roles, the exchange of voyeur and viewed, framer and object. Well, Vanalyne said, a lot of people who took the class wanted “to be tops, you know the butch, to be dominant and all that, but they had difficulty finding actors, so they then used one another.”
