Undoing Spectrality
a body vanishes from the surface/ its remains seep into the stage-screen/
diatomic actors flicker in the sky-light/ a chimeric dance across thresholds
The ghosts of words and borders continue to haunt artists of colour in global contemporary art stages. What does it mean to inhabit that stage with a script and process of one’s own making and the spectrality of one’s selves? This question not to merely extend the semiotics of the title, but to materialise and visualise what is often unuttered, unspoken, and unthought but deeply felt by many who inhabit these multiple non-/bodies. Going from the auteurist (situated within the artist as self and anthropocentric) to the planetary (situated alongside non-human bodies and more-than-human technologies), the tethers between Sandeep Mukherjee’s and Rohini Devasher’s praxes, respectively, create a spectral spectrum of responses in their makings.
Not simply a return to the ‘spectral turn’ of the 1990s-2000s academic sphere and Derridean deconstruction, Spectral Theatre also gestures to the anxieties and joys in the failures of performing certain materialisations and politics of assumed corporealities that in turn render ghosts of us who do not. And these seemingly spectral existences must be part of the larger discursive realms where geopolitics, science, art, and critical discourse commune. We inhabit the spectral in teleological modes. This text is not about why or how ghosts exist, but rather what can spectrality reveal; an invitation to dwell within the spectres of our present(s) and present selves, both speculative and lived. Hauntings are not necessarily nefarious or burdensome, but are propulsions to consider the unseen and incomprehensible. We exist within imminent threats of extinction, in individual and collective reckonings, be they through the ceaseless breakdown of socio-political and capitalist systems that are snowballing the climate apocalypse, the difficulty of being both human and non-human bodies in a differentiated ways, or the slow toxicities of living in an inequitably dying world. Spectral Theatre hovers among these liminalities of human and non-human mortality as well as the joys of encounter in phantasmic gaps that acknowledge and live in and despite these knowledges.
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Theatres
“Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven— waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through […] There are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on.”
“Immigrant Haibun,” Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds
To dwell in the little holes within ourselves; the stars that constellate across the skies of our immigrant bodies.
Human lines of flight because the emptiness is far too much to bear and non-human migrations are projections— lights from the other— so we make ghosts of them.
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Ghost Stories from AI Spectres
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Returnings
Spectators
These works you spectate in Project 88 are ghosts of themselves returning to this particular stage in transmogrified forms.
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Rohini Devasher’s Glasshouse Deep was initially conceived for the 2021 Sea Art Festival at Ilgwang Beach in Busan. Collaborating with scientists at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (from her Delhi home and studio), she collated their samples of diatoms, which are single-celled algae that happen to be a curious hybrid of both plant and animal, from the East Sea and employed layers of video-feedback to create a deep-sea theatre of diatomic bodies. This work reverberates within Gustave Holst’s “Venus, The Bringer of Peace” from “The Planets” (1914-1916) which also mirrors back on itself, like the recursive flows of light across the technological matrix creating the diatomic play. Last year, Glasshouse Deep was directly projected onto the beach in Busan, on the interstitial realm between sea and sand. However, here, it returns to its other spectral homes— the projector and screen.
Glasshouse Deep, Still, Single Channel Video with Sound 14 minutes 21 seconds, 2021
Sandeep Mukherjee’s Untitled (Starburst) is a panel that was originally part of a five panel site-sensitive series composed in 2002 and his Centrifugal work (also site-specific) was created in 2005. The latter marks a significant shift to the abstract in his practice, whereby he incorporated his own body as a recurring motif, of which Untitled (Starburst)was one of the last. The earlier work shows the artist’s corporeality within folds and unfoldings across a non-linear planetary song. His head pulses to Macy Gray and Daft Punk and his body is thrown across the rosy expanse, disappearing into its celestial creases and almost violently ejaculated from starbursts of his own making. Based on nude photographs, the artist’s topological exploration of representing his body springs from an urge to unground and untether it from its gravitational constraints, along with the limitations of the corporeal itself, but also constantly returns to these through its sharp perspectival meanderings. While Centrifugal has seen many iterations across galleries in the U.S., the geopolitical realm Mukherjee calls his primary home, Spectral Theatre is its first stage in India, nearly two decades after its conception. Acrylic ink and embossed drawings disperse, refract, radiate, diffract, amalgamate in ectoplasmic spirals and birthmarks across the vast skins of Duralene. The ‘blank’ sections of these panels once, too, held paint, subsequently erased by Mukherjee. The artist’s body has become spectral within the motions of non-human configurations, and it gestures to our spectatorial bodies and their constantly transmuting distances to his work. Centrifugal thus indexes the corporeal, even as it challenges its representational form within his praxis, as evident in Untitled (Starburst).
Untitled (Starburst), Detail, Acrylic, Color Pencil and Embossed Drawing on Duralene 25 x 300 inches, 2002
Glasshouse Deep renders the most infinitesimal of bodies into cosmic ones, Untitled (Starburst) and Centrifugal make intricate, abstract studies of them. They play with the ontological and representational thresholds of the human body— the pointillist possibilities of returning to ourselves through spectral deviations, the phantasms lingering in the imaginary theatres of skies and seas, screens and surfaces. Almost chiral, the radial symmetries of Mukherjee’s forms in Centrifugal and the radiating lines in Untitled (Starburst), and Devasher’s diatoms appear to nearly mirror one another and then disappear before the silhouettes of similarity can be fully demarcated, but leave enough of an impression for us to enter through the haunting channels their works create. An assemblage of luminescence-loops and oscillations between screen and Duralene, glassy exoskeletons and planetary patterns, these works are theatres and actors hosting one other. Light becomes the phantasmic director concatenating these motions, passing the thresholds of uncanny imaginaries and retinal screens. We are left aching with vibrant ghost-encounters, suffused with dislocations, haunted by their infinite returns.
Centrifugal, Detail, Acrylic Ink and Embossed Drawing on Duralene, 5 panels: 96 x 60 inches each, 2005
If one enters the atmospheres of projection and approaches too close to the ghost-screen of Glasshouse Deep, “the figures of the visitors themselves are ‘screened,’ for they too become projections. As apparitions, they populate the phantasmagoria of the projective space, their silhouettes interacting with the images in an elaborate shadow theater.” (Bruno 161). I borrow here Giuliana Bruno’s semiotic illuminations from her most recent work on light and site, specifically about artist Diana Thater’s installations of animal subjectivities, which I extend here to Spectral Theatre. To consider the phantasmic interplay of spectatorship and artwork, however, goes beyond corporeal shadow-play and must extend to spectral readings, especially when we consider Centrifugal and Untitled (Starburst) alongside Glasshouse Deep.
Glasshouse Deep, Excerpt, Single Channel Video with Sound 14 minutes 21 seconds, 2021
Abstract painting and experimental media have long been viewed as texts that must be subjectively ‘read’ and contextually deciphered by audiences. Incidentally, a significant portion of haunt-logical cultural theory revolves around ‘reading the phantoms’ i.e. secrets in a text (particularly the works of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török, in their essay collection L’Écorce et le Noyau), that a text or moving image or painting work holds until discerned and exhumed by the spectator. They conceive of ghostliness as the unspeakable, not due to shame or taboo, but what cannot yet be articulated in our languages, and I deepen this— to the fact that we cannot yet hold our existential, geopolitical, and spiritual disparities together in comprehensible, sayable, knowable ways, some of which emerge within Spectral Theatre. But we can begin to try by occupying spectral ways of sensing and reading within and among ourselves, and inhabiting the spectralities we have produced and inherited. There are no identifiable secrets held within the paint, screen, light, surface, or within ourselves. But by occupying the liminal stage between actor and audience, and inhabiting uncanny psychic and political modes beyond the binary, with a a detour through the spectral mediator, we might begin to dwell in the assemblages produced from both within and from afar, reading ‘closely’ and ‘at a distance’; returning to the paradoxical and phantasmic threshold.
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Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
A non-linear series of facts and rumination:
• Greek poet Sappho was born in (probably) 630 BCE on the island Lesbos, composing a prolific oeuvre of elegiac songs and odes to desire, most of which has been lost. Only fragments remain, with the lost words denoted in Carson’s seminal translation as brackets.
• Theatre as we dominantly know it, originated in the form of verbal storytelling and performance in Greece, with the oldest surviving Athenic play being “The Persians” (472 BCE) by Aeschylus, a story of their recent loss at the Battle of Salamis narrated in the voice of the defeated Persians themselves.
• Emptiness- a stage
• Loss- an actor
• Brackets- a theatre of traces, of spectrality, of encounters
• In their practices, Mukherjee and Devasher practice “the opposite,” daring to live leaning against brackets, disclosing rather than foreclosing their bodily politics and creative selves, holding blankness beside themselves and embracing emptiness as a playground, they talk to the spectres of loss.
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Bibliography
- Abraham, Nicolas, et al. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
- Bruno, Giuliana. Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2005, pp. 373– 379., https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni143.
- Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Taylor and Francis, 2012.
- Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
- Sappho, and Anne Carson. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Virago, 2003.
- Villano, Bianca Del. “Ghostly Alterities. Spectrality and Contemporary Literatures in English (2007).”
- Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2007 Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copper Canyon Press, 2019.
Note: The conversations under “Ghost Stories from AI Spectres” emerged from a series of simultaneous prompts to and responses from language models GPT3 da-vinci-003 and ChatGPT (Dec 15 version).
