Andrea Loux’ work moves between the areas of performance, installation, video and photography, connecting them one to the other in a diverse manner. At the same time, it brings into focus the thematic complex of establishing and transforming spaces and situations, whose continuity it dissolves – in many cases with a psychologizing intent – through its interventions and constructions. An example of this is the sound and light installation yes – no – but maybe – never, concluded in 2002. The work is site specific, which characterizes many of Andrea Loux’ projects. It was developed for the former Women’s Hospital in the City of Bern, shortly before its complete renovation and reutilization. Such a place, a vacant hospital, inundated with the past, has a very special character: its emptiness and abandonment offer its last visitors an overwhelming projection surface for summoning up known, imagined and heartfelt images of life, suffering, healing and death. What makes this more so the case is dealing here with a women’s hospital, deeply connected to archaic ideas of birth and the reproduction of life. In such a place it seems as though the shadows of its past, of patients, doctors, orderlies and relatives, of operations, pains, of the first and last breath, along with those associations, fears and memories that occur to us directly on location, combine to an immense emotional network. Andrea Loux reacts to the existing atmosphere of the space with a seemingly restrained but very effective intervention, or rather, she finds a visual and acoustic equivalent for this atmosphere. From the multitude of situations in the Bern hospital, she selects a room containing two wall-size medicine cabinets with numerous storage compartments and large glass-paned doors covering their upper compartments. She leaves the doors of the lower compartments open and places inside of them the ten bedside lamps already collected from the households of ten women living in Bern. The lamps, powered by a mixing panel, illuminate in a varying order, reaching in turn a different brightness before going out again. In addition, the room is filled with the cries, sighing, singing and whispers of a woman’s voice. One can neither discern the meaning of the rising and falling tones uttered by the voice, nor describe with any certainty the emotional state of their speaker. Her voice is like that of the night’s, like the sound of sleeplessness, of a feverish outbreak of fragments of conversations, a moaning, perhaps even the sound of a dream.
Since the space found in the Bern hospital already alludes to a dense, emotional disposition – expressed, so to speak, from within itself – here Andrea Loux can reduce the narration to the nonlinguistic utterances of a human voice in order to attain the intended psychologizing and disturbed effect. In many cases, she also searches for this element of disturbance, of disconcertment, in the “normalcy” of everyday life, as shown in her early work Tracy is having…(1995). The installation consists of a table with burnt slices of toast and lettering covering the wall which reads “Tracy is having a great time decorating the house and making it homey”. The quote suggests that the protagonist Tracy – perhaps an alter ego of the artist – has submitted to the cliché role of the woman: she is responsible for the house, for creating the homey atmosphere of the ideal home; it’s Sunday and there’s toast for breakfast. Yet this world robs Tracy of her grip on things, and so the toast is black and inedible. The “housewife” recognizes that the idyllic household has clearly experienced a disturbance brought on by the heteronomy of her role. She is no longer the mistress of her house, but rather feels as though the household order has become a threat. In keeping with Freud’s characterization that the uncanny is “nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and estranged from it only through being repressed,” her home also becomes uncanny for us.1
The thematic developing and bringing forth of such leaps and fissures in normalcy is an important connecting element in Andrea Loux’ works, whether in relation to the given aspects of a spatial construction – as applies to the large complex of works which form the Insertions, in which the artist forces her body into the smallest of found hollows in pieces of furniture and lets herself melt into them, so that the space experiences an estrangement – but most of all in relation to the psychological disposition of the protagonists in the video works, as in Table Stories (2002) or Roulette (2003).
Table Stories thematically develops the everyday situation of a group – two women and two men – having dinner together. The gathering seems to concern some formal occasion. The women are dressed in black and the men wear light-colored suits. The video image is shown in a split-screen effect and divided horizontally. The table’s edge corresponds with the horizontal division, so that we receive a view of the situation above the table as well as below it. What’s new here for Andrea Loux is operating with the idea of the leap: within the spatial construction on the one hand, since both picture halves also refer to the overall perspective as well as to color-related design differences, emphasizing that this concerns parallel worlds here; while on the other, in relation to the psyche of the figures. By no means should one think that either of these worlds functions according to a legitimate “normalcy,” or that the work is therefore aimed at depicting a simple confrontation between two contrasting conditions. The situation is too stiff and disjointed for that, the few remarks exchanged at the table too threateningly-laden with meaning, and too estranging is the part played underneath the table, where all four people move themselves to one by one, to embrace and stroke each other there. What’s actually created here – through the estrangement aided by the split screen, and filming and editing techniques – is a new narration on the inability to be close to another person and having this only occur, as it were, when “swept under the table”. The formally-structured artificiality and strong sensation of a staged situation point to a mise-en-scène, 2 about which Mieke Bal states, “as a concept [...] it offers an internal connecting element between the narration, video style, the visual language of images, and psychoanalysis [...]”3. Because the mise-en-scène affords a view into the production of the “play,” beyond that it reflects the viewing process and the viewers, which also plays a major role regarding the video installation Roulette.
In Roulette, the installation once again concerns an everyday situation: people seated at a table on the occasion of a birthday. During the course of the video narration, what begins as a happily relaxed mood changes to an extremely discomforting and disturbing atmosphere, brought on by the protagonists’ absurd and sometimes latently aggressive actions and remarks. Again, a situation at first “homey” becomes uncanny, as there seems to be no way of escaping this house. In addition, the work is structured as a video loop, so that it permanently oscillates between the cheerfulness of the opening situation and a mounting threat. This threat is intensified by the fact that narrative passages are constantly missing from the flow of the story: as the camera rotates around the table, we always receive no more than a fragmented view of how those present behave. What’s he doing now – the man playing with his knife right before our eyes, or the one strangling the cloth napkin? In other words, the unsolved secrets culminate here around the threat of the actions and the broken and interrupted story in suspense. Something else which supports this is having the work projected in a walk-in, cloth cylinder where the video projector continually rotates, projecting the image – in synch with the moving camera – in the 360-degree radius on the cylinder’s inner wall. Therefore, during the viewing, one rotates to the same degree and experiences a state of spatial disorientation. The work allows a cartography of ambivalent situational nuances to materialize, on whose matrix the collected projections of greed, expectation, and various emotional states really do take place in the psyche of the figures.
The missing part is by nature a peculiarity of the medium of video (as with film) since it calculates the laziness of the human eye, too slow to perceive as such the stringing together of individual images. Aware of this technical fact, Andrea Loux expands on the possibilities of using the missing part as an element for carrying and creating meaning in her work.
Kathrin Becker, Kuratorin und Leiterin des Video-Forum Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin
From: Andrea Loux – Räume, Geschichten – edition fink – 2004