A Professor of Art at Kenyon College, Claudia Esslinger's multimedia video installations over the last decade have explored the nature of power and authority. By conjuring potent metaphors that suggest various forms of control--social and scientific, psychological and physical--her work concerns the insidious effects of power and the vulnerabilities of its subjects. Cosmetic intervention, exploratory testing and surveillance inform Esslinger's visceral meditations on the pursuit and invasive probing of both human and animal. These themes are examined in her installations Plucking the Songbird (1994-95) and Civil Divination (1998-99), and video Reinventions(2001). In addition, the artist considers meanings and contradictions embedded in social and familial conventions in Projected Memories (1995/2000) and Fragile Armors (1997-98). Esslinger's installations layer video, sound, voice, artifact, space, time and constructed environment. Experiential and allusive more than directly illustrative, these works present palpable stimuli that trigger open-ended associations in the viewer. While Esslinger's work is largely video-based, the exhibition title, Still/Moving Images, is indicative of the artist's recent experimentation with the large-scale digital printing of still images derived from her installations. The combination in this exhibition of a variety of still images, video and other media provides an opportunity to draw connections across a breadth of Esslinger's work.

Reinventions, Esslinger's most recent video piece, concerns women's internalization of social conventions. Featuring a clinically composed, starkly lit eye, a tweaser's acute plucking of the eyebrow elicits self-protective, autonomic responses in the subject. Set to the plaintive ascending and descending notes of a piano being tuned, the eyelid closes periodically and we are presented with a dark, murky imagery that suggests a retreat to an interior conscious or unconscious, perhaps a momentary dislocation of the senses, a blankness, a dream state. Following this sequence, we see and hear rushing water, and then, ghostly images of women swimming underwater in linear fashion. Do the women seek temporary refuge from, or a kind of cleansing of, the tyranny of social and cultural expectation? Or are we to infer a more cautionary, tragic outcome--a narrative ending in drowning that recalls the fate of Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet¹? Working non-prescriptively, Esslinger evokes a number of possible interpretations.

A related theme that recurs throughout Esslinger's work is self-protection. The artist asks, in effect, what are the sympathetic mechanisms of reaction, protection and withdrawl? Plucking the Songbird and Civil Divination, works that bear a symbiotic relationship to Reinventions, employ equivalents for authority based in intrusive medical and pseudo-scientific practices. In Songbird, a video monitor at the center of a hospital gurney depicts a dead bird as its feathers are methodically plucked without apparent reason. The video is accompanied by the melodic song of a bird, followed by the mechanical utterance of a series of words: "smother, impede, inhibit, restrain, bind . . ." Divination features a forest of suspended, forked willow twigs--divining rods--which "seek out" and envelop video images projected on a gut scrim of women swimming underwater. The unwilling subject of the rods' magnetic attention, the women in Divination seem to seek respite from their grasp. For Esslinger, the divining rod, much like tweasers (or other similar tools) becomes a scepter, a symbol of domination--silent and non-verbal--for the individual who wields it. By marking the inequitable relationship between the "practitioner and the practiced upon," Plucking, Divination and Reinventions, address the arbitrariness and vagaries of power.

Projected Memories and Fragile Armors query the interconnected hierarchies of family, religion, community and sexuality. Projected Memories' fleeting 16mm filmic images projected through small apertures in long narrow, embroidered white wedding sheets, is redolent of the power of former rites of passage and their visual record. An anachronistic artifact itself, 16mm amateur film footage of the ritualized events of childhood and early adulthood, simultaneously reifies and casts as obsolete such ideologically laden moments. The iconic universality of these highly selective records reinforces a kind of tautological web of association from which we are never completely able to escape. Esslinger works to exploit such complexities and elisions in meaning. The familiar family ceremonies reprised by lens-based media become ironic, constrictive, even destructive. Prominently embroidered words--"Obedience"; "Submission"; "Devotion"--undercut any impulse to view these images and the elegant fabric that comprise the installation with the simple nostalgia that they are intended to elicit. Further complicating our reading of these artifacts, we hear the voices of subjects, who in an accompanying audio track, narrate their formative experiences with an honesty that is as intimate and disarming as our own inner voice.

Perhaps nowhere else in Esslinger's oeuvre are we more directly confronted with our frailty than in Fragile Armors. Recalling museum artifacts of past cultures, Esslinger's beautifully crafted, life-size "armors" are made of organic, porous materials such as willow, gut, grasses and reed. That the torso-shaped armors, made of natural materials, house video monitors is a reminder of the pervasiveness of technology and its contrast to nature. In one of the Fragile Armors pieces, interviewed subjects speak confessionally through horizontal slits about their emotional and sexual abuse perpetrated by abusers otherwise considered pillars of the community. When confronted with the latent psychological damage carried to adulthood by these anonymous victims, Esslinger's trope of the "practitioner and the practiced-upon" resonates powerfully. For the artist, her fabricated armors are, at once, "constrictive and protective" of our vulnerability. Fragile Armors and Esslinger's larger body of work increase our understanding of the two things that, as the artist states, we fear most: "our inner selves and the technologies that threaten to take over our private lives."

Dan Younger
Director
Olin Art Gallery

This essay is based upon conversations with Claudia Esslinger conducted in March 2001. Quotations are derived from statements by the artist.

1. Kathleen McManus Zurko discusses Shakespeare's Ophelia in her brochure essay that accompanied the exhibition, Civil Divination, College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, OH, 1998.