Dancing with the Ghost: An Exercise in Counter-Forensics
Identifying the forensic turn in contemporary popular culture, media theorist Lindsay Steenberg argues that it appears at the intersection between science, the justice system, and the media. In her book, Steenberg asks: "Mediated or tabloid forensic science is an area where academics, journalists and the public are interested in asking the same questions—what effect do programs like CSI have on American culture?" (Steenberg 2013: 102) The obsession with unresolved crime cases, murders, or missing persons has resulted in a rising number of television programs and media content in which the forensic narrative seems to play a central role. The so-called CSI effect testifies to a "confusion over the border zone between fact (scientific, medico-legal, evidentiary) and fiction (televisual, literary, cinematic)" (ibid: 106), which certainly is not a new phenomenon, but which in the post-truth era has got even more radicalized.
Such a conflation of the fictional and factual is at the core of the exhibition Poem for E.L. (or Processing the Violence of Imposed Narratives) by the artist Maya Gurantz. It consists of 7 video projections, one drawing, and a choreographic performance. This audio-video collage and Maya's scheduled live performances of the choreographic process immerse the viewer in a multimedia installation that complicates any attempt at linear storytelling and comprehension. All these elements (video, drawing, dance) set the stage for experiencing the gallery as a space of forensic counter-imagination and a site in which ghosts can reappear and acquire a kaleidoscopic presence.
Maya focuses on the story of the Canadian tourist Elisa Lam, who disappeared in 2013 and was found dead in a water tank on the rooftop of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. If Lam's tragic death was exploited throughout the years and became the plot for many docuseries such as Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel or How to Get Away with Murder, thus becoming another symptom of the CSI effect, then Poem for E.L. intervenes precisely into this exploitative cultural logic that revolves around the endless repetition and mediatized circulation of violence. In other words, the cinematic and choreographic retracing of Lam's haunting body becomes an aesthetic exercise in counter-narration that reveals the patriarchal and colonial gaze embodied in surveillance technologies.
The exhibition evolved over an eight-year research period and encompasses "Elevator Cinema," a video work that includes Maya's meticulous reconstruction of Lam's gestures and movements in an elevator; these were caught on CCTV cameras and subsequently released by the police. In that way, I argue, she challenges the neoliberal scopic and kinetic regime that keeps policing bodies that are erratic, different, and defy the heteronormative order of society. The surveillance footage from the elevator depicts the young Canadian woman from the moment she enters the elevator. What first looks like a choreographed sequence with Lam arriving, entering, and later exiting the elevator (as if hiding from someone or something) turns out to be a series of movements performed in an affective state of fear and anxiety. Unfortunately, these recordings were also the last ones in which Lam was seen alive. After a few days, her family reported her missing, and within a few weeks, her dead body was recovered from a water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel in downtown L.A., where she had been staying. Although the official investigation concluded that Lam, a Chinese-Canadian student from Vancouver, was not murdered but had drowned, the case remained enigmatic and, as such, an ongoing source of speculation and conspiracy theories.
Mobilizing the choreographic apparatus in addition to the video works and drawings, Maya engages in a meticulous frame-by-frame reenactment of Lam's movements inside and outside of the elevator. However, instead of focusing on solving the case, the artist has a different intention. Combining original CCTV footage in which we see Lam with video of her own movements, Maya creates an uncanny cinematic kaleidoscope that is both documentary and fictional. In so doing, she unveils knowledge that cannot otherwise be articulated, one that comes into being as a corporeal affect resisting signification and representation. Furthermore, disrupting the clear borders between documentary testimony and fictional accounts results in suspending mimetic interpretation and leads to the refusal of a linear temporality with clear-cut distinctions between cause and consequence.
The choice to develop the exhibition by combining the media of choreography and video (works: "Codes," "Mad Scene," "Da Vinci Ocean," "Portrait," "Extractions", "Last Walk/Fugue") situates Poem for E.L. at the intersection of visual and performance arts. This, again, can be understood as a conscious and critical attempt to challenge the imposed narrative of Lam's enigmatic behavior and tragic ending. On the other hand, Maya's use of choreography and the durational drawing performance create the aesthetic condition in which it becomes possible to ponder the constellation between corporeality, images, and their (hyper)mediatized echoes and afterlives. The drawing that the artist performed throughout the show is guided by the idea of transforming the original source CCTV footage into a corporeal action. This strategy of reembodying surveillance images also radicalizes the tension between presence and absence, allowing the viewers to experience and move through multiple temporalities.
In his book on the intersections of knowledge, illness (hysteria), and mediality, French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman reveals how the female body in pain is staged and transformed into images (photography). This Invention of Hysteria, as Huberman denotes, coincides with the Outbreak of Images, which "is the problem of the violence of seeing in its scientific pretensions to experimentation on the body. That this experimentation on bodies is performed so as to make some part of them—their essence—visible is beyond doubt." (Didi-Huberman 2003: 8) Analysing how Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist and pathologist, had constructed the figure of the mad woman at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, Huberman surveys the optical regime of madness in which the camera had played a fundamental role. If, for a moment, we leave the historical context of 19th-century Paris and return to the CCTV foot of Lam in the elevator, we become aware of the conceptual and discursive overlapping.
At the intersection of these two optical regimes, we find the out-of-order body of a mad woman that is disciplined and confined by the state and media apparatuses. This aspect of the exhibition comes to the fore, especially in the video work "Mad Scene," in which the artist uses found footage material to re-edit and reexamine the history of moving-image performances of female insanity, as she articulated it. Indeed, the fast montage of these images portraying female bodies subjected to various kinds of psycho-social and religious torture triggers our affective response. We are plunged into a vortex of visual violence that is a contemporary repetition of the medical experiments performed by Charcot that were seminal for Freud and his psychoanalysis.
Maya's engagement with Lam's movements can also be seen as an attempt to unveil traces hidden within the somatic archive. In that sense, her detective-like search for the layers and leftovers of affective corporeality allows us to imagine a different, non-normative embodiment that resists the oppressive mechanisms of control and confinement galvanized by the exploitative logic of capitalism. In addition, it could be argued that by evoking and recalling Lam's lost body, the artist creates an aesthetic condition to counter the subversive power of imagining and performing bodies that do not align with the dominant, patriarchal, and colonial order. At the same time, the visceral dimension that comes to the fore in Maya's choreographic reenactment articulates a haptic visuality in which the female body is not reduced to an object to be dominated and devoured by the disembodied optics of the male gaze.
The condition in which Maya choreographically reconfigures physical absence accentuates the spectrality of Lam's body. The aesthetic procedure of activating the somatic archive turns the exhibition into hauntological research aiming to perform a symbolic act of exorcism. Drawing on the concept of hauntological dramaturgy that performance studies scholar Glenn D'Cruz formulates, Poem for E.L. develops along a similar poetic trajectory. "Ghosts," writes D'Cruz: "put us in touch with ethical problems generated by remembering the dead, mourning the dead, and seeking justice on behalf of hungry ghosts, those restless souls who have unfinished business on earth." (D'Cruz 2022: 18)
One of the defining characteristics of hauntological dramaturgy is the prominence of affect and affectivity. In the exhibition Poem for E.L., we are not as much invited to engage with the meaning of the artworks but rather to experience how they affect us in a visceral way, thereby urging us to activate our feelings, which – if we believe the dictum of Yvonne Rainer – are facts. Hence, the re-performance of apparitions brings forth a plethora of uncanny sensations that correspond with the impossibility of feeling at home in an alienated world saturated with images and shaped by the violent narratives of the patriarchy. According to the artist, the exhibition further materializes as an eccentric utopia that mixes hallucination and dreams with reality and memory; this culminates in Gurantz's "Last Walk/Fugue," a speculative surrealist film shot entirely from the protagonist's POV that takes the viewer on a journey from the elevator to the rooftop site of E.L.'s death.
From a temporal point of view, the choreographic ghosting oscillates between multiple temporalities, being at the same time an archival work, an epiphany of presence and promise of potentiality. As such, temporal dislocations disturbing the boundaries between the present, past, and future are another sign of hauntological performance. As a memory machine, Poem for E.L. embodies "performance as an archival act of care" (D'Cruz 2022: 16); it erects both a memorial for Elisa Lam and engages in liberating it from the alienated cultural confinement that is replicated through the numerous docuseries. Providing Lam with a reconstructed body, Maya establishes an ontological circumstance in which the exhausted ghost can finally find peace.
One of the defining characteristics of the medium of choreography is ephemerality, which makes it hard to document and archive the moving bodies. At the same time, due to the primacy of the body, choreography is regarded as an aesthetic practice best suited to address issues such as presence and liveness. Drawing on Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks, that there is a "convergence of performance theory and archaeological thinking," it could be asserted that the "examination of presence and its performance is linked to inscriptions of the past into the present." (Giannachi, Kaye, and Shanks 2012: 1)
Together, the video documentation exhibited under the title "Extractions" and the dance Maya was performing throughout the show set the stage to shape Lam's absent body. The uncanny return of the past that attains a corporeal form is transformed into an evanescent presence. In this instance, the relation of Maya's own body to the ghost signifies that which is not here and can perhaps be defined only as a spectral presence. Hence, the performative/choreographic process of unearthing the somatic archive of Lam's enigmatic presence sets in motion a multilayered temporality in which the past converges with the present to illuminate the unknown.
A critical aspect of Poem for E.L. is its relation to trauma. While it does not explicitly deal with it, the feeling of immense (mental and psychosomatic) pain that must have tormented the young woman delineates the limits of representation and that which eludes knowledge. As Anna-Lena Werner has shown in her study on the status of trauma in contemporary aesthetics, there are "traumas' far-reaching effects on visual culture and collective memory." (Werner 2020, 11) Trauma signifies an event that resists definition or description and thus cannot be easily grasped. Occurring "not only in war zones and instances involving accidents but – more frequently yet – within the private sphere, in the form of sexual assaults against women and children." (Werner 2020, 41)
Apprehending and situating the issue of trauma within the aesthetic context of Poem for E.L., it could be argued that it corresponds with the idea of affirming not what is known but what remains obscured and repressed. To radicalize this thought further, the exhibition operates within the framework of negative aesthetics, as it defies the indulgence of viewers in beauty that can be comprehended only intellectually. Instead, by setting the body in motion and facing us with the trauma of violence, the displayed works (screens and drawings) and dance become some sort of conductors of affects that get redistributed between the bodies, a kinaesthetically induced aesthetics that transforms into an ethical act of becoming unruly. In this constellation, negativity is not related to value and value-making but refers to the limits of knowing and the critical deconstruction of the violence of reasoning. In other words, the aesthetic concept of negativity refers to the potentiality of art to redistribute knowledge by confronting us with social conventions and narratives and expanding it through imagination.
Working against the cultural logic so profoundly intertwined in the neoliberal machine's Law-and-Order modality (and morality), Maya unsettles not only the patriarchal apparatus but directly intervenes in the forensic narrative that has been shaping the media and entertainment industry over the last decades. Thus, Poem for E.L. becomes a celebration of the irrational, a corporeal summoning of apparitions whose movements still reverberate between this and the other worlds. Rebelling against the policing of bodies that are out of order, the exhibition sets in motion a subversive affect celebrating the carnal and haptic sensation. Indebted to artists like Maya Deren and Yvonne Rainer, Maya's video and choreographic work establish a counter-forensic imaginary in which the zones between fact and fiction and the borders between the human and the non-human get confused. As we are plunged into the chaos of artistic creation that unfolds as a hauntological performance, we learn and remember to dance with the ghost.
Andrej Mirčev,
February, 2025.
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Bibliography:
D’Cruz, Glenn, Hauntological Dramaturgy. Affects, Archives, Ethics, New York; Routledge, 2022.
Giannachi, Gabriella, Kaye, Nick and Shanks, Michael (ed.), Archaeologies of Presence. Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, New York; Routledge, 2012.
Huberman, George-Didi, Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.
Steenberg, Lindsay, Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture, New York; Routledge, 2012.
Werner, Anna-Lena, Let Them Haunt Us. How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020.
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Image list:
All images Courtesy of the Artist and Prospect Art1- Untitled, 2023, Pencil Drawing on Wall, 16’x8’ (Installation - LA Art Core, 2023)
2- Untitled, 2023, Pencil Drawing on Wall, (detail) (Installation - LA Art Core, 2023)
3- ELevator Cinema, 2016, HD Video, 3:00 (Installation - LA Art Core, 2023)
4- Codes, 2015, Video, 2:50; Mad Scene, 2015, Video, 11:53; Da Vinci Ocean, 2015, Video, 2:57 (Installation - LA Art Core, 2023)
5- Mad Scene, 2015, Video, 11:53 (Video Still)
6- Live Performance (1 of 4) with Extractions (2015-2023), video documentation, 56:22 (LA Art Core, 2023)
7- Live Performance (4 of 4) with Extractions (2015-2023), video documentation, 56:22 (LA Art Core, 2023)
8- Last Walk/Fugue (2023), HD Video, 13:10 (Installation - LA Art Core, 2023)
9- Last Walk/Fugue (2023), HD Video, 13:10 (Video Still)
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About the Artist:
Maya Gurantz Maya Gurantz is an LA-based artist and writer who interrogates social imaginaries of American culture and how constructions of gender, race, class, and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. She's shown her videos, performances, installations, and social practice projects at the MCA Denver, Grand Central Art Center, Catharine Clark Gallery, MoCA Utah, Oakland Museum of California, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Navel LA, Art Center College of Design, Goat Farm Atlanta, Great Wall of Oakland, High Desert Test Sites, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. She was a recipient of the inaugural Pieter Performance Grant for Dancemakers and an Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation. Maya is a regular contributor to The LA Review of Books (where her essay, Kompromat, was the most-read article of 2019), and has written for This American Life, East of Borneo, The Frame at KPCC, The Awl, Notes on Looking, Avidly, Acid-Free, and an anthology, CRuDE, published by the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges.
