Piss Eloquent

ArtForum, Feb, 2000 by George Baker

It is not polite to speak of the crotch of the question.

ERIK SATIE

YOU ARE PUSHED UP CLOSE AND TIGHT AGAINST THIS BODY, a man's body, held by a camera that clings to its object like a pair of too-small trousers to the skin beneath them. You are staring at a crotch. Fragmented by the camera's inert pressure, this is a body robbed of any sense of boundary, caught--like the trunk of an upended tree--at one of the sites of its own splitting, displaying the shadowy fold of zipper and seam as displaced echoes of the body's own rupture. You notice, of course, the penis, cradled in the snug material but also pushing against it, the full promise of its phallic burgeoning into form thwarted as well as belied by the blue-gray expanse of fabric melting into a similarly gray background. You face an image almost without figure, a formal condition that emerges as the lethargic analogue of this body without borders--bland, monotonous, and monochrome.

But then a wet spot emerges. It quickly spreads, amorphous and glistening, only to be joined by a second stain slightly further down the leg. The video assimilates the medium's inherent temporal unfolding not to any narrative schema but to the simple action of a man pissing his pants in real time. And as the two stains merge into one, continuing their inexorable spread, the liquid suddenly breaks through the surface of the pants, first a single drop, then several more, promptly accumulating into warm, gushing streams of semi-transparent, shimmering fluid that pours down the surface of the screen. This cascade provides the obvious climax of the video, as well as its eventual denouement: the trousers' slow reabsorption of the liquid, the rebalancing of an initial excess, the diffident expansion of the stain into a moist, tepid indistinction, barely set off from the rest of the pants.

And with this, Knut Asdam's video Untitled: Pissing, might be seen as prefiguring almost all the concerns of the larger project that this young Norwegian-born, London-educated, but New York--based artist has been elaborating over the last five years. The video's art-historical references are obvious and dense: We think of other male artists who have shown us their genitals (Robert Morris's I-Box); we think of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Bruce Nauman's rearticulation of the readymade as task performance (Self-Portrait as a Fountain); we are meant, I believe, to think of the marking procedures of Jackson Pollock and their send-up by Andy Warhol in his "Oxidation" paintings. But rather than embrace a simple thematics of urination--a common enough proposal, really, in recent art--Asdam's video enacts a type of formal devolution, an operation rather close to what Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois would subsequently define as the workings of the informe in its modality of entropy. For if Untitled: Pissing seems to invoke a literally phallic unification of the visual field, it simultaneously presents the phallus as a "part object"--a bodily fragment whose anarchic equivalencies undo both corporeal unity and fixed identity--recoding the masculine body as a producer of flows and locating the aesthetic gesture not in the realm of mastery but in a loss of bodily control. And rather than produce some emissary of the Phallus in its guise as bounded, distinct form, this loss of control spawns a type of ambivalent visual mark that leaches into a state of nondifferentiation: the ghost, as it were, of form.

Asdam would immediately transfer the procedures of Untitled: Pissing to a series of ongoing video works, all given some version of the title "Psychasthenia." The reference is to Roger Caillois's infamous 1935 essay "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," in which the dissident Surrealist suggested that the phenomenon of insect camouflage should be compared to a type of schizophrenic psychic condition characterized as a "depersonalization by assimilation to space": an entropic loss of distinctions, of ego boundaries, of any bodily sense of inside and outside. At first, in Psychasthenia 2, 1997, As dam would replicate the immobile, fragmenting stare of Untitled: Pissing, focusing our attention now on the forms of corporate architecture as opposed to the male body. Once again, though, we are staring at something like an architectural part object, at what Asdam, thinking of Untitled: Pissing, has called "an architectural crotch shot": a tightly framed image of what seems to be the corner of a mirrored glass build ing. It soon becomes apparent, however, that we are gazing at the disjunctive seam between two separate glass towers, presented to our vision as if they were one. And again, the rigid girder structure of the two buildings invokes the specter of a properly phallic, bounded form, only to be immediately subverted by the myriad, liquefying reflections of the mirrored glass walls--a mode of visual doubling undermining the givens of formal organization that was precisely Caillois's larger concern. The video's arrangement of the harsh armature of these two buildings also inevitably summons up the gridded application of a traditional perspectival system. The system, however, doesn't work, as the uncanny sense of optical illusion and anamorphic distortion generated by the piece constantly flips one's reading of the grid from ordered recession to anarchic projection, disturbing the perspectival system's anchoring of what Caillois would have called the subject's "coordinates," and thus the ability to place oneself withi n a given space. Such uncertainty would only be redoubled by Asdam's later reconfiguration of the video as Psychasthenia 2+2, 1997-98, in which the entire image would be folded over on itself, doubled internally like some sort of gargantuan inkblot, creating a new set of architectural seams and an increasingly disorienting visual fluctuation. When I first saw the video as part of the "Nuit Blanche" exhibition in Paris in 1998, it was called Psychasthenia 3. Projected in such a way that the image was disrupted by a constant but erratic stroboscopic flickering, it was paired, on that occasion, with a video of an open flame, suggesting not some sort of revolutionary call for an architectural conflagration, but rather seizing on fire as the prototypical engine of the dynamic of expenditure, as the visual enactment of perpetual flux and the unending dissolution of formal boundaries.