September 7 - January 4, 2015
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA, US
Sometimes one has to take the long way ʹ′round. Lisa Tan’s video Sunsets shows parts of an interview between an anonymous reporter and Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. It is, by all accounts, Lispector’s last appearance before she passed away December 9,1977. We see her reclined in a chair, tired, looking almost pissed-off, as if she really doesn’t want to be there. But then again, she must have been exhausted. She’d been in chronic pain for more than 10 years, since, in 1966, falling asleep cigarette in hand and setting fire to her mattress. The interview, as we see it, is being translated by someone who communicates it to the artist, who in turn writes it down. A person speaks to another person, seen by a third who tells a fourth, who puts it in writing.
Lispector’s first line is, “I think that when I write, I am dead.” She says it in response to a question writer Rainer Maria Rilke was once asked, “If you couldn’t write anymore, would you die?” Death is brought to Lispector by the act of writing. Whether she anticipates death as she writes, or if she is in fact dead as she writes, matters little. Both being dead and forestalling death is to come face-to-face with death. Both being dead and anticipating death is to be ferried by Charon, the question is how far it is to shore. And though we are all, indeed, in the same boat, here it is by all means a particular kind of death. Given that it hinges on a special propinquity, a kinship between writing and death and death and death, it is perhaps the gift of death, as in Jacques Derrida’s second sense when he asked, “How does one give oneself death in that other sense where se donner la mort also means to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination for it?” Possibly, it would be to write to think of death. And, perhaps, to write unto death. To write and think about the death of death.
We, the ones that watch the video, don’t see the whole interview. We hear it, through its multiple layers what the reporter asks, Lispector’s response, the translator’s interpretation and Tan’s keyboard clicking,like echoing echoes. What we see in addition to the interview, because it is a film, so we’re always faced with something, are scenes filmed in Sweden at either 3 a.m. during the summer, or 3 p.m. during the winter—hours of twilight, hours of darkness and light, hours in-between that allude to both endings and beginnings. We’re also faced computer screens that show various planets and stars and universes. They are obviously screensavers, functions of the computer that come into being when it, as it’s said, goes to sleep. But is it also a parable to the idea of something’s ingredient? Suggesting, in some way, that each pixel is a building block for the impenetrable image of space as it takes more than one pixel to make an image?
Texts
Ringborg, Theodor . “Sunsets.” commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.link / pdf