| peeping tom |
Rozalind Drummond Monash
University Gallery, Melbourne
|
 Rozalind
Drummond |
The
irresolvable paradox surrounding the representation and
definition of the woman is meticulously explored in
Rozalind Drummond’s multi-media installation peeping
tom. Drummond’s exhibition uses a (sometimes
unstable) mixture of video technology, popular culture
and Freudian referents to confront and question the
patriarchally constructed enigma of the feminine. The
result is a lucid examination of the voyeuristic male
gaze. Favouring a Lacanian theoretical stance, peeping
tom posits the female as a logocentric mystery
requiring a textual analysis. Numerous references are made to the notions of a communicating subject and the construction of the feminine through language: Freudian titles compete with detective novels on wall-mounted bookshelves, library catalogues list forensic studies and pulp thrillers, three display cabinets house a diverse collection of old sepia photographs, letters, ribbons, and a plethora of found objects, all suggesting a ‘virtual life’ lived by a person or persons unknown. The installation is rhetorically structured like a museum display; a painstaking reconstruction of a dead past. The display cases are complemented by Drummond’s film-noir style shots of the Freud Museum in London. Much of the imagery is calculatingly dark and sombre, alluding to the crime section of Madam Tousard’s. Drummond has created an ‘artificial’, cryptically narrated, masculinist subjectivity. Like a psychoanalyst ‘reading’ a patient or a detective investigating a mystery, the viewer deciphers the story through ‘clues’ provided at random. The story reveals an arguably pathological perception of the feminine. Drummond’s women are shallow, monochrome beauties, naively modeling for long-forgotten amateurs. Manipulated and enlarged, they become images of a reconstituted femininity; a postmodern perception of a post-war sexuality. The women in these tinted ‘snapshots’ pout and pose for the observer, self-consciously dropping a shoulder-strap or revealing a glaringly white length of thigh. The form imitates early fifties glamour, but the content recalls eighties feminist discourse. The female body is represented as an object of visual penetration, vulnerably exposed for the masculine gaze. Further commentary on the tension between masculine subject and feminine object is provided by three small video screens mounted at eye level at the far end of the installation. One screen follows the path of a woman through a subtly-lit museum. Observing an endless variety of preserved objects, she becomes herself an object of scrutiny, a female body placed on display in a predominantly masculine visual domain. A second screen shows scenes from a late fifties British exploitation film (Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, from which the exhibition derives its title), in which a psychopathic film maker murders desirable young girls before the camera, documenting the last traumatic moments of their lives. As in Hitchcock’s Psycho, the relationship between voyeuristic pleasure and sexual violence is made explicit through the use of a shifting subjectivity: the audience is forced to adopt the positions of both aggressor and victim. The structure and theoretical context of Drummond’s peeping tom requires similar acts of subjective transitivity. The third video screen projects a real time picture of the exhibition, relocating the spectators themselves as objects within the installation. The observer is subsequently made to recognise h/erself as other, as a being existing beyond the more familiar parameters of the self. Like the ‘tinted beauties’ in Drummond’s enlargements, the viewer is divested of agency by the presence of h/er own electronically reconstructed image. In short, one must become other in order to understand the process by which the gaze silences the woman, reducing her to inarticulate object. Perry Fowler |
 Rozalind
Drummond |
|
 Rozalind
Drummond |