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Tea and Home Movies
by Christine Stoddard
When I was a young girl I had a fascination with looking in other people’s windows. When walking or driving the streets of my suburban neighbourhood, I would surreptitiously gawk at the living rooms I could see through open curtains. A kind of adolescent voyeurism, these windows became little movie theatres in which I staged the banalities of daily living and imagined the dramas that, at the time, seemed the limit points of my future life. What was that man eating for dinner? What television program were those kids watching? What was that woman thinking sitting quietly on the couch? Did any of them know I was watching? What did they want me to see? What role would I play if they invited me in?
That perverse pleasure of a glimpse into the private world of another is, ostensibly, the topic of Cheryl Sourkes’ recent exhibition Featured Webcam at the twenty+3 projects gallery in Manchester. Borrowing digital imagery from an anonymous community of internet webcams, Sourkes exhibition raises provocative questions about practices of surveillance, the performativity of domestic space, and the curious economies of public/private interaction.
Featured Webcam is composed of two works: Home Cams, a large format book of digital thumbnail images arranged like a computer screen’s hyperlinks to various webcams in the community, and Private Life, a thirty minute DVD of footage compiled from various individual webcasts. The gallery itself, located in a quiet residential neighbourhood, is the converted front room of artist-curator, Heidi Schaefer. The site adds another layer of complexity: instead of peeking in Schaefer’s front window—through which I can see a book laid out and a tiny television screen mounted on the wall—I am invited in and welcomed as a guest. Heidi shows me around the exhibit, chatting about the work, and offering me a cup of tea. My voyeuristic pleasure, and the anonymous critical distance usually given the traditional gallery-goer, is undermined as I become implicated in the intimacy of her gallery/home and the private lives on display.
The book, Home Cams, is a coffee table-sized work containing hundreds of enlarged thumbnail images, six lined up in a row across each page. Arranged in series of loose similarity, either in terms of content—particularly the splayed genitals of men and women, as it is on much of the web—or similar formal and elements like colour or composition, each page is like a large white computer screen where text indicates links to “Previous…1 2 3 4 5…Next.” It reads like a consumer catalogue of desires and aesthetics whose purchase is interrupted by the materiality of the book itself. The blurry and pixilated quality of much digital webcam imaging lends the pictures a certain tactility and luminescence. Like a kind of skin, the pages themselves call to be touched, caressed, regardless of whether they are an image of a man’s crotch, a rumpled bed full of children’s toys, or the reach of an arm to the edge of the frame. It is a desire that Sourkes exploits to the point of abstraction in some pages of the book where a thumbnail is enlarged to fit the whole page. Here, the picture is rendered almost painterly: canvases pulsing with black snow and squares of white and blue light, red angles and landscapes of movement of shape, line and colour. In this sense, Home Cams is a both a body and an aesthetic artifact. One whose erotic exchange is potentially polluting…which may explain the puzzling presence of a pair of latex gloves placed casually to the side of the book.
Private Life is perhaps the more interesting of the two pieces in that it enacts the complex interaction between being and performing, between private and public space, and the curious oscillation between display and surveillance that webcam technology activates. The DVD is a silent video loop of excerpts from thirteen different webcams that build into a life narrative of quotidian existence: beginning with the waving branches of an empty garden, the video moves through images of young to old, sleeping eating, dancing, bowling, ending with an old woman sitting in an armchair. Sourkes, in her artist statement, claims, “One can see many things in the mirror webcams hold up to the world, but everything that appears is in a unique dimension—neither the real world nor the virtual one, but a space in which both participate.” The work formally enacts that gap. A collection of thirteen lives from across the globe, the narrative never congeals into one life cycle; structured as sequenced stills captured from multiple webcams, movement is evoked but never completely fluid; perspective shifts from landscape, to medium shot, to conversational portrait, to view out a window, never resolving into one contained viewpoint and even occasionally reversing the inside/outside view expected of a private camera. And, most importantly, the players various ways of engaging (or not engaging) the camera creates an curious disjuncture between voyeuristic pleasure and intimate participation.
These multiple levels of performativity in Private Life call attention to the gallery viewer’s gaze (via the webcam itself) as not merely a controlling, surveilling gaze, but one which is actively determined through the image’s own practice of image-making. The persons depicted in Private Life, whether explicitly or implicitly, perform for the camera and address a (known) viewer. Their webcasts are made for a community of viewers, friends, family, and acquaintances, but have now been recontextualized by Sourkes. And it is the awkwardness of not necessarily being the (intended) viewer that points to the way public modes of being invade even our most private spaces. Even in those excerpts where the individual seems to perform the most private act—masturbation—privacy fails to accrue…quite literally in this case where the man’s penis remains flaccid despite his attentions (and ours). The hand and penis remain framed by public modes of viewing: the camera, the web, the home movie, the gallery… the host who interrupts the potential privacy of aesthetic pleasure to ask if I would like more tea. It is this public intimacy that is the most successful part of Sourkes Featured Webcam. It is the (dis)comforting potential of inviting the stranger inside your home and of being invited in.
Christine Stoddard is a PhD candidate at the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester.
