Nude Animal: Vanessa Renwick and the Wild

Abstract

In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006) Jacques Derrida remarks on texts by Rene Descartes concerning the animal. His attention is drawn to the look the animal returns. Standing naked before his cat, the philosopher sees it looking back at him. If now we introduce this mutual look into an account of screen work by Portland-based film and video artist Vanessa Renwick, the opportunity arises to think in terms of animality and women. I could not do her work justice if I were to attempt a survey of Renwick's practice, which I have been aware of for over ten years. Her name was familiar to me long before 1 saw anything she had made. Nor would it seem to me an improvement if I were to exclude from my remarks commentary on the work of other artists. What follows, then, is an attempt to substantiate a thinking about animality by means of a single work by Renwick. I try to do this in a way that also recognizes the achievements of two others working with the moving image: Benjamin Pearson and Shehrezad Maher. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A comparison of Renwick's 9 is a Secret (2002) with Pearson's Former Models (2013) will raise the question of our relation to death. In 9 is a Secret, Renwick describes the experience of being an assistant in a friend's suicide. Before removing the plastic from the head of his dead body, she hears herself saying, and we hear her repeat aloud, "You better be dead, motherfucker." It is as if we share Renwick's responsibility for his death, even bear the risks she took to assist hint. To be a survivor here is not to survive death oneself. Such a suicide commands a certain respect from the living, we who have not died, for we feel somehow humiliated by the departed, insofar as we agree to carry on in a world so decisively rejected by the friend. Renwick created a voiceover using a children's nursery rhyme, each line associated with a number less than nine. The lines of the rhyme number and characterize crows. Each line has the kind of significance for adults that such rhymes often do. Renwick shows us the young man who wants to die in beautiful black-and-white, high-contrast still images. They could be photographs, but there is often quiet movement. Like photocopies after several generations, the fragments consist of fixed poses cut from a strip of movement, a solitary black crow against a white ground. Carefully framed shots of a handsome young man, also in black-and-white, present a nude in parts, sculpted in the gray stone of what photographers would call, by comparison, images of greater latitude. Now immobile only because held in place, the fragments of the deceased before his death show signs of calculated movement. A viewer might be reminded of Chris Marker's La jetee (1962), in which subterranean victims of time-travel experiments are shown shell-shocked and fixed forever in black-and-white stills. The relationship between predator and victim in the animal world could be said to be a preoccupation in Renwick's screen work. Or perhaps it would be better to speak of the instinctive and irrational of living and dying. In this particular film, the stills punctuate a visual course of events in which we do not come to know the friend or learn anything of interest about him other than the reasons for his physical suffering and desire to die. We learn of the latter directly from Renwick in voiceover, almost in passing. The impression should not be left that the film offers an experience of sympathy, love, or generosity. In Former Models, by contrast, Pearson carries on an imaginary conversation with the deceased. This man with whom he speaks in voiceover is to be thought of as that of Rob Pilatus of the music duo Milli Yanilli, responding to questions after his death. Pilatus died in 1998. The voice that answers Pearson--that of Pilatus, processed beyond recognition if considered in its theatrical exhibition but coherent when listened to via a link emailed by the artist and using headphones recounts a disembodiment that considers the question of death in very different terms. …