When Gesine Braun asked me to give the introduction to this exhibition, I immediately began to search for references that, for me personally, would provide a point of departure for discussing the works on view here tonight and would serve as a way “in” to the organizing theme of this exhibition as a whole. Certainly not a simple task. But because I am a fairly simple person, I thought it made sense to begin at the beginning, namely to start with the title of exhibition itself, “False Emotion,” and to ask myself what acting falsely means in the context of today’s fast-forward, image-driven cultural milieu. In a relatively short time, I was able to come up with a rather lengthy mental list of examples of bad faith which, among other things, included beauty contests, mainstream television, music videos, and even presidential campaigns—all instances of mediated surface, faked appearance, and disconnected signs; in short people, places, and things that, for the most, part don’t live up to the feelings or promises conjured by their images. As I was bemoaning the increasing lack of “real” emotion in this our global world, it occurred to me that there was another time, in Western history at least, when image cultivation and acting falsely was also an accepted social convention and even a method of intellectual debate.

The eighteenth-century Rococo salon was rampant with false emotion, with superficial manners, flawless external appearance, indirect language, secret codes, and highly refined body language. In this contrived environment, artists, thinkers, writers, and society mavens alike interacted with one another through personal style, elaborate clothing, exaggerated gestures, play acting, and especially innuendo. As in today’s world, speed and agility in both language and presentation were of utmost importance in winning the attention of an admirer or winning an argument. But what is perhaps more interesting, and of particular relevance to the current exhibition, is that the salon, while being superficial, was also the locus of deep and complex social interaction which spawned the development of personal identity and intellectual inquiry on many levels, including sexual, aesthetic, political, economic, and philosophical. In many ways, society of the spectacle collided with the personal or private realm within the walls of the salon. Like the theater—and its later offspring, the cinema—the salon was a psychological space in which a particular theme or topic of discussion was acted out by a group of characters. Yet the “players” were more than just afternoon thespians. Indeed, each was an active participant in a dialogue composed of topical yet specific gestures (whether the raising of an eyebrow or the opening of a fan) that could be easily read and interpreted by those for whom they were intended. In the salon, therefore, there was no separation between artist and audience. To the contrary, art and society, creator and viewer mingled freely, traded roles, and appropriated strategies from one another. Thus, in my opinion, the salon serves as a pregnant metaphor for the ideas at work in this exhibition and helps to situate them and their makers within a larger historical continuum.

I find it interesting, but by no means a coincidence, that structures which were important to the functioning of the salon crop up again and again in the context of this exhibition: in particular the use of tableaux, the use of the coded gesture, and the device of the mirror.

Consider the work of Qingsong Wong, from Peking, whose photographs in this room openly mimic the artistic grouping of the tableaux. The elaborate geography of the piece is no accident. In fact, Wong appropriated the format and subject matter, from a centuries-old Chinese painting of an emperor with his harem, then filled it in with twenty-first-century details like Coke cans and colored hair extensions. In fact, the pictorial convention is not as dated as we might like to think and is still used by the media to depict royal families and sports teams. (You may recall the grand manner in which both the British Royal Family and the Communist Party presented themselves to television cameras when Hong Kong was given back to China.) Wong merely appropriates the format, and by default, its false emotion, to point out its shallowness and to perhaps reinvest it with new meaning.

In the same spirit, the Los-Angeles artists, Lynne Berman and Kahty Chenoweth experiment with the nature and role of socially coded gestures. For their video work, Porkopolis, they commissioned actors to perform the specialized hand motions that commodities traders use to sell contracts on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange. In their usual context, these strange gestures are accompanied by violent screaming and passionate body movements—a play act that is readily understood in the world of commerce. However, Berman and Chenoweth have chosen to isolate the gestures and slow them down, magically transforming them into lyrical signs with multiple meanings.

The same thing happens in Wolfgang Stehle’s installation, Televisiontheatre, in which the artist recites dialogues from famous movies in a completely monotonous and straightforward manner. By stripping away the bodily expressions and quirks that make people and characters unique, Stehle also blocks off innuendo and insinuation, leaving only the literal truth of the spoken word to predominate.

In addition to the tableaux and the mannered gesture, the mirror is also a recurring motif in this exhibition and a prop which played a central role in the functioning of the salon. Not only did it reflect one’s personal appearance and standing within the group but it could be used to spy on others in the room or to send messages to other guests. It reflected the light of candles hanging in chandeliers and essentially contributed to the salon’s elaborate and fantastic atmosphere. In a similar fashion, black mirrors transform the physical space and contribute to the dream-like quality of Gesine Braun’s installation, Marla Singer. Situated on either side of a large-scale light box, the dark ellipses are both surface and depth. Projected onto the light box is a transparency of the artist looking at herself in a mirror, on the other side of which is her alter-ego, a character from the film Fight Club. Here the mirror functions as image projection and image resolution.

The mirror is also present in Ludwig Schwarz’s Three Minute Cure, a looped video clip of a scene from the movie Tommy. From the reflection in a floor-to-ceiling mirror, we catch a glimpse of Tommy admiring himself in a regal white dressing gown and assume that the scene is one of display and leisure. However, fans of the rock opera, from which the movie takes ist name, will eventually realize that Tommy is deaf and blind and therefore not aware of his reflection at all. What we see of him in it is a simply a false impression.

One could say that like their eighteenth-century counterparts, the artists in this exhibition are working the surface, moving within globally accepted codes in order to make cultural headway. They accept the mediated world in which they live for what it is and see its matrix of cable T.V., Internet sites, and video cameras as materials in a global toolbox with which to create images of their own, to manipulate those of others, or to subvert visual language to their own ends. As Marshall McCluhan has astutely pointed out, the medium is the message. By using the various mass media—whether photography, video, or film—on their own terms, the eleven artists in this show transform the art of persuasion—the false emotion—into genuine and in-depth acts of social interaction and communication.

© 2002 Courtenay Smith