Teen angle

ArtForum, Jan, 2004 by Bruce Hainley

Witnessing one of Sue de Beer's goth girls intone I'm going to erase myself and you're going to find me everywhere, anyone might consider such states of mind a recent phenomenon--psychic rumblings "explaining" Columbine or Lee Malvo. Yet America has long trafficked in the gothic, been intimate with suicide, doom, and destruction. Long before Poe drugged the consciousness with haunted narratives of the nothingness residing at the cold, dark heart of things, and before Hawthorne allegorized the civil state as Dr. Rappaccini keeping his child alive by rearing her on poison, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards put the populace in the hands of an angry God, spidery sinners dangling between heaven and the ready fires of hell. Today, television necromancer John Edward may try to provide solace instead of burning brimstone, but let's not forget he's allowing anyone who wishes to communicate with the dead: The medium is the message, and the message is we're all caught crossing over, in between. And if you're still not convinced, consider the scholarship of Vampire Lectures author Laurence Rickels, who has augured the erotic, psychic, and social hellmouth potential of the trans-, which America has shifted into overdrive as an ontological raison d'etre: Trans-Am.

In the lovely closing moment of Sue de Beer's most recent video, The Dark Hearts, 2003, a girl in the driver's seat picks up a gloomy boy from his house for a runaway spin to a blue-screen make-out glen. The goth kiddo Adonis takes off his studded and dangling-chain leather collar and puts it around the girl's neck; she takes her double-stranded necklace of fake, pearly beads and embraces his neck with it. They daintily peck each other. A skull decal looks out at the boy from the passenger-side dashboard. The horror? The horror is the world they live in, which necessitates, instead of diary keeping, making "morgue entries" to figure out their lives. This is the world that's been left to them: darknesses transacting in between boy parts and girl parts, in between loving and leaving, in between teen loneliness and adult existence.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

De Beer's teens resonate with those night shades created by the twentieth-level wizard and theoretician of the in-between as a state of being, Joss Whedon, the brilliant maestro of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He found in Buffy and the Scooby gang the fittest embodiments for the tumult of nascent adulthood and (as the show and its characters grew) for the brutality of living in the world, where people die or stop loving or disappear or change in ways never thought possible, where the Scoobys came to understand, as they shape-shifted into their adult selves, that the true horror isn't anything outside but the fractal gruesomeness of dealing with personal demons, psychic slaying often done alone.

De Beer reckons with what it would mean to engage much of the complexity of the show's feminist philosophy lessons and still do something different--using the teenager as both the site of her interests and as her non-site (since non-sites' out-of-contextness situates uncertainty). In her previous photographic and video work, she's played with the teen demotic idiom of horror and gore films, video games, and death metal while skillfully acknowledging artmeisters of such gooey, unstable territories, namely Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy; but she laces her acknowledgement with the angel dust of the feminine and amps up the guys' contingent vulnerability. An early video, Loser, 1997, shows a girl--psychic snapshot of the artist as nerd--seeming to hold her breath, tension created by the not breathing as well as by the disconcerting uncanniness of her look (achieved by the weirdly simple device of having shot herself while she hung upside down--hair tightly wound so as not to spoil the effect--but showing herself right side up). Constricting breathing can heighten orgasm, but in a more directly autoerotic self-portrait de Beer French-kisses a static but blankly blinking video image of herself (Making Out with Myself, 1997), which sounds straightforward enough but becomes stranger and stranger the longer it's watched: Am I you? Are you me? Is there a way out of the whirlpool of the self? Narcissus fell in love with his own reflected image; de Beer images the love-fall into the self and its infinite allegorical (video) loop. Later, she even did time collaborating with Laura Parnes on an unauthorized sequel to McCarthy and Kelley's Heidi, 1992 (Heidi 2, 1999-2000). More recently, in a suite of photo works from 1999-2001, de Beer placed herself, at times maimed, bleeding, and on the run, in large photographic "grabs" from horror video games. No matter the strengths and graces of any of these works, they seem like test drives for her Transel and Gretel, Hans und Grete, 2002-2003.

Guitar solos in bedrooms, tedium in the classroom, and ritual sacrifices in the woods make up most of the "action" in Hans und Grete, in which de Beer deploys crucial, intelligent fictive and "real" examples of teen ontology for her own purposes, shifting even the resonances of her video's title. The two Grimm kids have been split into two pairs--Kip and Kathleen, Seth and Sean--but are played by only two actors. Abstracted, the witch has been transformed into loneliness, her gingerbread cottage--simultaneously a lure, a reprieve from hungers, and a trap--into the distraction of sex. Hans und Grete, like Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), is a double projection, but where Warhol worked with actual groovy twentysomethings (hanging out, waiting, getting fucked up, fucking) as a way of tracing the erotic and political consequence of now, de Beer gazes at teens, fictionalized but emotionally raw, to engage now's affect and mood--trapped in school, testing any way of escape (music, sex, suicide, drugs, mayhem), figures of the parental present in the shadows. Both artists eschew moralizing and pay keen attention to casting, valuing being over acting--not that it's easy to separate the one transmuting into the other and back. Whatever her works' antecedents may be in portraying imaginary teenage wonder and trauma--Harmony Korine's cat killers from Gummo; A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger turning a bed into a vortex of annihilating disappearance; Tomb Raider's collapsing of mental and representational space; Blair Witch's haunted woods; Dennis Cooper's lost muse George Miles's Hamlet-like poetries of indecision--de Beer's trying to figure out what relation these fictions bear to (or what effect they have on) the actual: the pulverizing nonfiction of Kip Kinkle's engulfing, disruptive sadness and of Ulrike Meinhof's unnecessary demise. De Beer's results unsettle: She pares away until her spooky content reveals the natural spookiness of being in the world. At one point in Hans und Grete, the camera travels through a woods at dusk, and the effect is kaleidoscopic and disorienting, anamorphic, as the woods folds into itself. The only sound is of birds and wind, from the Nintendo 64 game Corker's Bad Fir Day, warping nature itself into the sign of everything against nature. It's the bramble of existence and it's a nightmare.