Rochelle
Owens has made a name for herself for her avant-garde plays and her poetry
which take the reader into uncomfortable territory of taboo, flesh, violation,
body fluids, and life. The graphic
nature of her imagery has been the “shiny object” that generally captures the
critic’s attention, and unfortunately the sometimes shocking nature sometimes
blinds them to the work’s philosophical complexity and her subtle commentary on
how we see reality, beingness, and becoming in a world that contains intersections
of imaging technology and the body / person herself.
Hermaphropoetics: Drifting Geometries is a collection of
poems describing a series of stills in videos depicting the same object (a
person). To summarize, Hermaphropoetics is about the
fragmentation of unity and/or the deconstruction or deliberate disassembling of
unity.
The various
poems illustrate how there are many ways to see the same thing. Owens takes a
series of still photos that comprise a video and describes them individually.
However she does not say where exactly they fit within that series of images. Observing
one still after the other creates a historical continuum from the first
videographers, the Lumiere Brothers, to today’s high-tech videographers.
Rochelle’s emphasis on the fragmentation of video and the dissolution of a
recorded event also brings to mind today’s more or less omnipresence video
making abilities in the form of smart phones.
We are reminded that the technology has made us tend to forget that
video still is a series of single frame images.
The parallel
with language is clear. Language creates a reality and the words (parole) are
the individual stills. Take them out of sequence and the reality they create is
mediated – always – by the reader / audience. On a cellular level we like to think that the
raw images create reality.
Rochelle
Owens shows us that once you stop the flow - image after image after image, you suddenly
find yourself unable to actually connect with the reality until you place it
within a narrative which by definition includes language. That language does
not necessarily have to be verbal but there is a language nonetheless.
So Owens considers video
stills. We can say that they must exist in a certain order to gel into
meaning(s). The stills constitute the words and the parole of the grammar of visual discourse.
The sequence
of video stills demonstrates that all meaning is in essence a construct that is
constantly being deconstructed and reconstructed.
The
repetitions of images are like incantations. They rip open and expose the heart
and a sense of life. When Rochelle
discusses exposed flesh she’s also talking about the private laid bare in the
raw, painful moments where one is subjected to the indignity of the gaze.
The camera
is invasive. It creates in the subject a profound level of humiliation that has
to do with one’s autonomy. The individual in fact is a being, and that beingness
is suddenly stripped away and placed in the hands of the individual who has the
capability of ordering the series for sequences of images and also to create a
narrative that describes what is happening.
In addition
to creating sequences, Rochelle Owens creates fragments and in doing so reveals
how it is possible to cast the meaning-making process into indeterminacy.
In doing so,
she seizes upon the nature of what it is to create art.
There is the artifice of becoming and the frames seem to be becoming something,
but the frames can never become anything without the reader’s externally
imposed narrative.
We crave
explanations and we want a sense of the whole but the parts do not and cannot
add up because the video stills that come together to make a narrative are
inadequate to keep the mind of the post-postmodern reader in a single track.
The objectification of that frozen moment of death, nakedness, vulnerability and
exposure is what Rochelle Owens has created. Owens's avant-garde plays and poetry have always had a way of making reader feel vulnerable and awkward. On one level, that emotional response is in part about
the process of coming to grips with indeterminacy.
The camera
is in essence the technology of object-making. The accompanying consumption
occurs by creating the tools by which the reader enters and then slowly moves
into a state of self-fragmentation. Self-fragmentation is painful at first, but
after 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 repetitions profound desensitization occurs and
one enters into almost an almost trance-like state.
Each camera
technique offers its own slow trajectory. Life’s puzzle pieces are meaningless
when scattered out of order. Repetition, despite J Hillis Miller and his notion
that there is no meaning without repetition, does not necessarily hold water.
Simple repetition does not make meaning. Patterns are patterns.
The
assignation of value that is to assign value to the pattern - whether denotative
or aesthetic - is arbitrary. Nevertheless, there can be a sense of urgency if the
pattern has some kind of consequence in the phenomenal world, such as being run
over by a car or the likelihood of certain aggressive behaviors of dangerous
people.
Rochelle Owens
shows the absolute arbitrariness of life force elements that we generally
consigned to the sacred.
Reference
Owens,
Rochelle. Hermaphropoetics: Drifting Geometries. San Diego: Singing Horse
Press, 2017. 173 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9356-58-5
