I use the logic of S & M in my artwork to derive pleasure where it hasn’t been directly offered. This opens the question of who is then dominant and who is submissive. The stark limitations that characterize existing power relationships can flip, shift, break, or metamorphose when pressure is applied at the fulcrum.
I think about BDSM as a way to materialize a power relationship to then take it to its logical conclusion, to potentially open something that would otherwise be predetermined. Pain, and to some extent, pleasure are not additive—they are inherent to the power relations themselves. Consent is always present, but it is not always presenced. I am interested in how images can be a site where power relationships become visible. Questions of consent are being gestured at in some of the dialogues around identity politics in the U.S. right now, but we have come to a stalemate or stuck point here in some respects. For me, it is through astriction rather than avoidance that I hope to find a way through.
In my relationship with Berlusconi’s image, I experienced an intimacy with myself that could only be achieved through my engagement with his image. He was both like and unlike the patriarchs I grew up with. He is more forthcoming-- he is imperfect and not really looking to change. He openly declared: "Non sono un santo", (1), which translates to "I am not a saint." He continued by saying, "You’ve all understood that." And largely his faults have been understood.
Catherine Malabou defines plasticity as something that can be expunged but not assimilated (2)—she talks about it as a transformable whole with points of resistance. What here can be expunged and what can be assimilated? What interested me in Silvio Berlusconi was the mirage of perfection that his faults generated. They were necessary for the very existence of the fantasy of a different, more benevolent, and competent leader. Should the obstacles be overcome, we are not left with a pure intimate exchange. Such an exchange, critically, cannot exist.
For Malabou, being is both formed by and made of change. This secret interior of being shares a similar structure to that of images. Images have both a synchronic and a diachronic aspect. They can be read in the present as something with a surface—capturing a moment in time and holding information. And they can be read diachronically, as they change over time. This change occurs inside subjective readings or over cultural and historical shifts–but as Malabou’s plasticity demonstrates, the real engine of this change is the gap. This gap is what gives images their potential as a plastic tool. Plastic change can appear to emerge from this interior, from the submission to what delimits the ability to understand the other, from the seat of our subjective experiences, for Malabou, from our brain, and its enclosure, or, put another way, from within the image.
Both the sculptures and the writing respond to individual online articles or photographs of Silvio Berlusconi. Intimate but innocuous details in these articles become fodder for multiple artworks. These artworks are critical, but their primary function is an attempt to sensualize what might otherwise be traumatic and to find intimacy where it has been used as a false lure. It was never authentically offered, and yet it can still be found or projected. This is as strategic as it is pathological when the total unknown of the other is considered. The satisfaction is unconsummated or at least unrequited-- but submitting to this allows one to see that all language, all painting, all bodies, all events, and all deaths function in this space of limited access and unlimited interpretation.
As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson points out in her book, Becoming Human, plasticity can also come in the form of a demand from the outside, which is unevenly and unjustly applied(3). We do not choose the images that we are born; we do not consent to being. Being and image become entangled within the interpersonal and the social. Where we wish to unentangle them, to get to a moment which is ‘before’, a kind of sight that is clearer, that cuts through, a kind of history which is already fundamentally different, we cannot. At least, not with shortcuts. We cannot expect to arrive, but must endeavor. The image and its social condition and political context appear; the power imbalances run deep. Yet everything that unfolds afterward has the potential to take this impossibility as an imperative to move toward negotiation and transformation, both personally and socially. Where the human or humanity of the other comes forward, we are not necessarily led to a more equitable distribution of image or risk. The very category of human can be deployed to support the long-term maintenance and creation of inequity.
I see this work now, not as revisionist, but as attempting to apprehend what could not initially be apprehended. Though I can look critically at it, I also see how I sought to test my own vulnerability against what I knew was more powerful and pervasive than I could ever be. I wanted to understand the power relationship I was always already implicated in and, in many ways, felt stuck inside of. I sought, in particular, to understand my relationship with the men who had formed these structures for me as a child. This work didn’t necessarily lead me into a pleasure situation. It did help me find an opportunity for acceptance that didn’t merely reify or repeat the past. This work allowed me to come away, through further exposure to my own history, with some understanding of it, and I like to think, of him too.
The key lessons here are reminders that proximity to power is not safe, nor is it a path to freedom or transformation. Proximity to power is acquiescence. Forming an intersectional coalition is not a sacrifice, but a strategy. While we remain in relationship with, and caught within the constructs that structure our social and political situation, how we relate and behave within this space is neither predetermined nor neutral. I am left, not as an apologist or critic, but as a witness to the change within an image that had long ago become set. This is a luxury which might only be possible within the archives, looking back at a past event. When I made this work, I thought I was in a relationship with an image that was present, but instead, I see now, the role of media in this work is to delimit everything into a past, even if it was a recent one, where the harm had already been done and could not, in the same particular way, continue. It is to this site of witness that I invited and invite viewers, but what will or can happen now, in this new moment, or in the future moment of your reading this, I really cannot presently see.
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/i-m-no-saint-berlusconi-says-after-sex-tapes-idUSTRE56L3NN/
2. Catherine Malabou, “Interview with Catherine Malabou.” Figure/Ground, Interviewed by Gerardo Flores Peña July 25th, 2017. Accessed November 3, 2024.
http://figureground.org/interview-with-catherine-malabou/.
3. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York University Press, 2020.