CONFIDENTIAL
Brooklyn,January 2008
(Written as part of a collaboration with Eve K Tremblay for her show, "Becoming Fahrenheit 451" at BUIA gallery, NYC)
Confidential
For Internal use only
EKT- a case history
I met E. in Berlin in October 2007. I came to her studio apartment with LMT, a curator and art writer who introduced us. This is where I first heard of her project “Becoming Fahrenheit 451”. She told me about it briefly and that session was mostly spent on initial introductions. She mentioned on this occasion she was having back pains and asked LMT and I to help her lift a heavy print. I found this significant at the moment, and I would later find the back pains a recurring theme in our relationship. E was quiet but seemed eager to continue our conversation. We were to meet again in Oslo the following month.
We met again at L. gallery in Oslo, this time for the occasion of a group show, curated by LMT, she was participating in. Her contributions to the show included two photographic prints, a television filled with books and a performance. The performance was scheduled to be a live memorization session of Ray Bradbury’s book “Fahrenheit 451”. E had been deliberating greatly on how to make this appearance and was very reluctant to call it a “performance”. This term traces back to the meeting place of fine art and theater, which is crucial to understanding E’s work in a wider cultural context.
Coming back to the session, E did not speak much; she was deep in thought and pre-occupied with the terms of her performance, which was scheduled for three days from then. It was planned to happen in a forest nearby, where she would be watched by visitors to the gallery who were invited to “hunt” for her, as her exact location was undisclosed. The choice of location had much to do with the narrative of the book and the film “Fahrenheit 451”, but also connected back to other themes in E’s work and to the rustic landscape in which she grew up. On this occasion she asked me to become “a book person”, meaning to memorize a book of my choice and be somehow part of her project. She made it clear I would not have to memorize a whole book right away “because that is unreasonable”. Thinking now about this statement, it occurs to me- E was telling me something she was attempting to do was unreasonable. She was trying to protect me from this endeavor, which she had fully taken on herself. At any rate, I agreed and said I would choose M. Kundera’s “Immortality”. (I never completed this mission, another thing to think about in my own analysis.)
Since this was a stressful time, full of turbulence, we met every day until the opening day, so E could work through the decision making process. At this point it is crucial to state E’s back pain returned and was bothering her to such an extent that we spent the next session with her lying down on the floor and me sitting on a window sill behind her. She did not wish to speak directly and only asked me to sit with her while she memorized. It is important to note here that this was the precedent for the 50 minute session we would later have in New York, at B gallery. After she was done we sat in silence for a while and then I asked her what would happen if she decided she does not wish to memorized the whole book, does she have to do it, what would happen if she didn’t etc. E responded quite quickly this was not an option, that she had made a decision to finish the memorization and so would be required to go through with it. At this point I noticed we had five minutes left and told E so. She said it was fine, because she didn’t really have anything else to add today. Just before leaving she made a passing remark, jokingly referring to her teenage years in a Catholic boarding school as the reason for her disciplinary commitment to this task.
The next day we met again for the pre-opening event. The back pains were increasing and E asked to come lay down in my place for a while. I allowed it although it was a break in the setting and my place was very messy. The performance was scheduled for the next day, and so was our next session.
I accompanied E, LMT and the gallery owner, RT to the woods the next day. We watched her memorize and then went back to the city. No one but us appeared at the location. It was an intimate moment and E seemed happy with our company.
Back at the gallery, E continued the performance by lying on the floor at the same location where we had talked the previous day. She continued her memorization uninterrupted. This time she did not require my presence. I was asked, however to take pictures of her doing so. I felt this request was, in addition to necessary for documentation reasons, a way to have an accompanying presence, a watching eye.
The next time we met was back in Berlin. We were in a taxi when she suddenly turned to me and confessed that her “real” analyst’s name, back in Montreal was also Gabriela. She spoke of how her project had expanded since our last session in Oslo and that now she is “cheating on Ray Bradbury with other books".
I live in New York and E in Berlin. For this reason we would not meet again until January of 2008, when she came here for a solo show at B gallery in Chelsea. As part of the opening night, E requested we do a whole 50 minute session at the gallery. I was to sit with her while she memorized, underlining what she had forgotten. Until the day of the opening, we would spend our sessions “rehearsing” this process.
E would lie down on the couch and recite R. Bradbury’s book from memory. I sat with my copy, underlining the laps in memory, the repetitions of certain mistakes, the patterns of recalling. It is quite remarkable to see how the mind functions. As E walked up and down the pathways of her memory, certain words were almost always forgotten, certain paragraphs almost erased, only to be recalled at the last moment and retrieved, re-iterated, spoken.
As this was a long-distance relationship of sorts, I decided to write to my supervisor overseas, DJF, asking for her advice. In an interesting turn of events, she seemed quite confused at the somewhat experimental approach I had decided to take with EKT. After a lengthy discussion about the lack of clarity in my role and identity within the setting she suddenly writes: “Maybe I don’t understand anything and I am ruining what is yours. That’s why I am putting aside (?) the problem, maybe there is no problem. Maybe the original thing to do is to come and go within the identities... take everything I say with a grain of salt.” Upon a second reading of my transcripts, she wrote: “...In this second reading I think I understood it better. Furthermore, I no longer see what seemed like coming and going between identities as such. You go on to tell about a process within which, right from the start you serve two functions. Sometimes one prevails and sometimes the other. But at the core, they are both the same facilitating function.”
DF mentioned the American analyst Kohut and his mirroring theory. This seemed incredibly clear sighted on her part, since it is almost the exact same idea as Bradbury speaks of in Fahrenheit 451, in the scene after the two protagonists meet: “...How, like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? “
Back to the opening, E was understandably nervous, as was I, having this be a highly unconventional situ for our sessions. As E explained in the letter she wrote Bradbury and pinned onto the gallery’s wall, she had not, and was possibly not going to, finish memorizing Fahrenheit 451. There was a justification within the book for this decision, although I also find it to be a great progress in E’s ability to contain certain extents of incapability, which her past would not allow. Nonetheless, we agreed to have at least one more session, again at the gallery.
Gabriela Vainsencher