Echo
Feb 12 – Mar 13
Guntar Kravis

Echo-graph
Essay: Alexander Nagel

The aperture is the eye, and the camera obscura is the brain. An ancient theory held that things in the world emitted images, called species, that traveled through the air, entered the eye, and were projected in a chamber in the brain called the imaginativa, where they were then processed into memories. But if the images aroused erotic desire, then the heart was made to beat faster and the rising heat burned the image into the imagination. Transfixed by the image, unable to turn it into memory, the afflicted person is sent into a spiral of obsession, madness, and sometimes death.

Imagine Guntar Kravis straddling his models and videotaping them as their eyes close and an expression of pleasure spreads over their faces. In a second stage, the subjects view themselves on a monitor, and Kravis videotapes, and photographs, one of their eyes watching, and reflecting, the screening. There is no digital manipulation, only the cropping of the image along the circumference of the iris. The round images give us a double portrait of the subjects, one with eyes closed and one with eyes open.

The eye has pre-empted the camera, and the result is provocation and withdrawal. These eyes might seem to be glaring back at us from the gallery wall, throwing our voyeurism back in our faces, but actually they don’t see us at all. They are stunned, caught in the headlight of a monitor, and at the same time looking down the barrel of a camera lens. They are lost to us, even as they stare out at us. Absorbed in the image of their own oblivious faces, their pupils flare, their irises catch fire. The ecstatic faces, trapped in the orbit of the eye, are now twice removed, and we become aware of the fact that we can’t hear these moans. Some faces are blissful in their double oblivion; others seem to reach a new pitch of agony, as if howling for release.

The aperture opens and light enters, imprinting the film with an image taken from the world. Other forms of art might become relics incidentally, but it is photography’s purpose and fate to serve as a record. Photography tastes of death. It sees the body from the outside and touches it with death, enough to let it live on as image. The earliest users understood this, and had photographs taken of themselves with recently dead loved ones—posed before the process of physical decay had set in. In a photograph there is nothing to distinguish the dead baby from one that sleeps.

Ec-stasis means to be taken outside of oneself, and Narcissus enacts a peculiar, reflexive form of ecstasy, where the separation from the self is not only the result but the occasion of his rapture. Guntar Kravis diagrams the process. His subjects are shown at the ecstatic moment when they are outside themselves, and then in the act of watching themselves—their inaccessible selves—from the outside. The ecstatic faces now seem the result of their being caught in the eye; their eyes close and their mouths open as they melt and warp into the dome of the iris. Their pleasure comes in a spiral of self-involvement.

In the myth, Echo is condemned to repeat only the last words uttered by others. She stands outside the narcissistic perimeter of love, and is herself shaped by it as she reflects it back. In love with Narcissus and forever ignored by him, she takes the last words of each of Narcissus’ professions of self-involved love and finds in these verbal cast-offs the incomplete expression of her own unfulfilled love. Love trades on the remains of the self’s dislocation. Some say Narcissus was the first painter, but then Echo was the first photographer. These eyes that don’t see us are now offered to us as images.

The camera, always condemned to see the outside of things, here performs a double operation that facilitates the subject’s internal life. It is a sort of prophylactic, allowing us entry while keeping us separate, and at the same time echoing and diagramming the subject’s dislocation from him- or herself. Photography here is not merely the record of something out there. It turns out to be embedded in our relationship to ourselves, and to each other. Do we ever know each other? Do we ever know ourselves? Why is the lover farthest away at the moment of greatest pleasure? Why are we farthest from our selves at that moment? Why does pleasure come so close to pain?

Biographies

Toronto artist Guntar Kravis earned a degree in photographic arts from Ryerson University. His work has been published in Prefix Photo, Alphabet City and Mix Magazine. His work can be found in private, public and corporate collections in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. He has been a member of Gallery 44 for 8 years and is currently working on a short experimental film. The artist wishes to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their assistance in the production and exhibition of Echo.

Alexander Nagel is professor of the history of art at University of Toronto. He has written on various aspects of Western art from the Renaissance to the present. During 2004-6 he will be Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, DC.