Excerpt from Gianni Jetzer: “I Is Another”
In: How To See [What Isn’t There] – A Group Show with Works from the Burger Collection, Hong Kong, curated by Gianni Jetzer. Exhibition Catalog. Max and Monique Burger, Hong Kong, 2019, p. 89.
Artists have not only invoked the presence of the universal in their work; often, the presence of another human being, whether fictional or not, comes into play. The artist’s subjectivity thus becomes a nexus for interaction, leading to both the presence of the other and the construction of the self. French novelist Arthur Rimbaud expanded on this idea, questioning the single personality; to him, the other and the individual become one and the same, “I is another.”¹¹ He considered the “I” as an exterior force reaching beyond one’s own personality and into what sociologist Emile Durkheim deemed the “collective consciousness.”¹²
In the contemporary age of avatars, the concept of the self is undone altogether, replacing the real with the digital. In this age, the growing reconfiguration of the individual has reached a new level of complexity, almost completely detached from the carnal body.
Other points of view regard the heterogeneous nature of society, as Michel Foucault has remarked in his essay Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. In this text, Foucault analyzes the encounter with his mirrored image:
“From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. (…) I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect.”¹³
This tension between an absolutely real situation and its absolutely unreal counterpart epitomizes the complexity of identity and the total disentanglement of the self from the body. The question then remains: what form does presence take in the absence of a body?
Nadia Kaabi-Linke poses an answer to this question in the form of company for the exhibition visitor. Her Nervöse Bank (2017) is a typical viewing bench for galleries, with one alteration: when visitors sit down on the bench, they activate a hidden mechanism that runs a compilation of nervous ticks—the movement of restless legs, for instance—that have been collected in various transit places and waiting halls in administrative offices. The movements are conveyed through the vibrations of the bench, imbuing the furniture piece with specific individuals’ anxieties. The remnants of another are thus translated through furniture to the viewer, fundamentally altering their experience of the exhibition space by way of a presence rendered through a mere gesture.
– Gianni Jetzer is an art critic and Curator-at-Large at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
