Oh, must we dream our dreams, and have them, too?
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
"Love should be put into action", screamed the old hermit.
Across the pond an echo cried and tried to confirm it.
Elizabeth Bishop, Chemin de Fer
Presenting various acts of pleasure and indulgence, Ursula Hodel's videos explore the conditions of a woman's relation to herself. Wholly infused with desire, these videos present the artist engaged with the objects, images, rituals and fantasies through which her desire takes form. While some of the videos are highly active, depicting the artist engaged in ritualized, auto-erotic, obsessive or otherwise outlandish activities, others present her stiff and pensive, with only a voice-over to animate the work. Taken together, Hodel's corpus of videos from 1995 - 1999 are spectacles of intense intimacy, private performances with a persistent consciousness of the world outside. The sense of solitary intimacy which emerges in Hodel's videos is at times carnal and at others ethereal. The performances are primarily set in private spaces, usually the bedroom, and they depict the artist engaged in acts which are performed essentially with oneself eating, dreaming, masturbating. While sexual conduct is unmistakably private, and dreaming is necessarily something one does alone, Hodel intensifies the specifically solitary and bodily nature of eating by making it into a repetitive and lustful act. She loses herself in the corn she devours and the chocolates she eats are a continual source of pleasure. In Hodel's performances, eating almost becomes a form of masturbation, an association which finds its strongest realization in 'Cornucopia', where the artist is seen eating strawberries that are nestled in her body.
The complexity of Hodel's video oeuvre emerges with the realization that videos which portray extreme corporeal attention are seen alongside ones which diminish bodily presence. Juxtaposed to the many works concentrating on the flesh, Hodel's 'Past Life' series suggests the inconsequential nature of corporeal existence by showing the artist, often blurred or veiled, thinking the thoughts of a woman from another time and place. Hodel embraces this tension between body and spirit in 'Past Life: Mother' where recollections of a village marriage are recounted over the image of the artist lying like a corpse, covered in roses. Hodel's subject is neither the sensual body nor the transcendent spirit, but the way by which both are brought to bear in an exploration of the self. Though Hodel's video performances are primarily solitary and self-attentive, they offer traces of the external world which both mediate her selfregard and interfere in its complete realization. In 'Past Life: Fisherman's Woman', a village woman finds that the pursuit of her own desire via an adulterous affair results in her being ostracized by her village. For Hodel, the subject can never freely consume the object of its desire as even the strawberries on her body pass with difficulty through a veil before they can be eaten. In the rare case of a collaborative performance, 'Past Life: Egypt' presents Hodel with a camera engaged in erotic play with a man who possesses a camera of his own. Finding a mirror of herself in another, she also finds a separate subjective experience from her own. In all of her work, the camera itself ultimately possesses the greatest potential for exploring the complexities of self-regard. Each of her works reveals in its own way an awareness of its medium. Often this awareness manifests itself through an attention to sound and to abstract visual patterning. In the two-channel installation 'Havana', the inversion of one of the images lends an almost quilt-like, formal symmetry to the highly charged erotic content. In 'Cornuto', not only can she be seen adjusting the camera lens at the beginning, but throughout the performance, she reveals a consciousness of the camera and monitor as frequently as she appears to lose herself in the corn that she eats. Her works manifest a tension between acting in private, wholly for herself, and acting for a camera which presents herself to the world. Hodel explores these as conditions of making art and making love, where the distinctions between for-oneself and for-another are difficult to draw. Adam Lerner Associate Curator at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore.
Adam Lerner
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Ursula Hodel ° 1934, Solothurn (Switzerland)
Lives and works in New York (USA) and Zόrich (Switzerland)
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