Once upon a time someone might have sat in a kitchen chair at the table...a mother, a daughter, perhaps the whole family gath-ered for a meal. Adriane Little’s installation, Phantom Pains of Amputation violently severs everyday objects from that nostalgic familiar scene as well as from the fabric of memories that might have provided a link to past experience. The installation evokes the comforting scene only by denying access to it; it preserves it only by negating it. A severance as violent as an amputation, repeated, incorporated into the work of art. The seven chairs, painted in sterile, hospital-like white paint, are empty, or almost empty: they hold the script instead of bodies. Arranged in an eye shaped semi-circle, they embrace absence in a perfect geo-metrical composition. Someone might sit on them, even though these objects do not invite intimate contact; in fact, their haunt-ing aura arises out of almost brutal denial of intimacy. A simple gesture of sitting down becomes an act of usurpation and oblit-eration. The body of a stranger would deface the writing on the chair, erasing thus the anonymous trace left by another body. As

the compulsively repeated enigmatic line-- “mother can’t stop the writing on the walls”–suggests, these chairs are imprinted with the trace of the lost maternal body. Within the context of the installation, the chairs unfold into substitute pages, whose emptiness is so unbearable that it has to be covered and yet preserved at the same time. On this substitute page, a single sentence writes itself, can’t stop writing itself, until it covers all the chairs twice over. In a parody of self-reflection, writing turns upon itself, writes upon itself, almost obliterating its read-ability. Another startling gesture of the refusal of access: the circularity of self- reflection, which should make the subject at home with herself, turns within the space of the artwork into the impersonality of a line erasing itself in the act of repetition. And we, the viewers, cannot stop reading. By going in circles, we extend the line into infinity...unless we violently interrupt its un-folding by sitting down. The installation catches us in the move-ment of the compulsive repetition of a traumatic event, both re-enacted and transformed into the visual rhythm of the poetic

Phantom Pains of Amputation (Home), 2004

Videoo Stills

composition in space. The traumatic past, which the installation evokes, cannot stop repeating itself, invading and eroding the lived present, traumatizing the subject again and again, and yet evading cultural and personal memory. The traumatized subject-as Freud suggests,i and the numerous trauma theorists repeat after him-- continuously relieves the painful past as a present occurrence, just as the patient continues to feel the pain in her amputated limb. The traumatic event, which has failed to regis-ter itself in the lived experience, destroys the very distinction be-tween the past and the present, between the experience and its memory. According to Cathy Caruth, the temporal predicament of trauma can be described as a belated or missed experience, which, because it shatters the very possibility of experience, does not stop repeating itself.ii In the installation, the traumatic repetition of the maternal loss compels the reproduction of the identical chairs and the movement of writing itself. How can we read this strange sentence-- “mother can’t stop the writing on the walls”-- turning upon itself and against itself in the process

Phantom Pains of Amputation, 2004Installation View

of its endless replication? Is it the mother who, like a ghost, is compelled to write as if against her will, who can’t stop writing the symptomatic effects of her disappearance? Or, on the con-trary, is it something else that writes itself despite the mother’s wish to stop it? Now that she is dead, the writing is on the wall, for all to see, she can’t stop it, can’t hide the secret any more. Like a line written upon another line, the sentence doubles itself internally, one sense excluding and evoking the other, a repli-cation enacting the conflicting relation between writing and the maternal body. What kind of traumatic secrets does maternal absence reveal, what kind of revelations does her death make impossible? Displaced into the space of the gallery, the “writ-ing chairs” both hide and betray painful maternal secrets to the gaze of the viewers. A defiant disclosure that jealously guards the impossibility of its revelation. As if in a supplement to the obscurity of the writing on the chairs, the revelation of the secret comes from the artist’s statement, an exorbitant text which ex-ists both within and without the space of art: “While investigating

mother can’t stop the writing on the walls (Hebrew), 2004

the death of my mother, who died when I was seven [I discov-ered] the erasure of Jewish identity within my family.” In her statement, the artist speaks about the contradiction between the hidden, unknown Jewish identity of her mother and the Serbian Orthodox tradition in which she was raised: “The contradiction between these realities has left me as a cultural orphan.” This exorbitant confession links in a metonymic sequence a person-al traumatic event–the death of the mother-- to other traumatic events of the catastrophic Jewish history. Behind the script of this personal loss we uncover the remains of immigrant scripts, scripts of diaspora and the loss of cultural belonging. In con-trast to the directness of the statement, the composition of the installation evokes the traces of these multiple scripts of loss. One superimposed upon another, only through an insertion of a foreign language, Hebrew, it turns out upon a closer inspection of the writing on one of the chairs. Instead of a revelation, an awkward rendition of the English sentence into Hebrew signals an inassimilable foreignness despite the clumsy fidelity to the

Phantom Pains of Amputation (Public Library), 2004Video Stills

literal sense. This act of translation, word by word as it were, betrays the traumatizing secret of the hidden Jewish identity of the dead mother by writing it in the language unknown not only to the daughter but also to the mother herself. Although not passed from the mother to the daughter, the broken transmis-sion of the hidden identity cannot stop writing itself, cannot stop bearing witness to its erasure. The intrusion of the foreign writ-ing disrupting the compulsive flow of the native tongue makes us speculate about other languages, for instance Serbian in the case of the artist, obliterated by the bottomless melting pot of English. Languages no longer spoken, lost somewhere in the second or third generation of immigrants, who willingly or by necessity subjected themselves to the colonizing power of Eng-lish. Which one of them is the mother tongue? Was there ever a single mother tongue? These questions undercut any nostalgic fantasy of cultural belonging without alienation, of maternal inti-macy without separation, and yet they also indicate the artist’s search for a different mode of the relation to the maternal body

Phantom Pains of Amputation (B’Nai Shalom), 2004Video Stills

and cultural memory, to difference and similarity, to foreign-ness within and foreignness without. Perhaps this different mode the mother/ daughter relation can be called an interval orproximity, to use Luce Irigaray’s terms,iii the terms, which sug-gests both nearness and disconnection, contact and division. In the context of the installation, such proximity is created through the configuration of image, objects, texts. At its center is the jux-taposition between the video panels resting against the wall and the composition of the chairs. If we look at the chairs, read their text, and especially if we sit on them, we cannot see the video panels, but we hear nonetheless its sound. And if we look at the video, we leave the chairs behind, but we see one of them reappearing again on the screen, this time next to the figure of the daughter sitting on the curb of the sidewalk. The video is thus positioned as both an improper instance of and a substitute for “the writing on the wall,” to which the text on the chairs so obsessively refers. This filmic writing on the wall inscribes the daughter’s proximity to the empty maternal space, and at the

Installation View

same time repositions that proximity in the virtual public space, in the midst of the anonymous traffic of cars and strangers. In one of the video panels, we see the silent daughter sitting in front of a funeral home, reading a book about Jewish rituals. Perhaps she is learning about different funeral rites, which should have been performed but did not take place. The image of the daugh-ter facing her personal and cultural losses is repetitively defaced by the passing cars. In another video panel, her silent read-ing is pierced by screams of a small girl that could be read as coming from one of the houses in the background–it is the ig-nored voice of another that echoes one’s own past. Through the juxtapositions of its divergent elements and media, the in-stallation enacts different modalities of proximity: intimacy/ in-difference, nearness/otherness, connection/separation, neither one nor the other. As the artist puts it in her statement, “I remain neither Serbian nor Jewish nor daughter but exist as the rem-nants and residue in between.” What happens when the repeti-tion compulsion of the traumatic loss is repeated in the work of

mother can’t stop the writing on the walls (English), 2004

art? Adriane Little’s installation both participates in this painful compulsion and at the same time transforms it. By absorbing traumatic repetition into its own configuration, Phantom Pains of Amputation, confronts us with the necessity and the impossibil-ity of translation. Traumatic event and its symptomatic inscrip-tion on the body; the displacement of the bodily inscription on the skin of the chair; one language interrupting the flow of another; the scream and the text, the image and the text; all of these instances are acts of translation. They repeat, betray, and transform the loss into a prosthetic “installation” of an impossi-ble experience. And thus perhaps make mourning and proximity possible.

Ewa Plonowska ZiarekComparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo

Notes:

i Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961) 12-13.ii Cathy Caruth, Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1996) p.4.ii Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 14-19.

Phantom Pains of Amputation (Colonial Memorial Chapel), 2004

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DVD – Phantom Pains of Amputation

Initial Preview (labeled start here)

Extending Viewing / soundGallery Walkthrough

Phantom Pains of Amputation (Home); (Colonial Memorial Chapel); (Congregation B’Nai Shalom); (Library)(Serbian Orthodox Church)

all original running times 7-minute loop

Phantom Pains of Amputation (Serbian Orthodox Church), 2004

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This catalogue been printed to accompany the Exhibition Phantom Pains of Am-putation on view at the Carnegie Art Center from March 25 - May 15, 2004. This event is made possible by the Tonawandas’ Council on the Arts, the members of the Carnegie Art Center, the City of North Tonawanda, Hadley Exhibits, Inc., the Allentown Village Society and in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts (a state agency). The artist would also like to acknowledge artist and intellectual support from Jolene Rickard, Gary Nickard, Joan Copjec, Deborah Jack, Reinhard Reitzenstein and Sylvie Bélanger. Catalogue Design: Adriane Little, Documenta-tion: Soyeon Jung and Adriane Little, Installation Assistance: Jason Sokolowski and Jenn Ward. Essayist: Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. Printed by DPI Communications, Inc., Buffalo NY. © Carnegie Art Center, 2005.

additional information and artwork can be found at www.AdrianeLittle.com

Carnegie Art CenterTonawandas’ Council on the Arts240 Goundry StreetNorth Tonawanda NY 14120www.carnegieartcenter.org

Adriane Little is a visual artist and educator who received her M.F.A. from the University at Buffalo, where she currently teaches. Her work investi-gates trauma and ritual through an interrogation of a presence and absence of the maternal body. The translation of this space is both literal and meta-phor or the architecture of an ephemeral maternal space that is embed-ded within what she calls the matrilineal ghost. Her recent solo exhibitions include Call Home Mothers Dead at Big Orbit Gallery and When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk at CEPA Gallery within the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s expanded Biennial Beyond/In Western New York for 2005. Her work has also been included in several group exhibitions; including Normal/ Abnormal: Bodies and Minds at Woman Made Gallery and a 3-person exhi-bition at the Harris Gallery – University of LaVerne, LaVerne California that is upcoming in the fall of 2005.