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On the Threshold of the Visible: The Photographs
of Michal Rovner
Against a backdrop of escalating
violence in the Middle East, Israeli-born Michal Rovner's blurry large-scale
images of people and birds in some unidentified space transform the concept
of border into much more than a geographical line. Rovner has carved out
a zone in which conceptual and geo-graphical space is collapsed into a
realm of the imagination.
Art historian Nicholas Mirzoeff has used the term "intervisuality"
to connote a field of signification, a trait emblematic of Rovner's work.
In the introduction to his anthology, Diaspora and Visual Culture:
Representing Africans and Jews, Mirzoeff recognizes the need for
a multiple viewpoint that is at once contradictory, polyphonic, and utopian.
Mirzoeff notes that "the diasporic visual image is necessarily intertextual,
in that the spectator needs to bring extratextual information to bear
on what is seen within the frame in order to make full sense of it …
both within and beyond the intent of the producer of that image."(1)
Accordingly, the viewer should consider Rovner's body of work in its totality.
Comprising canvas, paper, and film, with paint, ink, computers, still
and video cameras, her oeuvre defies classification by medium. In video
installations, feature-length films, photographs, and paintings, Rovner
has created images that hover in a liminal space: between inside and outside,
fiction and reality, life and death. Undoubtedly informed by experiences
of war over entitlement to homeland, Rovner's work connotes exile, migration,
and displacement.
Shot in 1996 along the border between Israel and Lebanon, Rovner's first
film, Border, uses footage from three sources: the artist herself,
a professional camera crew, and the commander of the border. Employing
all the trappings of a documentary - the cinéma vérité
style of a hand-held camera, interviews with insiders such as local residents
and soldiers, ambient sounds - Border is anchored to the border
as a specific point in time and place. However, through extensive editing
and reworking of footage on the computer and in the darkroom, as well
as through layering and cutting sounds of gunfire, helicopter blades,
and wind swooshing over the microphone, Rovner undermines any stable appropriation
of the border as understandable space. Her use of the telephoto lens,
which obliterates any sense of distance and three-dimensionality, contributes
to a flattening of her images and, as Parveen Adams has noted, "achieve[s]
a certain collapse of the relation of objects to space."(2) Adams
further suggests that Rovner has created "a space without perspective,
without a vanishing point, without a horizon, for the border interiorises
the horizon within itself."(3) This kind of floating weightlessness
has been a persistent element in Rovner's work for the past fifteen years.
For her multi-part photographic series One-Person Game Against Nature
from the early 1990s, Rovner hired lean teenage boys to swim and float
in the Dead Sea. The figures in the final photographs were reduced to
primal imprints, barely recognizable as human beings. Suspended in emptied
fields of color, the boys appear to be flying or falling. Rovner achieves
her effect not only by photo-graphing her subjects from a great distance,
sometimes directing them by phone from as far away as one kilometer, but
also by manipulating her negatives and videotapes in a variety of ways.
Sometimes Rovner rephotographs images from the television or computer
monitor, or processes them through a copying machine. Other times, she
rephotographs Polaroids, which she then colors and enlarges into her signature
canvases or hazy, unfocused prints of birds in flight or hooded, stooped
figures. Rovner's process is thus characterized by subtraction and erasure,
in which the artist's distance from the original subjects increases with
each generation of manipulation. As the artist herself has noted: "I
make recordings of recordings and make different generations so you lose
something on the way but you gain something else. Like life. I try to
reduce them visually. I try to erase more than I record yet still be left
with the minimum that is necessary."(4) The resulting sense of shrouded
mystery and spirituality in Rovner's work leaves an indelible impression
on viewers and reviewers alike.
Rovner's recent multi-channel video installation, Overhang, and
Projection, Field 1, also feature spaces without perspective
or horizon. While the majority of photographs included in this exhibition
seem to be derived in some distant way from Overhang and
Field 1, original still images do not exist. Field 1.3,
Nun II, and Nun 7, included in the exhibition, are good
examples of the collapse of space mentioned in reference to Border.
It is intriguing in this context to think of the artist's fascination
with flight, which has been noted by several commentators. For instance,
curator and author Sylvia Wolf identified Rovner's early photograph Flying
Rabbit (1988) as "one of the first pictures in which she consciously
tries to simulate flight."(5) Rovner herself has stated that flying
is "about being taken out of context, being detached. It's about
being in between … ."(6) Flight, like Rovner's unidentified
borderland, is a zone of transition, between inside and outside, self
and other, presence and absence. In short, flight is another metaphor
for inbetweenness in Rovner's work. Her images are attempts to describe
an ungraspable reality which lies somewhere between truth and fiction,
on the threshold of the visible.
Such descriptions of Rovner's images bring to mind James Turrell's Ganzfeld
installations, in which he creates perceptual fields where spatial difference
is apparently erased, and where the experience of Euclidean dimensions
is replaced by a sensation of floating adrift in a voluptuous and dimensionless
sea of color. Turrell's personal reference point for this kind of installation
is his experience as a pilot, particularly during flights when weather
conditions create what are known as "lost horizons," or deceptive
spatial illusions that tempt pilots to trust their eyes rather than their
instrument panels. Turrell's intention is to create environments where
"objective" seeing collides with imaginative vision, thus encouraging
an experiential blurring of boundaries in his viewers.
Viewers of Rovner's work may experience a similar boundary blurring. Tate
Gallery curator Frances Morris has described the effect as follows: "Rovner
prises open the gap between what you see, what you know, and what you
feel. There is in all her work this border area, a threshold … to
be experienced through imagination and memory."(7) Rovner's horizonless
photographs create a gap between reference and inference in much the same
way that Turrell's installations wreak havoc on the usually seamless interplay
of experience and interpretation. Where the border should consist of a
line dividing physical space, Rovner's images actually reformulate that
space. Moreover, in some of her photographs, such as Falling in the Field
and Line, a central line bisecting the picture plane only seems to add
to the imagining of limitless space.
Their borders apparently dissolving, Rovner's photographs seem to fluctuate
and gradually change, becoming images of uncertainty in their denial of
focus. This approach to the photographic medium is in direct opposition
to the presumption of veracity, an abiding aspect of our common understanding
of photography. More than any other mimetic medium, photography is presumed
to have an obvious relation to visible reality. In Rovner's work, this
desire for verisimilitude is challenged in such a way that we are forced
to rethink our relationship with borders as a particular geographic sign
system.
In her recent book, Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture,
Irit Rogoff argues that in an age of forced migrations and contested borders,
the language of geography is no longer able to represent the immense changes
that have taken place in a postcolonial and postcommunist world. Instead,
she looks to contemporary artists' approaches to issues of belonging to
reflect the emotional geography of our world. Rogoff suggests that geography
is located foremost in the field of vision. She observes that visual culture
"designates an entire arena of visual representations which circulate
in the field of vision establishing visibilities (and policing invisibilities),
stereotypes, power relations, the ability to know and to verify: in fact
they establish the very realm of 'the known.'"(8) Rogoff discusses
Rovner's film Border at length, seeing the work as an important artistic
intervention. While the issues and topographies of the Israel-Lebanon
border may seem all too familiar from the nightly news, Rogoff nevertheless
views Border as "struggling with the effort to bring the
border into being, into vision, into straightforward acknowledgment."(9)
In that film, as in her later work, Rovner uses a variety of formal and
narrative techniques to convey the complexity of issues related to a particular
region, a disputed borderland. The viewer is left feeling that the border
itself cannot be conceived of, understood, conceptualized, or represented.
The same refusal to present us with a clear and focused image takes place
in Rovner's still photographs. Suggesting the unavoidable relationship
between sight and its failures, Rovner's photographs produce a structure
of blindness that interrupts the authority of vision. Like her pink birds
in flight, Rovner's geography knows no borders.
Andrea Inselmann
Independent Curator and Writer
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