Excerpt from The Ghost of an Exquisite Corpse by David Clark, originally published in Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video, edited by Tom Taylor and Steve Reinke, Joan and Stephen and Monique Ghost Dances reminds us of Freud’s statement that when two people sleep together there are already (at least) six people in the bed. In Montreal artist Monique Moumblow’s work, the imaginary aspects of sexual relationships and the lingering family romance appear both in the conscious fictions she creates and under the surface in her biographical sources. In her 1996 video tape Joan and Stephen, the imaginary dimension of sexual relationships is activated by the invention of Moumblow’s imaginary boyfriend. In previous performance and video work Moumblow had developed a complex love/hate relationship with a fictional alter ego named Anne Russell through works such as the video Liabilities. Liabilities is structured as a series of letters between Anne Russell and Monique. Anne was the name her mother had wanted to give Monique when she was born. Her father prevailed in naming her after a character in a French film. In Joan and Stephen she self-consciously invents her imaginary lover Stephen in a gesture that, like Acconci in Theme Song, both acknowledges and denies the impossibility of the action. Joan and Stephen is set in two locations. The framing story that appears at the beginning and the end of the tape shows a vignette of a family in a small suburban house. A child, sleeping upstairs, gets out of bed to spy through the open ducts on her parents making out in the kitchen below. The mother notices the girl and smiles at her as if inviting her into the sensuality of the family romance. This section, shot on black and white film, uses the conventions of filmic narrative and could be read as a flashback sequence, although there isn’t a direct narrative tie-in to the next section. This section is called “Joan.” Is she the mother or the daughter? Is this fictional or is this a re-creation of a real moment in Moumblow’s life? These questions are left open. The middle section switches to video. Suddenly we feel the effects of the intimacy of the video look in contrast to the distanced third-person point of view offered us in the film section. Using a hand-held camera to record herself, Monique rolls around and flops on a bed talking into a camera, addressing her imaginary boyfriend Stephen. In a series of diary entries or video letters that seem to have been shot over a period of time, Monique describes Stephen to him as if she were conjuring him: he’s tall but not too tall, he has pubic hair, etc. She creates this portrait to convince him of his existence but also creates an image of him for us, the audience. Strangely, we are in the position of the audience and of Stephen. The means of address is personal and yet like Acconci, we–the anonymous audience–are implicated. Monique seems both convinced of Stephen’s existence and in the process of creating him at the same time. If this tape can be seen as a remake of Acconci, it is a remaking of the process rather than the text. Moumblow confronts the camera with the same freshness as Acconci in Theme Song. The intimacy of the video equipment becomes a convincing medium to talk to her fictional characters. Joan and Stephen is a work that hybridizes film and video art conventions but leaves gaps for us to grapple with. Are we to suppose that Monique’s inability to grasp the reality of her situation is caused by the incestuous home she might have grown up in? Does one story necessarily have to tell something of the other? Could it be that the film is a fictional memory, conjured up in a fantasy in the same way that Monique’s fictional boyfriend was? Is Monique’s fantasy life a result of her former omnipotent point of view sanctified by her mother’s acknowledgement of the child’s position as a privileged viewer? The unresolved questions of the tape don’t privilege one reading over another as no discernible frame of what is real is drawn. |
Her, herself & Anne Russell From Ingmar Bergman (in Persona) to Jim Carrey (Me, Myself & Irene), filmmakers have been fascinated with the idea of more than one personality sharing the same skin and bones. But no one has made it more effortlessly understandable than Monique Moumblow. The reason is basic. Where the others have been working on the situation as outsiders looking in, Moumblow works with it from the inside out. She is the other woman she wants to be. The 29-year-old video-maker brings to her first solo Toronto show tonight at Cinecycle four videos and the promise of a live performance piece. She’s also bringing an alter-ego named Anne Russell, who’s the central character in one of the longer video pieces, Liabilities: The First 10 Minutes (1993). You get quite a clear picture of Russell. Five years older than Moumblow, she’s also a bit flashier. The fact that Russell and Moumblow are one and the same–at least when it comes to sharing corpuscles–shouldn’t in any way cloud your understanding of just how different the two are. Anyone not knowing in advance about Moumblow’s alter-ego will catch on quickly enough in Liabilities when Moumblow explains to the camera how Russell, supposedly away on a trip, mailed her a letter from London, England, although the postmark is from Montreal, Moumblow’s own hometown. The kicker here is not in catching on to Moumblow’s secret, but how easily Moumblow makes you accept Russell’s presence in the film. Indeed, much of what happens in Liabilities mirrors what happened when Russell first arrived in Moumblow’s mind and life. “I was in art school in Nova Scotia when I had my first performance with Anne Russell,” Moumblow said recently. (Note: It’s not “as” Russell but “with” Russell). “She (Russell) rented a hotel room in Halifax and put up posters around town about a lecture that she was going to give. People came to the lecture, but they were disappointed because it was more personal than academic.” Moumblow’s fascination with the duality of things is found elsewhere. In Joan and Stephen (1996), Moumblow creates an imaginary boyfriend, Stephen, who happens to be whoever is looking at her on the screen or video monitor. Three Waltzes (1998) is more of a break-through. Actual couples appear in its three short segments. Sleeping Car (2000) takes things further. Against grainy gray video shot during a VIA rail trip, Moumblow superimposes Swedish dialogue spoken by actress Ingrid Thulin in Bergman’s soul-chilling 1963 film, Winter Night. Added to this mix are Moumblow’s own subtitles. They relate to the images you see, but have little to do with what Thulin is saying. As always, Moumblow makes effortless sense of these mind-bending complications. |