In the 1960 French horror film Les Yeux Sans Visage, (aka Eyes Without a Face) a plastic surgeon kidnaps and murders young women; attempting to graft their faces onto his daughter after her disfigurement in an accident. While largely about the nature of obsession and control, and the danger of love turned toxic, the specifics of the film’s body horror have an unexpected resonance with the most recent addition to our archive. The titular faceless eyes, (which belong to the aforementioned doctor’s daughter, Christiane) offer us a complex, and surprisingly prescient metaphor for our own post-internet image culture.
The face of an anonymous dead woman, stolen from not only its true owner and originator, but the very history and context that gave it meaning, and grafted crudely onto a body it doesn’t belong to, perfectly (if bloodily and hyperbolically) describes the state of a lot of contemporary imagery. While ostensibly created for discovery and connection, the digital networks through which our images, data and social selves now flow, have instead become tools of mediation, exploitation, and dissolution. Image, gaze, reflection, identity, place and history, have all become increasingly divorced from and/or grafted onto one another in our digital spaces, in a grim process that leaves no shortage of bodies (both methaphoric and real) in its wake. And no matter how many times these grafts and transplants are rejected and left to whither, the mad doctors who benefit from the system push ever onward, refining but never reforming.
Whether we become faceless eyes, eyeless faces, or merely one of the bloodied hands between these states, (and indeed most of us have played each of these roles at one point or another) the aftermath is often little more than a waste bin of spare parts and bloodied mush. Image mush, data mush, person mush.
Espelhos Para Olhos Cansados (aka Mirrors for Tired Eyes) is a video performance by Nicole Kouts, which presents a figure wearing ‘lazy glasses,’ (which use angled mirrors to allow their wearer to read or view a screen while reclining) in various states of recumbency. While far more meditative than the frenetic Eyes, Kouts’ piece nonetheless explores the disconnect between eyes and face, as well as between gazer and gazed-upon. Alternating between wide landscape shots, and its reclining figure’s own POV, the work deftly navigates the same complex relations as the film, but without the baggage of that work’s schlock and awe theatrics.
Through the simple injection of two postage stamp sized mirrors, Kouts’ work replaces the garish high contrast gore of Eyes Without a Face with the calm, brightly-lit middle distance that most exemplifies the Neoliberal structure that the world has been enmeshed within since that film’s release. Bloody scalpels and tawdry music stings are replaced with bucolic repose and soothing arcadian skies. No longer is our young Christiane a tragic and conflicted figure, going from unwilling but passive victim to murderous vengeance-seeker. Instead, we are given a figure with no name, no history, and only the scantest of contexts, who sits in languid acceptance of the mediating screens that fill their vision. The mad surgeon’s murderous henchwoman has been upstaged by the simple, unchallenging comfort of a blue sky or lilting pond.
Having learned from their gorey ends in Eyes Without a Face, (I won’t spoil the details, but it involves some very good boys) those who benefit from and push the system forward have pulled back the scalpel, and instead offered us a calming balm for tired eyes. A seamless and near perfect mediation, which leaves only the faintest of scars…
Confession time: I have never seen Eyes Without a Face. I have a general awareness of it through cultural osmosis, and everything else presented here came from my own use of ‘lazy glasses,’ in the form of both Wikipedia and a hazy, decades old memory of the cheap Italian knockoff of the film, titled Atom Age Vampire. and before you ask, it features neither atoms nor vampires. This little (and rather halfhearted) deception is my own attempt at some theatrics. To show just how easily our new networks can cut away context and true experience, in favour of the crude and haphazard stitching together of data and image and cultural reference. I have not seen the film, but it has been seen, and with a minimum of friction I can graft it where and how I please. Mediation and manipulation are now the default.
We are all mad doctors here.
Until next time: So long. Au revoir. Adeus. Ciao.