Embalming presence in Youssef Nabil's 'Cinema' at Michael Stevenson
by Joe Palmer
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes shows how the event of viewing a photograph foregrounds the finiteness of life. The verisimilar record of a past moment highlights the transience of the present and, by extension, the inevitability of our respective deaths. Photographs can thus be seen to emphasize absence.
'Cinema' is Youssef Nabil's latest collection of hand-coloured photographs. It is a series of portraits of costumed, posing actors and artists - dripping with sentimentality, nostalgia and kitsch - which overtly reference famous works of art. In addition, enigmatic self-portraits are scattered throughout the exhibition, added as if an afterthought.
An ostensibly authoritative - and physically imposing - explanation occupies part of one wall. It suggests that the works reflect on death. More specifically, they are said to constitute confrontations with mortality, the fact that the artist and those he loves will die.
Nabil employs the rather trite metaphor of viewing his life as a film, the end of which corresponds with his death. The images thus become preserved moments of his life - stills from his 'life-film'. The apparent implication is that the setting-into-motion of these frames in his absence would somehow reconstitute his presence.
However, the emphatic theatricality of the subjects' poses and the hyperbolic sentimentality expressed in the relentless pastel palette underscore the fictitiousness of these 'stills', a point that is reinforced by the exhibition's title. With Barthes' thesis in mind, the paradoxical root of 'Cinema' comes to the surface: photographs both preserve life and hasten the recognition of its demise.
There is of course a crucial difference between the photographs that concern Barthes and those that constitute 'Cinema'. That photographs record only what-has-been is crucial to Barthes' conception of our relation to their subjects. But Nabil's hand-coloured portraits are not primarily concerned with what-has-been; they depict deaths that are-to-come.
For Barthes, 'colour is artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses)'. And painted corpses are precisely what Nabil's tinted subjects resemble. What Barthes' thesis concerning the apprehension of death autochthonous to the viewing of photographs suggests, is that Nabil's subjects are painted corpses in a literal sense: the subjects of 'Cinema' are presented as made-up cadavers to be grieved over (melo)dramatically as if at an open-casket funeral.
There seems to be a lack of adequate terminology to describe Nabil's images. One possible cause for this is 'Cinema''s splicing of painting and photography. Another is perhaps the disconcertingly kitsch aesthetic, so at odds with the gallery context. Significantly, however, this imposed silence - or caesura - recalls the nothing-to-say synonymous with grief, in which all that can be done is reflect on that which is no longer.
For such a sombre subject as death, 'Cinema' appears remarkably light. The subjects' poses are playful; the colouring self-consciously kitsch; and the accompanying text, which overtly states only the images' preservative function, appears facile. But this is all part of Nabil's sleight of hand. Both dexterous and deceitful in its execution, 'Cinema''s sugary sweetness (temporarily) masks a bitter pill. It poignantly exposes the massive failure of a preemptive strike against grief.
Rossy de Palma is a posed portrait of a heavily made-up and animated woman winking. Everything in the image points toward its status as fabrication. However, at the same time, the vibrant colours of the portrait's tinting - Nabil's remaking-up of her make-up - produces the disjunctive effect of making her the least corpse-like of all the exhibition's subjects, and thus the most 'real'.
Rossy sleeping depicts the same subject asleep. Her lack of pose suggests a more veracious representation; however, this lack is connected to her unconsciousness, a certain absence of herself. In this way, the work is both a more - and less - accurate representation than Rossy de Palma; it captures and preserves both more and less of the subject that is - or was - Rossy.
Nabil's subjects appear as if they have been embalmed in the process of representation. The more Nabil tries to 'bring them to life' - through colour, hyperbole, allusion - the more he accentuates their absence. The implication of the impossibility of representing presence in order to preserve it suggests the inexorability of not only death, but also grief.
It is Nabil's self-awareness of the futility of his professed project that makes his self-portraits particularly poignant. In contrast to the immobility of his other subjects, his figure appears fleeting: Nabil haunts his own portraits just as the spectre of death haunts him in his portrayals of his friends. In attempting to escape the death of his friends he is forced to confront something even more uncomfortable: his own death.
An open-casket funeral is perhaps an apt analogy for the public expression of something so personal as a confrontation with death. For it is precisely this interstice between honesty and bad taste that 'Cinema' seems to (successfully) inhabit. The gesture toward the double-edged nature of preservation through representation is what balances the exhibition's poise between kitsch and self-absorption; and it is the sincerity with which this acutely personal gesture manifests that makes the show so moving.
Joe Palmer is currently doing his Honour's in History of Art at UCT
Opens: September 4
Closes: October 11
Michael Stevenson Gallery
Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock
Tel: (021) 462 1500
Fax: (021) 462 1501
www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
