proxy pétillant

On a frigid January afternoon in London, Julie Béna and I took a walk around Bunhill Fields Cemetery, located just on the fringes of the buzzing Shoreditch district. Encircled by the towering uniformity of glassy office buildings, hipster-filled bars, and commercial Food & Beverage chain businesses, I was surprised at the silence that the contemplative space offered; a welcome respite from a city’s pulsating expectancy. In the cemetery, the seemingly endless routines of work, satiation, and leisure seemed to be suspended and revealed as existential façades. After a pensive stroll, we encountered vested caretakers who were wrapping tombstones in blankets, as if to keep them warm – a tender, considered, if not poetic, gesture that disrupted the city’s alacrity and regularity. This was, they said, part of a conservation process.

For the French historian Michel de Certeau, normalized everyday practices (like walking, reading, or talking) can be tactically reconfigured. These seemingly banal and ignorable practices are far from passive acts of consumption. For instance, readers do not necessarily obey the logic of sequence. Their eyes often improvise and “drift across the page.”¹ Similarly, city commuters often demarcate their own ambulatory paths which stray from those dictated by urban planning. Although, as de Certeau argues, these commonplace activities “remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms” and establishments, they also readily “trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop;”² reminiscent of the deliberate acts of slowness and care by the tombstone conservators in Bunhill Fields Cemetery. Likewise, the politico-capitalistic truancies that de Certeau outlines manifest themselves in Béna’s works, which, in her words, propose “different methodologies to slow down and pay attention to invisible mechanisms in our everyday lives.”³ Our brief stroll through Bunhill Fields proved illustrative of some central concerns in her work, for instance, her concern with alternative rhythms, practices, paradigms, bodies, and sentiments that may go neglected or unnoticed.

The cemetery is located at a walking distance from Kunstraum, a non-profit art space that engages with its surrounding neighbourhood, comprised predominantly of public housing units. Given the Kunstraum’s penchant for exhibiting experimental performance and time-based artistic practices, it is apropos that Béna had inaugurated her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom there just the night before our walk in the cemetery, as her practice originates from performance and finds productive and intriguing tributaries in video, animation, sculpture, installation, and research-based texts. Béna’s exhibition at Kunstraum was inspired by the potent liminality of the Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where William Blake and thousands of other nonconformists, writers, and radical thinkers like Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan are buried. The exhibition featured a new installation and animation film titled The Jester and Death (2019): a sequel to Anna & the Jester in Window of Opportunity (2019), which was exhibited in 2019 as part of Béna’s solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris.

In these multimedia works, Béna strategically deploys the jester as a double, an avatar, a deceptively light-hearted substitute through which she critically comments on social and political issues. The jester’s jokes, playfulness, and humour are tactical proxies through which Béna sublimates urgent and serious topics including, but not limited to, gender and sexual politics, socio-cultural hierarchies, precarious labour, and the insidiousness of cultural commodification. In his play King Lear, Shakespeare conjectures that “jesters do oft prove prophets,” referring to the instructiveness of a jester’s seemingly inane behavior. Jesters often straddle the fine line between comedy and tragedy, serving as secondary foils to a narrative’s protagonists. But it is precisely their foolishness that uncovers social mores and directs viewers to the moral of the story.

Like other works in her oeuvre, The Jester and Death elucidates some pertinent issues that Béna tackles through the comic relief of the jester-as-double. In an interview with curator Laura Herman for her exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Béna articulates that “the idea of the double—what is hidden or revealed, what is “in front” and “behind” the stage—was [her] reality until [she] turned 25 years old.” Béna’s interest in chameleonic personalities began from childhood. She was an actress from the ages of 4 to 15, balancing school in the day with theatre performance at night. Later on, as an adult, Béna studied at Villa Arson, a fine art school, while working night shifts as a barmaid in clubs to support herself. For Béna, these personae were “inseparable…invisible to each other and nonetheless dependent on each other for their existence.”⁶

Uncoincidentally, in her practice, Béna transforms into different characters and inhabits expanded worldviews and narratives. As identities become increasingly politicized and polarized, and with good reason, Béna’s practice is a timely reminder to maintain the fluidity of subject positions. Labels, often used for reductive promotional branding, are not as interesting to her as effusive and complex expressiveness. For example, in Have you seen Pantopon Rose? (2017), a video work that originated from an eponymous performance, Béna theatrically re-enacts the character of Rose Pantopon, a minor, forgotten protagonist in William S. Burroughs’ novel, Naked Lunch. Mentioned only in a single sentence in Burroughs’ novel, Béna took notice and delved further to discover who this inexplicable character was, who she could be. Over Skype, Béna tells me that “she became me, and I became her.”⁷ Personas were mixed: one real and contemporaneous, another fictional and from the past. Reality and surreality are separated by nary a sliver of existence. But are these divisions as concrete and absolute as we think? In the video, Béna brings to life a mute Rose Pantopon, symbolically silenced in history’s records. As a choir of three performers asks her probing questions, Béna, embodying Pantopon’s historical erasure, pantomimes with exaggerated facial reactions and a plastered, enthusiastic grin, rather than responding straightforwardly with words. Advertisements marketing glossy condominiums intersperse these questions, their hyper-smooth sheen underscoring Béna’s saccharine embodiment of Rose Pantopon.

What does this seemingly perfect veneer conceal? Teasingly, the final interviewer asks Rose/Béna: “How do you know I’m real?”, responding to her unanswered question with an equally cryptic claim: “I’m not real. Just like you Rose. I come to this reality. You came for a dream. A time ago.” Reality as a singular phenomenon does not hold steady in Béna’s practice. Dancing robotically in a black jumpsuit, Béna and an invisible narrator repeatedly sing that Rose Pantopon is “not a trick…not a song…it’s a mirage.” Similarly, in Anna and the Jester in the Window of Opportunity, the Jester is a representational proxy for a combination of two figures: Béna herself and Anna Morandi, an 18th Century anatomist and wax modeler. Béna first encountered Morandi’s wax sculptures at the science museum of the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna. Speaking about this particular manifestation of the Jester, Béna ponders: “Anna and the Jester function as one and the same person. Sometimes I wonder if Anna is the Jester, and the Jester is Anna, and if I’m the Jester, then who is Anna? Am I finally Anna?”⁸ Is one more ‘real’ than the other?

Behind a façade of shine, mechanical beauty, and perfection, Béna intricately weaves together different cognizant selves, literary narratives, and asynchronous temporalities, using storytelling as a means to question where authenticity, authority and power lie. This aesthetic strategy is evident in the animation for Anna and the Jester in the Window of Opportunity, which features Opportunity, an elaborately designed corporate glass desk against which the video’s narrative unfolds. As with the installation components of The Jester and Death, Opportunity exists both IRL (in real life), and in virtual form. Béna’s exhibition at Jeu de Paume was accompanied by a life-sized glass table model. However, in the animation, the table is an entire universe which the Jester traverses on her adventures: she ascends the table’s gargantuan legs, which are transmogrified into stainless steel elevators, and slides down pristine tubes as if on a slide. Through digital animation, a functional table is transformed into an endlessly expanding skyscraper, an entire terrain to be explored.

Béna brings to the fore characters, bodies, and personalities that have been historically marginalized, and grants them complexity and agency. This digital rendering of Opportunity houses the Mermaid, the Groom, and the Cyclops: three of the jester’s interlocutors in the video who are modelled after Morandi’s wax fetuses of stillborn or biologically deformed babies. The Mermaid, for instance, is a floating apparition with a tail, the Groom has two extra pairs of hands, and the Cyclops a shiny reflective gazer for eyes. But rather than fixate on or exoticize these differences, Béna gives voice and form to forgotten, unwanted, and invisibilized figures who are unassimilable by society’s normative standards of being. Digitality proves a useful medium where the excitement of subjective ambivalence and plurality plays out. Béna says of her animated characters like the jester: “I didn’t want to embody them or to project them into the “real world.”…[Through animation] I could make them speak and act but they would always remain somewhere else, in their own world.”¹¹ Reminiscent of Nakamura’s argument, the digital realm, rather than a ‘real’ life of flesh and bodies, has the potential to be a social arena, a place of greater subjective possibilities and interactions.

Digitality therefore allows Béna to represent bodies and worldviews that do not yet exist within comprehensible and narrow categories. Ascending in an elevator with the jester, the Groom muses about existential questions: “Does the existence square with the prior understanding of the subject? Have you stretched your existence enough to help you solve your problem?” These esoteric questions shore up Béna’s fruitful use of digital technology as an artistic medium to expand the registers of visual representation to include non-normative subjects. Opportunity, a matrix perceived to be utilitarian, industrially and efficiently produced, and regularized, in fact allows multiple possibilities and is inhabited by bodies that have been ostracized by the dictates of society. Glass, once clinically exclusionary, now becomes a home for Others.

Speaking about this work, Béna says: “I offer you something shiny to show you what is fucked up. I offer you some comedy to show you a tragedy. I’m always interested in this double bind.”¹² The blindingly bright and reflective glass surfaces of Opportunity come to mind. For historian Tom Holert, shininess is “characteristic of surface effects, of glamour and spectacle.” It “pretend[s] transparency while offering glistening opacity.”¹³ The asinine exclusivity of superficiality-as-aesthetic warrants attention and analysis. Glass is emblematic of this paradox. The material of choice for corporate skyscrapers, like those that glimmered condescendingly above the unassuming Bunhill Fields Cemetery, glass reveals as much as it conceals. Its material transparency gives only an appearance of accessibility, truth, and authenticity, while blocking access to the inner workings and hierarchies within the structure itself. In Anna and the Jester, Béna turns this paradigm on its head: revealing glass and its infinite transparency as conditionally opaque, using it to house the very entities that it keeps out of its border.

In his book Testo-Junkie, in which he recounts his year-long experience on an unapproved self-prescription of testosterone, Paul Preciado writes that “the real stake of capitalism today is the…entire material and virtual complex participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation, relaxation, and discharge.”¹⁷ In his biopolitical analysis, Preciado argues that the neoliberal pharmaceutical industry produces rather than provides for transgender subjects, regulating their dependency on essential, life-giving drugs like testosterone. For instance, testosterone should not be dispensed to those assigned female at birth, or genderqueer and non-binary people who do not wish to undergo sex reassignment surgery. By (mis)using testosterone and experimenting on himself without an end-goal in mind, Preciado asserts his subjective agency through what he calls a “micropolitics of disidentification,” subverting the dictated usage of the very molecules meant to produce and control a whole host of bodies.

Similarly, like Young, Béna, who performs in many of her own videos, is very conscious of her self-presentation, (self-)exploitation, her navigation within a seemingly hierarchical power dynamic, and the labour-intensive preparations for her performances. In the Netflix documentary After Porn Ends Part 3 (2018), which follows the lives of ex-porn stars, one performer wistfully ruminates that “the Internet is completely and totally forever, and you can’t take it [explicit depictions of yourself] back.” Others echo this sentiment. Hotel heiress and 2000s icon Paris Hilton, arguably the (unwilling) originator of the celebrity sex tape genre, recently confessed that she “thought everything was taken away from [her]” when her now infamous sex tape, 1 Night in Paris, was distributed without her prior consent and proliferated into an eternal invasion of privacy. Instead of viewing exposure and precarity as permanent insult and injury, a loss of power and agency, Béna and the performers of her video underscore Wendy Chun’s theoretical proposition for the right to loiter, to be publicly seen, and to engage with a “multitude of exchanges,” physical, virtual, sexual, or otherwise.¹⁸ Like Chun, Béna in this video work mobilizes the openness of orifice and nudity as avenues to channel radical sensitivity and feminist community building. Virality, of sex or contagion (at the point of writing, the COVID-19 coronavirus has elicited global and regional panic and re-ignited racial vitriol), can present opportunities for collective action rather than encourage the perpetration of paranoid persecution.