Julie Andreyev's Stereoscope and Thomas Kneubühler's Absence provide visitors to Gallery 44 with performative explorations of looking and being seen in an era of dominant technological mediation. What is seen when looking at representations of others under such conditions? Is there an empathic identification? Perhaps an important question to ask is: How do these states and conditions of mis/recognition affect, or, in fact, construct subjectivity and social relations? Through an engagement with this art (not just as viewers but as collaborative components within the work itself) we generate a critical distance from which to consider representation and subjectivity involving negotiations of time and space in relation to our own bodies. This is in stark contrast to the collapse of these dimensions within the instantaneous feeds of digital and video imaging machines and their distribution networks, the internet and television. The schizophrenic duality of contemporary modes of representation, described by Paul Virilio as "a split between activity and interactivity, presence and telepresence, existence and tele-existence," is made visible in this exhibition1. A shared alienation in response to both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ representations of the ‘subject’ is also revealed. In both modes we confront a familiarity betrayed by otherness — the uncanny. This phenomenon, it is inferred, seems inherent to abstraction/language/representation generally. The visually oriented, techno-scientific displacement of a linguistic/experiential constitution of the self merely spectacularizes a sense of lack.

If Jean Baudrillard was correct twenty years ago, a situation has arisen in which the disciplinary aspects of technology and panoptic space have been rendered obsolete2. The various apparatuses which Michel Foucault and others have theorized as inventing subjects through the control of behaviors sited in the body are no longer necessary in an "age of deterrence." Baudrillard proposes that at both ends of the gaze in any technologically mediated exchange of looking there is now ourselves. We "the people" are centre-staged all the time and no one has to watch. The result is that ideological conflict and emancipatory politics achieve an unceremonious invisibility. Reality television, web cams, and Speaker's Corner seem to provide made-to-order evidence of this. But who are we? Do we really see ourselves in these images? What do we recognize?

Thomas Kneubühler, Untitled, from the series Absence, 2001

Andreyev's and Kneubühler's works make us confront the unknowableness of ourselves as representations in contemporary culture. They demonstrate that the recognition of absence is more than likely a commonplace occurrence. Agency is suggested because a noticed absence implies the existence of a missing subject. This contests Baudrillard's assertion that there is "[n]o more subject, focal point, center, or periphery: but pure flexion or circular inflection."3 Most importantly, Absence and Stereoscope allow for a view of the looping gaze from outside of itself. In this scenario, visitors might become secondary viewers observing the primary viewer, who is, in effect, a performative agent within the work. The performance is seen without a telelogical collapse of time and space — of phenomenological experience. Taking in Stereoscope, we watch other gallery visitors awkwardly bend down and conform their bodies to the constraints of Andreyev's viewing machine. It is even possible to observe them straining to reconcile the two mirror-reflected images, one for each eye, which constitute the stereoscopic image. We might survey other gallery viewers staring at Kneubühler's portraits, waiting for those moments of recognition when the repeatedly depicted situation registers. We watch them seeking an empathic identification, ultimately denied. We, the primary viewers of Kneubühler's pictures are already in a simulated secondary viewer position while looking at representations of the technologically-mediated looped gaze. Here, each performance involves ambiguous exchanges between attention and distraction, engrossment and detachment, public and private, which are flattened to a point of incomprehension within this loop. A complete absorption of the subject in the act of looking (while viewed or viewing or both) is thwarted. We are all pulled in multiple directions by the simultaneity of these conflicting forces.

Viewers of these works become momentarily lost. The subjective presence one looks for in the images is displaced by the act of looking. Representations become ciphers of lack. This is compounded by the content of these images. We see uncanny doppelgängers similar in their disquieting presence to surrealist corpses or mannequins, but they have a much more complex relation to ourselves and the "real" of time and space — that other world of representation which theoretically pre-existed the technological mediation of the senses. Andreyev's piece invokes Sir Charles Wheatstone's pre-photographic stereoscope of the 19th century, while Kneubühler's photographs appear as reportage of the "now." A continuum is set up by the dialogue between the two works. Within Stereoscope we have another continuum between the antiquated viewing apparatus and the image represented in stereo: a scene in an amusement arcade known as Playdium (offering the latest in virtual and video game entertainment). The figure playing Motor Raid and the bystander leaning towards the screen of the game in the Playdium are modeled after two central figures in Antoine Watteau's tableau painting entitled L'Enseigne de Gersaint (1721). Depicting figures with their backs to the viewer, this image speaks immediately of the absence/presence of the subject within the representation. Complicating this lack is the visual confusion which ensues for the primary viewer when other visitors unwittingly cross in front of either image reflected in the left or right-eye mirrors. While the tableau representations appear three-dimensional, wayward gallery-goers appear flat (only visible to one eye of the primary viewer) rupturing the illusion. Here, then, Optica presents elements of 18th century tableau painting, 19th century stereoscopes, and 20th century computer screens together as representations of the disciplinary technologies of looking, technologies that have not been out-moded, but are not entirely successful either.

The historical continuum of reference set up in Optica points to the general inadequacy of representation to impart the essence or truth (bizarrely abstract considerations in their own right) of a subject to others. We can't feel truly comfortable in having an empathic identification with what we are looking at. Kneubühler's intimate portraits enact these conclusions powerfully. We may not know the individuals he has photographed personally but we do sense that whoever they are, they are not all there in the image. The pictures are lacking. Amazingly, Stereoscope and Absence use the extremely modern conditions of the technologically-mediated looped gaze to effectively reveal this absence in images instead of removing it from sight forever. Andreyev and Kneubühler take us outside of the gaze to see again.

Footnotes

1 Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997). 44.

2 I am referring here, and in what follows, to some conclusions he makes in his essay "The Precession of Simulacra" of 1983. The copy I am using is a reprinting in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). 253-281. In particular, I am discussing his ideas about an age of deterrence on page 273.

3 Ibid.

Julie Andreyev is currently Associate Professor of visual art at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She completed her undergraduate work at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and received her MA from Simon Fraser University. Imagery from entertainment and news media such as television broadcasts and movies informs the conceptual and formal aspects of Andreyev's work. Her interests also include research into contemporary entertainment sites such as arcades, consumer VR systems, video games, and historical devices such as panoramas, stereoscopes, and dioramas. Her work, which has been exhibited across Canada and in Australia, consists of digitally produced prints, photographic installations and video.

Thomas Kneubühler is a Swiss-born artist currently living in Montreal. He came to Canada for the first time in 1996 as an artist in residence. In 1998 he curated a program of recent Swiss video art, which was shown in Montréal, Québec City, and Toronto. In the last few years, his photographic work has dealt mostly with the relationship between human beings and technology. His work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, and Portugal, and most recently, he was part of the group show Life in Real Time at L'Espace Vox in Montreal. He is represented in a number of Swiss collections.

Jeremy Todd is a visual artist working in Vancouver, B.C.. He received a BFA at York University and an MFA at UBC. He has been teaching critical theory and studio courses for the UBC Fine Arts Department during the past three years. Recently, he left the university to pursue studies relating to his own practice.