For the past twenty years, Sue de Beer has been using, challenging, and subverting the tropes of horror to make experimental films that are by turns unsettling and beautiful, and infused with a sly-eyed humor. Her sixth major production centers in and around a medical clinic located on a remote island off the New England coast, whose doctors, nurses, and patients all hold their secrets, and are possibly not what they seem. De Beer has long wished to make a werewolf film, and on the occasion of her fourth exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, I sat down with her to preview and discuss her newest piece, The White Wolf.

Jessica Holmes (Rail): So how is the installation going?

Sue de Beer: It’s good, it’s coming along. Have you seen The White Wolf yet?

Rail: No, I haven’t.

SdB: Would you like to watch it right now?

Rail: Sure.

[The film begins]

SdB: It’s two projections. The music was written by a friend of mine, Andy Comer, who has done music for several of my previous films. When I was working on the edit for The White Wolf I found recordings that Andy made for me in 2005, so all this music is from a thirteen-year-old basement recording session. We had recorded the audio for The Quickening, but I had put it to the side because it sounded too Hitchcock. I used a lot of rear projection when I was doing the shoot for The White Wolf, so the Hitchcock feeling seemed to make sense for this film.

Rail: I was going to ask about the music, because I was reading that music rights have hindered you from making your films more accessible in the past. I was wondering if you were thinking of ways around that.

SdB: The music for The White Wolf was done with all copyright free music, except a moment in the film where an Andrews Sisters song plays.

Rail: How did you go about casting for this film?

SdB: I had an idea that for this particular film that I wanted to work with dancers. I thought the athleticism of dancer’s bodies, would bring an interesting physicality to the project–partly because it is a werewolf film. My friend, the curator Khary Simon, had a contact to Tadej Brdnik from the Martha Graham dance company. Khary reached out to Tadej, and Tadej suggested a few of the dancers with the company who he thought might be interested in working with me. Rail: How long have you been thinking of making a werewolf film? De Beer: This film was made in part with my Guggenheim fellowship. I had written a very simple proposal for that, about doing an occult horror, a werewolf film. I have been working on this project for two years now. The research phase of my work tends to take me to expected places as I develop my concepts and imagery. And certainly werewolf lore has a very long history. The more I researched werewolves and their appearance in culture, the more the layered the subject became for me. On the screen now is Yuka Honda, who plays the doctor. She’s a musician.

Rail: She’s in Cibo Matto, isn’t she?

Sdb: Yeah, she is so epic, an exceptional person. What we are seeing here right now are her hands doing werewolf shadow puppets.

Rail: How did you connect with Honda? She is the central character of the film, right?

SdB: Through Jon Spencer. Initially I interviewed dancers for the role of the doctor, but I couldn't find one that was able to convincingly speak the doctor’s monologues, which are quite long and difficult texts. The dancers that I met with struggled with the text. I have worked musicians in the past because they have trained voices and can bring a text to life. I kind of hit a wall with my dancers and these texts, and so I reached out to Jon for help. I remembered Yuka Honda from when I was in art school in the 90’s. Cibo Matto’s Viva! La Woman had just come out and I remembered this album had a very abstract, poetic quality. I wondered what Yuka was like now. Jon put us together and I met her in a cafe and I had her read and she brought the text to life. She is a fascinating person.

Rail: Do you have a vision what the set and costumes are going to look like before you begin filming?

SdB: Yes, it does. This photograph over here is one of me as well. I was having a hard time asking other people to sit for me back then. But this one over here was the one where I got the courage to ask someone else to be in a photograph. In this one, when I was building the set, I had cut everything in the room in half. I tried several times to shoot in it, and the photos look terrible. Then I cut her in half also, and that made the image make more sense.

Rail: It’s interesting to see how cleaving the image actually fused it together.

SdB: [Laughs.] There are little bits of humor in the work, I think. In my werewolf film, the topics are so serious—I thought you needed to laugh in order to address these kinds of larger questions.

Rail: There is a long, rich history of wolf tales. How much research did you do into werewolf folklore?

SdB: I was specifically looking for a story that had a female werewolf, in part to see if there were any. The title of my film comes from The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains, a novella by Frederick Marryat that was published in 1839. The wolf figure in the story was a woman. And interestingly, that story had a structure to it that I recognized from a few films that I was interested in and thinking about, where there is someone passing through a town where something strange going on. There is a mystery, and the story works to uncover it. I had been interested in The Birds for example, and there is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film The Man Who Lies that also has a similar structure. So I was thinking about all of those, using them to create a narrative structure. But really, the narrative is just a framework for these larger questions.

Rail: There was a line from one of the monologues that really struck me. “A person is not a body, he explained. On the contrary a person consists in two aspects, those of spaciousness and form. Spaciousness exists inside form like air inside a balloon. The body that we’re born into is one possible form. But it’s not the only one.”

SdB: Yes—this is my favorite scene in the film.

Rail: What sort of questions were you asking with this? What was percolating?

SdB: Well, what sort of questions came to your mind?

Rail: To me, the idea of transformation seemed to course through the film, which the metaphor of a werewolf embodies. How does that play in your making of the film?

SdB: Yes, the film is about transformation and I think—at the end of all of my reading and research—that is why werewolf stories exist: to look at the human body and the way that it transforms outside of personal experience, outside of the individual. The stories exist to examine a moment when the physical body itself sits outside of human control and just transforms involuntarily. During a lifespan this will happen to everyone multiple times and I think that there’s a way that that’s connected to being that I have a lot of questions about. My work is all of these questions, those early photographs are as well.

Rail: There’s something in the film that is also suggestive to me of memory, another thing that transforms over time.

SdB: Nothing changes so much as the past.

Rail: Right. Can you talk to me a little bit about your use of color? You mentioned earlier that the colors you used were one of the first things set in your mind, and the palette is indeed so striking.

SdB: The mint greens.

Rail: Yes, the reds and purples crossing the doctor’s face.

SdB: Something for me that’s outside of language—color—it’s just beautiful. I think about film and filmmaking as a sculpture and part of the way that the sets are built is about a kind of sculptural expression of a moment in time. Color is connected to that. I’m not sure why—I love this baby pink and the mint green. I have a friend that had meningitis as a kid who had spent some time in the hospital and he remembered this kind of mint green of the hospital walls. He told me about it and the story stuck in my mind somehow.

Rail: Colors can also evoke really powerful memories, like this story of your friend, for example.

SdB: Maybe we’re all defined by the color palettes of our own memories, or place memories.

Rail: I’ve spoken with other filmmakers and photographers about a proclivity for sculpture. What is it to you about the medium that goes hand-in-hand with filmmaking?

SdB: I don’t know if it does. It makes no sense what I do. I think film people like my work because it is unusually raw. When I studied in art school, I would make photos and films, but would be embraced most freely by the sculpture departments. I think like a sculptor, although I produce in many media.

Rail: Several years ago, when her film Women Without Men came out, Shirin Neshat said in the pages of this magazine that she wanted her film to be seen in commercial theaters because “It’s useful and productive if visual artists can also be participants in the popular culture beyond the doors of galleries and museums.” As someone who incorporates a lot of pop cultural references into quite renegade films, I wonder how you’d respond to that idea?

SdB: It’s something I also think about quite a bit these days. But I think these divisions are breaking down somewhat, possibly because of the influence of social media. Rail: Much is often made of your allusions in your work to Italian giallo films. In what ways do you make use of the tropes of that genre; or, in what ways are you possibly subverting them in The White Wolf?

SdB: I love the color of giallos, and the objects in them. They informed my lighting quite a bit. I also like the clothes in giallos. My stories are pulling from a literary history as well though. This film also references Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Rappacini’s Daughter,” for example, in the final monologue text. Rail: It’s fascinating that you tracked down the first literary work to feature a female werewolf character. It seems that gender is a persistent, yet subtle underlying theme in many of your films, and especially so in The White Wolf. Can you tell me about its function in the film?

SdB: That wasn’t the first—it was just one of the few. There was another werewolf story that was female driven, The Were-Wolf by Clemence Housman, published in 1896, which is similar to Marryat’s werewolf story. I don’t think my work is about gender. I just write and film stories about people. This film is a story about wolves and people.

Rail: Let’s backtrack a little and talk about your beginnings and up to now. You began as a photographer, is that right?

SdB: Yes, with those works that will be shown with The White Wolf.

Rail: How did you migrate into film?

SdB: Well, one of the first video works I did was Making Out With Myself. I think I may have shot that in 1997.

Rail: Is that when you were in graduate school at Columbia?

SdB: I shot that video in graduate school. Then after school I did a project with Laura Parnes called Heidi 2 that was the sequel to Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi, an early work. One of the nice things about that experience was that, because it was a collaboration and because as a young artist who was quite shy, I had really not wanted to be in front of the camera—collaboration gave me the courage to ask people to really join me in this searching process. Before that, I had a hard time asking people to step in front of the camera for me. I play a lot when I shoot and I don’t really have a clear idea of what I’m going to get when I start, so I used to have a very hard time asking people to trust the process. Then I received a grant from the American Academy in Berlin and I went there and did my film Hans & Grete, which was in the Whitney Biennial in 2004. That was my film about school shooters.

Rail: I was going to ask you about Hans & Grete. I kept coming back to this film in light of the rash of school shootings over the last several years and even in the last couple of months. Has your perception of the film changed in light of all of these school shootings we hear about so frequently now?

SdB: I've changed so much since I made it—I mean, I'm in my forties now. I just saw the writer Laurence Rickels, and he told me he wrote a chapter on that film for a book that was published a couple years ago, Terror and the Roots of Poetics. I had never seen this book before, and I was able to find it online. His text was a nice way to re-visit that work. I had never seen the book, so I went and got it. Alissa Bennett wrote the monologue for the shooter character, and the text really cut close to the bone. That film is not on the Internet partly because of the music I used and I don’t know if I would ever want that film simply available on the Internet just in case kids watched it and felt that the film is encouraging that kind of violence. Alissa captures something real about the way kids are and the way they can think about immortality. As an older person it’s a position that, over time and experience, you really come to understand how false immortality is. But as a young person—especially a very young person—it has a lot more traction in your imagination.

Rail: I think it refers to Kip Kinkel, doesn’t it? I don’t want to say that he was the original school shooter, but he seems like the tipping point. The Columbine shooting happened a few months later and that shooting sort of ended up overshadowing Kip Kinkel’s crime.

SdB: I was friends with the writer Dennis Cooper when I was working on Hans & Grete and he wrote a novel called My Loose Thread that is based on Kip Kinkel’s life. For some reason that story really moved me. I created a lot of cross narratives, which I do in The White Wolf as well—it's a structure I use in many works—to ask people to look at different perspectives, and to think about the ways that they're the same and the ways that they're different. That piece, also I shot it shortly after September 11th. There was so much violence going on in the world then. I had been in New York when the towers fell, and then I was in Europe when the US invaded Iraq. The US was also rendering people to black sites—torture sites. I became interested when I was working on that film in western European terrorists and their presence in mass media. Specifically I was looking at the Red Army Faction – the ‘Baader Meinhof Gang’. In Germany, there have been many films made about them. They're often presented as Robin Hood figures in mass media, so I wanted to unpack that, and the ways in which kids look up to these figures and create their own narratives and fictions about these things. The film I did after that was Black Sun, which was really about the way that people kind of seek out love in different forms at different ages. The Quickening, which is my Puritan film, followed that, and then I did The Ghosts, about an occult hypnotist.

Rail: I did want to ask you about your film prior to this one, The Blue Lenses. You shot on location instead of in a studio. Is that right?

SdB: Part of that film was shot in Westbeth here in New York and then I shot part in Abu Dhabi. That piece was a constant series of surprises. I shot in New York first and thought I shot full script but then when I looked back at it, I realized that I hadn’t. I had been given this opportunity to work in Abu Dhabi and I thought, well I’ll shoot the other half there and see what happens. So I went thinking I would just build sets there and work like I normally do. But laws around real estate in Abu Dhabi are very different and I was there for four to five months and wasn’t able to really get a space set up, so I had to shoot on location. The good thing about that was that I had to interface with the city in a real way. My line producer, Amani Alsaid, was a young Syrian filmmaker, raised in Qatar. We would go out and we would do location stuff together. I’m always asking people I work with to repeat back what I say to them. So, when we were choosing locations I showed her my work and we talked about the script, and she would say back to me what I planned to do there and it would always end up different than what I expected. So it was an interesting process, a surprise and a challenge.

Rail: Have you always been intrigued by horror and noir genres?

SdB: I think so.

Rail: Was it an interest of yours growing up?

Sdb: I think it’s just being raised in Salem, Massachusetts and probably too many witch trial field trips as a kid. You know, even New England’s architecture has a specific look. Of course, as a New England child you’re also given a lot of Nathaniel Hawthorne and H.P. Lovecraft to read, and Edgar Allen Poe is the local poet. The term for Herman Melville and Hawthorne—the literary genre is dark romanticism, and that was a lot of fiction and imagery that I was exposed to as a young person. That genre certainly developed my imagination, and then of course in Boston at the time, in the early 1990s, there was a great music scene. A lot of hardcore and heavy metal, and I think the music also celebrated that kind of look. Then later, when I was living in Berlin I became really interested in Rainer Werner Fassbinder and these German filmmakers that used very low budgets. They would talk about important ideas while the wheels were falling off the car as they were filming. I was interested in the structure of that way of being.

Rail: How was it filming at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City?

SdB:I wanted to shoot The White Wolf on sets. When I shot my film prior to this one, The Blue Lenses, New York real estate had gotten so expensive, I had to change the way that I worked in order to get it made. And I love that film, but for The White Wolf I really just wanted to work on sets. In New York. Mana generously offered me a space, so I could work in this way. They also have a cinema room and I had wanted to do back projection, because I was really thinking a lot about Alfred Hitchcock. They had a beautiful projector there, and I was able to make that happen. I’m very grateful to them for that.

Rail: When you’re imagining these sets, how involved are you with getting them actually up and built?

SdB: I had three rotating assistants, but I was there the whole time. It’s important to me that the sets look handmade. There are a lot of things about them where my hand really needs to be in it. It’s this funny form of meditation for me. The biggest challenge in this film was the bar set.

Rail: The bar set was stunning.

SdB: When I pulled it off, I was like, “Yeah!” I am very proud of that bar set.

Rail: Can you tell me a little bit about your working process? I’ve read that you work collaboratively with your whole crew, and the writers who compose the monologues. Tell me how that all worked and came together for The White Wolf.

SdB: Maybe it’s recognition of the limits of my own experience or anyone’s unique experience. If I let people tell me how they interpret my idea, the more complex the world is that I am able to present back at the end of the process.

Rail: So when you are making a set for example, are you open?

SdB: Well, okay, I am very controlling when I am making my sets. That is also true of the some of the costumes. I bought the nurse dress that dancer Cara McManus wears, on Amazon. I gave it to Cara and said, “Well, if you want to alter it, ok, maybe that's better.” So she and my assistant went to the bathroom and they cut it very short, and they came back out, and I said, “That's what you want? Great!” And then she left for the day, and I went on Amazon and bought the dress again. [Laughter.] And I cut slits up the sides so she could move her legs, but kept its original length. The physical presence of the sets is very important to me—maybe because these places are based on real memories, and I have a personal relationship to them. Also this piece is a love letter to New England, and my New England childhood. With some other things I am more open. With Yuka, I had her over before we began shooting and we worked together on her clothes. She introduced the wig she uses in the film. She found the wig as we were shooting and felt that her character would wear a wig like that. You have to really be a rock star to be able to take off a wig like she does in the film!

Rail: Another aspect of transformation too—you put on a wig and you become something else. A small gesture that seemed really potent.

SdB: I agree.

Rail: The spoken language is also really lovely. Who wrote the monologues?

SdB: Nathaniel Axel, who is an artist I have worked with before. He shows at KARMA gallery. He’s great.

Rail: How much back and forth did the two of you have?

SdB: A lot, but also, he’s also very autonomous. He’s interesting. I can see in this text how he put in references from previous films of mine. The end monologue is both “Rappaccini’s Daughter” from Hawthorne, and then the end line is very similar to the end line from The Quickening. It’s almost identical. There are themes in the final work that have been in previous works of mine. Nate knew my work pretty well when we started working together. He’s very interested in imposters, and I love that. He also wrote the texts for The Blue Lenses, which is all about an imposter.

Rail: Dance is an art of making a story through the physical use of human bodies, and in The White Wolf there are several memorable dance segments. In what way did casting dancers shape the film?

SdB: The people cast in this film were all creators in their own right. I cast them because they are interesting people, and because they reminded me of the written characters somehow. Kazu I think feels at his most relaxed when he is tap dancing. It is his natural state. Cara can be quite polite when you speak to her, but when she moves she shows her complexity—there is a wildness and a freeness in her movement. I love that duality in her as a person, and as a performer.

Rail: What draws you to depicting violence?

SdB: It’s American.

Contributor:Jessica Holmes

Jessica Holmes is a New York based writer and critic who contributes regularly to Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, Hyperallergic, and other publications.

Sue de Beer, The White Wolf (still), 2018. Video, sound, color. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Sue de Beer. SdB: A little bit. The sets for me are the most spontaneous thing. I tend to have a color palette in mind. One of the settings in the film is a medical clinic and I really wanted to work with this cool green for the clinic.

Rail: Who is this tap dancer on screen?

SdB: This is Kazu Kumagai, who is a band mate of Yuka. They perform together in an experimental, electronic music group called ‘Limbs’. Yuka plays keyboards, and he taps as percussions. He is quite a well-known tap dancer.

Rail: He is incredible.

SdB: His steps sound like rain.

Rail: The amount of control that you need to have in your body to be able to move like that is something that was always beyond me.

SdB: I know, I am so jealous.

[The Andrews Sisters song “Daddy” begins to play.] SdB: So this is the copyright protected piece of music; the Andrews Sisters song. The dancer you see here goes by the stage name of Gin Minksy. She’s a burlesque dancer, who also went to art school. Her burlesque is related to her artwork. I couldn’t bring myself to remove the song because I felt it would change the work.

[The film ends.] Rail: Thank you for showing me the film. What else is included in this exhibition?

SdB: For this exhibition, I also decided to show images from my first body of work, from 1998, which were included in my first solo show with my gallery in LA, Sandroni Rey Gallery. They are a series of large-scale photographs, and they represent the first time I had used a constructed set. They are fairly violent. When I was working on the sets for The White Wolf, I was thinking of these. I can show them to you, they’re around the corner.

[Walking.] Rail: And these are film stills, or straight photographs?

SdB: Yes, they are photographs, early work from when I was in my twenties. Each photograph would take several months to produce. I built an upside down set for this photograph, and I would just go in to the studio and photograph myself in there. That's me in this image.

Rail: An upside down set also makes an appearance in the film.

No one does high-concept, low-budget horror as exquisitely as de Beer. Her new two-channel film, “The White Wolf,” is a plot-defying twenty-three minutes of werewolf innuendo, set on a fictional New England island where a mysterious medical clinic attracts the terminally ill. As the artist plumbs the folkloric, psychological, and spiritual significance of lycanthropic transformation, she metabolizes her B-movie references in makeshift sets as captivating as a view into a cracked Fabergé egg. A lighthouse in the gloom, a shadowy bar where a striptease is performed against a forest backdrop, and an examination room bathed in green light form the visual backbone of the ambient narrative. The solemn ruminations of the clinic’s head doctor (played by the musician Yuka Honda) and a tense, melancholic score by Andy Comer propel it.

—Johanna Fateman

Working at the intersection of film, photography and installation, artist Sue de Beer has always yielded suggestive narratives and evocations of time and memory in her work. At Marianne Boesky, de Beer has debuted her sixth film project. Entitled The White Wolf, de Beer’s film is in the guise of a classic low budget horror scenario: that of the werewolf. But, as is typical of de Beer’s work, it is able to create not just aesthetic beauty, but highly provocative ruminations on the havoc of time, sexuality, and the ways our psyches and physicalities come together to form us as human beings.

De Beer’s films, diverging from most of what we see in the context of gallery oriented video art and film, have similar impact as narrative art cinema. They are condensed, and more abstract in meaning and information to be sure, but I nevertheless am usually left with that all-encompassing pleasure that the films of David Lynch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or David Cronenberg leave me with. Her films often inspire awe and wonder.

De Beer’s practice has evolved considerably from the beginning of her career. But her style and interests have held a remarkable coherence. There is the interest in the occult and mysticism that the artist views as her birthright having grown up in Salem, MA. There is the aesthetic connections to genre horror, particularly the lighting and color of Giallo thrillers pioneered by directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava. De Beer often interacts with texts of noted transgressive writers and snippets of language written by Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis and Alissa Bennet have appeared in her work. And finally, De Beer’s work is admirably unpretentious. Not only in the sorts of genres and conventions she brings into her work, but also in the very way that she creates the work itself. She is unafraid of incorporating new technology into the work.

You can see this aspect in her earliest work, the “horror” photographs that are being shown concurrently with The White Wolf, in which de Beer used crude but aesthetically potent digital edits to emphasize her images of eviscerated bodies. And you can see it in The White Wolf, a piece that saw de Beer turn to crowdsourcing website Kickstarter to get the project funded. De Beer’s openness to using aesthetics, genres, and methods outside the highfalutin art world’s established order has lent her work a sense of idiosyncratic vision.

The presentation of The White Wolf alongside’s de Beer’s horror photographs is an intriguing one, demonstrating de Beer’s adherence to certain genre tropes related to horror but how her work has nevertheless grown in sophistication and poetic impact. The photographs were shot in a neutral style that de Beer copped from looking at architectural and wedding photography, according to an interview with The Creative Independent. She used this direct photographic style to capture scenes of gore and graphic violence, in a sense breaking down and isolating singular conventions of classic ‘80s slasher films by the likes of Wes Craven and John Carpenter to still images of maximum impact. Conversely, The White Wolf uses a horror trope, the werewolf, but eschews scenes of violence or even showing us the werewolf in question, instead using the werewolf convention as an analytical lens into contemporary existence. In this sense, you can argue that de Beer was interested in breaking down the conventions of horror in earlier work while her recent installations and films use horror, and fantasy, to ask deeper questions about what it means to be human now.

The film is set in a fictional island off the coast of New England in the 1980s and works as a series of interconnected vignettes that follow several characters related to a local medical clinic. New York-based experimental musician and Cibo Matto member Yuka Honda plays the clinic’s doctor who narrates the history of the island (the narration is written by the artist Nathaniel Axel). One such story is that of a local lighthouse keeper and his wife who are subject to terrorizing forces, suggested but never confirmed by the film to be werewolves. The film finds its characters all grappling with events that are so far out of their control that they cease to feel like they are major characters in their own stories. A quote by a nurse (played by Cara McManus) at the end of the film reinforces ideas related to memory and time, and how our passings of time and memories contribute to a larger community history, “Our memories are not alone,” says the nurse. “Instead we have been grafted onto a story far greater than our own."

There are no werewolf attacks in this film. No eviscerations of human flesh. Instead, de Beer relies on an auteurist’s sense of mis en scene to hone an atmosphere of existential dread using the werewolf as a metaphor for something uncontrollable and sinister infecting the characters’ lives. Like her 2011 film The Ghost, de Beer designed all the sets and the spaces seen in The White Wolf herself. Working several months at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey, de Beer built the film’s medical clinic, home interiors and island views seen in the film. This kind of all out attention paid to every detail of a film’s production is rare in all of the film world, and the only other working filmmaker this involved with every aspect of her productions is the feature filmmaker Anna Biller. The sets being built by de Beer herself help singularize the tone and mood of the film. It is all the projections of the artist’s viewpoint.

There are some dazzling filmmaking techniques employed throughout the film. It is projected onto split screens. Sometimes the screens match up, sometimes one echos the other, sometimes they project different images altogether. The accumulated effect leaves you off balance, susceptible to the anxiety woven into the content. De Beer said in an interview with curator Khary Simon that dancers became an element in the film because she felt that the beauty in the physicality of dancers relates to the beauty in the physicality of the werewolf. In The White Wolf, viewers are treated to dance performances by McManus, Blakely White-McGuire of the Martha Graham Dance Company and by Honda’s bandmate, the tap dancer, Kazu Kumagai. De Beer photographs the dancing stunningly, at times rotating the camera upside down to give the mystical effect of a dancer performing upside down on a ceiling. There is so much in this film other than werewolves that you often forget that it’s a werewolf movie, except you never really do forget that it’s a werewolf movie. The “werewolf movie” is the baseline knowledge that guides the viewing of the film.

And most importantly, and as is typical to much of de Beer’s oeuvre, The White Wolf is beautiful. De Beer’s films, even though she’s dealing with these low budget horror aesthetics, are imbued with such stunning color, light, choreography and text that they on many occasions ebb towards the sublime. The beauty of The White Wolf doesn’t just reinforce the merit of de Beer’s art, it reinforces the artistic merit of genre horror and werewolf films as sites of possible beauty. Perhaps a true mark of an extraordinary artist is the ability to not just use the limitations of a medium to make art, but to show that within the set of limitations they’ve chosen to work within is a near infinite realm of artistic possibility. De Beer finds the infinite within a confined set of parameters.

“Sue de Beer: The White Wolf” at Marianne Boesky Gallery

The White Wolf, de Beer’s sixth major film, was created as part of her John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. It follows the intersecting lives of characters connected through a medical clinic to a secret history linked to a small town. The non-linear film employs elements of the “werewolf genre” and explores the relationship of the body to one’s sense of self.

Sue de Beer’s “The White Wolf” at Marianne Boesky Gallery June 21 through August 3, 2018

Sue de Beer’s sixth major film “The White Wolf” will be premiering at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s 507 West 24th Street location, along with a display of her early horror-inspired photographs, which are instrumental in the film’s realization. This new film was originally conceivedas part of de Beer’s John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, which she received in 2016, and employs its classic werewolf narrative as an instrument to examine the themes of transformation, memory, and the psychology and physicality that attribute to the sense of self. Presented as a non-linear, two-channel installation, the film “fuses the elements characteristic of the werewolf genre with a lyrical examination of the body and its relationship to the ephemeral sense of self,” says the gallery. It embodies the artist’s signature editing style, consisting of the persistence of vision, duplication, and reflection. To further relate the themes of the film, the film also includes dance sequences performed by McManus and Blakely White-McGuire of the Martha Graham Dance Company and tap dancer Kazu Kumagai— band-mate of lead actor Yuka Honda— who is also a New York-based experimental musician and composer.

The myth of the werewolf gets a fresh spin—including an old Hollywood strip-tease, in which Red Riding Hood puts on a wolf skin—in Sue de Beer’s new video work, The White Wolf (2018), to go on view this month at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York (21 June-3 August). The “loneliness” around werewolves, who outlive others, and the “stages of being a person… [which] often involve involuntary shifts in your physical self” drew the artist to this mythology, she says. The two-channel, 22-minute video, made as part of de Beer’s 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, tells a werewolf tale set on a Maine island (in reality, kitschy sets de Beer built at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City) with a low-budget horror film feel and a foreboding score by de Beer's longtime collaborator Andy Comer. Amidst other action, the musician Yuka Honda, who also wrote a song for the film, recounts the story a lighthouse keeper who believed his wife was no longer the same person. The woman “saw a wolf’s mouth inside her face” each time she looked in the mirror, Honda tells us. If viewers find themselves confused by the video’s twisting stories, they are in good company. “I’m not even quite sure who the werewolf is,” de Beer says.

Amelia Diamond: Can you tell me about the moment or series of events that put you on the path to becoming an artist?

Sue de Beer: I had decided to become an artist when I was quite young. I was still in high school. I think a key moment for me was being expelled from high school [laughs]. Before that I was on a kind of academic trajectory, and no one in my family had been an artist. My family also didn’t have a lot of connection to contemporary art or the contemporary art world. So as a young person, when I was expelled from school, because people’s expectations of me changed, I suddenly had this radical freedom. This must have been hard for my parents, but they were supportive of me in this moment.

I started looking at art. I was curious about it — it was unfamiliar to me, and I found it to be really challenging. I was living in a small town in Massachusetts, and I would take a bus into Boston to visit museums. I took some art classes and fell in love with it.

I also was looking to music for information about art (which doesn’t really make any sense I know). I was into the Velvet Underground at the time, so I discovered Andy Warhol through Lou Reed. Because of his music, I had this idea that New York was a place where artists lived. His music made me think, “I should be in New York.” So, I applied to art schools in New York, got in, and moved. It was a lucky set of poorly-made decisions.

AD: What was your first day in New York like — or your first day of art school, your first realization of, “I am actually in New York…for art school?” Did it live up to your expectations?

SdB: I didn’t have realistic expectations. I didn’t quite know what or who artists were. But I do remember, in the first week, just feeling like New York was the place I really belonged, and art school felt really natural. It felt like home.

I had always felt like I didn’t really make sense in my small town — I was a bit different — so it was nice to be in a place that was so big and so much. So much going on, many different kinds of people; it felt electrifying, and it opened my mind and broadened my thinking.

AD: Can you recall one instance when you were like, “Oh, this is an artist”?

SdB: There were many instances, people and ideas I was exposed to in this early time. I was interested in Johanna Fateman, who was self-publishing ‘zines about contemporary art while she was a student at SVA. I became friends with Dennis Cooper and he introduced me to West Coast artists and the scene out there.

A few exhibitions made an impression on me as a young artist. One of them was a Nari Ward show at Deitch Projects [Happy Smilers] — it was a big installation piece with fire hoses and a fire escape in the middle, and he had painted the walls yellow. It felt shocking and new to me, the way that he used the space. The whole installation was immersive and beautiful.

I saw the 1993 Whitney Biennial, one of my first encounters with a broad array of contemporary artists, and it became a touchstone that I compared other exhibitions to. I remember much later, comparing the ‘91 Biennial catalog to the ’93 Biennial catalog, and realizing that a dramatic shift had just happened in the art world right when I arrived in New York.

The early 90s in New York was a brilliant time to begin to participate in the art world because of this expansive energy. Later, I think the art world narrowed again, and that was an awful shock to me: like the only male “group” shows, or only female “‘group” shows. But the art world goes in waves.

AD: What part of the wave do you feel like the art world is in now?

SdB: Well, I think this is an exciting moment. Things seem to be opening back up. There’s all kinds of energy going on right now that I really love, that I haven’t felt in years. It makes my heart beat faster. When the art world became more conservative, many voices I was interested in went missing. It was depressing. So boring.

AD: How do you think social media effects the art world today?

SdB: I like how social media changes who the gatekeepers are for content and ideas. It’s added an additional venue, or an additional access point that has nothing to do with the market or capital.

AD: Your work was shown in galleries in Soho in the 90s — what was that whole experience like?

SdB: Oh. The art world was much smaller back then — or it felt that way as a young person in the space. Some of my friends who later became artists or gallery directors worked in shops in Soho to pay their rent.

There was a row between Grand Street and Wooster where there were some fantastic galleries and great shows happening. I had some work with Stefano Basilico for a while. He had a small gallery space next to Friedrich Petzel. I did a show with Jeffrey Deitch at Deitch Projects. Marianne Boesky’s first Gallery space was in Soho.

I was briefly represented by Jack Tilton Gallery. I remember he had just taken on the artist Xu Bing, who did a show for Jack [A Case Study of Transference] that involved live pigs living in the Gallery…

AD: You must have so many great stories from this time…

SdB: So many. I remember I had a woman helping me sew enormous stuffed animals for my installation for the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She had a studio on Canal Street on the fifth floor of the building, and we produced the work there.

We didn’t realize how big the animals were until they were actually stuffed. We couldn’t get them into the elevator because they wouldn’t fit. I tried to squeeze them in the stairwell and they barely moved. The animals were two or three feet taller than me. It was like a five-story birth canal with this circular staircase, and there were three of those animals to get downstairs. You couldn’t have a studio space on Canal Street today unless you owned it, but at the time, it all seemed very reasonable and very funny to be squeezing this giant purple lion thing five floors down.

AD: You’ve been showing your work for 20 years now. What projects are you currently most excited about?

SdB: I’m getting ready for my show that opens on June 21st at Marianne Boesky Gallery. It’s my werewolf film, The White Wolf, that I’ve been working on for two-and-a-half years. I asked Yuka Honda, from the band Cibo Matto, to star in it because I’ve always been a fan of hers. She’s just magnetic on camera.

I’ve also been thinking about the past recently, so I asked Marianne if we could show the first body of work I produced when I was a young artist in my twenties, which are these horror photographs I made between 1998 and 2000. So the werewolf film is the major installation, and then in a project room, we’re going to show my early horror photos. I’m excited about the works being in dialogue together. [Horror, as a genre] has a specific type of beauty. It has a sort of gracefulness to it.

My work has always asked questions about the way that people are, what people love, or what they fantasize about. Playing around with form, changing it, pulling it apart, and putting it back together again, in the wrong way.

KDH: Over the years, you've collaborated with editorial and commercial projects. Something that I've admired is how the end result never feels differently from your gallery based aesthetic. I like that your work truly seems to be extracted from the mind of an adolescent; interlaced with beauty, eeriness, sexuality and horror. Has that been difficult to convince collaborators and directors of this importance or is that what they come to you for?

SDB: Well, I have been lucky with who I have worked with. But also you know it's hard for me to make anything other than that. I don't think I could. So I think if someone commercial asks me to do something, they know I will just be the artist that I am. No one has ever asked me to do anything differently than that.

I love looking at people's choices - the decisions they make when they get dressed, what they carry in their bags, how they decorate a room. When I was living in Berlin I moved constantly, and stayed in many places that weren't mine. I loved that - living with other people's decorating decisions, and their systems for making coffee.

KDH: You currently have a live Kickstarter campaign that has already surpassed your expectations. What has this experience been like? Can you also talk about the project you will be funding, The White Wolf (2017) and how it is a horror but also inspired by the aesthetic of the Italian Giallo?

SDB: Well, every film I have made is inspired by the Italian Giallo. But every film I have made is unique, and from a plot point of view they really have little to do with the Italian Giallo. This film is a werewolf film, and I don't really want to tell too much and spoil it. But I am excited about the script. I worked with Nate Axel again on the script.

The Kickstarter was something that I wanted to try doing. I remember talking with Jongho Lee about Rob Pruitt's eBay store, and about how much I liked it. That it reached different people - people that wouldn't normally be able to collect expensive artwork, sometimes people that didn't follow art. I can't afford to buy expensive artwork, so I enjoyed a place made by an artist where people like me could participate.

And I had a few people that I respect do Kickstarters and, I don't know, I thought maybe it was a quiet way to change the power structure for what can be funded. Like Bernie Sander's "30 dollar donations". I think Social Media has been a powerful force for change in that way - suddenly groups of people have a sense of how large their group is, and how they have shared concerns.

But you know I made the kickstarter, then I published it and panicked. It's really public! So if you screw up everyone sees it fail in real time! And they keep it up forever so I felt a lot of pressure to make a film I felt proud of for my ask film. I am relieved that my kickstarter has been a success - I forgot the part where I could really publicly fail!

KDH: While many artists focus on work that avoids gender or sexual references, I feel that your work is deliciously feminine and feminist. It has the ability to disrupt gender norms often associated with women by tearing down psychological structures and also delving headfirst into what could be described as the feminine psyche. Can you speak on this, what I would describe as a particular level of honesty or vulnerability in the work?

SDB: That's really kind of you. As a younger artist, I hated the female part of being a young female artist. I was happier just being a young artist. I hated answering questions that defined my work as coming from a female perspective. I hated having people comment on my appearance in press or in person. My incredibly intelligent students talk about their frustrations with having to "perform gender" or "perform race" and I empathize.

I don't think about gender when I make work honestly. Unicorns belong to everyone. But I do remember that it was a big moment for me when I sewed those giant stuffed animals as the installation for Hans & Grete. It took some courage.

Now I am older, so I don't really care what anyone thinks of me. I just do what I think will make the best artwork, and let other people decide what it means.

KDH: I enjoy the seduction found in many of your projects. There is an enticement through witches, magic, dark metal and fantasy that pulls the viewer in while also has the possibility to make some uncomfortable.Discomfort in art is so important. What are your feelings around that and the reaction or non-reaction of a viewer?

SDB: Oh I don't know. That's so nice also, thank you. I like to scare myself I guess. And I love seduction - I'm really fascinated by it.

KDH: What is next? Where do you see your next project going? Is the goal to get bigger and do a feature or focus on vignettes teetering between the representation of life and death?

SDB: This current film will represent 2 or 3 years of my life by the time I open the exhibition - I'm right in the middle of it, so it's hard for me to see past this moment. One thing I would like though would be to go back and re-master my older films, and find a way for them to be more easily accessible and be seen. I am going to finish the White Wolf, and then I really just want to work on that. Unlocking my 5 other films somehow, so everyone can see them.

As with watercolor, that fickle medium, much of de Beer's work teeters on chance -the perfect coming together of elements out of her control. "I stand behind my cameraman's shoulder, usually with a monitor I'm holding, and pass him things to try out. After working together for a while, you don't even have to say anything. He just knows," she explains. It's this kind of relationship that's key for de Beer, who relies on the collaboration with her writers, actors, and crew to determine the direction a work will take. It's not only the visuals that come about organically, left up to whatever happens between the wineglasses, kaleidoscopes, or other unorthodox objects she proffers on the day of shooting. The entire outcome of a de Beer film relies on experimentation, risk, and a group of people willing to follow her down the circuitous path along which these elements lead.

The melodious chant of an Arabic prayer opens the film. With two university research grants and a four-month-long teaching position at NYU Abu Dhabi, de Beer set out to make what she describes as a "Daphne du Maurier-inspired noir set in a fictional version of the Middle East." Du Maurier's stories, which were the basis for a number of Alfred Hitchcock films, are masterpieces of suspense and intrigue. For her film, de Beer has in fact lifted the title for The Blue Lenses from a du Maurier story, in which a woman, upon having the bandages removed after surgery to restore her sight, finds that through her new eyes, the people around her now alarmingly bear animal heads atop their human bodies. De Beer's version also creates alternate modes of seeing, but here - in her fractured scenes, often bathed in blue, deep green, and bright red - the altered perception presents a multifaceted picture of the Middle East, one that includes but also defies the preordained set of images the region usually calls to mind.

The opening scene is set by the voice of a young woman, who tells a story that starts at the end, with a funeral for a man she knew for a while, albeit not very well. It seems that nobody did. Over the course of 20 minutes, we learn a little more about this mysterious character, Daniel: salesman, connoisseur of fabric, drug user, magician, and thief. Interspersed between these semi-narrative fragments, told to us by either the character himself on-screen or the woman's voice, are snippets of disparate and unrelated scenes and snapshots. While the plot wanders, a plodding, clocklike drumbeat drives through the middle of the film, holding the viewer's attention through a story that leads only to further ambiguity. Interruptions come in the form of a burlesque dance performance, or eerie stills of the indoor ski slope located in the opulent Mall of the Emirates, shown deserted after hours. As the scenes skip and jump, they circle back to the captivating, plotless fragments of the enigmatic man's story. The character of Daniel came from a casting call de Beer put out, at a point when she and her writer on this piece, Nathaniel Axel, had only one scrap of text written, a monologue from the perspective of a shoplifting employee. With this in hand, de Beer sent out a call for all the characters in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, purely to see what this odd combination would yield. "A guy came in who thought he looked like the Ghost of Christmas Present," she recalls. "He was all wet from the rain, he had on a Hawaiian shirt, and he was very big, and looked like he was going to murder us all," she laughs. Though she ended up casting another actor in the role, the character of Daniel was born. De Beer often starts by "asking for something that doesn't work," but pursuing it nonetheless, because "asking this of a place or set of people can give you a truth-event, or a new kind of image that you wouldn't expect. You're not asking for an image you know you want, you're asking for the situation to tell you its own image." The plan is: don't make plans.

De Beer's style of winging it may be unconventional, but it's one that she has developed over time, with a band of fellow risk-takers willing to follow her lead - whether that's casting actors who might not ever see a script (many times she just describes what should happen in a scene and lets them take it from there), filming without a sense of the finished structure, or the aforementioned tendering of objects over her filmmaker's shoulder. Making herself (as well as others) nervous is a motivating force. She admits it's not always easy to find those eager to take the leap. "You have a crew and actors and equipment that cost a lot of money, and everybody waiting around to be told what to do, while I'm wondering, is anything interesting going to happen today?" She laughingly admits that, to put it bluntly, this process "takes balls." Much of this she learned during six years spent in Berlin in the early 2000s - needing a break from New York and its skyrocketing rents - where she developed her style of non-narrative stories through the videos Hans & Grete, 2003 (included in the Whitney's 2004 Biennial), Black Sun, 2005, and The Quickening, 2006. She looked to the filmmakers of New German Cinema for inspiration, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, who, because of a loophole in German governmental funding for cinema and TV, were able to make their early films fast and loose but with what de Beer regards as incredible artistic integrity. Since returning to New York for a faculty position at NYU, finding money has become an even bigger pressure. "Your funders also have to believe in your balls," she jokes. And The Blue Lenses, for which she transported this method of working to a country where she'd never worked before, took "the largest metaphorical balls."

De Beer grew up around New England, moving to new York to study at Parsons for her undergraduate degree before receiving an MFA from Columbia. There, in her second year, after working primarily with photography, she made her first film, Making Out with Myself, 1997, which features the young artist, through visual trickery, performing the titular act. Not one to enjoy being in front of any camera, de Beer experimented with her own image early on because of an apprehension about asking other people to do things that could be potentially awkward or embarrassing. But that nervousness has proven to be a great stimulant for de Beer - anxiety becomes a type of challenge. "Now I feel very comfortable asking people to do that for me," she says. "As I've grown older and made more work, the process has evolved into just pulling all my information out of the piece as it unfolds, rather than coming up with an idea and executing it." Often her favorite parts of the final films are these unscripted moments. In The Quickening, she recalls telling German hard-core musician Gina D'Orio, who plays the lead in the film, to "go into the forest and dance with the animals." once settling on some music, Gina choreographed the ensuing ballroom dance she performs with a wolflike creature, after accepting a pineapple from his outstretched paw. Similarly taking a gamble in how she screens her work, with The Blue Lenses de Beer has opted for Marianne Boesky's Lower East Side gallery, a bright, storefront space dominated by a wall of windows. It's an attempt to get away from the pitch-black, curtained rooms where film is usually at home and which the artist dislikes. She's created sculptural installation elements to work with the environmental constraints. Patterned, lacelike screens - made of aluminum to block the bright sunlight - mimic the architecture seen throughout The Blue Lenses, and the windows are tinted blue. Rather than trying to make the space around the film disappear, to have no interference between the viewer and the work at hand, de Beer wants the screening environment to provide another element that can play into the audience's interpretation.

The attraction of de Beer's work is that she's not interested in giving the viewer a clear, wrapped-up story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She manages to make her films both suspenseful and captivating, yet awash with ambiguity and without conclusion. In so doing, she invites an abundance of readings. With still images, sections separated by vague titles, dual projections that sometimes sync, sometimes skip just a beat, and occasionally go off on their own tangents, de Beer uses any means to bring together the most interesting accumulation of scenes and visual elements to make her multilayered pieces. But there is one thing she won't do: "Postproduction effects. I hate them," she says. "I feel that it just looks like after effects." Everything happens on set. What she shoots is what she gets; she doesn't retouch her work. "I always shoot with colored lights. I'll maybe lighten something occasionally, but I have to believe the world to be able to make it a world, which includes being in a room with the lights exactly the way they are," she explains. Even if making that world, and getting that image with the lighting just perfect, requires a certain amount of trust, risk, and backache for those involved.

Sue de Beer paints a lonely, haunting portrait with moving imagery. She is a filmmaker, but she is ultimately an artist in the sense that her short films exist in a sculptural environment that typically inhabits a physical space - usually a gallery - replete with film stills, three dimensional objects and more. Her films are often inspired or influenced by literary works and deal with identity, memory, and paranormal activity. In her film The Ghosts, an occult hypnotist recovers lost lengths of time from peoples' memories and returns them as if they are new memories. In another film, The Quickening, sexuality and desire is explored in an oppressive environment of Puritanical New England in the 18th century. The installations in which De Beer presents her films creates an almost dreamlike environment that leaves the viewer wondering if the time spent within the installation was a dream itself. Premiering tonight at Marianne Boesky Gallery, De Beer will be presenting The Blue Lenses, which is set in Abu Dhabi and tells the tale of a woman given surgery to restore her vision: upon the bandages being removed from her eyes, she sees people with animal heads instead of human heads. It is inspired by British author Daphne du Maurier's novel of the same name. Indeed, it is the first time the artist has filmed in the Middle East and the entire exhibition has flourishes of an Islamic theme, but with a film noir slant - even the windows of the gallery have been tinted a jewel-toned blue to hint at the power and beauty of Islam. In the following interview, De Beer talks about The Blue Lenses, rescuing Proust from an apartment fire, and trying to explain American puritanism to German electro-clash musicians.

Oliver Kupper: I want to talk about your first video piece, Making Out With Myself, because it's a powerful first foray into your future oeuvre, where did the idea to make out with yourself come from?

Sue de Beer: I made that piece in 1997 - that's 18 years ago now. Wow. I don't quite remember why that image came up - possibly I thought it was funny that one could do that as a moving image. Funny and lonely. And intimate. It's still showing, that film. Maybe people relate to the awkwardness of it.

OK: Did you grow up watching a lot of films - was there one particular film that made you want to explore cinema as a medium?

SdB: I watched a lot of films in my 20s. The filmmakers I continue to think about are ones that use real people and small budgets - like Paul Morrissey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Abel Ferrara, and Argento. They are all sculptors to me - I think because the budgets are small I can always imagine walking around in the rooms they are shooting in. They have a physical presence. I also like the tension between what's real and what's clearly fake in those films. The bad acting sometimes lends some authenticity to the moment, which is something I think about when I am working.

OK: Literature has also had a profound affect on your work as an artist

• anyone from Proust to Maurier to Dennis Cooper - can you remember the first book you ever read and how it made you feel?
  

  SD: I don't remember the first book I ever read. I first read Proust when a friend of mine had a fire in his apartment, and came to live with me. I went back with him to his flat the morning after it burned - everything was black. We took what few things were left - I remember the selection included a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, a bottle of cologne, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a camera. He stayed with me for 3 months, then left the book with me after he moved out. I read it cover to cover.
  

  I met Dennis Cooper when I was quite young - I want to say 20. My boyfriend at the time was friends with him, and we would go out to LA and stay with him. So I met him before reading his books which is quite a privilege to be able to say. I found them to be frightening and romantic at the same time. The quiet parts are - theres nothing else quite like them.
  

  OK: You lived in Berlin for a spell, and created three films there, do you think that had an influence on your work or do you think it sent your aesthetic in a new or different direction?
  

  SD: Yes. I miss Berlin. It radically changed the color in my work. I was able to build huge sets there, and was able to assemble skeleton crews easily. It was also nice having some distance on American culture, and making work with that removal. I never could have shot The Quickening in the US for example. Trying to explain Puritans to Gina D'Orio and Annika Trost (the two German electro-clash musicians who played Puritans in my film) made me understand Puritans in a new way. They didn't like the hats, for example. Gina made me explain Thanksgiving to her.
  

  OK: You are not only creating the films and showing them in theaters - you present them as installations with photographs or film stills, sculptures and more. Do you feel like you are doing more justice to these films by presenting them in this way?
  

  SD: Yes.
  

  OK: Your film, The Blue Lenses, which premiers at Marianne Boesky tomorrow night, was your first film shot in the Middle East. What was it like shooting there?
  

  SD: Wonderful.
  

  OK: The installation is also centered around the beauty of Islamic culture. Are you subconsciously or consciously trying to paint this world in a different light - a lot of people think of Islam, the Middle East, as a hot bed of terrorism and violence?
  

  SD: I had very little experience with the Middle East before I shot there. I had no idea what to expect, and I purposefully left the shoot open to change - to be changed by the place. I mostly knew images from the news, from Hollywood movies which did not seem accurate, or a little bit of Iranian new wave cinema. I did not want my film to be political or topical. So I shot using this Noir format, which is a western narrative format. A western genre. And I found the images and places when I got there.
  

  So my film has new images in it - I hope. Ones you wouldn't normally get to see of that place. But it isn't accurate which I like. Its a fictional world. I like the idea of the audience picking it apart. But also of an audience just getting lost in this world, and not worrying terribly much what is fictional and what is real.
  

  OK: What is the ultimate overarching theme of The Blue Lenses and why it is important in the context of our current zeitgeist?
  

  SD: That's a difficult question. Maybe the 'theme' and why it would be relevant now are two different things. The film tries to describe a man who doesn't want to be describable. I think the older I get the more impossible it seems to me to fully articulate a person or a place. I am starting to enjoy people most when they reveal very little about themselves. I like sitting silently with people and just watching them do things. How they do things. Daniel I thought would change the way he does things on purpose for a time. To be confusing.
  

  Why the Blue Lenses would be important to make now is not the story, which is not a new kind of story, or not the 'theme', but maybe its marrying this kind of story to that particular place. Maybe it changes your expectations of the story, and changes your expectations of the place.
  

  OK: Is there anything that you are really excited about right now that's driving your next project?
  

  SD: The unpredictability of the shoot and how I never knew what to expect is still electrifying to me. I would like my next project to have more of that.
  

  Sue de Beer: 'The Blue Lenses' opens tonight and runs until October 25, 2015 at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Necessary reading: Sue De Beer's comprehensive 2003 monograph 'Hans and Grete' is a rare out-of-print document of de Beer's 2002 short film about school shooters. Companion reading: 'The Complete Box Set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past'. Food for thought: 'The Blue Lenses and Other Stories' by Daphne du Maurier. Must Watch: 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant' by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @autremagazine
  
  

SURVEYING the row of door buzzers outside the hulking Brooklyn building where the artist Sue de Beer works, it somehow seems fitting to find a lone occupant listed on the building's top floor, with no further explanation: "GOD."

"I don't know who that is or what they do," Ms. de Beer said, breaking into a laugh when a reporter pointed out the small handwritten label next to the buzzer. "I've never really been up to that floor."

But given the nature of her work and especially her most recent creation - a lush, frankly mystical video piece called "The Ghosts" that will have its debut Thursday in an unlikely place, one of the stately period rooms at the Park Avenue Armory- it is tempting to imagine the Holy Ghost himself at work up there in an old warehouse on the Red Hook flatlands, not far from a dingy bus depot, an Ikea and a discount store called 99 Cent Dreams.

Over the last decade Ms. de Beer has built a cult following for the darkand often disturbing ways that she mixes the profane and the sacred - or at least a postmodern version of the sacred, a longing to escape the confines of ordinary consciousness for something perhaps more beautiful or true.

The exhibition at the Armory and a show of related sculpture to open Feb. 18 at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea are the most prominent presentation of Ms. de Beer's work in the United States since she first became known through her inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and entered many prominent public collections, like those of the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

In the work for which she is best known, videos that have mined the underbelly of youth culture - a critic once described her as "the pre-eminent auteur of teen angst" - the supernatural, or at least supranormal, has never been quite so front and center as it is in "The Ghosts," which Ms. de Beer describes as a turning point, three years in the making.

But it has never been far outside the frame. The adolescent bedrooms that so often serve as the centerpieces of her creations, cluttered with posters and guitars and packs of cigarettes, have seemed at times like existential anterooms, where the occupants await some kind of apotheosis with the help of love or drugs or other mechanisms for escape.

Like, for instance, the sensory deprivation tank in which Ms. de Beer spent many dark, quiet hours when she lived in Berlin, with a pyramid above it for energy-channeling. ("It was kind of hokey," she said.) Or the hypnotists she began to visit there and in New York, who informed the creation of the central character in "The Ghosts," a hollow-cheeked hypnotist convincingly played by a fellow artist, Jutta Koether, a painter and musician.

"What I wanted was some kind of a nonverbal, non-narrative experience outside myself, something like a state of total belief without having to articulate a belief system," Ms. de Beer, 37, said in a recent interview in her studio, where she shot much of the new video in small rooms with the windows blacked out. "But I don't know if I ever got there."

The new 30-minute two-screen video grew out of a period of desperation in her life, after a year in which she made no art at all. At that time, in 2007, she was traveling almost nonstop, mostly between Berlin, where she lived for several years, and New York, where she is now an assistant professor at New York University.

"I was burned out to the point where I just couldn't do anything creative, and so I actually kind of gave up, and it was liberating," said Ms. de Beer, who, despite the Stygian nature of her fascinations, is engaging and open in person, exuding a kind of rock-geek cool.

In the winter of her bad year, the sun would set in Berlin before 4 in the afternoon, she said. She started venturing out only at night, riding the U-Bahn subway trains alone with a notebook, trying to write. Then for two months she locked herself in a room with only a desk, a chair and a blanket, rarely coming out.

When she did, she had written the basic script for "The Ghosts," which follows three characters - a young woman, a record- store clerk and a money manager (played by Jon Spencer, singer and guitarist for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whom Ms. de Beer persuaded to act for the first time) - as they seek the help of the hypnotist to deal with loss and longing.

In doing so, they conjure up ghosts - frightening-looking ones, who owe a visual debt to Ms. de Beer's long fascination with horror films and, lately, to the particularly bloody 1970s Italian subgenre known as giallo. The ghosts seem to be challenging the viewer to decide whether they are mere memories or phantasms of a more substantial sort - or whether, in the end, it really matters.

In her early years Ms. de Beer was often identified among the practitioners of a death-haunted, neo-Gothic strain of contemporary art that emerged after 9/11, a list that included Banks Violette and David Altmejd. But the new work, while playing with those expectations, owes a lot more to Proust than to Poe, as a wrenching examination of memory and the ways it shapes identity.

"I think that over the last several years she's developed a signature style and voice that's all her own," said Lauren Ross, the curator and director of arts programs for the High Line and a former chief curator at White Columns, who has followed Ms. de Beer's work. "It's always seemed to me that she is after a certain kind of character, one constantly in danger of losing control of the self. I think she's very interested in how thin that line is."

She added: "I've always found her work to be extremely unsettling, It's always taken me out of my comfort zone."

Doreen Remen, one of the founders of the Art Production Fund, the nonprofit organization that is bringing the video to the Armory with the help of Sotheby's, the event's sponsor, said the fund was interested in helping stage a video project in New York partly because "video has the ability to bridge a kind of audience gap that exists in contemporary art."

"And," she added, "I think that with this work, Sue is playing more with the conventions of movie entertainment in a way that is going to grab people, even though it's not a conventional movie by any means."

Because of great difficulty finding production money for the video in 2008 as the economy plunged, Ms. de Beer's ghosts were whipped up mostly on the cheap, using naked actresses spray-painted white, head to toe, and chocolate sauce for the blood that oozes from the mouth of one of them, all of it transformed later in the editing room, where she spent months shaping two terabyte hard drives full of footage.

"I was doing all this research on how to make a ghost on essentially a two-dollar budget without making it look just laughably hilarious," she said.

Her sets, which have always worn their high-school-play artificiality proudly, in this case really needed to do so because of budget concerns. A few helpers built a late '70s Trans Am from wood - complete with the phoenix hood decal known in its day as the screaming chicken - spending little money except on a certain smokeable substance to make the experience more enjoyable. The only real splurge, Ms. de Beer said, was hiring a cat trainer and a large white Persian cat named Snoebell, indulging a visual fascination she finds hard to explain. (Snoebell also appeared in a 2009 video.)

Ms. de Beer met Mr. Spencer through the members of a German band called the Cobra Killers. He said he became involved partly because she described the project as a horror film and he is a fan of the genre. But during the shooting, which he squeezed into an exhausting Australian tour schedule, he was unsure at times what he had gotten himself into.

"Things were always a little vague, even sometimes the address where I was supposed to show up," he said. "I don't know if she was doing this to increase my sense of disorientation, to keep me in the dark. But I guess if she was, in some ways it kind of worked. It was a strange experience all around."

Ms. de Beer, who doesn't like to use trained actors in her works, said she was drawn to Mr. Spencer mostly because of his weathered voice and "world-weary face" and was pleased with the character he helped bring to life, a businessman who seems to be trying to exorcise a lost love by summoning her from the dead only so that he can leave her, repaying her for abandoning him. (The dreamlike dialogue in the video was written by Alissa Bennett, who has collaborated with Ms. de Beer before, and by Ms. Koether.)

Ms. de Beer said during the interview in her studio one blustery afternoon that the video was "really very personal for me, partly because I had benched myself."

"When I finished with the initial script, it felt very important to me to make it," she said.

Growing up in a rambling Victorian house with a widow's walk in Salem, Mass., which still exudes an air of its witchy past, she felt that mysticism was a kind of birthright, and it has been a more prominent element of her work in recent years. A 2006 video, "The Quickening," set in a cartoon-ish Puritan New England, delved into the spiritual seeking of the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and quoted from the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," putting the Jonathan Edwards warhorse to work in probably the strangest context it has ever found itself. Ms. de Beer has also borrowed from the dark, violent post-religious mysticism of the novelist Dennis Cooper. (From his novel "Period," used in a 2005 de Beer video: "I could open the other dimension right now if I wanted. Or I could stay here with you. I'm kind of like a god.")

But Ms. de Beer said that her fascination with ghosts is in one sense simply about finding a way to explore how we all must deal with the past and with loss as we grow older, a struggle that finds a metaphor in the artistic process itself.

"As an artist, you shed all these objects which were the Ôyou' back in the moment when you made them," she said. "And then you go back and hardly recognize them and feel like the person who made them wasn't you but someone else, like a sister or something. And you wonder 'What was she like?'"

link to original article in the New York TImes

link to excerpt from video, "The Ghosts"

From Feb. 3-6, de Beer's 30-minute video The Ghosts (2011) will screen in one of the period rooms at the Park Avenue Armory. De Beer will supplement the ornately decorated Veterans Room, in a corner on the Armory's first floor, with plush carpeting and comfortable places to lounge.

This two-channel video is the artist's first since The Quickening (2007), a trippy horror movie set in Puritan New England about two women chased, and eventually hung, by a masked killer. In The Ghosts, co-sponsored by the Art Production Fund and Sotheby's, a hypnotist (played by German artist and musician Jutta Koether) retrieves lost memories for three "clients": a Wall Street money manager, a teenage girl and a record store clerk.

At one point during The Ghosts, the money manager coolly intones, mid-hypnotism: "I have to bring you back, because there is something that I need to tell you... I want to hear you say that you miss me, I want to hear you say that you're sorry... I will let you come just close enough, so that you can feel it when I leave." Digging into the folds of one's memory will unearth feelings of revenge that are best left buried. But according to de Beer, "You never actually lose something. Whatever you've seen is there and will come back whether you invite it or not."

After living on and off in Berlin for a decade, this is de Beer's first video shot in New York in as long. "In Berlin everyone's unemployed so you can get everyone in a room for two or three weeks and then you've got everything." De Beer started the script for The Ghosts three years ago, and the film was shot over the course of nearly a year in the artist's Red Hook studio. The drawn-out schedule allowed de Beer to work with a bigger cast and more elaborate sets than she has in the past, and to make filming adjustments to accommodate a post-recession budget.

Two adjacent rooms at the Armory will house an altered praxinoscope (a French animation machine, not unlike Brion Gysin's infamous "Dream Machine"), as well as an installation of cutout screens that block and filter light. These components tie The Ghosts to de Beer's show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, opening Feb. 18. The latter will feature sculptures (including the praxinoscope), as well as a few short videos culled from the "oceans of footage" shot for The Ghosts. As the title elegantly implies, "Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure" uses the viewer's movement, bright colored lights and perforated screens to orchestrate a mobile DIY eclipse within the gallery. This is de Beer's first show not entirely dependent on video. If she's as skilled at creating moody, lush environments in the gallery as she is on a film set, we're in for a treat.

ORIGINALLY I WANTED TO MAKE A GIALLO-a very classic version, with ghosts in it. During the course of the narrative development I began to undergo a series of hypnosis, and I also started going to a sensory deprivation tank in Berlin. So I began to wonder about intersections between the physiological and the psychological, or about ways to take your conscious mind to a place that is unconscious but still visible-a place that produces images. It was then that I began to conceive of a character that was very much in a giallo-an occult hypnotist. After I completed the basic outline for the script, I asked Alissa Bennett to write a text for the hypnotist, where the hypnotist talks about ghosts and the way ghosts inhabit a room-leaving traces of its former occupancy, clues for present and future residents. I also asked her to write a text for a character who repeatedly visits the hypnotist, to experience a more vivid sort of "recollection." Alissa named this "the material recollection."

It was difficult to find a person that could play this hypnotist character. Jutta Koether, who plays the hypnotist, has a strong presence as a person. She is also a musician and I find her voice to be beautiful and rhythmic. For the two characters in the film that are musicians, which are Jutta and John Spencer; they both have voices you could get lost in, voices that carry a lot of feeling with them.

For this video, in particular, the editing was quite physical. How do you make a ghost without it being something that is absurd? It's especially hard on a small budget and shooting over a long period of time. I shot from end of October to December 2008, for two months straight, and then I re-shot five months later and did a lot of experiments to try to understand how to make a ghost. I think that in the editing of this piece, the hypnotism seems to be located in the physicality of video. The way that light can affect your eyes and in turn how that light can affect you physically was exciting to me. The optical effect of persistence of vision, and the way that could make segments of the video overlay.

The first part of this shoot took place in Fall 2009, after the October downturn had been digested, so my budget was quite small when I began to work. One of the characters in the film, Claire, was originally supposed to disappear and she was supposed to do it in a way that was a lot more filmic. But it became clear to me that I didn't actually have the footage that I needed to make that happen, so I asked Alissa again to write a text for this character where she could make herself disappear. Claire describes how she will make herself into the perfect ghost, which echoes a theme for Jutta's character-the nature of a haunting. How absence can be more powerful than presence. Claire's character is new for me, in that she's extremely unsympathetic. I find her to be a bit malicious, in the way that she can see the damage she is about to do, and is looking forward to its effects. She is secretive. But all of these things could make her absolutely fascinating for the right person who would love to be seduced by her. Please, come ruin me again.

"The Ghosts," mimics a giallo - an Italian genre that mixes horror and mystery and gained popularity in the late 1960s. Through four monologues, it tells the story of a hypnotist who can return lost spans of time and memory to their rightful owners. Those owners in turn experience the moments as if for the first time.

The idea for the film came after de Beer had ceased to create anything for a year. It was 2007, and de Beer was constantly traveling between New York and Berlin. "My personal life was chaotic," de Beer said. "I was disconnected from personal relationships, never quite where I was supposed to be."

To refocus de Beer spent hours in a sensory deprivation tank and sought out hypnotists in both cities. When it came time to write, de Beer found herself riding the Berlin U-Bahn alone after the sun set with a notebook. She then locked herself in a room for two months straight. Besides her notebook, a chair, desk and blanket were her only company, not unlike one of the characters in the film.

"I lived in this in-between," de Beer said. "I had this feeling in the script, I was longing to move into fantasy space."

After she finished the script, which centers around a troubled money manager, played by first-time actor Jon Spencer, singer and guitarist of the "Jon Spencer Blues Explosion," a young woman and a record-store clerk, de Beer shelved it. That was the fall of 2008. She shot for two weeks in the fall of 2009 and for one week in summer 2010.

"Throughout shooting she kept saying, "do less, do less," said Claire Buckingham, who plays the young woman. "Sue just wanted to take away the performance of acting and have the simplicity of the space and the moment." To do that, Buckingham said de Beer called for long takes. So long that Buckingham actually fell asleep during one of the scenes where her character visits the hypnotist, played by Jutta Koether, a painter and musician.

While the deviled quail egg with miso and salmon French toast detracted from the eeriness of the evening, Andy Comer's nine-song performance added to it. Comer and de Beer had collaborated on several past projects including their 2009 performance of "Radio Play" at The Kitchen in the Lower East Side.

"Her film is beautiful," Comer said, although neither he nor de Beer sat in on either of the evening's two screenings. "The film questions dream life and tries to make sense of the past while dealing with loss. There are few more relatable topics than that."

A money manager gets hypnotized to fix his broken heart. Then, a teenage seductress and a store clerk face their personal demons.

These troubled souls are characters in a video by New York artist Sue de Beer. "The Ghosts" also stars sexy spirits who strip and ooze blood. It starts today at the Park Avenue Armory.

"I'm sure there are plenty of haunted money managers out there," De Beer, 37, said in an interview. She shot most of the 30-minute work in 2009 while stock markets were crashing.

Her perfect character was a banker wanting to find the ghost of a lover who left him. He is played by the malt-voiced Jon Spencer (leader of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), who looks too handsome to be abandoned. His world begins to unravel as the hypnotist, portrayed by German artist Jutta Koether, counts from 10 to zero.

You might feel a bit queasy too. White faces of ghost women are superimposed over the hypnotist's face, flickering madly. Real-life objects like lamps and partition screens dissolve into pools of light and kaleidoscopic patterns.

"I wanted to make a film in which you can fall into a trance and suspend disbelief," De Beer said. She had a "low five-figure budget," writing the script in a windowless studio in Berlin and shooting footage in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Each character visualizes his or her fears, dreams and desires. The red-haired girl sees a fluffy, white cat. The men, predictably, dream of naked ladies.

Red Lollypop

The soundtrack includes Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Simon and Garfunkel. The Cure adds sizzle to a scene in which the Lolita-like redhead tries to seduce the record-store clerk by sucking on a red lollypop.

"He is trying not to be picked up," said De Beer. "He knows she's trouble."

The poetry and humor turn what could have been a bizarre arty film into a moving meditation on loss, longing and memory. Not everyone might care for hypnosis or get all the supernatural references. Still, most viewers will relate to the dread felt by someone who picks up the phone and hears an unknown voice saying "I am coming to get you."

The film is showing at the Armory's Veterans Room, which has silver drawings on the ceiling. De Beer has added a silver rug and metallic bean-bag chairs. The presentation brings to mind the installation by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist at the Museum of Modern Art two years ago.

"You can enjoy it on a purely entertainment level," said Doreen Remen, co-founder of Art Production Fund, a nonprofit organization that produced the event and got Sotheby's to sponsor it. "And that's what opens up the work to the audience beyond the art world."

"The Ghosts" runs through Feb. 6 at 643 Park Ave.; +1- 212-744-8180. De Beer's next show will open at the Marianne Boesky Gallery on New York on Feb. 18.

(Katya Kazakina is a reporter for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

Now transplanted from Berlin to Brooklyn, the artist will have her biggest U.S. exhibition yet, opening Feb. 3, when her video about a hypnotist who controls a money manager is screened in the period rooms of the Park Avenue Armory. She is currently at work on a new show slated for March at the Marianne Boesky gallery.
The Observer sat down with Ms. de Beer to explore her peculiarly American brand of gothic.

Peter Hudan: Tell us about the project at the Park Avenue Armory.

Sue de Beer: The Ghosts, an Art Production Fund project, is primarily an exhibition of a new film, although there will be sculptural pieces. I started The Ghosts saying I wanted to make a giallo (Italian crime and horror film), but it isn't really a giallo now.

PD: And the Boesky exhibition?

SB: It is called "depiction of a star obscured by another figure." It is about eclipses, which in a way Ghosts is also about-one body eclipsing another. We're building an 8-foot drop ceiling in the gallery that will be transluscent white. It is the first time I will have an exhibition without video as a primary focus; it will also have a sculpture based on an early animation machine from the turn of the last century. Shamin Momin is curating a show in Marfa, Texas, and she asked me to turn a building into a sculpture.

PD: You were born in Tarrytown, raised in Boston, went to Parsons and Columbia. How is your background a part of your work?

SdB: New England aesthetics has had a strong influence on my work. Especially painters like John Singer Sargeant. I was raised in Salem and very close to Salem. The 17th-century architecture which has this Louise Nevelson quality to it.

PD: It's been said that you are a "true American" artist? What do you think about that statement?

SB: I didn't really consider myself to be an American artist until I was exhibiting in Europe. Then I really understood how American or how my worldview was American.

PD: What are some qualities of this Americana?>

SB: Optimism and humor mixed in with seriousness. Although my work can be quite dark, I have a sympathy for the characters.

PD: You often work with teenage actors. Why?

SB: Teenagers have a vulnerability and an electricity about them.

PD: What directors and films have inspired you?

SB: Lynch and Kubrick, there are so many. Fassbinder's An American Soldier. Syberberg's Hitler, Lars von Trier. Hausu, an incredible Japanese psychedelic horror film. Frank Casdorf, Christoph Schlingenseif and the Volksbuhne. Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace.

PD: You started winning awards about a decade ago. Did it change your life, your work?

SB: I was able to make work without having a job. It moved me to Europe; at that point I had been traveling to Europe but never had a chance to live there.

PD: When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

SB: I don't know. I was expelled from high school, which was very positive for me. I decided to become an artist after that; it felt like a good decision. I didn't have many other options anyway.

PD: Now you teach at N.Y.U. Is it a good time for young artists right now?

SB: I think it is, but I think it is a very difficult time for young people in general. I'm shocked at the lack of decent paying jobs, considering the size of student loans.

PD: Would you recommend Berlin to artists?

SB: Yes, but you have to be economically independent to do it. It is difficult to be an auslander and find work, so you have to be making money off of your work. Berlin is filled with history and there is something haunting and uncanny about it. The city enters into your blood, very strange, and it gives you very vivid dreams.

De Beer's 27 minute video starts off in key with fast-cut images of soldiers unloading and unpacking weapons, while a voiceover recounts the birth pangs of the Bauhaus from "a flaming protest against materialism [that] was founded after the horror of war" (words taken from Oskar Schlemmer's 1923 Das Staatliche Bauhaus manifesto). Quick fade to a Rasputin-like figure swathed in red light (reminiscent of Yves Bonnefey's "The place of the dead / May be a fold in red cloth"), who seems to be playing a primitive electronic organ or Theramin, the Russian inventor of which was himself dealt a double fate or foil as both capitalist inventor and Soviet undercover agent. Next, in keeping with this blend of either music or espionage, fade to black: a guy looks up at snow falling. Then two masked goths with hooded capes dance around against a bluish backdrop of painted, teary eyes and an archaic symbol (Schlemmer staged theatre at Bauhaus). We hear Rosa Luxemburg's famous words: "tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again.' (...) I was, I am, I shall be." Several other coded scenes follow, punctuated by excerpts from Bauhaus fabric artists Gertrud Grunow's 1923 Farbe, Form, Ton ("Light and color are no longer just blue and red - they are a living force") and Walter Gropius' Principles of Bauhaus Production (1925). Slipping in and out of frame and sync are, variously, an afroed dude, psychedelic swirls and patterns, a grotesque puppet character who is set on fire, snowy walks, old bauhaus footage, model household appliances, the entirety intercut with previous scenes. Everything ends in mist before looping back again to the "spiritual" awakening caused by the "misery of war."

In Permanent Revolution, the Berlin / New York artist plays leapfrog with Marx and Engel's famous proletarian battle cry, a Hegelian fairytale that first appeared in Die heilige Familie (1845) and Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850), but which thereafter disappeared from their lexicon, only to be picked up again later by Trotsky and even Rosa Luxemburg. Raised originally by Marx to resound within the settings of the Napoleonic Wars, during which time the bourgeoisie not only facilitated the transition in France between the Terror ("permanent war") and "permanent revolution" but also helped to crush its very momentum by artificially creating a famine that eventually delayed the Russian campaign, bringing the machinery of revolution to a halt, the term implies not so much a revolutionary class in itself as a kind of historical agency, an always fluctuating titration of the "decisive forces of production." This idea is further refined in later formulations leading to the March 1850 address, in which Marx's theory is no longer about revolution per se, but appears as a sort of wake up call to the forces of political subjection. As if this was not fanciful enough, echoes of this forever "imminent" awakening reappear in the later Soviet song and dance about the "direct victory" of the proletariat, Bauhaus's "resolute affirmation of the living environment of machines," Johannes Itten's Zoroastrian "color spheres," right through historical modernism, the counterculture, and beyond. Itten's 1921 claim that "everything moves, and nothing is ever dead, for otherwise the world would not exist," is, I suspect, the point of all this cavorting about in de Beer's video. My guess is that, like Benjamin, she can't stop excavating the "dark loam" of cultural memory, where what lies buried must always come back - as the farcical scene or stage of its own revolution.

SdB: I saw Gina and Annika play two shows in Berlin before I contacted them.

During the first show at the Prater, Gina, who was wearing an ice-skating outfit, fell off the stage I think by accident, and kept singing from the floor, covered in wine and dirt and surrounded by an awe-struck crowd. And I had just finished the script for the Quickening when I saw the second show - it was at the Maria - also in Berlin. Gina and Annika had a< 12 piece back up band for that show playing some kind of traditional greek instruments. Annika came out on stage with a hula hoop, poured a bottle of red wine on herself, and demanded that the bar give her and the entire band vodka before she would agree to sing. At that moment, I could really see both of them in my mind, running through a black forest, signing a pact with the devil.

So I got in touch with Gina through a friend of a friend, and asked if she would want to be in the piece. She helped me contact Annika after that.

KP: Gina told me that when they played at the party after your opening at Marianne Boesky last year, when flying to New York, their hula-hoops became a security issue. True?

SdB: The hula hoops were taken away from them by the security people at the airport. The skies are now safe from burlesque.

KP: Annika and Gina also told me that you were interested in Annika's fascination with the German classic "Das Boot" and that you were considering making an all-female reworking of the submarine drama. Is that a serious possibility?

SdB: These are funny questions. When I was in pre-production making props for the film, Annika told me that she had been to film school, and had wanted to be an actress, but dropped out when she realized 'Das Boot' only had male leads. Somehow I hadn't seen this project as a specifically all-female submarine rock video, I had some other images of things going on in the submarine involving sailors, but yes, I would love to do that with them. They keep going on tour and I keep travelling also so we haven't really followed up.

KP: We've discussed before that you prefer to show your films as one-off screenings or full installations that incorporate the films works. Would you like to say a bit about this artistic decision?

SdB: Not really.

KP: Your rise to prominence as an artist has been strongly linked with work in which female teenage subcultures, fashion, horror, beauty and dark destruction are all linked, perhaps most widely perceived after the 2004 Whitney Biennale. Some have connected this with a distressed internal state and yet my perception of you -and the work- are layers of serious discourse peppered with a deeply bemused dark humour. Are you a happy bunny or a tortured artist? Discuss, twenty points...

SdB: Wow. Both I guess. I don't know how to answer that.

KP: You effectively bide your time between Europe and the USA, having both a New York and a Berlin gallery. Any observations as an artist on the differences -or similarities- in sensibility of these two art demimondes?

SdB: New York is kind of strange right now. The art world boom made a lot of people high on coke. I am liking the Berlin energy more right now for making work, but I am also getting more spaced out as I get older, so maybe it just suits me better.

KP: At the time I was working on the "Frauhaus" project we were communicating about your forthcoming project that will show in Antwerp next year. Would you like to tell us a bit about the project?

SdB: I just finished it. I have a show up at Arndt & Partner through end of October that is three large installations - and one of them is the new video you are describing, which I titled 'Permanent Revolution'. It uses source material from the Bauhaus, and meshes it onto a kind of non-linear narrative structure, using music and editing to tie it together. The exhibition at Arndt was particularly exciting to work on as it shows both the Quickening and Permanent Revolution together, and there are a lot of links between those two works. It is also the first time I showed three big installations and two big films at once. It was a really massive undertaking, and now I am very tired.

I am bringing Permanent Revolution to Antwerp in December - it was filmed in Belgium in March. And it will also travel to LA and Tel Aviv in the coming year.

The American artist Sue de Beer has an impressive CV that includes the Whitney Museum of American Museum at Altria; the 2004 Whitney Biennale; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien and Kunst Werke, Berlin and the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, to name but a few institutional credits. She has shown in numerous respected galleries including her representing galleries, Marianne Boesky, Arndt & Partner Gallery and Sandroni Rey Gallery, and was presented by Sandroni Rey at Statements, Basel, Miami Beach. She is working on a new project that will be exhibit at the MuHKA Museum, in Antwerp next year.

So bietet ihr die Jugend mit all ihren stotternden Gesten die Möglichkeit, die Sprache aus dem Spiel zu nehmen und so die Fuzzy-Logik ihrer Bilder von eindeutigen Interpretationen unabhängig zu machen.

Das Betrachten einer Videoinstallation von de Beer ist daher nicht gerade eine Erfahrung textueller Kohärenz, sondern vielmehr ein (Wieder-) Erkennen von Erscheinungen. Willentlich wird auf jegliche Requisiten verzichtet, die dem Betrachter bei der Entschlüsselung der Szenen behilflich sein könnten. Linguistische Gerüste brechen weg, es sei denn, man stützt sich auf persönliche Mythologien. Die Erzählung steht nur selten in Bezug zum Bild, die Bildfolgen scheinen wie einem Delirium entsprungen. Das Ganze ist eine Traumlandschaft mit ikonischen Erinnerungen.

In gewisser Hinsicht ist de Beer eine wahrhaft amerikanische Künstlerin, eine Künstlerin in der Tradition von Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha und Robert Longo. Mit wahrhaft amerikanisch meine ich die Fähigkeit, ein spirituelles Werk zu schaffen, das jedoch nicht in einer geschichtlichen Matrix verankert ist. Es ist die Fähigkeit, Ideen auf der Grundlage einer immerwährenden Gegenwart zu entwickeln, in der die Geschichte ein Ferienort ist, von dem man Souvenirs als Sammlung kollektiver Erinnerungen mit nach Hause bringt. Geschichte ist also nicht die Quelle, sondern der Gegenpol, der die Gegenwart erst verständlich und fassbar macht.

Eine solche Geschichtsauffassung bestimmt auch de Beers Blick auf die eigene Zeit. Die Gegenwart wird als Horrorgeschichte dargestellt und ist damit in ihrem Mangel an unmittelbarer
historischer Kontinuität auch nostalgisch, unheimlich und besessen von Äußerlichkeiten.
Eine mythische, fossile Gegenwart, die sich als Schauergeschichte (gothic story) präsentiert, gerade weil das Konzept der gothic story auf der Verfälschung von Geschichte beruht und damit eine Vergangenheit schafft, die es so nie gegeben hat.

Die von der Vergangenheit abgespaltene und somit verwaiste Gegenwart wird traditionell in der Form des Märchens überliefert, eine Form, die de Beer in vielen ihrer Werke einsetzt. Hans and Grete, ihre Videoinstallation aus dem Jahr 2002, mag sich oberflächlich auf den deutschen Mythos der RAF beziehen und andeuten, dass die Gleichsetzung von pubertärer Melancholie und terroristischen Aktionen als Erfüllung von Sehnsüchten etwas sehr Tröstliches hat. Unterscheidet man jedoch zwischen Horror und Terror, so erkennt man, dass das wahrhaft authentische Kapital, auf dem ihre Werke basieren, nicht die terroristischen Gewaltakte sind, sondern ganz eindeutig der Horror als ein geistiges Konstrukt. Man könnte sagen, de Beer betrachte die Wirklichkeit mit einem gewissen Staunen, anstatt sich ihr mittels psychoanalytischer Verfahren zu nähern: Dinge werden gezeigt, aber nicht erklärt. Indem sie das Werk nach den Decknamen von Baader und Ensslin Hans and Grete benennt, katapultiert sie die Wirklichkeit ins Reich der Märchen, wo das Reale Lacans innerlich wird und zu bluten beginnt. Erinnern wir uns, dass Hans und Grete Ð Hänsel und Gretel Ð von ihren Eltern in den Tod geschickt wurden, ganz einfach und ohne Entschuldigung. In allen Märchen geht es darum, den Horror offen zu legen, und dieser bildet auch das Grundgerüst, um das sich de Beers Geschichte der Uneindeutigkeiten rankt. In The Quickening tanzt ein junges Mädchen mit einem Wolf Ð und war es nicht Rotkäppchens Mutter, die sie, nicht ganz unwissend, was Vergewaltigung betrifft, hinausgeschickt hat zu ihrer inzestuösen Begegnung mit genau diesem Tier? Ebenfalls märchenhaft ist das wiederkehrende Motiv des Doppelgängers, wie es beispielsweise in den vielen geteilten Bildern auftaucht, die schließlich damit enden, dass der Kopf der Künstlerin in zwei Teile gespalten wird (Untitled, 1998).

Das Reale bedarf keiner Erzählung, aber einer geistigen Verfassung. Das bringt mich zurück zum Konzept des gothic, der Schauerästhetik, das de Beer Ð wie schon Kienholz, Ruscha und Longo Ð zum ästhetischen Mittler macht. Indem sie das Stilmittel des Gotischen einsetzt, kann de Beer die Rolle der unzuverlässigen Erzählerin einnehmen und damit die Freuden des Missverstandenwerdens für sich nutzen. Ihr wird Zutritt zum Reich des verwunschenen Ortes, des Spukhauses, der antiquierten Arena und ihren nekromantischen Genüssen gewährt.

Das ist der Grund, warum de Beer Wert auf einen inszenierten Kontext für das Betrachten ihrer Videos legt. Indem der Raum durch eine Reihe von gezielten Eingriffen zur Erweiterung des halluzinatorischen Bildschirms wird, den Horror so einkapselt und zusammen mit dem Betrachter in ein abgegrenztes Umfeld einschließt, entsteht eine Art Schneekugel-Effekt. Der Film wird in die Wirklichkeit hinein verlängert, oder, anders ausgedrückt, durch die Sakralisierung wird der nun nicht mehr gewöhnliche Raum um die Möglichkeit von Wundern und Greueltaten bereichert.

Wie schon in ihren früheren Werken setzt de Beer auch in ihrer neusten bei Arndt & Partner Berlin gezeigten Videoinstallation Ð einer der offiziellen Darstellung widersprechenden Geschichte des Bauhaus` Dessau Ð Pastiche-Technik ein. In den Annalen der Kunstgeschichte steht das Bauhaus für alles Moderne, also für das Konstrukt einer verheißungsvollen Zukunft auf Grundlage der Vernunft. Aber genau wie die abstrakte Kunst hantiert auch das Bauhaus mit okkulten Wahrnehmungen, und seine Besessenheit mit dem Fortschrittsgedanken wurde von vielen seiner Mentoren, etwa Johannes Itten oder Wassily
Kandinsky, in einer Sprache ausgedrückt, die eher esoterisch als wissenschaftlich war. Diese okkultistischen Tendenzen entspringen der Theosophie, wie im Falle Kandinskys, oder dem Mazdaznan-Kult, einer zoroastrischen Sekte, der Itten angehörte. De Beer stellt ihnen einen visuellen Raum zur Verfügung, dessen Farbgebung, morbide Atmosphäre und physische Kontextualisierung (man wird durch einen Wald zum Werk geleitet) sich auf das Okkulte beziehen Ð dies ist die Geisteslandschaft, die sie schon in früheren Werken eingesetzt hat, der geistige Raum, in dem sie sich heimisch fühlt. Und wie in den früheren Werken wird auch hier die Bedeutung destabilisiert, indem der Text des Bauhaus-Manifests Ð ein Text voller Erwartungen, gesprochen in der autoritativen Stimme des Wissenden Ð mit Bildern überlagert wird, die seine Bedeutung verändern. Der Text ist ein Widerhall von Oscar Schlemmers Triadischem Ballett über eine Allianz zwischen Mensch und Maschine, die nun in eine Breakdance-Sequenz mutiert und damit das Versprechen hält, ihm jedoch gleichzeitig die ursprünglich darin enthal- tene Schicklichkeit verweigert. Diese Diskrepanz zwischen dem utopistischen und rationalen Text und dem obskuren Umfeld aus Lichtmaschinen und unaufgelöster Darstellung, dieses Bilderrätsel zwischen Vernunft und ihren wahnsinnigen Töchtern ist das Herz der Finsternis, zu dem wir geführt werden. So betrachtet ist das Bauhaus eine Geisterstadt, deren Bewohner uns in unseren Träumen aufsuchen, ein Ort, an den man durch den Wald und nur aus Versehen gelangt. Ein Ort der gebrochenen Versprechen.

Adolescence then, known for its stuttering gesticulations, was also her way to take language out of the game so that the fuzzy logic of her images stands independent of any explicit interpretation.

This is why looking at the video installations of de Beer is not exactly a lesson in textual coherence but one in recognizing appearances. All the requisites which enable understanding disappear by intention. Linguistic scaffolds crumble unless you favor private mythologies. The narrative seldom relates to the image, the sequences are delirious. It's a dreamscape with iconic memories.

In a sense de Beer is a true American artist in the tradition of Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha and Robert Longo, and by True American I mean the capacity to generate a spiritual production without it being immersed in a historical matrix. It is the capacity to form ideas on the basis of a continuous present, where history is a tourist resort, whose souvenirs are brought back home as a set of collective memoirs. History, then, is not the source but the antidote, by which the present is being understood, grasped. This understanding of the historical dimension shifts her works towards a certain treatment of the present. It is now framed as a horror tale, and therefore is also nostalgic in its lack of immediate historical consistency, uncanny and obsessed
with its surfaces. A mythical and fossilized present which uses the gothic format to emphasize its immediacy exactly because the notion of the gothic is based on faking history, and by doing so it builds a past which never existed.

The present orphaned from its past is traditionally delivered in the form of the fairy tale, which de Beer applies in many of her works. Hans and Grete, her video installation from 2002 may relate on its surface to the national German myth of the RAF group and there is a great comfort in equating pubescent melancholia with their actions as a fulfillment of a desire. But if you discern horror from terror, you realize that de Beer made it very clear that horror, being a construction of the mind, is the true authentic capital to be used in her works rather than the terrorist acts on which the piece is based. De Beer, we might say, exchanges psychoanalytical procedures in favor of a certain sense of wonder where things are not explained-but shown. By calling the work Hans and Grete, the code names of Ensslin and Baader, catapults reality into the realm of the fairy tale where the Lacanian Real becomes visceral and starts bleeding. Hans and Grete, I remind you, were sent to their deaths by their parents, simply so and with no apology. All fairy tales are about the horror being laid bare and this is the skeleton on which de Beer's tale of ambiguities can be told. In The Quickening, a maiden is dancing with a wolf and was it not the mother who sent Red Riding Hood to her incestuous encounter with the animal knowing a thing or two about rape? Or the recurring theme of the doubleganger as in the many split images which ends in her own head being cut in two (Untitled, 1998).

The real does not need a narration but it needs a frame of mind which brings me back to the gothic. De Beer, like Kienholz and Ruscha and Longo makes it an aesthetic mediator. By using the aesthetics of the gothic de Beer can assume the role of the unreliable narrator and the beauty of being misunderstood. She is admitted to the realm of the haunted place, the antiquated arena and its necromantic delights.

This is why de Beer gives importance to the presence of a staged context while viewing her videos. It creates a snow globe effect where by virtue of a set of decisions the space is an extension of the hallucinatory screen, that is, it encapsulates the horror and encloses it within a confined environment together with the one who observes. It is now a movie turned real, in other words the sacralisation of a space no more mundane and therefore enriched with possibilities of miracles and atrocities.

As in her earlier works de Beer's use of the pastiche technique is present also in her last video installation, presented at Arndt & Partner Berlin (2007), which is the story of the Bauhaus told against the grain. In the official chapters of art history the Bauhaus stands for all things modern, that is, a construct of a future of promises based on rational thoughts. But the Bauhaus, like much of abstract art is also rooted in occult perceptions and its obsession with the idea of progress was often translated through many of its mentors, such as Johannes Itten or Vassily Kandinsky, into a language which was more esoteric than scientific. These occultic tendencies stemming from theosophy as in the case of Kandinsky or the Zoroastian styled sect, the cult of Mazdaznan, whose adept was Itten, are given a visual space by de Beer which relates to the occult in its color scheme, its morbid atmosphere, and its physical contextualization (you are lead to the work through a forest), that is the mental landscape she used in earlier works, the mental space she feels at home with. And as in the earlier works, here also meaning is destabilized by overlaying the text, the Bauhaus Manifesto, rich in expectations and spoken in the authoritative voice of the one who knows against the images which mutate its meaning. The text echoes Oscar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet about an alliance forged between man and machine that is now morphing into a break-dance sequence, thus keeping the promise but denying it the sense of original decorum it entailed. This discrepancy between the utopian and rational text and the occultic paraphernalia of light machines and unsolved presentation, this rebus between rationality and its mad daughters, is the heart of darkness towards which we are being lead. From this perspective the Bauhaus is a ghost town whose inhabitants visit us in our dreams, a place you entered through the woods and by mistake. A place of broken promises.

Sue de Beer's latest video, "The Quickening", 2006, is a morality tale without a moral, a murder mystery with no solution. It's set in Puritan New England - although de Beer seems unconcerned with creating the realist mis-en-scene of the conventional period piece. The movie puts incongruity to use as a narrative strategy. When John Denver launches into the second stanza of "The Eagle and the Hawk" following the unceremonious hanging of one of the characters, the music is jarring, but the effect is oddly felicitous.

The story of "the Quickening" is fairly simple, beginning and ending with the unexplained murder of the two female leads (both of whom are chased, stabbed, then hung by an unidentified creature). These events themselves are bookended by excerpts, narrated by the male character (Travis Jeppesen), from Joris Karl Huysmans's 1903 preface to his 184 novel "À Rebours" (Against Nature). In a voiceover immediately following the demise of the first victim, Annika Line Trost, Gina V. D'Orio reads a passage from Johnathon Edwards's fiery sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), strenly excoriating the "wicked unbelievers," and in the scene that follows, a mysterious, hypnotic machine triggers a dream sequence in which D'Orio dances with forest animals in a leafy clearing.

As those familiar with de Beer's work might expect, "The Quickening's" plot is less a motor for character development than elaborate window dressing for the artist's referential games. Tropes and imagery from her previous works make appearances. The dancing fauna and falling glitter reprise sequences from "Black Sun", 2005, while walls full of fanciful obscure lettering and ornate floral sketches bring "Hans & Grete", 2002-2003, to mind. The sound track and the recasting of Jeppesen, the male lead of "Hans & Grete", also establish links to other works.

"The Quickening" is de Beer's first single-channel video since her early experiments in the medium, "Making Out with Myself", 1997, and the gorgeous, unsettling "Loser", 1998; it is also her first foray outside adolescent ennui. Gone is the dialogue between two screens, the materialized play between split personalities and mirrored perspectives that marked her last four movies. For "The Quickening", this fracture has been folded into the work's internal structure, sublimated into psychedelic lighting and kaleidoscopic effects.

Vestiges of immaturity remain. The shaky, handheld camerawork illustrates de Beer's stubborn resistance to critical exhortations to "grow up", while the clumsy exaggeration of plosives in Jeppesen's speech recall high school theatre. The movie walks the line between Edwards's stoic certainty in God and punishment and Huysmans's meandering path towards faith, while the mash-up that constitutes her particular style - Dario Argento's "Susperia" (1977 by way of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" (1990 - 1991) with smatterings of Kenneth Anger and of Gregg Araki's "Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy" (1993-97) - equivocates between slick production and a winking crudeness.

De Beer's irresolution is both her strength and her vulnerability, allowing her to float between genres without settling down, though it can also leave her work feeling aimless. Recurrent images of ships and Thanksgiving iconography offer a hint of colonial critique, but the suggestions are all too fleeting. "Truly it can be said that beauty lies only in mystery. The beauty is the mystery," Jeppesen concludes in the movies final two lines. If thats true, de Beer has a lot of beauty on her hands, but she's still unsure where to take it.

In one particularly trippy sequence, the would-be killer is lulled into a trance in which he envisions one of his victims as a forest nymph/housewife who takes time to dance with dangerous animals while sweeping leaves from a woodland floor. A catalog essay by Kim Paice explains that "his visions allow us to understand the creativity of magic, sexuality, and art as social resistance." Possibly, though viewers unversed in De Beer's sources - Puritan sermons by Jonathan Edwards and writings on decadence by J.K. Huysmans among them - are unlikely to make the connection. The texts may have helped de Beer deconstruct some complex components of sexual politics, but the imagery they inspired fails to illuminate the murky landscape of power-structured relationships. Nonetheless, while The Quickening is far from resolved, it does reveal an artist will to taking risks as she matures.

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire."
-Jonathan Edwards, excerpt from his sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)'

The shadow of Puritanism still lingers, like a baleful curse, across the cultural landscape of the United States, with New England as its traumatic epicenter. The Puritan God was an angry God, all-powerful and punishing, the patriarchal father of a vast dysfunctional Family of Man. Puritans believed in the doctrine of predestination, which held that man was inherently sinful and depraved and it was only through arbitrary divine grace that he could be saved from damnation. Belief in Jesus and participation in the sacraments did not guarantee salvation; that was determined by God's sovereignty alone. After the Fall, God chose an elect group for salvation; indeed, it was predestined from birth if one was chosen for Heaven or condemned to Hell. In spite of this, the 17th century Puritan colonists thought of themselves as the Chosen People of God, destined to found a New Jerusalem in the harsh isolation of the New World. Their only weapon against darkness was the study of the Bible, an obsessive practice that necessitated education for all. Grammar schools and colleges were established early on and ironically it was this very literacy that led to their downfall, as greater knowledge led to greater freedom of choice for their descendants.

The psychic topography of New England is dotted with troubling historic events and individuals who perhaps cracked under the strain of extreme Calvinist Protestantism. The assertive Anne Hutchinson was deemed heretical for a dissenting voice that posed a threat to the male authority of the church hierarchy. Accused and tried for blasphemy in 1637 she was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and in 1643 met a violent end in East Chester, New York at the hands of Indians. Some fifty years later women were again at the center of controversy in Salem, Massachusetts. Here it was the unexplainable public outbursts of a group of girls, otherwise trained to be subservient, that led to a diagnosis of bewitchment; probably influenced by the recent publication of Cotton Mather's work Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689). At the end of the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692, fourteen women and six men were executed while scores more were imprisoned.

One of the most famous sermons ever delivered in Puritan New England was in 1741 by the American Congregational preacher Jonathan Edwards. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was a fiery evangelical warning, delivered in a monotone to great effect. The introduction focused on Deuteronomy 32:35, "Their foot shall slide in due time," in order to emphasize that each person should continually seek God's grace in order to fight against indwelling sin. Audience members were found crying out, weeping, swooning, and going into convulsions – so great was the emotion stirred up by Edwards. Copies of the sermon were printed and distributed to a wide audience which helped to usher in the First Great Awakening, a movement among American colonial Protestants that made religion intensely personal, creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt that desperately sought redemption.

By the nineteenth century Puritanism had all but died out in New England in a literal sense, but an aura of horror and the preternatural still clung to the region. In 1892 the murder trial of Lizzie Borden, accused of hacking her parents to death with an ax, enthralled the nation with its sensational bloodiness. With its intimations of incest, lesbianism, and feminine sexuality run rampant, Fall River, Massachusetts today remains a site of fascination and Lizzie Borden's home has been turned into a popular Bed and Breakfast. In the early twentieth century Providence, Rhode Island gave us that master of supernatural literature, H.P. Lovecraft. Under the spell of his Puritan ancestry, Lovecraft wrote haunting tales of a New England under the attack of an unseen, invasive evil. Forbidden knowledge, revealed to a weak humanity secretly controlled by nonhuman entities from other worlds was a favorite theme, with obvious parallels to earlier Puritan fears. Stephen King of Maine, Lovecraft's literary heir, continues to keep us in thrall under a prolific avalanche of horror fiction.

The uncomfortable and still unresolved relationship between our Puritan past and present is best exemplified by the pathetic yet germane tourist trap, The Salem Witch Museum. Visitors are ushered into a dark cavernous space and forced to stand on an illuminated red pentagram inscribed on the floor, as if part of a satanic ritual. Stacked floor to ceiling are wax tableaux narrating the events surrounding the Salem witch trials. Decrepit and dusty, they light up in chronological order to deliver a series of corny and didactic accounts meant to exonerate the innocent. But the underlying message delivered to a willfully susceptible audience is: What if the Devil truly did walk among them, and what if he still does, today ...?

"The devil stands ready to fall upon them, and seize them as his own, at what moment God shall permit him. They belong to him; he has their souls in his possession, and under his dominion."

-Jonathan Edwards, excerpt from his sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)'

It's pretty unusual in the context of her video-works that deal almost categorically with today's youth, coming of age, and rock-n-roll. Without much of a stretch, I suppose, the quizzical making out with myself (1997) could be considered a preamble to The Quickening. Both works emphasize bonds between creativity and sexuality. But nearly a decade later, de Beer has developed a fuller role for the artist, who is now a character with some depth, and she has created a sensual video-installation to engage bodies and minds. Readers of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851) will recognize the oppressive society about which Nathaniel Hawthorne spilled so much ink. Clandestine meetings, keys passed between lovers, and the clash of religious morality and sexual desire, all find a place in The Quickening.²

For anyone who forgets that Hawthorne's writing about the puritans was once thought "naughty" and "racy," de Beer's work is an evocative reminder of how sexy puritans can be³.

In spite of the fact that de Beer intended The Quickening as a kind of period film, her disdain for the idea of the historical real should be immediately obvious. If it isn't, then, to make this point she weaves Joris-Karl Huysmans's reflections on the demise of naturalism -- in À Rebours (1884) -- into the monologue of the central artist-character⁴.

Typical of her sense of humor, she realizes a frenzied and unreal style. Her erratic cut-up method results in a trippy, fin-de-siècle decadent, scary movie.

The Quickening includes tell-tale signs of slasher films, like close views of a woman being stalked, maddening shots that hide the killer's identity (we see and hear the blade penetrating and being pulled from her body), and sequences that seem to make the camera's view into the killer's viewpoint. The way that violence hijacks eroticism and turns sexual pleasure into fear and shock will also be familiar to fans of the slasher genre⁵.

All of this is echoed in simple but effective audio -- howling and thudding made by Andy Comer, wind sounds made by passing buses and traffic -- which de Beer layered into the final cut.

The impression of spectral events that is given relates to supernatural visitations, like those in 'spoken' histories of the 1700s that sounded psychedelic to [her]: a cat appears at your feet as you sleep, and the cat becomes a man, and then you are in the forest and you have to sign a black book.

Indistinction between fantasy and reality further complicates matters, and makes the heroine's night-journey as terrifying as it is trippy. It's difficult to confirm or fix her position or time tracks when de Beer layers phantasmatic trips upon dreams and trances⁶.

If there is storyline, it gets lost in quotation, amateurish cuts, and illegible anagrams. It seems as though there is some kind of film-within-a-film in which the heroine is stalked and raped by a character who behaves like the psycho killer of slasher films, the crazy dangerous guy who hunts down sexually active young women. After being viciously stabbed, the heroine, who is marked by her sexuality, is hung like the witches in Salem, and unceremoniously abandoned in a cave⁷.

Only later will she be found by a woman wearing a scarlet dress, who places a mirror in the dead woman's hands. If this is not confusing enough, the artist's dream sequence shows a maiden, waltzing with a wolf and bull, and sweeping a forest floor. The weirdness of showing her idyllic place in nature is matched by the sentimentality of Comer's John Denver cover song in the background.

These bizarre events seem to take place in the mind of the artist-character. His visions allow us to understand the creativity of magic, sexuality, and art as social resistance. They also help us make sense of the historical theme of the work. As Max Weber explained in his laborious way, protestantism created a stronghold where utilitarian attitudes and occupational practices of capitalism flourished.⁸

Not surprisingly, then, de Beer's artist is shown in decadent surroundings so we understand that he is something of an outsider. Puritan asceticism and policing of desire was, much like that society's attempt to stamp out magic, fully consonant with the work ethic, frugality, and capitalist spirit which animated the lives of protestant puritans. These facts notwithstanding, sexual repression is not merely the historical product of capitalism and born of the way that utilitarian labor can be thought of as opposed to useless expenditure. One of Michel Foucault's great innovations was to have seen that sexual repression relates to the ways our bodies and bare life have become increasingly politicized and drawn into the center of the juridical-political order⁹

This shift, which he identifies with the era of biopower, also involves the proliferation of discourses about sex and of institutions that have made a science out of sex and pleasure.

What happens in The Quickening is therefore pretty striking. In the work, we see pleasure and science turning into art and magic. This is not to say that there is a simple reversal of the biopolitical situation. But I am saying, and I think de Beer is also suggesting, that the exercise of power on and through the body is perhaps the most pressing concern that we face today. In this vein it makes perfect sense for The Quickening to include Jonathan Edwards's restrictive warning about the foot that slips from its firm moral grounding, and Huysmans's remarks about gesturing hysterics, who were thought to be possessed by the devil¹⁰.

Both historical texts point to the society's need for control over the body's movements, gesticulations, and desire.

The artist-character is someone who wants to get beyond the rigid conditioning of the body and mind. For de Beer, he becomes "a kind of psychedelic inventor - like Timothy Leary or William S. Burroughs/Brion Gysin - who takes controlled substances to experience the breakdown of the conscious mind." The entire work, then, seems to have emerged from a trance that was induced in the artist by a dreamachine. This simple device is made out of a light cylinder, which is attached to a record player's turntable spinning at 78 RPM. In 1959, Gysin and Ian Sommerville conceived it as a multidimensional kaleidoscope, and they subsequently used it in psychedelic experiments with Burroughs. They believed that the flickering light patterns made by the machine could stimulate the cortex, reproduce the Alpha frequency of brainwaves, and induce hallucination. The dreamachine was therefore considered a means of freeing the mind of conscious -- and social -- control. Availing herself of these insights, de Beer also tries to interrupt the programming of human subjects through processes and patterns that are intrinsic in the human body¹¹

So her video includes hallucinatory, disorienting, and beautiful flickering, and she exploits vivid color lighting to affect people inside the installation¹².

Reflecting on the dreamachine, Burroughs told an interviewer that he made a point of keeping up with science, particularly, current research about drugs, psychiatry, and brain stimulation¹².

This science, he felt, could tell us a lot about how to resist being controlled. Although de Beer's dreamachine does not herald political revolution in today's puritanical culture, she and Burroughs would probably agree that cultural revolutionaries should be open to such means of changing the body and mind.

1 All comments by Sue de Beer in this text have been taken from correspondence with the author during October, 2006.

2 de Beer is, in fact, a long-time reader of Hawthorne's work. She grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne did a lot of his writing.

3 Anne Abbott, "From Review of The Scarlet Letter (July 1850), in Ed. Ross C. Murfin, Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006), p. 266.

4 Huysmans's novel À Rebours is frequently associated with the turn from Naturalism to Symbolism, and as he wrote in the preface twenty years after the fact, "Naturalism was getting more and more out of breath by dint of turning the mill for ever in the same round." Joris-Karl Huysmans. Against the Grain (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. xxxv.

5 Cinematically lush and yet a little raw, de Beer's work has a bluntness that is by now her signature. It suggests the relevance of Tom Savini and the how-to horror books that de Beer likes so much.

6 De Beer continually exploits anachronism, too. One heroine wears a somber but short puritan dress and heavy makeup. Another heroine appears as a sexy maiden, clad in a scarlet dress with a plunging neckline. Both women don high heels and stockings, even though they wear the conventional white head-dress of puritans.

7 Nathaniel Hawthorne's great grand-father was a judge who presided over the Salem witch trials in 1692, and Hawthorne spoke about his guilt concerning that legacy.

8 Max Weber. Trans. Talcott Parsons. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Dover Publications, 2003). This text was originally published in German.

9 Michel Foucault. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 5. This book was written in French in 1975 and published in English in 1978.

10 In a voiceover, de Beer uses excerpts from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741) by theologian Jonathan Edwards. The title of The Quickening also interrelates the body's movements with time, and refers to "the moment when a child grows in the womb, and the moment before death - the hastening of death, The Quickening."

11 The dreamachine relates to Foucault's notion of technologies of the self.

**12 She captures patterns just like the ones that are shown in Antony Balch's experimental film The Cut-Ups (1966), which is a work that includes Burroughs, Gysin, and Sommerville. The pattern corresponds to swirling mosaics and diamond-patterns of psychedelic color lighting in de Beer's video and installation. Jens Hšhne, a Berlin-based lighting designer who builds many of his own lights, helped de Beer create effects of the 1960s and 1970s with color gell filters and special lenses.

I was lucky enough to work with de Beer on her breakthrough video, Hans & Grete, which was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennale. It was an experience I didn't think would ever be repeated. The artist prefers not to work with actors more than once, and I was never much of an actor to begin with. Imagine my surprise when I was cast in her latest project, The Quickening. Intrigued by de Beer's schizophrenic description - a manic period exploration of early American puritan settlers fused with psychedelic brainbuggery and murder, a sort of Dario Argento meets Kenneth Anger clusterfuck - I immediately x- ed out the last two weeks of October on my calendar in anticipation of the forthcoming deluge of de Beer's sinister weirdness.

While we were quite fortunate to shoot most of Hans und Gret inside the castle- like environs of Berlin's Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, for The Quickening, de Beer managed to procure an abandoned tobacco factory in the working-class district of Pankow. Devoid of heating and electricity, the dusty, decrepit building had a haunted edge to it. Neighborhood derelicts seeking shelter constantly broke into the place, and our imported power supply kept zapping out. The tiny cast and crew chain-smoked to keep warm. If all that weren't bad enough, the thinly insulated walls seemed to amplify the noise on the streets outside the building, especially on one afternoon when a neo-Nazi demonstration marched by less than a hundred meters from the entrance.

The extreme circumstances served to heighten the dark atmosphere of the piece. This time, de Beer opted to use a cast wholly composed of non-actors. Oliver Schuetz, editor of online music-zine dorfdisco.de, played a possessed preacher man. Gina V. D'Orio and Annika Trost, better known as Berlin's most vital electrotrash outfit Cobra Killer, effortlessly transformed their dazzling physiques into bonnet-laced Protestant prowess (only to be subsequently stabbed and hanged by mysterious hands.)

Although I grew less certain each day about what The Quickening is actually about - in fact, I won't know for sure until I see the finished project - I do know that it's set in the late 1700s in New England. My character is meant to be a puritan inventor of psychedelic dream machines; the bits of narration I provide were taken from J.K. Huysmans's decadent classic Au Rebours. It's a real hodgepodge of seemingly conflicting influences - from God to Satan and back again. I began to wonder whether de Beer really knew what she was doing, if she'd be able to pull it off and create something that somehow makes sense among the chaos she was brewing. Then again, if the journey to the end product were any less scary, art might hardly be worthwhile...

Ana Finel Honigman: Why do you choose to display your videos in conjunction with sculptural elements?

Sue de Beer: It started as a purposeful accident. When I began making art, all of my pieces were either photos or videos, but in them, I often made use of some kind of extreme prop. Because I made these props myself, I now count them as my first forays into sculpture. For example, in Untitled, I took a photo of myself sliced in half. To make that image I crafted a full-body cast of myself, sculpted the wound out of wax, and finally fused two photos of me around the sculptural object to make the final print.

AFH: When did your use of sculpture evolve from making props to installations?

SdB: I made my first sculptural installation for Heidi 2, my project with Laura Parnes. We made that installation because the video was so long.

AFH: So, were you thinking of the installation almost like an incentive for viewers to stay and watch the whole video?

SdB: No, that would have been too much like us displaying some sort of aggression against the viewer. It was more about finding a rational use of the space. People were going to be spending at least a half hour in there.

AFH: What did you learn from that early experience of merging installation and video?

SdB: I learned never to cast again. When we were making that installation we did a lot of casting, and I developed an allergic reaction to the mold release. I walked around looking like Freddy Kruger for a month.

AFH: Appropriate, right?

SdB: Yeah. Also, that piece traveled for three years, so I learned a lot by following how the installation held up under foot traffic. That knowledge has been really helpful to me in terms of what I am doing now. I need to know that because I am making objects intended to be handled, sat on, participated with.

AFH: Are people comfortable tactilely engaging with the sculptural parts of your work, or are they too shy?

SdB: People seem to know now that they can touch all the objects, so they get excited. Sometimes they almost get too excited. At the Whitney Biennial, the stuffed animals ended up with some odd things stuffed under them. I even found a bottle of hand lotion and some magazines under Klaus, the purple lion. I was like, "Klaus! What have they been doing to you?" Things have to be built as if you were building for an insane preschool.

AFH: Couldn't "insane preschool" be a definition for art in general?

SdB: No. Actually art is the opposite of insane preschool in terms of materiality. The insane preschool analogy had less to do with content and more to do with the way that the objects are being touched. Things are delicate and fragile and rare in an art context. People can't use art, so instead they watch the things from a distance. Art is more like a zoo in that way. My experience so far is that if you let people touch and use your art they can lose control and maul it a bit because that's what they've always wanted but have never been allowed to do.

AFH: Most of your installations evoke typical teenage ways of watching movies. At "Statements for Basel Miami" in 2004, you constructed a drive-through setting complete with a constructed car and at the Whitney Biennial, you invited viewers to snuggle with stuffed animals while watching Hans & Grete. Do you want your installations to draw people into the world of your adolescent characters, or are the installations designed to alert viewers to the artifice of your movies?

SdB: Well, I don't really see any artifice. My world is kind of real to me. The experience of shooting on my sets feels pretty real. What I mean is, I have driven in a regular car and a plywood car and both kinds of driving felt real to me. I think it is pretty engaging when I snuggle with Mr. Kitty. And, usually when I am building these installations, I am thinking about making something that I wish I had in my apartment.

AFH: What do you think links the experience of viewing while lounging on massive stuffed animals or soft, plush chairs with the more mysterious experience of climbing through a creepy clapboard house in order to watch a film?

SdB: I think that the link between the different installations is that they would all be great places to take a date. You could relax with your baby, hold hands, and cop a feel inside the sculpture.

AFH: Are you sure you want to encourage that kind of thing? Look what happened to Klaus.

SdB: Klaus loved it.

AFH: Demonic dolls and cursed toys are such a classic horror-flick motif. Why do you think there is a connection between stuffed animals and fear?

SB: It is scary to love something unconditionally. When you are in love, or when you love, you are the most vulnerable you will ever be. You can love a toy safely because you know it won't fuck with you, but when the toys start fucking with you too-you know things have gotten bad.

AFH: But don't children also abuse their stuffed animals mercilessly? Aren't they a little like clowns in that way? They are our victims, and on some level, we know they would be justified in taking revenge.

SdB: Pleasure comes in many different forms, and sometimes it comes for the wrong reasons. If we were Lacanians this would all fall under the heading of jouissance. Sometimes it feels good to torture someone or something, sometimes it feels good to be loved or to love unconditionally, sometimes it feels good to be hated by someone or something.

AFH: How does this relate to your work?

SdB: Maybe this is why there was such a frenzy in the Biennial room-the audience internalized the angst in Hans & Grete and enacted it on the animals.

AFH: Do your other works provoke similar reactions?

SdB: People were not as abusive to the car at P.S.1, but the situation was different with the house at the Whitney Museum at Altria. There, people explored the installation in ways I didn't anticipate. They climbed in through the windows in order to see if there was a way they could get into the part of the gallery that had been blocked off. It was funny to be in that space because while you watched the video a head might peek in behind you and watch you watching.

AFH: That sounds terrifying.

SdB: Well, it is a situation that reflects the moods of the videos. I like it when that happens When you watch Hans & Grete, you abuse your environment. While watching Dark Hearts, you wait for someone to come kiss you because it has this waiting and observing thing. But Black Sun is about exploring places you aren't allowed to go, so I like that people climb it, trying to get to areas they can't reach.

AFH: So, would you say that the sculptural elements in your installations are successful when they represent the essence of the films?

SdB: Maybe, and maybe that is why I keep thinking about Minimalism right now.

AFH: Do you think that would further exaggerate the emotional experience? Do you think Minimalism can articulate aspects of the videos that representation can't?

SdB: There is a psychological aspect to how people interact with a space-the way the space is delineated encourages people to do one thing or another.

AFH: I can't really see you doing pure white structures. Which Minimalist works affect or inspire you?

SdB: I guess I will get in trouble here because not all of these artists are strictly Minimalists, but I keep thinking about a Flavin show that I saw at Dia a long time ago. It was installed very well: the lights were given their own space, and you moved through the rooms guided by the color. I also think of when Robert Gober left a room empty except for a drain in the floor.

AFH: So, would you say that when you think of Minimalism, you're not referring to stripped-down forms but defining Minimalism as one idea perfectly executed to the exclusion of any other idea?

SdB: Maybe by "Minimalism," I mean a piece of sculpture that breaks down each architectural situation, as if it were a Judd. This isn't reflected in my work yet, or at least I don't think it is, but it is on my mind.

AFH: Aesthetically and conceptually your work reminds me of the concerns addressed in Riot Grrl feminism. Am I right to think the theory and subculture of that movement have influenced your work?

SdB: That is an interesting question. I am a big fan of those 'zines Johanna Fateman produced in the 90's. My friend Rachel just lent me "Artaud-Mania" and "My need to speak on the subject of Jackson Pollock". And I had a studio assistant who got into a car accident in high school skateboarding to Bikini Kill. Isn't that great? She was hanging onto the back of a car.

AFH: Do you think it is still relevant to interpret art from a feminist standpoint?

SdB: I guess the answer is that every woman who is actively producing and shaping culture is part of the dialogue defining and redefining femininity and feminine identity. I feel like there was a backlash against feminism in the '90s in the artworld, and now there is some kind of fuzzy 'post-feminist' discourse, that is not quite interesting. [Cultural theorist] Slavoi Zizek says that the revolution isn't the most important thing, it is the day after the revolution is what matters.

AFH: Is post-feminist a term you are comfortable applying to your work?

SdB: I am part of the moment after the revolution, so I am participating in building the new. Sometimes that is confusing. I owe a lot to '70s and '80s feminism. Without that movement, I would never get to do big installations in museums. So, if I were 20 years older, things would have been much, much harder for me. Not that building large installations is ever easy.

AFH: Why do you think there is a renewed interest in horror imagery or Gothic narratives in culture?

SdB: All of these things are social. Recently, I have also been surfing images of Glen Danzig [of the bands The Misfits and Danzig]. I am particularly fascinated by the way he looked in 1993. His look was kind of reassuring because he was so solid; even though he was really short, he seemed decisive. I think in that particular moment, he stood for the kind of direction that you could take.

AFH: He provided an image of ideological assurance that was non-existent in an era moral relativism?

SdB: With this dark stuff, goth and horror, you are up against death, but the gothic narrative provides a structure cradling you while you look into the abyss. I think this is why there is an earnestness in art right now. People want meaning and meaningfulness in life. Maybe this need is intensified because there is a void of structure and meaning right now.

AFH: What does the current wave of original and remakes of classic or foreign borror films say about our current cultural concerns?

SdB: Maybe a new passivity.

AFH: Do you mean a political or creative passivity?

SdB: Maybe both. I think there is a general feeling that we're a generation incapable of changing anything. That makes this a good time for remakes and sequels.

AFH: Would you consider your films to be remakes or sequels?

SdB: No, I am not really interested in perpetuating the sequel problem. I made Heidi 2, but even then it felt important to try to make "the new" happen. I am against the impossibility of changing things.

AFH: How does your art relate to the cultural products-books, movies, and subcultures-that you reference?

SdB: I guess that the people/characters in my videos are coming face to face with cultural inertia and trying to sort it out. They are filled with yearning. They want change, newness, contact, and life. They're trying to build the new on rocky footing.

AFH: Are you interested in making mass-market movies, a Hollywood or indie film?

SdB: I keep going back and forth on this. I think the difficulty is that with film, you need a minimum budget of a quarter of a million dollars, and you need to get distribution for your project when it is complete. In a perfect world, with this problem solved, this feels like the plus and minus to me: in film, you have a burst of fame for your project, and it lasts for a couple of years, the whole world has access to it, and then everyone forgets about it in 10 years. My students, for example, do not know "Twin Peaks," which in its time was a ubiquitous pop-culture phenomenon. So, you have this massive ability to communicate, followed by the din of silence. Art reaches fewer people, but it unravels itself more slowly over time, and it stays in your mind in a more current kind of way. All of my students know who Jeff Koons is, for example, or Hannah Wilke and Francesca Woodman. Woodman was dead by the time "Twin Peaks" came out.

Ana Finel Honigman is a writer living in Oxford, England.

The camera pans across a handmade set alive with lurid greens and reds. A dark-haired girl walks up carpeted stairs as an older woman sleeps. The two screens divide and symmetrically mirror the hallway. The girl approaches the bedroom door, turns the han- dle, and then . . . the screen goes black. She reappears in a pink leotard and dances with a large stuffed-animal horse to Phil Collins's cloying, contagious cover of "You Can't Hurry Love." As the older woman moves slowly around her bedroom another dark-haired girl cavorts with a boy in a nearby graveyard (also handmade). Dressed in sheets and masks they drink, giggle, and flirt. Left alone in front of the gravestones, the girl strips, slowly removing her Sonic Youth T-shirt until she's wearing only a black bra and lace underwear. The next scene, possibly years later, finds her on an airplane dressed in business casual. She eats a solitary meal. Meanwhile, back inside the house, her teenage self and the other dark-haired girl race up the stairs, still eager to turn that handle. The door poses a horror-film twin imperative: Don't go there/You must! Beyond the door the melancholy older woman brushes her hair. Is this the exciting promise of adulthood? Of compromise and maturity? All three women act as memories of each other, projected, reversed, clouded, revealed, and dropped- only to be returned to, yet again.

Black Sun's title is taken from French philosopher Julia Kristeva's essay collection (subtitled Depression and Melancholia), which discusses, among other things, the yearning sadness that drives us to find a substitute love object to compensate for a loss or wound, which some psychoanalysts say goes back to the original trauma of maternal separation. But even for those unfamiliar with Kristeva's book, this Black Sun portravs once and future women toying with the limits of their desires."De Beer also includes several voiceovers drawn from novels by Dennis Cooper, a writer whose main theme is the twisting byways of lust. The dark-haired girl in the graveyard announces her deepest desire:

"Here's what I want: Love. Specifically, I want the power to make people love me, maybe a secret word, which I only use when I see someone special." It's a glimpse of a relatively gentle form of ado- lescent longing-one we pretend to outgrow.

There's a deliberate girlishness to many of Black Sun's images-the ceramic kittens and discarded nylons, the stuffed pony and pink leotard. De Beer willfully refuses to renounce these personal details, however ungainly they prove to be-a radical gesture in its own right. The installation was accompanied by a pamphlet, the front a reproduction of the cover of a girl's diary. The text inside reprinted e-mail correspondence between de Beer and curator Shamim Momin prior to the show. It gets personal. "I remembered being an insomniac 9-year-old, wandering through our childhood house, listening to evervone sleeping," the artist wrote Momin. "It made me feel like, 'Oh, this isn't recent.' I was just such a lush through my 20s that I didn't notice it." The diaristic impulse-and how it creates as much as reveals a self-is part of the point of Black Sun. The piece addresses how we access memory to construct versions of ourselves. Our teen flirtations and faddish passions can be expunged-or they can be preserved in recognition that some- times the most awkward moments can be the most sublime. There was another diary on view at the Whitney Altria: the open book galleries often leave for visitors to write comments. A few wrote that they "didn't get it." One signatory, "Krystal Ortiz, Latin Princess," said that she "loved it." A 58-year-old woman noted that she was a mother and cancer survivor: "The film spoke to me." Then there was Mandy, who wrote, "I want to live in this space," and signed her name with a heart. Dear Mandy: You already do.

As in previous works, the winkingly gothic milieu of 'Black Sun' extends into the three dimensions of an installation. De Beer has filled the entirety of Altria's modest gallery space with a pink structure that- in a metaphor for her overall approach- suggests both dollhouse and haunted mansion. Shown on a pair of hanging screens in its all-black interior (complete with matching shag rug and extra-large bean bag chairs, natch) the video opens, in the first of the works many operative mirrorings, outside what appears to be a maquette of the very same structure, bathed in a tart green and red light. The scene then shifts and we see a girl in a nightgown moving tentatively across the purposefully artificial set toward a door behind which a maternal figure sleeps. Its a sequence that will be repeated, with slight variations, in three interconnected "acts", each designed to track a formative stage in the protagonist's journey towards individuation.

Throughout the work, such establishing shots of portended confrontation between Mother and Daughter are alternated with skillfully orchestrated moments of action and of interiority. Utilizing techniques that suggest the loopings and enfoldings of Doug Aitken's multiscreen videos, de Beer crates intricate rhythms with the twinned screens (sometimes using them to explicitly double each other, at others dividing one image between the two) to weave several overlapping marrative threads, featuring two similar-looking actresses, into an elaborate whole.

First, a slide show sequence pictures objects- porcelain kitties, girlish bracelets, nylons- that describe a trajectory of femininity accompanied by the young girls reading of a diaristic passage on the inter-related anxieties of memory and identity (taken, like all the work's words apart from its intertitles, from Dennis Cooper's fifth novel, 'Period' (2000)). We then see her testing her nascent sexuality by doing an awkwardly sensuous Flashdance routine with the ur-symbol of masculinity, a horse- here sublimated within the form of a stuffed animal that comes to life in her bedroom. In the video's teenage segment, the girl (now played by the slightly older of the two actresses) repairs to a creepy fake graveyard where she describes, in voice-over, a desire for magical control over love as she and her boyfriend, dressed in sheets and skeleton masks, drink and fumble with each other. Later the girl, alone in the plywood cemetery, does a matter-of-fact strip tease down to her very grown-up black lingerie. And in the final, most oblique sequence, all three moments of the girls development seem to fuse: Now dressed like a young professional departing on a flight, the protagonist of this last episode has a kind of wistful world-weariness that signifies maturity. As she eats an airline dinner and dons an eyeshade, her doppelganger finally reaches the precint of the maternal room, symbolically becoming her own Mother.

Like Kristeva's meditation on melancholia referenced by its title, 'Black Sun' confronts issues of identity, memory, and longing. Stylistically, however, it probably has more in common with the phrase's literary source, a line by the eccentric nineteenth-century French poet Gerard de Nerval ("My sole star is dead - and my constellated lute / Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia. Nerval described his verse as the product of a "supernaturalistic" state of reverie, writing that "Our dreams are a second life"- a sentiment that might just as well serve as a motto for the engrossing "supernaturalism" of de Beer's work, and its use of uncanny distortians of time and place to evoke the anxious process of adolescent psychosexual awakening.

I brought a handgun to school with me pretty regularly during most of the spring of 1973. A 22 caliber Ruger. I kept it in my Hollywood High School locker in a paper bag. I figured it would come in handy for hunting small animals when the world came to an end.

But the world didn't end when I was 17, and now I'm watching Sue de Beer channel the adolescents we were, and still are, through a mix of empathy and sensuality that barely contains the dreamlike horror of complete exposure. In Black Sun, she creates a luminous and layered narrative, which turns repeatedly to face its own past. Naked young feet creep up astroturf-covered stairs. The doubled projection screens draw us toward a door, coded with the orange-red light of movie violence. Inside the red glow, an older woman undresses, restaging the vulnerability and confusion of youth as the frailty that reemerges with age. She lies down on the bed, the skin on her chest is rippled. We are too close now, helplessly intimate as she crosses her hands slowly over her chest, becoming a corpse

Now the girl is younger, and I'm not trusting her, this graceful little girl in the pink leotard - how can she be more than an object - I resent her cleverness and satisfaction, but most of all the charm of her slight awkwardness. Self-loathing. I was never this little girl, but I was. Your double, your twin, the one who mocks you, the one who offers redemption.

And then it works, you start to feel them, and you feel her, but there's yourself, too, all the bitterness and misery comes with it. Her girls are pretty. She is the younger sister, the watcher now. She waits patiently, directs her story without hatred, but your ghosts are the older sisters, they are too much, they wish they could be sweet, but they are what they are. They are killers and it's too late, the little one is dead.

The woman is undressing upstairs in the red light again, but now the night-light is cool and blue, and the teenager - the one who can act in the world - not just in her room - has gone to the graveyard. She wears the symbol, rather than simply being the symbol. In her death mask and ghost costume, she laughs, and meets a friend. The teens pour their drinks - you pour yourself into them, pour your heart out, tear their hearts out - a toast.

There in the symbolic of death, they escape from the horror show that marks the betrayal of development and mortality. If, in the world around us, death has become our only symbolic, then is it through our identification with de Beer's characters that we can we move beyond the paralysis of self-consciousness, the nightmare of our own mutability? We are the rotting corpses unless we wear them.

In the red light, the little girl tries on the black wig, combs the dead hair. She lies down, nestled in the bed, in the dead.

Sue gives us these children to love. Making careful notes, she gives us back our experience through her dreams. She cleanses us of our memories by forgiving them, showing us to ourselves as the vulnerable young people we were when we first had apocalyptic visions. The bi-polar strategies of mania and despair are the twins designed to shield us from our own innocence. But de Beer gives us back our fallibility through the realness of death.Ê Death is her gift. Her death is our gift.

In your room, where time stands still, or moves at your will
Will you let the morning come soon? Or will you leave me lying here?
In your favorite darkness, your favorite half-light
Your favorite consciousness, your favorite slave
In your room, where souls disappear, only you exist here
I'm hanging on your words, living on your breath, feeling with your skin
Will I always be here?
-DEPECHE MODE, "In Your Room," 1993

The year 1998 saw the release of an underrated, noir-inspired film titled Dark City. Misinterpreted as a kind of actionless attempt at a Matrix-type world simulacrum, the poetry of its cinematic spatial psychology was lost on many, both critics and viewers alike. Our world, we discover, is controlled - built, even - by a race of corpselike, bowler-hatted "gentlemen" who glide (literally, as they have no visible ambulation) through a terrifying project of reorganizing the world each day, for no greater purpose than experimentation. The narrative is intercut with stylized shots of the city (the only daylight images, since all human interaction takes place at night, in darkness) shifting and swelling and morphing, the buildings growing or crumbling, Rubik's Cube-planes reconfiguring themselves, people's surroundings transforming into new lives and identities. People, their physical beings, remain, but their lives, memories, relationships, and desires are entirely reassembled at daybreak. The problem is the vestigial memories and recognitions that get layered in everyone's mind, despite the otherworldly erasure of identity, and how they infect each day. The confluence between the literal shifting of forms in space and the new worlds' traces and glimpses of the ones buried beneath them becomes a metaphor of time and memory, a lyrically stylized representation of the way the things that we as humans believe to be true and accurate in life may always be merely subject to the way we woke up that day, the slip-shift that happened in the night, in time.

Sue de Beer's work of the past decade has repeatedly tuned to this intermingling, even reciprocity, between identity construction and space, both literal and psychological, and its contingent shaping of memory and time. She often focuses on moments of rupture, emotional extremes that are true enough, deep enough, terrifying enough, to trouble any seamless, linear retelling of a life; yet she positions these vulnerable states of being within tightly framed stages, rigorously formal parameters that allow the ideas and emotions in the piece to extend out as far as they need go - a kind of structural anchor to an endeavor inherently unstable. De Beer's early photographs, and in particular her videos and attendant installations, vibrate with that tension of form and feeling, less a fight than a necessary, uneasy synthesis.

De Beer's examination of space as a metaphor for psychological interiority traces back to her earliest work. Operating within strict parameters of color, form, and content, photographs such as Door with Mirror (2000) map an architectural structure as a translation of a psychological space. The careful staging of the minimal components - a mirror, a door, a light switch - throws every detail into sharp relief. Unconnected, unhinged, the door leans anthropomorphically against the wall. The reduced palette, and slight adjustments of the light, push toward a neutrality that turns generic ugliness into a kind of Holiday Inn-sublime. The precision of the visual structure gives the image a near-sculptural reality, a theatrical organization that holds its imminent action tensely within. The artist calls this "the structure of the idea."

De Beer draws on a long history of mapping the body into architectural space, from the classical Greek and Renaissance practices of anthropomorphizing architectural elements to the more recent constructions of space as a literalization of psychology often seen in cinema. A recurrent theme in her work is the viewer's empathy with private spaces familiar to all of us - places of both comfort and terror. There may be nothing quite so personal, specific, and psychologically fraught, for example, as a teenager's bedroom. In the photographs Bed and Bed2 (2000 and 2001), as in Door with Mirror, presence is so strongly suggested that no actual body is required. The stain of what appears to be blood on the ceiling in Bed implies the aftermath of horrific violence; the same sense of loss persists in Bed2. To represent the figure in these spaces would be redundant - what is unheimlich about them is the combination of their phenomenological normalcy and the vibration of the absent figure embodied in them.

De Beer's treatments of the figure, meanwhile, were equally discomfiting. A seminal early video, Making Out with Myself (1997), maps the artist into the scene, kissing her own twinned face. As in the photographs, the simple, careful visual construction makes it clear that vestiges of imperfections are intentional, the slight awkwardness of the technique limning the sincerity and discomfort of the action. A slightly later series of photographs pushes discomfort to the extreme, depicting often gruesome scenes of physical violence that are observed by the blasé, almost tender gaze of the violated subject. In one untitled image a woman, unabashedly facing the viewer, has been cleft from sternum to crotch yet seems almost beatifically unperturbed. Once the moment of transgressive shock has passed, the artificiality of the image becomes patently clear, opening up a sense that the violence is both critical and beside the point - that it functions to open up a different discourse. De Beer has discussed these images in terms of a physical interaction: "It was talking about sculpture for me, this real experience/fake experience, when the two are happening simultaneously." The photograph's content engages an immediate, visceral reaction that is then mitigated by the nature of the image as a blatant construct: it is "a fantasy image because it's so completely fake and why, then, would someone fantasize that?" Foregrounding their near phenomenological presence in space for the viewer and the tight, formal qualities of their composition, these photographs began to approach what the artist has called a "sculptural experience." At the same time, in a move recalling literary innovators such as Dennis Cooper, or the way horror films manifest psychosexual tensions in the viscerally repulsive, the invasive act becomes an expression of intimacy, even love. The deep human impulse to gain access to what one desires can often effect its destruction.

The immersion of de Beer and other artists of her generation in the violent, the morbid, the dark, often through popular culture, draws on the exploration of abjection in the art of the early '90s but is critically distinct from it. While the earlier moment focused on the overlooked and the pathetic, the contemporary address of popular media and culture does not strive to "heal a split" between the repressed cultural self and the natural, or between the vulgar theatrics of daily life and the exalted purity of high art. Fearlessly engaging content thought difficult or even sensational, de Beer explores the possibility that ambiguity, beauty, sincerity, terror, and perversity might combine to convey life's most precious moments. She avoids the trap of sensationalist entertainment through formal rigor, a stripping down of unnecessary content, and an insistent staging of her images as constructs. Instead of assuming a privileged viewpoint on the referents she incorporates, she reflects the internalized position of contemporary popular culture. The hierarchical investigation/deconstruction that was the basis of Pop art is no longer even the question; like others of her generation, de Beer seamlessly incorporates all cultural forms on their own terms. Horror movie tropes can speak as eloquently of fear and repression as can Freud, the sublime is as present in an awkward kiss between teenagers as in the romantic landscape, the psychological mapping of architecture might appear in a classical Greek theater, a modernist translation of the repressed body, or a teenager's bedroom plastered with heavy metal posters and littered with bottles of pink nail polish. De Beer strives to locate meaning, which is always fundamentally personal, through an endlessly mediated world.

It's like glass, when we break
I can't stay in this place
I can't stand when the room turns round on my fate
-LOVE SPIT LOVE, "AM I WRONG"

Manifestations of individual identity have remained critical to de Beer's practice, but later work - such as Hans & Grete (2002), her first major two-channel video - receded somewhat from immediacy and direct engagement with a personal psychological interior. Borrowing from the extreme aesthetics of horror films, the sumptuous visuality of high-definition video games, and the fatalistic credos of adolescence, Hans & Grete revels in artifice without sacrificing emotional intensity. The narrative maps two pairs of teenagers, their agonies of self-determination expressed through both harmless desires for fame and violent enactments of powerlessness. With its types of personality and codes of conduct that betray sincere but painfully conflicted desires for connection, the maelstrom of adolescent contradiction becomes the ideal arena in which to explore human complexities. As the artist describes it,

This early engagement with "teenageness" started simply because I was trying to get to something really vulnerable . . . something that felt real to me that comes to the surface. Adulthood can be about veiling and armor of a different kind. Teenageness, well, if the kid is wearing armor, it looks like this: "I AM WEARING ARMOR SO YOU CANT HURT ME."

Neither an exploitation of our youth-driven consumer culture nor a childish or escapist regression, de Beer's explorations of this moment of development access both her own personal history and, more abstractly, the fluid state of being that adolescence embodies. Adolescence is an open realm of possibility for the creation of self: awkwardness and antagonism, resistance and desperation for structure, violence and vulnerability, vision and self-destructiveness.

The fractured enclosures of the teenagers' bedrooms in Hans & Grete are zones of both safety and of confinement. Despite the explicitness of the sex scene early in the piece, the four protagonists never interact in any way that feels truly intimate; they dress in carefully constructed costumes to represent their allegiances, they mimic their heroes in private, sometimes they fuck, but mostly they talk on and on to no one, to the camera, to us, expressing the elaborate irrational dreams of a teenage mind, trying to say something real to someone, but in essence talking only to themselves and, painfully, still get it wrong. Tenderly exploring the protagonists' alienation, the individual monologues have a poetic lyricism, yet there is a distance to their emotive intensity. A minor but illustrative example is the names: in all de Beer's later projects she uses her actors' real names, letting them exist to a degree as themselves, but in Hans & Grete the names are invented - parts for the actors to play. This explicit artificiality is maintained throughout the video in both the sets and the characters, who ultimately become ciphers of themselves.

This moment in de Beer's work ultimately leans toward developing a structure of investigation, a framing of the subject that establishes a distance from the immediacy of the personal. The resonance of the literal interior spaces - most significantly, the bedroom, and other recognizable arenas of adolescent formation and transgression, as well as of the violent violation of the living body - necessarily slid toward being outside the subject itself. At the same time, in terms of content, palette, and narrative the rigorous rules of the early photographs loosened up, even while the foundational structure remained compositionally tight (each frame of the video might be rendered as a perfectly constructed still itself). There is a new sense of pleasure in the aesthetic baroque. As the artist says, "Making Hans & Grete, I freaked out and totally enjoyed myself. The video looks like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory on crack."

The future is an infinite succession of presents...
-HOWARD ZINN

De Beer's three most recent videos - The Dark Hearts (2003-04), Disappear Here (2004), and Black Sun (2005) - retain the precise staging she developed earlier but allow a space within which the utterly personal can be reinserted. It is not a return to an earlier approach but a refinement of one, designed to achieve "both more structure and more complication - an expanded world." The focus on mediated becoming and identity in the early figurative photos and Hans & Grete turns toward internal transformation and history, still situated and staged through a psychologically fraught construction of space. While The Dark Hearts and Disappear Here are discrete works in their own right, they can also be read as "studies" for critical paths brought together in the more elaborate format of Black Sun.

The short The Dark Hearts depicts a teen sneaking out of the house to meet the object of her affection - a familiar adolescent narrative. Julian draws in his notebook and moves restlessly around on his bed, while Mimi stands in her space, both aggressively confident and slightly awkward in the image, the body, that she presents to the cinematic frame as if to a mirror reflecting herself or perhaps us. The setup is familiar from Hans & Grete, where the characters are introduced by an intertitle and a clip of them in their bedroom, a typically referent-laden set in which identity is indistinguishable from the spatial construction and the actors' movement within it. Unlike the characters in Hans & Grete, however, Julian and Mimi transcend the barriers they've constructed for themselves. Where the earlier work exhibited a sense of blunted exchange, a desire to reach toward the other person, and the world, that is at the same time out of step with them, the exuberant freedom of the characters in The Dark Hearts culminates in the first moment of true exchange in de Beer's videos. Leaving her room, Mimi drives her pink Mustang to Julian's house and takes him out for a spin. The camera lingers on the car's grille, the image of the galloping horse an inexhaustible symbol of liberty and individuality. More obliquely, the stallion suggests the less-discussed association of young girls and horses (a common feature of "young adult" fiction targeted to girls, for example), the inchoately sexual nature of that relationship, and the early understanding it brings of power, freedom, and fear. This reading is underscored by the pervasive strength of the feminine in the work: Mimi's bedroom, embodiment of her confidence, is emphatically pink; she, not Julian, drives a car, also pink; she seems to be a little older than he is, and to be slightly the leader in their interaction. Though mutual, the exchange of necklaces before their poignant kiss is instigated by Mimi, and the necklace, of course, is a feminine object itself.

The actual kiss resonates truthfully, slipping between the "acting" of a kiss by teenagers and the actual exchange of one. But this intimate moment reaches its real consummation a moment later, when Mimi reaches over and tucks an errant lock of Julian's skater's swag of black hair behind his ear. Significantly, it is in this near-silent, dialogue-free work of de Beer's that language ceases to trip up communication, and that what the artist calls "a sense of aliveness and presentness" allows a real connection to take place. There is a hovering fragility to the encounter, as if one deviation from the tiny cues of the teenagers' interaction might cause the whole thing to collapse. The final kiss feels like an exhalation of breath that you didn't know you were holding. Clearly communication can and will fail repeatedly; it's not success that is striven for but the possibility of it, and beauty resides in the resilience of the continued attempt. The search for the deepest intimacy, in other works explored through a literal piecing out of the interiority of the self, thrums as powerfully as a body split open in the simplicity of this encounter. Near-platonic, Mimi's and Julian's kiss avoids the trap of fetishizing sexual nostalgia, producing instead the sense of "too-muchness" that is the hallmark of formative moments, when the real occupies a space not parallel to the measurement of time.

Hans & Grete is shown in an installation resembling the sets on-screen - a device that refuses the kind of dissolution of self in the cinema that a movie theater encourages. The installation approximates a teen bedroom, with shag rug, stylized sculptures of guitars and amps, and enormous stuffed animals on which we recline to watch the piece. These props encourage an awareness of space (both within and beyond the video), and of our own relationship to it. Similarly, to view The Dark Hearts we sit in a replica of the patently artificial Mustang that Mimi drives in the video. The car exists not as some kind of diorama but as a sculptural object, meticulously fabricated but deliberately imperfect, with silkscreened front grille, glossy pink paint, open wheel well, and an interior lined with green Astroturf and complete with silkscreened Misfits lunchbox mounted on the dashboard. We can open the door, climb in, adjust the seats; but our pleasure in this playacting allows for a gleeful awareness of the set's fakery. Perhaps, like the memory of a kiss (implicitly a first kiss) that the video may spark, accuracy matters less here than the recollection of being in that particular emotional place. We are in the piece but outside it at the same time.

YOU DON'T LIVE THERE ANYMORE
The first intercut image in the short video Disappear Here presents a sheet cake, as from a child's birthday party, showing the sentence "The recollection is a cascade of spatial metaphors" in frosting. (The phrase neatly summarizes a conceptual thread tying together all of de Beer's work.) A teenage girl enters her bedroom. She is wearing a Girl Scout uniform that seems at first sweet, then - as she gets ready for something before the mirror - confining, too small. The props of her transformation include a cigarette and studded leather bracelets, anachronistic accessories that imply the multiple roles she is playing, outgrowing some but not yet comfortable in the next. Her awkward, semisexual "performance" before the mirror, and the viewer, enhances this suggestion. The girl sets up a tripod and takes a Polaroid of herself. In the video's last, silent moments, we watch the image develop on a split screen - though we may as well have watched it fade away: we are acutely aware that at this moment the girl is no more that image than she will be years later when she finds it buried in a drawer. Voyeurism, directly confronted, is mitigated, in the same way that the narcissism of the girl's youthful moment plays against her discomfort with herself.

Meanwhile a voiceover in what we assume to be the girl's voice describes a school field trip in the third grade. The memory is precise in its banal details ("a gray lighthouse that Chris Cortland says his Dad bought for a dollar last year") and sweeping in the dramatic poetics of youth ("Mrs. Pearson's classroom becomes a dead space in my memory . . . and all I feel is just the darkness of the water"). Sliding from internal recollection to performance, the scene cuts to the girl's face, which traverses the split screen, and we see her speaking the monologue. For her this may be a mirrored moment, the teenage girl articulating her own existence, defining herself through the traces of her memory and image; for us it may be external proof of who she is, and of how she might begin to form desire and sexuality of her own. The moment, still largely innocent and unself-conscious, is troubled by brief close-ups of body parts: her slim leg as it emerges from the short Girl Scout skirt, her long sleek hair curling against her bodice, her braceleted wrist held awkwardly behind her back. As in much of de Beer's work, the viewer's relationship to voyeurism remains in question. Are we understanding the origin of this fetishization, the complicity that we all have in creating it (including the girl herself, posing for us, for the camera, for her own reflection), even as we continue to produce it? This notion of feminine desire and display as foundational to the formation of identity will become the conceptual center of Black Sun.

In Disappear Here the teenager thinks back nostalgically to what she sees as a moment of purity. The innocence of the memory calls attention to the complex signifiers of the set and costume: the intense pinks of the slick satin pillow; the messy dresser littered with nail polish, makeup, and stickers; the Girl Scout uniform that seems first sweet and then too small, in tension with the cigarette and leather bracelets that show its wearer outgrowing the parts chosen for her, beginning to find her own part to play in the recognition of her realness, her presence. "I turn around once more to watch the sailboat [cloud] melt and reappear as a mouse on stilts," she recites, demonstrating the acute awareness of a moment of self-identification, "and for a second I know that everything's gonna be fine, I know I'm gonna be okay cause I'm watching it happen."
The recitation of the memory is always malleable. The photograph that is the final image of Disappear Here brings to mind Roland Barthes's idea of the photograph's "structural autonomy" as the crucial quality of the medium. Even though the photograph is clearly not identical to the reality it shows, Barthes writes, there is no transformation from reality to image; instead there is "a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a question of exactitude, but of reality." It has been argued that with the advent of digital imaging, and its destruction of the evidentiary role of photography (Barthes's "analogon," the "has-been-there" quality), the viewer's trust must necessarily shift from image to source. Power now lies not in the image itself but with the party who offers it. Disappear Here suggests that power has never been anywhere but with that party - that the "has-been-there" quality of the photograph is never more than a specter, a ghost of memory. As Douglas Crimp puts it, "In our time the aura has become only a presence, which is to say a ghost." These metaphors of death resonate with the often used (indeed seemingly inevitable) rhetoric of the undead in relation to photography, with its present that is not the present, that is defined by its absence, but that the digital era takes to a new level in which it may not have been.

De Beer, of course, makes no attempt to be a trusted source; she always reveals the artificiality of her objects, sets, and scenes, in order to emphasize the meanings they evoke. She is not interested in the falsely immersive state of conventional cinema, "another world" that offers escape from this one. Instead she provokes in the viewer a critical awareness of the simultaneous existence of both the fictional space and the actual one. Just as she fractures the screen to avoid a singular viewpoint, the stylizations and imperfections of her sculptural objects forestall passive immersion. The experience is incomplete - fractured, ruptured - without the active participation of viewer to understand it as such. A sentence in the last monologue in Black Sun contains this notion perfectly: "Things can't hold things."

BLACK SUN, OR GIRL WHO LIVES ON HEAVEN HILL
Barthes's discussion in Camera Lucida of Pliny's myth of the origin of painting perfectly fits de Beer's seaming of memory and desire. The story links art's beginning to the passion of a woman, Dibutades, who traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall, thus fixing his presence in the moment of imminent absence. Dibutades can only make her tracing, however, by turning away from her lover's actual presence, using the darkness of representation to hang on to the light of reality. Barthes determines the import of the photograph as this contradictory "memory of the present." This is the paradox of the photograph, which generates the undead, the specter of time without closure, a life of infinite deaths with no actual death. This too is the haunting of memory generally: the desperate human need - a need with which photography synthesizes - to contain that moment of ephemeral limerance.

These aspects of feminine desire and display, of multivalent identity, the "spatial metaphors" of Julia Kristeva, and - when we're lucky - these brief moments of direct, unmitigated fulfillment weave together in the complex format of Black Sun. Wanting, one might argue, is ultimately determined by an idea of memory; our minds focus on the peak and the final moments of a past experience while crowding out memories of its duration. In this process, which de Beer has termed the "phantasm of predestination," (your idea of) the past determines (your idea of) the future. Desire and memory rearticulate time according to its meaning, not its actuality. If time really exists only as memory, and has no relationship to the duration of the experience itself, why do we put such value on "things that last"? Why is length more elevated than intensity?

The splintered syntax of time is reflected in the deliberate framing of Black Sun. Ostensibly mapping three specific moments marked by simple numerical intertitles, the video traces events in the life or the memory of a single girl at three significant ages - roughly eleven, seventeen, and twenty-eight. Further intertitles trouble the temporal flow, suggesting that these events are recalled, cloudy, and constantly revised according to the girl's changing self. Quoting a similar practice used in cinema to organize the passage of time ("Six Months Later," "Sometime in the Present"), these intertitles suggest an attempt to organize and outline the past moment - a proposal ultimately confounded by the images themselves.

1.
A girl stands outside the house. We hear the thunder of a stormy night, evocative the way even the trope of a childhood memory can be. A tightly framed bedroom, an older woman getting ready for bed, a brief shot of a man removing his pants. The woman lies down in bed, hands folded like a corpse. Approaching, climbing the stairs, the image slips between our point of view and the girl's - we are the viewer together. This potentially fetishistic slippage is made complete in Black Sun: we are as much inside as out; as the girl watches from outside, we stare from inside. The palette is deeper, more jewel-like, than in the earlier films, with shadowy outlines on the wall, filtered in deep red. The girl's feet pad the Astroturf, her body moving up the stairs beneath the slippery greenness of her satin nightgown, running, opening the door to an apprehensive unknown.

Time: Forgetfulness and Thunder
A slide show of objects - porcelain kittens, silk stockings, glittery rubber bracelets, a fat silver ring against a quilted silk bedspread - accompanies a voiceover, a girl's voice exploring the power of the image of another on one's own sense of self. She is feeling that feeling of multiple lives into which our past falls as we grow older, and the need to understand the other ones we once were: "Things about my other life seem to come back with me. Here is getting scarier then there now." Memory is like a haunting, like a ghost. The photographic image is itself a specter, according to Barthes's idea of the "has-been-there" aspect of image capture. Memory is a means of life-beyond-death, but one that is perverse, better, more horrific, limiting, essential. "She says where she lives, strange things go on all the time. Magic things, evil things."

Not Fade Away
In a dance studio we see the young girl again, in a pink leotard and legwarmers. She gets up and dances to a Phil Collins song on the radio: "You Can't Hurry Love." At this moment, among others just like them at this time of her life, we are witnessing the birth of a formative desire - the feminine desire to be looked at, but also to be in control. A pony toy comes to life, she entices it to dance with her. As in The Dark Hearts, the moment feels authentic: she is actually dancing, she choreographed the piece herself. The studio walls are bright pink, there is a pink parasol to play with, a tiara on the floor, teen fan magazines. Close-up frames show her total immersion, her dissolution, in the joy of her body. We are slightly discomfited by our awareness of the joy and ecstasy of the physical, by our brief glimpses of her own, suddenly fully embodied feminine sensuousness. Flipping back to being a little girl, the curve of her tiny waist erotic and childlike, she fetishizes herself as we do, again vacillating between inside and outside. Her awkwardness alternates with the discovery of skill, the totality of being in her own body.

Tomorrow Is Yesterday
The first moment repeats, is different. She is outside the house, the woman is folding clothes in the room, the girl is older but dressed identically.

2.
The older woman in the bedroom is framed against the split screen of the teenage girl in a graveyard, trying on makeshift ghost costumes with a teenage boy. Their laughter is pleasurable discomfort, the moments of intimacy allowed by the safety of their masking. As in The Dark Hearts, the tension of the encounter is satisfied by a purity of contact, brief seconds of true exchange. The girl climbs the stairs, her body moving beneath the slippery green satin of her nightgown. Her feet on Astroturf, she opens the door of the same red room to an apprehensive unknown. What is happening inside?

A Fortified Castle
The graveyard, smoke and costumes, masks. They drink from a bottle, complicit. Her image fractured across the screens, the girl speaks to us directly, voicing a monologue on the construction of desire, the control of love, that is simultaneously powerful and completely aware of its own futility:

Until then, here's what I want. Love. Specifically I want the power to make people love me. Maybe a secret word which I'd only use when I saw someone special. I'd walk up to him or her, say that word, and then he or she would be very in love with me. Then, if they ever got bored, there'd be another word that would cancel the spell, wipe their memories clear of me.

From Deadness to Aliveness
In silence that heightens the tension of physical desire and fear, she removes her masks, her costumes, dons another as she performs a deliberate, minimal striptease, the next version of the younger girl's dance sequence. Knowing her beauty, her power, giving him (us) what we want, knowing we shouldn't be there. Moving, she is fully in herself, alive, capped by the perfect discomfort of not knowing what comes next. Hands brushing her hips, seductive and fully unsure.

3.
The Problem of Time
The same girl, older again, standing in the terminal, dressed to leave. One has the sense of her life in full as she leans back against the slippery satin-blue of her seat. She puts on a black mask to sleep, a red light glows from outside.

The Night of the World
She dreams, sees the house, the older woman on the bed. Is that blood on her stomach? The young girl climbs the stairs, the teenager as well, bare feet move across the floor, the young girl in her pink leotard dances to a distorted version of the song. Distortions abound, in time and space. She opens the door, finally inside the room. The black-haired woman in the pink nightgown is the young girl getting ready for bed. She slips off her silk stockings; the black hair is a wig, carefully brushed and placed on her head. She is all those women. The room is tight, the camera swings, pulls in so tightly we know we shouldn't be this close. Her face is blank, looking at herself in the mirror. She has learned/will learn to reveal nothing. Time stands still, the closed frame traps her like the room itself, like the space of time the room projects.

The End
As she sits in an airplane the red room is on her person, in her red shirt. The continuity of palette perhaps symbolizes how she carries it with her but owns that moment for herself, for her own body. She reads, eats, drinks, sleeps. People's resonance in one's life so rarely has to do with their actual presence, it is rather a manifestation of desire for who they were, are, or should be. The conundrum becomes how to hold one's past in a sense of the now - how to know that there is no real past, it's always that space of the undiscovered and the constantly renegotiated. In Black Sun's last monologue, the protagonist is shown on an airplane - the ultimate liminal space, nothing and nowhere, nontime and nonplace. We hear on the voiceover, "Things can't hold things. . . . You don't feel it when I do, since you're not me, though I hold you so dear, so deep, past the point of knowing what's real. There's something there, but it's not here."

An imagined sun, bright and black at the same time.
-Julia Kristeva, BLACK SUN: DEPRESSION AND MELANCHOLIA, 1989

Like much of de Beer's previous work, Black Sun weaves together myriad sources, from cinema, literature, pulp fiction. One might be the sinister, graphic, Asian-inspired aesthetic of Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), whose protagonist, an innocent ballet dancer, faces the horror of the thing unknown. De Beer's spatial psychologies of the unknown and haunted also pull from writings ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables to melodramas like My Sweet Audrina and Flowers in the Attic, books targeted toward young girls. The mise-en-scènes of this genre are usually staged around a house, haunted by ghosts or by sinister events in the past that have trapped the heroine in some way. References to specific personal and cultural moments also abound in Black Sun, from the graveyard scene's gesture toward Michael Jackson's Thriller video, through the Phil Collins song to which the little girl dances, to the teenager's Sonic Youth T-shirt. The monologues spoken by the teenage girl that frame the most significant ideas of the piece-impossible desire, the transience of love, the difficulty in placing the memories that form our sense of ourselves-are in fact excerpts from novels by Dennis Cooper, originally written in the voices of young, gay men, a slippage of gender and sexuality wholly in keeping with the idea of the unfixed, fluid self that de Beer insists upon in all of her work.

De Beer's continued preference for a two-channel, split-screen presentation is a conceptual gesture on two levels, both decentering the cinematic experience and reinforcing the fractured nature of her narratives, which themselves in turn mimic the layered, hybrid identities of her characters. The images reflect and mirror across the screens; we often look at two versions of the same character, which seam together, then slip apart again. De Beer's phrasing of multiple identities diverges sharply from the pathological positioning pervasive in contemporary culture, projecting a sympathetic intimacy with the subject rather than a diagnostic distance. The idea of multiple selves is emotionally resonant; she has described it in terms of a doubling in which the existence of the replicated self is both troubling and necessary. This doubling is envisioned literally in Making Out with Myself, as its title suggests; in Hans & Grete, meanwhile, the two pairs of teenagers are played by the same actors, split selves revealing how context and choice turn similar impulses into wildly disparate results.

The spectral, ominous tone of much of de Beer's work may be linked to this formative notion of identity. "The multiple self is a place of horror," according to the artist:

because it is a place of no identity. Even if you can see yourself when you are doubled ... or if you make that image into an object and place it in front of yourself to look at it, you are displaced outside of yourself into this entity, which are now two. You become a stranger to yourself - an Other. Is that adolescent? That is something that must continue for one's whole life, right? Those moments where you step out of time and have no recognition of who you are, or where you are, or what led you to that point.

De Beer's haunted spaces are limned by the notion of the phantom self, most explicitly in Black Sun. Similarly, the installation for Black Sun is her most evolved evocation so far of this complex of ideas in a physical state. The two-dimensional construction of memory and desire in the video is reflected in the three-dimensional construction of the set. Space, as always, is crucial. Entering the gallery through glass doors stickered with the shadowy silhouette of trees, we are confronted by an aggressive wall of glossy pink. Even though we are indoors, this girlish structure is clearly the exterior of a house. It is impossible to grasp as a whole, however, for a total view of it is thwarted from all sides, and its claustrophobic placement in the entrance space encourages us either to enter quickly or to back away. Inside, the video plays on its usual two screens. Interior space is flipped again; we recognize the house we're inside from the video we're watching. Trapping us in layers of interiority - in the gallery, in the house, in the video - the physical and psychological fracture seems complete. Actually Hans & Grete, The Dark Hearts, and Black Sun are all staged against the image of the house, whether the surreal but familiar suburban houses of the first two works or the quintessential "haunted house on the hill" of Black Sun. Looming ominously above, one can almost hear the introductory voiceover from Robert Wise's 1963 film The Haunting: "an evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored."

The concept of the split self in female subjectivity is emerging increasingly in de Beer's work. Historically divided in image, and today still constantly subjected to ideological contradiction, the female is formed as a multiple self that incarnates fantastic and irreconcilable mythologies. This fragmentation allows heterogeneity and flexibility to be valued above a single critical perspective, but if a search for some essential center of individual identity persists, there is a simultaneous danger of a splintered identity becoming pathological. Suggesting that the fluid feminine is metaphorically a paradigm of the postmodern nonlinear narrative, Laura Mulvey has used the Pandora myth to illustrate this idea of the feminine as both seductive surface and concealed threat. It is a concept that ripples beneath the surface of much of de Beer's work.

While Mulvey's critique is largely a barbed analysis of a male-oriented construction of women, de Beer's investigation shifts the perimeters somewhat to include a space in which the feminine can look at itself, becoming no longer purely the subject of another gaze but of its own as well. The idea of the decentered feminine involves a rejection of the modernist totality and singularity of form and narrative, replacing them with a web of allusions and hybrid identities, a dissolution of oppositions that resonates more closely with life. Perhaps a more truly "feminine" identity would involve a constantly shifting set of renegotiated priorities, masks, and vulnerabilities.

Rather than closing around a sense of loss, Black Sun posits the fact that memory and self are always constructs, inherently flawed and false, as the pool from which a sense of "aliveness" must be drawn. The last scene - in which the younger woman, the quasi-protagonist, is on an airplane - embodies this sense of liminality, this critical nonspace of becoming in which anything, in any direction, is possible. In this denouement of its narrative, Black Sun is permeated with a breathless sense of immanent "going," not necessarily departure but movement, which carries within it all the hope and despair of the before and after. As Paul Auster has written, "Finally on a plane, expecting, believing that it would crash, waiting for it, and having it not: perhaps I had discovered (quite simply) that the dead were not allowed to scream in you more than once a day. I looked out the window-nothing happened. White clouds, silver wing, blue sky. Nothing." The passage perfectly evokes the anticipatory tension of Black Sun. Airplane space is the most fully collapsed time we experience, belonging to nothing and no one but that exact moment, yet encompassing all those moments experienced and yet to be experienced. Vague possibilities shimmer in every direction.

Sue de Beer's new two-channel video installation 'Black Sun' (2004-5) is haunting, and not just because you watch it from inside the skeleton of a house. Titled after Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical treatise on melancholy and interspersed with narrated monologues from Dennis Cooper's Marquis de Sade-like novels, the video tracks a teenage girl's struggle to escape her mother's chronic depression through daydreams. But as de Beer reveals, the line between fantasy and rality can be thinner than a razor's edge.

The video opens with shots of the girl's home, eerily lit. As the mother lies catatonic in bed, a sexual predator lurks. The girl- here a young adolescent- dances alone in her bedroom to "You Can't Hurry Love." A bewildered voice (presumably the girl's) says "I am more like her. No, she is more like me."

Identity confusion spills into the character's mid-teens. "Here is what I want," she confides. "Love. Specifically I want the power to make people love me." The camera cuts to a girls and a boy, dressed as ghosts and drinking vodka in the cemetery as she strips to black lingerie- a diva, but a vulnerable one.

The final act portrays our heroine in an airplane, reading the emergency exit card. She falls asleep and, in a nightmare, becomes her mother-wanders in her nightgown, dons a wig that looks like her mother's hair. As the sequence ends, however, she is herself once again. For the moment, she exists in the realm of the living, but de Beer leaves no doubt that childhood traumas burn like an eternal flame.

That Black Sun is a case in pointing out ghosts is meticulously performed in or as the absence of a voice of one's own: all text in Black Sun, from title to footnote, is citation, at once séance summons and ventriloquizing possession. The title cites Julia Kristeva's 1987 study of mourning and melancholia (which doubled as her excavation or restoration of what was otherwise missing in the work of her mentor, Jacques Lacan). At this point, however, de Beer in fact redoubles Kristeva's title, which is also already a citation from "The Disinherited" by Gérard de Nerval. To follow a text of influence so closely can also bring about its point-by-point reversal as dis-inheritance.

Kristeva takes her departure from "Freudian theory," which "detects everywhere the same impossible mourning for the maternal object" (Trans. Leon Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1989: 9). Her momentum at takeoff, however, she owes to authors of new-and-improved psychoanalysis, from Jung to Lacan. Kristeva conjugates the loss of the maternal object along the Oedipal lines Freud gave the primal father and his representatives: "Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation, provided" - and with this proviso Kristeva summarizes her understanding of healthy psychic development - "that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized - whether the lost object is recovered as erotic object" (the homosexual scenario, according to Kristeva) ", or it is transposed by means of an unbelievable effort" (Kristeva refers here to the uphill struggle of heterosexual developments) "which eroticizes the other ... or transforms cultural constructs" (now we're talking sublimation) "into a 'sublime' erotic object" (27-28). Kristeva's lines of healthful development out of these choices (all of the above) are also the measure of what the melancholic, the subject of her study, tries to refuse (or re-fuse): "the maternal object having been introjected, the depressive or melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead of matricide" (28). Because a daughter is her mother's continuity shot, this process of internalization is even less confrontational or decisive and way more slow-mo in its release of the destruction. Although homosexuality was part of the health plan given above, now homosexuality joins the disposition of melancholic daughters (though it appears that a female/male distinction is operative here): "The homosexual shares the same depressive economy" (29). In the cases of daughters comprising the clinical basis of Black Sun, the matricidal imperative postulated by Kristeva (a former Maoist) is admitted only as virtually imperceptible or, at best, as the construction of her analysis. It is clear, then, that in Kristeva's Black Sun case by case differentiation occurs in the murky area displaced with regard to the theory itself - in the shadows at close quarters cast when, in consideration of sexual difference, Kristeva pulls the emergency brake on her otherwise monolithic theory. The matricidal frame that is the normal fare for circulation outside the psychoanalytic session nevertheless returns as the redemption value of the melancholic deposit - it's only a matter of change - which must be secured through or as forgiveness (at once illusory and imperative). "He who does not forgive is condemned to death. ... The Resurrection appears as the supreme expression of forgiveness" (192). Forgive an author whose tendency to refer to missing mothers has prompted reviewers to confuse his psychoanalysis with that of Kristeva's Black Sun. Alone the distinction I draw between mournable and unmournable objects along a sliding scale of unmourning (the concept or condition to which I grant metapsychological precedence) disallows the assimilation of my readings to Kristeva's version of Jung's Electra Complex.

The closing section of Sue de Beer's Black Sun bears the title "The End," which is not given generically, but as echo or recording of lines heard earlier in the video (borrowed from Dennis Cooper's Closer): "The End. I like how in movies that phrase will suddenly appear at a certain point. Most children worship a statue of some guy nailed on a cross. I worship The End. It's a great concept." That The End appears only at a certain point means that it is not an absolute ending, but a marking of or in that living on that, while not limited to lifetime, is still immersed in finitude. The End, then, is the great concept of haunting, not to be confused with that of eternity, resurrection, or redemption. An amalgam of daughter and gay author thus catches the rays of another Black Sun that does not set the mourners against the unmourners.

In another passage through literature (Cooper's Period), which transmits via voiceover, we find de Beer's single textual intervention - the change of a series of male pronouns into female ones: "She says I'm her. That I'm a reflection of her. She says where she lives, strange things go on all the time. Magic things, evil things. I guess I'm starting to believe what she says. Because she is so confident, and I'm always confused." It is via pronoun inversion that we can discern in the death-wish static of haunting's transmission what the spook has to say. The foreign-body text shares with the host corpus "the same depressive economy" or erogenous zone in which the third-person pronoun can be pried loose from its antibody function, otherwise Dad-set against the melancholic's dyadic span of retention. That's why the fusion both is and remains a phantasm, a con. Listen to the fateful ambiguity of "alone" in the following lines de Beer selected from Period and placed on the voiceover track: "If you're here, I'm more myself, I think. It feels real, but I'm alone in believing it's you."

At the entry stage of her own early adolescence, Sue de Beer started dreaming up memories of the mother who died on her when she was two years old. An older sister, with whom she was always very close, was six at the time of their mother's passing. She could add her childhood memories to those of the baby. Black Sun is as much about the sibling bond (big sister's dear diary was used as the cover of the exhibition brochure) as it is about the missing mother. Inevitably the father and the new wife he married within a year of his first wife's death would have welcomed the opportunity of making the baby their own fruit of the loom of the time to come. It would, presumably, have been in everyone's interest to bring up baby in forgetfulness of a separation not in development but in death. But then there were the older siblings, ready and waiting, like wandering witnesses, to situate their testimony within the death cult of childhood even the youngest in their lineage found herself installing and stalling inside during adolescence.

Is it harder to come alive when you have a dead mother? Or is the added mission of keeping the missing body charged and animated within a force field of attraction, of being attractive, an extra turn on? To have (and to hold) a dead mother requires an affirmation at once untenable and necessary. In Black Sun three actresses represent their respective age groups: young teen, young adult, sixty year old. A morphing interchangeability seems to loop through the three actresses. Is it the skewering of vanitas imagery that is underway when the sixty year old's body slips into the place of the teenager? At the same time one senses everywhere an affirmation of life's body. Thus the older actress is the age de Beer's mother would be, were she still alive. The mother is thus granted a flashforward that is not the retrenchment in deep-frozen time associated with mummy phantasms. Each body is allowed to shift "from deadness to aliveness" (the title of the section in which the intermediate actress emerges as underwear ad from the friendly ghost costume she wore while partying down in the graveyard, the quintessential teen danse macabre). These all-important metabolic shifts commence with the youngest actress's dance sequence, a genuine high point, in which even the totemic toy pony gets animated and together, both suddenly on one side of the two-channel projection, they join in dancing to "You Can't Hurry Love." Between the lines of a beloved song: "My Mama's dead. You can't bury love."

In "The End" we're back on the plane set, hovering somewhere over the unlikely resemblance between a teen girl's bedroom and a luxury coffin. But now the intermediate actress, the artist's representative in the real time of making Black Sun, luxuriates in the in-flight rituals of identification: eating, drinking, reading, and sleeping. (The first time around she only prepared for rest and then looked like she was playing dead.) We end up in a space of sur-arrival. Not arrival, then, simply because she's still going. As the voiceover reads out loud: "There's something there, but it's not here" (Period again). But that she is still going also means that she has survived what can cross the mind in the high of the moment - the auto-destruct program secretly shared with an internal other on the self-same schedule of perfectibility. But we would be wishing ourselves the good mourning that certain ideologues prescribe (who, in their political projections of bad influence, confuse the undead with the gun-dead) if we were to grant our passenger survivor status. Survival of what? Preparedness for death? Above or beyond arrival and survival (or substitution) she flies: somewhere over the reign below of chance, coincidence, crash. "If the plane went down, maybe it would be perfect;" Sue de Beer writes in the e-mail exchange with curator Shamim Momin reprinted in the exhibition brochure: "at that moment of feeling an end, having that be transformed into the physical expression of a ball of fire, or falling quickly, a panic, and that that could feel perfect - an exterior expression of an interior state" (11).

To this day, he supports the equivalent of The Undertaker's musculature on a 5'2" Prince-sized frame and considers himself the "backbone" of the so-called "mosh movement." More realistically, he's an eternal teenager with a black hearse: This summer a video began circulating on the Internet showing the Rollins-in-Goth-clothing getting cold-cocked by the angry vocalist of a spurned opening act - It's like watching some kid getting his assed kicked outside the lunchroom. Add up these strength/flaws and you have a keen roll model for teens of all ages: somebody punk enough to admire, cartoonish enough to mock.

In high school, coming across The Misfits logo - "The Crimson Ghost," a smiling, hooded skeleton -- spray-painted on the side of the cranberry processing plant in my hometown made me cry. It was a powerful grail amid the bent mailboxes, horseflies, blueberries and pine. I imagined the author was some kindred spirit wearing a torn Sonic Youth tee over perfectly mucked brown corduroys and ratty sneakers, a girl who stuck Reynolds Wrap on the end of her stereo's antenna to pick up the distant college station, pulling codes from the air, rocking out as best she could to a distant, rattled "Teenage Riot."

Months after my brief visit to Danzig's pad, I discovered Dennis made sure Sue de Beer walked by the Satanic one's home when she was in town, too. The brilliance of her work is a crystalline lodging of this shared, near-religious enthusiasm within a complex practice that channel surfs between Paul McCarthy, Vito Acconci, Nan Goldin, and Headbangers Ball. As she put it when we discussed Throbbing Gristle, Vienna Actionism, and Marilyn Manson's essentialized pop take on that hybrid, "I want to be 14 and on acid and go to a Viennese Actionist performance. Lets build a time machine!"

A number of Sue de Beer's videos - Disappear Hear, Hans & Grete, The Dark Hearts, Black Sun - are jam-packed with submerged subcultural symbols because nervous, restless outsider teens and their fabulous, crushworthy inventions are at the center of her craft. In The Dark Hearts, star-crisscrossed teens in a toy-box town locate an ideal partner and aim for a clandestine make-out session in a pink Mustang. As it should be, the aforementioned Misfits logo is featured prominently on the dash, a subtle little wink to other ex/current disengaged teens. When you watch the piece in a gallery, you get to sit in a pink car, too: The potentially powerful Misfits skull is therefore posted inside a gallery, a white-washed space that lacks real fireworks and those awkward first pecking. (In true teen misfit fashion, her early Valle Export/Lacan-style video "Making Out With Myself" shows De Beer swapping passionately nervous spit with herself.)

On one level, punk's always been about uniforms. Throughout her oeuvre de Beer's understandably concerned with wardrobe: A misplaced rock tee or lame pair of pants are the easiest way to spot a wannabe. Of her video stars, only Mimi Lestor and Julien Orlow, the couple from The Dark Hearts, wore their street clothes for the production. Otherwise, she collaborated with the teens on a fantasy/reality hybrid. "When I was dressing Lena Hergessell for Black Sun I brought her dance stuff out and she looked really disappointed," she said. "Then I asked her to combine it with her own clothes and she came up with this combination that was like her uber-self - because she had this fantasy part to her wardrobe - pink legwarmers and a pink dance skirt, and then whatever, her favorite things from her actual outfit. Then she got excited and took home the pink legwarmers she thought were so terrible."

In The Dark Hearts, Lestor's pink skirt and Wizard of Oz purse work on a number of levels, but Orlow's sartorial choice is less obvious than just some teen in black. Besides dark, gothy hair, spiked necklace, and black boot/pants ensemble, he's wearing a Murderdolls t-shirt. The Murderdolls are a gory collaboration between Slipknot guitar Joey Jordison and Static-X guitarist Tripp Eisen: Think nu-metal mixed with Cradle of Filth. During production, Orlow and De Beer had a discussion about Black Sabbath versus the Murderdolls" in which he claimed Black Sabbath’s "hippy music" and not "evil." The band does a suitably dark cover of Billy Idol's "White Wedding." Is this the song in his head when he and Lestor exchange silent vows? How does he hold his head at Ozfest differently than when in this car with this girl? If he made a mix tape, what would he put on it?

Additionally, a "weirdly blank" poster of Murderdoll's guitarist Joey Jordison decorates his fantastical sunflower yellow bedroom. Orlow took the poster home after production: "I posterized these photos of members of the Murderdolls covered in blood and dirt or whatever sweat after a show," De Beer says. "I looked them up after casting Julien in the role because he showed up to the audition in those clothes." (Here her 14-year-old actor created a Misfit/Murderdoll palimpsest, basically a silent cross-generational nod.)

Nowadays, uber teens are everywhere in fashion and on the web; blubbering tween romantics can log-onto a punk-porn website like Suicide Girls - a 'community' for fans of nude dyed-haired, tattooed young women - and locate any number of fantasy neighbors along with list of favorite bands, artists, books, and sexual positions. But this isn't the world of The Dark Hearts. "The Suicide Girls are all about sexy posturing and fronting," she says. "The Dark Hearts are all about scarily exposing secret parts of themselves when they expose their desire, and then being happy to find out that the other person isn't going to laugh or treat them badly, but will expose themselves back. The Dark Hearts is kind of about the perfect moment that almost never happens, but when it does it's just always with you."

Cobbling an alternative universe, De Beer houses her work in rooms with shag carpets, comfortable beanbags. "I think that benches are uncomfortable and too severe for what is going on in my work," she says. And as soon as she gets enough money, she plans to build an entire house, a kind of clubhouse utopia. "My kids have a fucked up universe to deal with, and I can't just stick them on some austere bench to figure their shit out. That wouldn't be very loving of me." To help weather the storm, she's also chiseled toy houses and sound-stage skies, invulnerable spaces of wire and string, lands of doubles, saturated ennui, and phony high-school shootings: It's constructed singularly enough that these kids can inhabit it by themselves, but lodged inside the narratives are these undercover clues for those who can pick them out, connecting their own epiphany to her looping universe. Which is why the musical references need to be dead on: "To me it feels like this, you are a kid, you buy a record. You decide to kill yourself, but then listen to the record really loudly instead

When you're a lonely teen, you wish like Dorothy that one click of your scuffed Doc Martens would conjure a different, non-b&w geography where you could place your most precious things. Sue De Beer's videos offer that space with both complexity and tenderness, and even when it gets rough, her subjects needn't worry about pulling back the curtain only to discover a sniveling poseur.

Having collaborated before on a one off zine called Mall Punk, for which Sue did the cover - a pair of trenchcoat killers in gorey clown makeup embraced in a kiss, a homoerotic revision of the Columbine tragedy (a photo that later adorned the cover of Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread) - it was a no-brainer to work together again. Besides, the show was essentially another magazine, one in a sort of triptych of zines that featured many of the same people in each, a revolving door of friends and likeminded artists. Each issue had a specific theme - animals (Animal Stories), terrorism and disaffected teen consumer culture (Mall Punk), and finally, ghosts (Ghost Stories).

The artists in the latter included an equal mix of young New York and Los Angeles based talent - Jesse Bransford, Matt Greene, Lorenzo De Los Angeles, Joel Westendorf, Greg Einhorn, Naomi Uman, Banks Violette, and Adam Putnam. There were others too, writers lined up as well, that would have been featured in the magazine, if it had ever actually come to print fruition. For whatever reason it did not. In retrospect, this fact seems well suited to the project. A magazine about ghosts that is an apparition itself (though the work that went into the Ghost Stories show has seen its rightful due in other arenas). When Sue first asked me to write something about this long past, off the radar event, I was initially nonplused. But then, thinking about what her work is about - memory and the romantic, ineluctable reconstitution of past events, it all started to make sense. These were salad days, before Germany and the Whitney, before Matt Greene's rapid ascent, before Trinie Dalton (whose band Unicornipcopia played on the patio dressed in white ghost sheets) had written a novel.

I suppose this could be an opportunity to gain some perspective on what has become a popularly phrased genre in modern art - that which has been termed for better or worse neo-gothic. But, in turning an eye on a show such as this, it would seem that much of that kind of contextualization is the result of mere coincidence. Artists like Greene, Bransford and Violette, while certainly in communication while developing their own signature styles, ones that draw from a banquet of eremitic male teenage obsessions, cryptically signified heavy rock and the melancholic far dimensions of H.P. Lovecraft (also central to Putnam’s work of ectoplasmaically charged empty spaces) - were each on singular pursuits of tackling the uncanny. And like Durer's famous etching of a sad cherub, toiling the day away alone with a compass and alchemical tools, the work constructed by each of these artists was also lonely, introspective, with all outward signs dissolving into personal, transcommunicative meaning. There was also Greg Einhorn's minimalist video of a streetlamp silently swaying in the wind, Joel Westendorf's comical ghost puppet transformed digitally into a stylized new wave expressionist portrait, contrasted against a tattered thrift store frame and homespun cobwebs (there was even a live spider, what a pain to get to the gallery in tact!). Naomi Uman's "Removed" video played behind a black curtain in the corner, staged like a carnival peepshow. This movie, which last only a couple of minutes, took years to produce, as she hand painted fingernail polish over the frames of an Italian porn every image except the writhing female star before dousing the whole reel in bleach, leaving the woman's form ghostly white in contrast, as she humped away frantically for an orgasm that seems to never technically come. One of the most striking yet subdued pieces in the show was submitted by Lorenzo De Los Angeles, a detailed draughtsman who prefers the warmth of color for his pencils. His diminutive "Obvious Poltergeist" depicted a Victorian seance table, where orbs of light dance about in a send up of one of Madame Blavatsky's specious parlor games. Meanwhile, across the way, Sue's large photos of mutilated young models smiled upon the event. Unfazed that their torsos were ripped open, or legs bent out of socket, they were instead perfectly ebullient to find themselves transfixed in still moments echoing scenes from childhood horror movie faves - Craven, Hooper and the likes.

As the night went on, white cream and black mascara was procured from somewhere, ghoulish faces were soon donned by everyone involved, and the focus turned outside to the soft sounds of Unicornucopia. Having grown up closely as an artist with most of the contributors, Sue remembers the show as "one of the nicest art things I have ever experienced." And yeah, I remember it that way too. It was a rare snapshot of the work of a group of artists still budding yet well beyond nascence, brought together in this strange space, virtually out of site of a larger critical gaze. So much happened shortly afterwards, beyond the obvious world events, very good things, and very difficult things, moves, separation, divorce, and the rest. Still, not to sound cliched, but what is a ghost if not a memory? And if so, then this ghost is one of the good ones. A veritable Casper if you will.

As one old dead guy who I am not at all that familiar with, George William Curtis once wrote: “Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or the conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory." I'd like to think it was poetry then too, but then of course I'm biased.

In effect, the starting point of Sue de Beer's research for this work, is the psyche of American teenagers. A year in Berlin, however, intensified her relationship to contemporary German history. In any case, there is no doubt that Sue de Beer, since her youth, was aware of the posters illustrating the German RAF-protagonists in the Che Guevarian guerrilla style, as well as the 'Wanted' placards that decorated the bedrooms of some of her high school classmates. Her personal preoccupation with the RAF gave birth to the work's title Hans & Grete, named after Baader and Ensslin’s code name, and also used by Astrid Proll for her photographic collection of private shots from the foundational stages of the RAF. The title implies it is not only Kathleen who especially relates to western German terrorism of the 70's and 80's, but that Sue de Beer sees similar influences in the other three characters - whose ideas and actions do not explicitly relate to the theme. Similarities between the characters in the piece and the real RAF protagonists can thus not be seen in their actions, but in the solely imaginary transgression. Violence will no longer be committed, but purely imagined. From psychoanalytic standpoints, personality structures of both parties seem to resemble each other. The difficult task of breaking from the significant and self-defining parental predominance ought trigger an action so radical, it creates an abrupt and irreversible separation. The longing for meaning, to detach oneself from the crowd, has been attached to members of the RAF by scientists such as Christian Schneider or Jan Philipp Reemtsa. Kathleen's monologue also refers to this quest when she says: "You can derail history by deleting yourself from it, and everybody knows that. I'm gonna do the opposite though, cause I want to watch that collision."

De Beer made the forty-minute Hans & Grete, 2002, while in residence at the American Academy in Berlin, and it is perhaps the most remarkable piece in her small but growing body of work. The two-screen video installation splices together elements of German culture—the title references the Brothers Grimm and nicknames chosen by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, ringleaders of the Baader-Meinhof gang—with a cognitive pathology of the shootings endemic to American high schools in recent years. It sounds heavy, but that heaviness is modulated: four revealing monologues written by Alissa Bennett (one per character) are set adrift amidst scenes of classroom boredom, furtive sex, a ritual animal slaying, and a lot of amateur guitar wizardry. Perhaps indicative of divergent forces acting upon each teen, doubles proliferate across the two screens. The video has two actors (who each play two roles), two bedroom sets, two classroom scenes, two sex scenes, two scenes of violence, etc. Kip, embodying Kip Kinkle—who in 1998 killed four people (including his parents) and wounded two dozen classmates—paradoxically explains his own massacre fantasy as an opportunity to “close down the space between us all” and “pull all the threads back to [himself.]” He's paired with Kathleen, who home-records a 4-track song about the suicide of Ulrike Meinhof yet opts out of the finality of that act as her own fate. Seth and Sean, “normal” counterparts to Kip and Kathleen's “gothic” teens, find more appropriately conventional outlets for their feelings: he wants to be a rock star while she's worried that he might leave her (and the baby he doesn't know about.) De Beer does not pass judgment on these characters, instead allowing them the space necessary to reach for an uneasy eloquence. The juxtaposition of conversational tics—the everpresent “likes” and “ums” of youthful speech—with a disarming self-awareness makes her portraits of lives in limbo uncommonly convincing.

De Beer's characters are not only concerned with their futures. Disappear Here, 2004, looks back: The video focuses on the porous border between memory and desire by looking at a teenage girl who recalls a third grade field trip and takes a Polaroid self-portrait. Dark Hearts, 2003, features a young couple immersed entirely in the fleeting moments of presentness that anchor all fumbling romances. De Beer's theatrically stylized videos round out our understanding of the jumbled episodes we've all lived through, humanely outlining their intricate mental and emotional sphere.

In the lovely closing moment of Sue de Beer's most recent video, The Dark Hearts, 2003, a girl in the driver's seat picks up a gloomy boy from his house for a runaway spin to a blue-screen make-out glen. The goth kiddo Adonis takes off his studded and dangling-chain leather collar and puts it around the girl's neck; she takes off her double-stranded necklace of fake, pearly beads and embraces his neck with it. They daintily peck each other. A skull decal looks out at the boy from the passenger-side dashboard. The horror? The horror is the world they live in, which necessitates, instead of diary keeping, making "morgue entries" to figure out their lives. This is the world that's been left to them: darkness transacting in between boy parts and girl parts, in between loving and leaving, in between teen lonliness and adult existence.

De Beer's teens resonate with those night shades created by the twentieth-level wizard and theoretician of the in-between as a state of being, Joss Whedon, the brillian maestro of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He found in Buffy and the Scooby gang the fittest embodiments for the tumult of nascent adulthood and (as the show and its characters grew) for the brutality of living in the world, where people die, or stop loving, or disappear or change in ways never thought possible, where the Scoobys came to understand, as they shape shifted into their adult selves, that the true horror isn't anything outside but the fractal gruesomeness of dealing with personal demons, psychic slaying often done alone.

De Beer reckons with what it would mean to engage much of the complexity of the show's feminist philosophy lessons and still do something different - using the teenager as both the site of her interests and as her non-site (since non-sites' out-of-contextness situates uncertainty). In her previous photographic and video work, she's played with the teen demonic idiom of horror and gore films, video games and death metal while skillfully acknowledging artmeisters of such gooey, unstable territories, namely Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy; but she laces her acknowledgement with the angel dust of the feminine and amps up the guys' contingent vulnerability. And early video, "Loser", 1997, shows a girl-psychic snapshot of the artist as a nerd - seeming to hold her breath, tension created by the not-breathing as well as by the disconcerting uncanniness of her look (achieved by the weirdly simple device of having shot herself while she hung upside down, hair tightly wound so as to not spoil the effect - but showing herself right side up). Constricting breathing can heighten orgasm, but in a more directly auto-erotic self-portrait de Beer French kisses a static but blankly blinking video image of herself (Making Out With Myself, 1997), which sounds straightforward enough but becomes stranger and stranger the longer it's watched: Am I you? Are you me? Is there a way out of the whirlpool of the self? Narcissus fell in love with his own reflected image; de Beer images the love-fall into the self and its infinate allegorical (video) loop. Later, she even did time collaborating with Laura Parnes on an unauthorized sequel to Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley's Heidi, 1992 (Heidi 2, 1999-2000). More recently, in a suite of photo works from 1999-2001, de Beer placed herself, at times maimed, bleeding, and on the run, in large photographic 'grabs' from horror video games, No matter the strengths and graces of any of these works, they seem like test drives for her Transel and Gretal, Hans & Grete 2002-2003.

Guitar solos in the bedrooms, tedium in the classroom, and ritual sacrifices in the woods make up most of the "action" in Hans & Grete, in which de Beer deploys crucial, intelligent fictive and "real" examples of teen ontology for her own purposes, shifting even the resonances of her video's title. The two Grimm kids have been split into two paris - Kip and Kathleen, Seth and Sean - but are played by only two actors. Abstracted, the witch has been transformed into lonliness, her gingerbread cottage - simultaneously a lure, a repreive from hungers, and a trap - into the distraction of sex. Hans & Grete like Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), is a double projection, but where Warhol worked with actual groovy twentysomethings (hanging out, waiting, getting fucked up, fucking) as a way of tracing the erotic and political consequence of now, de Beer gazes at teens, fictionalized but emotionally raw, to engage now's effect and mood - trapped in school, testing any way of escape (music, sex, suicide, drugs and mayhem), figures of paternal present in the shadows. Both artists eschew moralizing and pay keen attention to casting, valuing being over acting - not that it's easy to seperate one transmuting into the other and back. Whatever her work's antecedents may be in portraying imaginary teenage wonder and trauma - Harmony Korrine's cat killers from Gummo; A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Kruger turning a bed into a vortex of annihilating disappearance; Tomb Raider's collapsing of mental and representational space; Blair Witch's haunted woods; Dennis Cooper's lost muse George Miles's Hamlet-like poetries of indecision - de Beer's trying to figure out what relation these fictions have to bear (or what effect they have on) the actual: the pulverizing nonfiction of Kip Kinkle's engulfing, disruptive sadness and of Ulrike Meinhof's unnecessary demise. De Beer's results unsettle: She pares away until her spooky content reveals the natural spookiness of being inthe world. At one point in Hans & Grete the camera travels through a woods at dusk, and the effect is kaleidoscopic and disorienting, anamorphic, as the woods folds into itself. The only sound is of birds and wind, from the Nintendo 64 game Conker's Bad Fir Day, warping nature itself into a sign of everything against nature. It's the bramble of existence and it's a nightmare.

Hans & Grete opens with two pairs of feet, dirty socks on, fiskily mingling, at the end of the bed, mid fuck, a scene soon juxtaposed with an endlessly spurting cock, fake as its unbelievable load; it ends with a girl in her bedroom alone. Despite a script made up of texts written by the epic Alissa Bennett, what holds attention isn't "action" (narrative, plot) but visual derangement and emotionality. De Beer takes full advantage of the unnerving discontinuity of where her dual projections meet: Projected in a corner (punished dummkopf's position), the video creates bodies impossibly collapsing into themselves or reveals the cracks in the constructed mask of the self the face presents to the world. The gorgeous loners attempt to articulate through pauses and aphasic gaps as much as words their individual plights, but their visages, split by the dual projection's seam (and seeming) - reveal the wounded sinthome joining the visually dissimilar pairs of protagonists (goth versus prep rocker), played by Travis Jeppesen and Lena Lauzemis. Everyone in the film is thinking about what they are doing or supposed to do and who they are, and they find they're in every way "other" - the creature reality. No fashionable reserve, no cool distancing, de Beer's generous gift of emotional honesty, as in the best songs of Will Oldham or Chan Marshall, makes the project project, all the while featuring anti- and super-natural homemade artifice as structuring ground. At times staring out blankly and at other times speaking in a voice-over as he performs some private ritual with a hunting knife and a stuffed dog while smoking a cigarette, Kip declares: "people can leave, die, disappear, run away, you know, whatever, but you can never be completely rid of a person becuase there's always something that proves them to you again. It's like there are invisible connections that exist between you and every person you've ever met. That keeps pulling you back together again, forever - and you know, you can't change that."

De Beer's use of decor somewhat lighten's the proceedings: A raunchy ornamental gnome stands with buttocks bared until Seth smashes him to bits with his guitar; a bed headboard displays "Kitty", sometimes in reverse; stuffed and ceramic animals witness most of the teen's goings on. There's as much humor as poignace when Seth announces his plans to become a supreme being of the recording studio: 'I mean, you know, there are some guys who are just cut out for that. You know, you've got people like Morrison, Hendrix, Robert Plant, Jagger, probably to a lesser extent someone like Scott Weiland, you know that guy from the Stone Temple Pilots. But I mean, like, you know, when you see somebody like that, who just.. with that kind of star quality, you just know it. And it probably has less to do with talent than with the fact that these people radiate this kind of magnitism that the world cant resist." DeBeer shows Seth posing, pickin gup his guitar and rocking out while his girlfriend, in a baby blue T-shirt, lounges on her bed. De Beer juxtaposes the couple with Goth angel Kathleen making music alone in her room. Boys announce things in a way that girls don't, or arent usually encouraged to. Seth can enumciate his rock-god lineage; Kathleen might be channelling Kathleen Hannah, Souixsie Sioux, or even Meinhof, declaims nothing, even if the sequence might be called, in an inter-title, "Kathleen's 4-Track Demo". Only after this does Seth get to rock out by himself - he plays a riff and says it's what we'll remember.

Of course, what's telling is that it's Kathleen's demo, not Seth's, and that we hear in the film a woman singing her rockin' heart out. De Beer proves herself enraptured by such difference, and at a time when such issues, some would argue, are obsolete, "merely" electronic (which would be when it's most crucial to think through the difference): She closes the video, crossing over and between the teen male and female pleasures and burdens of living and dreaming, with a juxtaposition of some of the possible and historical outcomes of how each gender deals with the unbearable lightness of being and how culture at large encorporates the dealings. Shorthand it by saying its Charles Manson versus Sylvia Plath, but less sensational and more quotidian, homely. (I'm tempted to suggest some of the consequences could be allegorized by the move from D&D to video gaming: the imaginary constantly exteriorized - digital manipulations instantly more "productive" than throwing a 20 sided die and waiting for the dungeon master's reading - leading somewhere simply not good.) With an obviously fake gun, Kip takes target practice in the air. De Beer cuts between him alone in his room, and dummy figures seated in a classroom. The clock ticks.. Dried blood stains a windowsill. Gunfire. The dummies are shown blown away, piled in the corners of a classroom. Cut to: Sean with a fake but pulsing pregnant stomache. Her voiceover: "You cant sit around waiting forever to be rescued becuase it's never going to happen, not ever.. I keep all my secrets to myself." She give a lit cigarette to her stuffed bear to drag on. She discusses the option of suicide but thinks that if you kill yourself you hang around "watching everyone forget that you were ever alive". It all closes with Sean alone but not quite suicidal. "Personally I'm not into it, but that's just me. I think I've always been pretty afraid of being alone."

The World's loss and confusion ensorcelled in girls and boys, in rooms. Teenagers may prove the richest embodiments of "between" states or of sexual and psychic unruliness, but if you think that their turmoil is any less real than adults', you'll miss out on the haunted beauty of it all. The film keeps cutting back to the outside of a nowhere little prop house. Rinky-dink music plays. It's the world's address, but no one's really at home.

Teens and horror have always made a sexy and scary combination, particularly in the history of film. From 1950s horror masterpieces such as "I was a Teenage Frankenstein" or "Teenage Werewolf" via 1980s classics like "Halloween", "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" to todayÕs slasher films a la Wes Craven, such as "Scream". Sexy teens, serial killers and all other kinds of freaks and monsters are without a doubt a winning mix.

Despite repeated warnings to stay away, a group of fun-loving but none-too-bright teenagers set out to reopen the eerie Camp Crystal Lake, which closed 20 years earlier after a series of bizarre and unexplained deaths. Now someone is lurking in the woods, spying on the happy campers, and plotting a gory, grisly revenge on those who would disturb the camp's slumber.

In her most recent series of video works i.e. "Hans & Grete" (2002), "Dark Hearts" (2003) as well as in her new work "Disappear Here" (2003) Sue de Beer looked into the darker side of troubled adolescents. While the two most recent films show the horror of teens being simply misunderstood by the adult world "Hans & Grete" discloses how teens in fact can turn into little Freddys, Jasons or Michaels themselves. The work investigates the psychology of so-called school shooters and is based on the actual massacre at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. A blood bath without precedent and still only another episode in an endless series of killings among teens in recent years: Springfield, Ore., Jonesboro, Ark., West Paducah, Ky. and Pearl, Miss. among many others.

A teenage girl becomes the target of a killer who has stalked and killed one of her classmates. A tabloid news reporter is determined to uncover the truth, insisting that the man who raped and killed the girlÕs mother one year earlier is the same man who is terrorizing her now. The girlÕs boyfriend becomes the prime suspect and the horror begins.

De BeerÕs work is neither an impersonal documentary on PBS about the seemingly immoral and nightmarish abyss of teenage life nor a voyeuristic and exploitative look into the daily behavior of US teens a la Larry Clark. She genuinely combines teen subjects with her insights into teenage subcultures in which we find everything from "Hello Kitty" toys to V.C. Andrews books, Morrissey albums and elements of gothic culture. De Beer lets her characters loose allowing them what most of them dream about: to take revenge for losing their innocence and having to face a complex world no one prepared them for. The artist is doing this while exploring and glorifying the particular realities and cultures US teens have created for themselves as a counter reaction to the adult world that seemingly confuses them so fiercely.

We are taken into the world of a mad killer, Michael Myers, who at a very young age stabbed his older sister to death. Locked away for many years in a mental hospital Michael escapes one night and returns to his home to continue his killing spree.

For the bedroom wall doubles as a huge video screen, and de Beer takes visitors on a split screen trip deep into the heads of four teenagers, two boys and two girls. We listen to their innermost thoughts as they sit bored in school, wander through the dark woods and just hang around in the on-screen version of the claustrophobic bedroom set, playing air guitar, having sex, reading magazines and thinking about their lives.

Part fairy story, part horror movie, de Beer makes us listen to what might just be running through the minds of those teenage shooters who do all the messy, ordinary, banal teen things and then get up the next day, go to school, take out a gun and wipe out their classmates.

And having worked in Germany for the last year - the piece was made while de Beer was the Phillip Morris fellow at the American Academy in Berlin - she makes a connection between the pasty-faced bedroom psychos of her homeland and their older German cousins, the middle class radicals of the Baader Meinhof gang.

Written down like this, it all sounds very heavy, very portentious. But de Beer's skill, supported by he excellent writing and acting team, is to make her points exactly the way her youthful protagonists might have made them: laid back, cool and funny, with lots of sex and terrible rock 'n roll.

The most striking thing about the video, and the insight it offers, is how sad they are.

The youngsters she shows are afflicted with a melancholy as deep as Shakespeare's Hamlet, the subject they are shown studying in school, and cannot bear the thought that all those human connections they are having such trouble making will one day be broken forever and that, ultimately, their lives will be forgotten.

They might be, but Sue de Beer is at the beginning of what should be a career well worth watching

Sue de Beer kennt die Faszination düsterer Gegenwelten. Immer wieder thematisiert sie die dunklen Seiten von Jugendkultur: Spuren von Blut und Schüssen, von Selbstverstümmelung und Zerstörung anderer durchziehen ihre Filme und Fotos. Darsteller in morbiden Posen präsentieren sich - halb spöttisch, halb verstört - in einem seichtem Poesiealbum-Ambiente.

Ab Samstag ist in den Kunst-Werken de Beers ambivalente Filminstallation "Hans und Grete" zu sehen. Die extreme Jugendgewalt in den USA und die High-School-Massaker brachten sie zu ihrem Thema. "Viele dieser Kinder haben nach außen ganz normal gewirkt wie Kip Kinkel, der seine eigenen Eltern erschoss. Sie wuchsen behütet auf. Trotzdem sind sie voller Angst. Ich habe nach Antworten auf dieses Phänomen gesucht", sagt de Beer.

Das Märchen "Hänsel und Gretel" erzählt bekanntlich von zwei Kindern, die in den dunklen Hexenwald geraten, weil es zu Hause lieblos und karg zugeht. "Hans and Grete" dagegen spielt in einem komfortablen Jugendzimmer und beschäftigt sich mit der jugendlichen Verlorenheit im Überangebot der Reize. Der Besucher kann sich in lustigen Knautschsesseln niederlassen, es gibt bunte Abziehbildchen von Pferden und Vögeln. Doch wie in Lynchs Filmen zuckt unter der süßlichen Oberfläche das Perverse. Das 40-minütige Video, erkundet die Psyche der jugendlicher Amokläufer, ergänzt durch Anspielungen auf Baader/Meinhof.

"Diese Kinder in den USA wollen einen Bruch herbeiführen, aber sie merken nicht einmal, dass sie sich vielleicht auch gegen eine bestimmte Sozialstruktur wehren. Sie sind nicht analytisch wie die Mitglieder der RAF", erklärt de Beer. Vier junge Schauspieler geben in den Monologszenen des Videos Einblicke in eine Psyche zwischen Teenager-Weltschmerz und Sehnsucht nach Ruhm.

Ein Charakter ist an Ulrike Meinhof und ihre "Briefe aus dem toten Trakt" angelehnt. Auf die Kombination war de Beer während ihres Berlinaufenthaltes als Philip-Morris-Stipendiatin an der American Academy und am Künstlerhaus Bethanien 2002 gekommen. Sie las das Buch der Exterroristin Astrid Proll über "Hans und Grete" alias Andreas Baader und Gudrun Ensslin. "Ich will diese Leute nicht glorifizieren", betont de Beer. Doch es geht ihr darum, auch die High-School-Shooter politisch ernst zu nehmen - und zwar aus ihrer eigenen Perspektive und Sprache heraus.

De Beers Bildwelten stammen aus dem "ganz normalen" Universum der Mainstream-Horrormovies, Videospiele und Comics. Sie kann sich daran erinnern, wie sie selbst bei Kellerpartys den Gruselschocker "Halloween" sah. "Ich habe sehr viel geschrien. Gleichzeitig war da das Gefühl, dass diese Bilder offenbar ein tiefes Bedürfnis abdecken", erklärt sie. Seit ihrem Kunststudium versuchte die heutige Yale-Dozentin, ihr Unbehagen ästhetisch präzise zu formulieren.

Über den Erfolg war sie selbst manchmal entsetzt. Da war zum Beispiel jene Sitzung mit einem Gruftie, der für seine rituellen Selbstverletzungen bekannt war. "Ich bat ihn um eine Fotositzung", erinnert sie sich. "Bei dieser Sitzung entstand ein Bild, für das er seine Brustwarzen aufschnitt und hochklappte. Während wir es machten, fanden wir nichts dabei. Aber als wir es hinterher sahen, haben wir uns geschämt. Es war wie ein Beweis dafür, wie kaputt wir eigentlich sind", sagt de Beer.

Sie lacht, nimmt einen Schluck Ginger Ale und sieht beiseite. Es geschieht öfter während des Gesprächs, dass ihr Blick plötzlich abwandert und sich die Lider herabsenken. Vielleicht denkt sie an Kip Kinkel, den sie gerne in seiner Gefängniszelle interviewt hätte, ehe sie fühlte, dass dies dem Film nichts hinzufügen könnte. Dann wirkt Sue de Beer plötzlich wieder fröhlich. Erstmals seit sechs Jahren arbeite sie wieder über ein anderes Thema, sagt sie: "Das Leben in Berlin hat mich glücklich gemacht. Ich habe mit einem Film über meine glücklichen High-School-Erinnerungen begonnen: Schuleschwänzen und die ersten erotischen Abenteuer mit Jungs auf dem Rücksitz."

"Hans and Grete", bis 23. 11., Di.-So., 12-18 Uhr, Kunst-Werke, Auguststraße 69, Mitte

taz Berlin lokal Nr. 7173 vom 4.10.2003, Seite 29, 156 Zeilen (Kommentar), HENRIKE THOMSEN

Completed in the spring of 2002, Hans und Grete was made during de Beer's tenure as artist in residence at the American Academy in Berlin. As the video's narrative unfolds, two historical moments - roughly 30 years apart - are examined through de Beer's kaleidoscopic vision. Shifting references to teen culture and cult legends permeate the interlaced narratives of Hans und Grete 's four teen-protagonists: Kathleen, Kip, Sean, and Seth. The images in this book, stills made during the production of Hans und Grete, serve as an abbreviated guide to de Beer's multi-dimensional video installation.

Unfolding through a series of interview-format monologues and through more experiential episodes, the Hans und Grete narrative stems from grotesque incidents of youth violence. De Beer's tale draws on the stories of Fort Gibson's Seth Trickey, Jonesboro's Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, Littleton's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Paducah's Michael Carneal, Pearl's Luke Woodham, Santee's 'Andy' Williams, and Springfield's Kip Kinkel. Each of these adolescents was involved in a middle school or high school shooting between 1997 and 2001, a period when more than a dozen such massacres took place in the United States.

"Hans und Grete" were the aliases for Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who were lovers and the ringleaders of the Red Army Faction, a West German revolutionary movement. In 1970, Ulrike Meinhof, editor of the leftist German newspaper Konkret, aided Baader's escape from prison, thereby establishing the moniker of the "Baader-Meinhof" gang. As seminal 'guerilla' terrorists, the Baader-Meinhof group was involved in a chain of violent revolutionary actions worldwide. Coupled with the suspicious alleged suicides of several key gang members, their widespread influence elevated many figures in the group to the status of counter-culture legends. De Beer's video incorporates elements of the Baader-Meinhof story in the tortured psychological dramas of its characters. Media images of Meinhof, alongside rock and goth posters, appear in the work as a visual anthem for the teen characters' fatalistic credos and dark obsessions.

The video brims with allusions to those subcultures in which youth movements are especially fluent: horror movies, video games, psychedelic rock, metal, and goth. De Beer extracts bizarre electronic sound bites from a range of adventure/quest video games including Conker's Bad Fur Day, The Legend of Zelda, and Yoshi's Story. Psychedelic posters produced in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside recent imagery from underground goth and metal scenes, inspire design motifs skillfully compressed into the structure and decor of de Beer's hand-crafted sets. This iconography, combined with elements of German kitsch such as garden gnomes, gaudy stuffed animals, and over-sized, heart-shaped cookies, evokes the hybrid nature of international youth culture.

Hans and Grete's four protagonists live in dual worlds comprised largely of artifice and disparate cultural artifacts. Each of these worlds features a male and a female character; the stories of each pair are cryptically intertwined, relating obliquely and sometimes overtly to their counterparts. Played by a single actor, the male characters Kip and Seth are driven by their ambitions. Kip aspires to power through his school shooting fantasy. Seth dreams of himself as a rock legend - star power is all he wants. Played by a single actress, the female characters, Sean and Kathleen, internalize their emotions, disregarding their futures. Sean is pregnant, though her adolescent bedroom, crammed with stuffed animals, reveals that she is little more than a child herself. Kathleen embodies the imprisoned persona of Ulrike Meinhof, to whom she relates as a lonely and devastated anti-hero.

While each teen features prominently in the video, Kip is the impetus for much of the story's action. Mapping out Kip's bloody fantasies, de Beer examines the fixations that propel teen violence. Early in the video, during a hideous midnight woods scene, Kip mutilates his pet dog, Fluffy, in a ritual of pure pleasure. He pounds, slaps, stabs, and cuts the creature into a bloody mess, though Fluffy is obviously a stuffed animal. Nonetheless, in this scene de Beer alludes to the macabre reality that many school shooters performed bloody rehearsals before their killing sprees, torturing domestic animals as their first kill.

In the first two of three classroom sequences in Hans und Grete, de Beer overlays audio tracks from two classic horror movies: the classroom scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Halloween (1978), respectively. In each scene, a tyrannical teacher instructs on the finer points of reality, mortality, and fate. Both scenes, in the horror films, occur at the moment when the teen heroine glimpses an insane murderer on the loose. Already on a killing spree, the murderer will ultimately be defeated by the heroine. In de Beer's third classroom sequence, Kip uses a crude, unmistakably fake gun to shoot what are visibly dummies. In each instance of Kip's murderous intent, the dubious power he seeks collapses in the fakery of the horror genre.

Motifs from several horror films, particularly A Nightmare on Elm Street, appear throughout Hans und Grete. Over the course of de Beer's video, the music, setting (most often adolescents' bedrooms or the woods), the promise of blood and death, coy eroticism, necessary humor, occasional irony, and sheer fakery contribute to an ethos befitting the archetypal horror film. Vivid fields of color further establish a mood of almost formal beauty, contrasting with the video's expressionistic narrative, saturated in the chaos of teen-angst. Devoid of detachment and irony, de Beer effects a direct approach to difficult and often taboo subject matter. The highly structured, multi-part video relies on the monologues of Kathleen, Kip, Sean, and Seth, written by Alissa Bennett. Emphasizing each character's preoccupation with fate, the monologues establish enigmatic links among the four protagonists.

In their monologues, the teenagers reveal their visceral experience of fate as a potent, seemingly physical force. Addressing existential and metaphysical concerns, their allegorical discourse pertains to invisible connections and scientific systems, to the dichotomy of absence and presence. The sets, constructed by de Beer with purposely false perspective, amplify the story's artifice, compounding the narrative ambiguity of the monologues. Employing filmic distortions such as flipping and mirroring effects, double and split images, and psychedelic abstractions, de Beer concocts a disruptive vision of space. Significantly, the video's installation is grounded in the duality of split, adjoining over-sized screens, which converge at the wide angle of 120 degrees. Projected, the paired image allows de Beer to employ perceptual tricks in which deceptive angles confound the viewer's perception. At some moments, a single image occurs on both screens at once, causing a strange void-like disturbance of the space. The crack between the screens functions as an anomaly, a signifier of the characters' perplexities. Through such devices, de Beer's project transcends time and space, recalling the hallucinatory tradition of Dennis Cooper's novels and the films of David Lynch.

The audience watches Hans und Grete amid the installation's over-sized stuffed animals and shag carpeting. Such an environment reflects the fakery of the video's scenarios while implicating specific historical moments and reinforcing de Beer's spatial preoccupations. The viewer, ensconced in this adolescent boudoir, may enter the picture to occupy the space between the screens and the hybrid, history-laden reality Hans und Grete proposes.

A season or so ago, she collaborated with Laura Parnes on "Heidi II," a grotesquely engrossing riposte to Paul McCarthy from a girlish point of view. Having each gone solo, both she and Parnes (whose recent film updated Dante's Inferno) are still exploring the transformation of childhood innocence into teen evil. "Hans und Grete," De Beer's two-channel video installation (with shag rug and plush animal seating) takes off not from the fairy tale but from Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff's aliases. Luring us into the secret subcultures of disaffected kids, it weaves together the psychology and pathology of aspiring rockers, goth vixens, and schoolboy shooters. THROUGH SATURDAY, Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, 212-727-3323. (Kim Levin)

Um sich der Gewalt zu nähern, so die letztjährige Philip-Morris-Preisträgerin, muss sie Geschichten erzählen. Dabei verwendet sie Motive aus Kino und Kinderzimmer, aus Popmusik und Jugendkult, verwoben mit den Mythen der Siebzigerjahre. Heraus kommt eine grelle Mischung aus Gefühl, Kitsch und Gewalt.
Doch damit die Geschichten uns erreichen können und nicht in den Diskursen über Gewalt, Medien usw. versteinern, hat Sue de Beer mit surrealen Mitteln unsere Seh- und Denkgewohnheiten außer Kraft gesetzt. Die Klage etwa, dass die Jungendlichen nicht zwischen Wirklichkeit und virtueller Welt ihrer Computerspeile unterscheiden können, hat Sue de Beer transponiert: Ihre Protagonisten haben die Welt ihrer Mythen und Kuscheltiere zur Wirklichleit erhoben: völlig vertieft darin, ihrem Plüschtier eine Zigarette anzustecken oder es - in einer anderen Sequenz - blutrot-trefend umzubringen.

Der häusliche Terror, in dem ihre Protagonisten agieren, ist die Konsumwelt aus Sex, Drogen, Hardrock, Lebkuchenherzen und Gartenzwergen - jene Accessoires, die in der vorherrschenden Kälte für Momente Ersatzwärme suggerieren. Jeder ist ganz alein mit sich beschäftigt und damit, ober seine Performance in der Welt hinbekommt.

Sue de Beer: I made this piece in 1997.  It was actually based on a performance that I did at Momenta Art where these two people were joined together at the lips.  That piece was kind of a disaster but there was something nice about the motion and something that I couldn't capture in a photograph.  The video itself is very photographic.  It's three minutes long and in a way non-narrative.  It's more like a kinetic photograph, the way that it functions.  I think if you compare it to my later work in photography that it's similar.  It's one image, one shot.  There's no editing, no change in framing.  But I was able to do things that I couldn't with a photograph.  Like you have the before and after of the kiss, the weirdness of it being live and being fake, which didn't really seem possible in a photograph.  I actually tried to do it as a photograph too, but it didn't work as well.

CM: So prosthetically joined at the lips... kissing yourself, you also did a similar kissing image for the cover of Mall Punk...

SdB: Yeah prosthetics and special effects but then also this idea of intimacy.  When I did the video I had just finished reading Remembrance of Things Past, and there was this moment in The Captive where Proust, who has been sequestered in his house and developed this tremendous jealousy of his girlfriend, is kissing her goodnight, and he talks about the inside of her mouth being an entranceway and yet a barrier to her.  This kiss to me is a perfect symbol of thwarted intimacy, because on the one hand he is inside her body, but on the other hand it's just another sign of being incapable of inhabiting someone else's body.  So making out with myself in this video has the same sort of impotence to it.  The kiss that you are seeing is real, there are two of me, and the kiss is really happening, but it is also really low-fi, and therefore also very fake.  There is this mood to it that has that same sort of impotence or thwarted quality to it, of trying to get inside of your own body, and being incapable of intimacy, even if it is reflexive.  So it's really... it's really pathetic actually (laughs).  

CM: It is very lo-fi.  This being your first would you do it differently now that you have more skill?

SdB: No I like it crappy actually.   I'm really interested in special effects in movie making and the way in which people try and make an imaginative image, but for me, one of the important things in this and which carries over into all of my works, is that you see the hand that makes it, that the blue screen is really jumpy, and that you see the edge of the face sort of flickering in and out, that you can sense someone behind it all creating this perverse image.

CM: Did you expect that effect going into it, knowing your limitations, or was that something you liked once it occurred.

SdB: I think I knew that I wouldn't be able to do it terribly well, and some of the earlier pieces that I had done using prosthetics had that split between being believable and sort of not believable, and yeah, when I was editing it, I really liked the result, and that made me realize how important that was, the obvious fakeness.  That is something that has come up again and again in future works.  That's why this video is such an important first project for me. 

CM: You have repetitions, themes that come up, like the intimacy issue, but also the replication of self.  I guess you said that you got the idea for the video from seeing Christie Tarlington kissing herself in an ad that you saw on a bus.

SdB: Yeah but that stuff was in my work before that. That was my catchphrase for a time. 

CM: Well in the Mall Punk series that you did, the cover piece (which was later used for the cover of Dennis Cooper's new book My Loose Thread)... I think when we were talking about what would be a cool cover for the magazine, I had suggested a guy and girl in a similar pose, but then you ended up doing two guys, which fits in better with the replicated self theme.  But you also pushed it into a gorier realm.  Can you talk about the way that the earlier themes, fused with the more violent themes in your later work?

SdB: I guess the first violent piece I did, that was shown at the same time as the kissing piece was this photo where I was split in half.  I had been reading a lot of Dennis Cooper books, and actually I was thinking about his relationship to Proust... I take in a lot of his (Cooper's) work and Genet's work because they are also interested in the artifice of (construction?) and because of the way Cooper uses violence as an expression of intimacy, or thwarted intimacy.  It's very moving to me.  The next big project was Heidi 2, which was a sequel to Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy's movie Heidi, which was sort of styled on the American horror movie - I think I read somewhere that it was specifically styled on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - so I was sort of obsessively investigating American horror movies when making that piece, and combined with my interest in Cooper and Genet, it was somehow about seeing your own death or how America sees images of death.  I think even in the make out video that element is there as well because one of the heads looks almost corpselike.  It's like kissing a corpse or your imagined dead self.  That was really interesting to me looking back on it.  What started out as two living people in production became one alive and one dead once completed. 

CM: Your work continues some themes of other artists that have been described as feminist, work dealing with the conflict between ubiquitous idealized images of self and the personal self-perceived image.  Someone I was talking to recently said that she thought that your work approached these issues in a way that didn't use the same tropes, that was almost masculine in its approach. 

SdB: More gender neutral.  Yeah I tend to think of myself in a more gender neutral way, and I think the make out video is gender neutral.  It's de-glamorized, sort of goofy and sort of pathetic, but it's not particularly gendered to me.  I am interested in the history of feminist art, and I am also interested in many other histories, whatever I find to be exciting to me at the time.  So then Cooper or Genet are gay men, or Valle Export who is really great to me is coming from a history of feminism.  These are all great people and they are categorized in different ways, which may or may not fit with what their work actually means. 

CM: Who are some of your film heroes?  Do you have favorite effects people?

SdB: Yeah I have a lot of Tom Savigni books.  I'm more into the old ways of doing effects, having to use actual props, rather than the computer.  In the make out video I actually made a plaster cast of my own head that I used to kiss.  So even though it looks totally digital, it was made in an old fashion way. 

CM: Some of the later works you've done, some of the photographs, Like Twins or the one of the two girls exploded that have kind of become one, their torsos sort entwined or shoved through the other... it seems that a lot of emphasis is put on the formal arrangement.

SdB: Yeah the pose was actually taken from a Sheile drawing.

CM: Well this is another instance where you have done a piece in an updated form.  Why this interest in doing remakes and sequels?  Are you trying to update the subject for a modern audience, or is it to get things right that you saw flawed in the originals, or is it more of an homage?  What percentage is what? 

SdB: Yean I am kind of a bottom feeder.

CM: No there's a definite difference.  Like in Twins you've added bobby socks and miniskirts and it becomes a different piece...

SdB: I think everything I do stems from somewhere else, from the works of others. 

CM: Yeah, like the Nightmare on Elm Street reference in the piece Bed, with the blood dripping from the ceiling.  Are you making a comment on revisionism itself?  Or is it just that you are interested in these things.   <o:p></o:p>

SdB: It's not that highbrow, from my perspective. Others may get that from the workand that's fine. History kind of becomes kind of a collage.  But I think of myself as more of a fan. 

CM: Have you ever read any Frederick Exley? He has this book called A Fan's Notes, in which the premise is that all anyone can be these days is a fan.  He's talking about sports, but ultimately it's about originality, and sort of the exhaustion or impossibility of originality, and how we are left to be merely fans of prior achievements.

SdB: No I haven't read that. Well there are people like Hal Foster who talk about the death of originality and repetition, and I guess the difference is that the topic of my work is not about that death.  I have no problem with my status as it stands.  I feel really comfortable.  So it's not the subject, it's just the form that I use. 

CM: Do you worry that people might accuse your work of being formalist?  Some artists really take offense at such accusations.

SdB: No I actually think about formal things a lot.  And I don't think that my work gets addressed a lot on formal terms.  Because of the thing that we were talking about before, with leaving the loose ends visible, being able to see the hand of the artist, I think maybe people get this idea that it's spontaneous, but actually the  work is very carefully constructed, extremely minimal - the photographs in particular are - so yeah they're all about formalism.  I love it. 

CM: Let's talk a little bit about innocence.   All of your work seems to deal with young people, and I wonder if you think of your work as correcting some of the media's images of young people, their misconceptions about what it means to be in the mind of a young person.

SdB: I think it depends on the source of the media.  The prime time newscaster reporting on an fifteen year old kid that got shot at a school is probably going to get it really wrong, but an account posted on a teenager's website about the same incident might be a lot more accurate.  I mean somewhere someone is going to get it right.  Partly what I am interested in is a kind of empathy that someone can have for something that's been mass marketed, like loving and believing in a musician, or believing in the world of zombies, and that having a kind of sweetness and purity to it.  And also sources that you wouldn't normally think of as being pure, like an earnest love of advertisements for a hair product.  And so taking a horror movie out of the context of the schlock narrative, you might have a fifteen year old confronting death for the first time, and dealing with their own mortality, and seeing that as a pure experience.  That's something that is a constant in my work, even in the make out video. 

CM: So the attraction for you is the belief ?

SdB: Yeah the belief.

SdB: Yeah no matter how corrupt it is. Whether for a hair gel, or for records, or whatever.

(Jesse interrupts). 

Yeah? I'm getting called.

An issue de Beer wrestles with is the impossibility of a true outsider stance, in a world where goth, punk, and goth-punk moves are heavily recycled, researched, and marketed. Like an art world version of Quentin Tarantino, who equates film and life, she makes no distinction between real teens and media teens, and the boredom we sometimes feel listening to/watching their existential dilemmas mirrors the vacuity of popular entertainment, from coming of age films to reality TV. It made little difference to me to learn that the parts of the script were taken from writings as diverse as Ulrike Meinhof's and Kip Kinkel's; it all sounded like bad TV dialogue of "disaffected youth" to me. Whether the kids shoot up a school or become CEO of Raytheon, they (we) all wade out of the same sludgepool of media cliches. The banality of the dialogue is belied, however, by de Beer's complex mise en scene mixing game imagery/sounds, cult insignia, scrambled architectural references, and pop culture bric-a-brac from both sides of the Atlantic.

De Beer's next work shows signs of brightening up: perhaps her trajectory will be the reverse of Cindy Sherman's ingenues-to-vomit trail. Below is an image from a new installation titled The Dark Hearts, "a nostalgic romp through punk coming-of-age in suburban America. Part road movie, part Mike Mills romance, the loose narrative revolves around two teenagers sneaking out of their parents' house to go prowl the neighborhood." Looking forward to seeing where they go (and she goes).

The key difference is that the former has an organic link to the world and the latter is a product contrived to manipulate an audience. Down a theory-bedecked hall of mirrors we can continue and claim that pictures like De Beer's are not merely manipulative but "about" manipulation, "about" the appeal of the macabre and its exploitation by filmmakers, television producers and . . . well, artists. At the end of the hall, though, that last mirror reflects our culture's own sorry visage, grown soulless and desensitized.

The how and why of photographs like De Beer's makes for compelling discussion, because the images themselves beg for justification. Why, after all, would a photographer stage an image of a young woman whose body wedges into the cracked torso of another, so that her head peeks out from the crotch of the other's jeans as if a full-grown stillbirth?

Why a picture of a young man casually laughing, as his fingers poke into the wet, gaping, crimson wound at his waist? And why a photograph of a seated young woman, cigarette in hand, her face a mask of indifference, and her midsection a skinned mound of blood and innards, perhaps even a fetus?

What intrigues De Beer are the internal contradictions within such scenes, the same tangy miscegenation of horror and humor, the grotesque and the giddy that drives Paul McCarthy's work. McCarthy didn't invent abjection, but he helped popularize it and fetishize it to the point where young artists like De Beer can trade on its currency.

A few of her pictures look like slasher-flick stage sets, with their rumpled beds and blood-stained ceilings. These, at least, leave something to the imagination other than the piercing question of how violation and degradation got to be so cool.

*Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392- 3404, through June 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Ihre Kompositionen neigen zu einer hochgradigen, fast diagrammartigen Strukturiertheit, aber auch zu sparsamer oder mangelnder Oberflächenspannung. Diese gewisse ‘Langweiligkeit' der jüngsten Fotoarbeiten ist dabei ebenso präzise austariert wie andere formale Aspekte ihrer Bildsprache. Unspektakulär an der Oberfläche, erlauben die Fotos zahlreiche Widersprüche und Zumutungen, die mit der Erfahrung verknüpft werden, den Horror zu konsumieren, und die darüber in den Vordergrund treten. Wenn in Bed, einer Arbeit, die auf einem Slasher-Film basiert, Blut von der Decke tropft, ist das ein eher stilles Element innerhalb einer architektonischen Szenerie, in der im Ganzen irgendetwas faul zu sein scheint: Das Foto markiert eine Reihe von räumlichen Widersprüchen, während ein Körper zerstückelt wird. Oder jenes Foto - angeregt durch eine Szene aus Dennis Coopers Frisk -, das zeigt, wie sich die Künstlerin im vollkommenen Chaos selbst gebiert (Untitled): Ein Bild, das die Frage nach körperlicher Begrenzung, Verschmelzung und Logik aufwirft. Hier sind Elemente wie Körperlichkeit, Volumen, Umriss und Verlauf der Arme, die marmorweiße Haut herausgearbeitet, während der Gesamteindruck einigermaßen flach ist. Dem entsprechend erscheint die Anstrengung, das eine Erwachsene eine andere gebiert, mehr körperhaft als erschreckend; der Anblick von Untitled vermittelt ein Gefühl des Unbehagens. In stärker auf Darstellern basierenden Arbeiten wie Sasha, der Aufnahme von einer Statistin aus einem Horrorfilm, vergisst man angesichts der Langeweile der Sitzenden und ihrer Sargentesken Schüchternheit beinahe all die aufgeschlitzten Bäuche, die überall zu sehen sind. Obwohl fiktional, haben Sasha und der Film, in dem die Akteurin mitgespielt haben könnte - die Sets, Codes, die unterschiedliche Beleuchtung des Films et cetera -ihre eigenen Kräfte, Möglichkeiten und Abläufe, und daran ist de Beer interessiert.

De Beers ungewöhnlicher aber reichhaltiger Mikrokosmos zur Untersuchung formaler Aspekte und kultureller Phänomene versetzt sie in die angreifbare Position, dass ihre Arbeit als moralisch zweifelhaft und als suspekt begriffen werden kann. Ähnlich wie bei Gerhard Richters Baader-Meinhof-Serie bedeutet aber diese Angreifbarkeit für die Arbeit zugleich einen ihrer entscheidenden Gehalte. Es geht hier um mehr als um kultischen Schockeffekt: Erstens bleiben historische Ereignisse im Allgemeinen sowie der Columbine-Fall und vergleichbare Schulattentate im Besonderen für die meisten von uns eine auf lange Zeit hin ungelöste Angelegenheit. De Beers Arbeit fordert deren erneute Infragestellung heraus, lässt uns diese Ereignisse noch einmal durcharbeiten. Zweitens kann man wohl nicht umhin, ihre freigeistige Herangehensweise und ihre Bildsprache zu genießen. Drittens wirkt ihre Arbeit weder formal noch intellektuell betrachtet oberflächlich (ihre Selbstporträts sind geradezu episch): Sie hat vielmehr etwas zwingendes.

Am 20. April 1999 wurden an der Columbine-Highschool in Littleton, Colorado, zwölf Studenten und ein Lehrer von den Studenten Dylan Klebold und Eric Harris getötet. Die beiden beendeten das Blutbad durch Selbstmord. Es war das schlimmste Highschool-Massaker in der Geschichte der USA.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), einer der bedeutenden amerikanischen Maler des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, war unter anderem für seine Porträts der Schönen und der (Einfluss-)Reichen bekannt und beliebt. Er porträtierte unter anderem Präsident Woodrow Wilson, den Öl-Tycoon John D. Rockefeller, den Schriftsteller Henry James sowie Kunstmäzenin Isabella Stewart Gardner.

First, doubters should be reminded that de Beer's work is part of a pictorial history of the dead or violated body as seen in the art practices of Edouard Manet, Paul McCarthy, and Sue Coe (for starters). Besides this artistic continuum, the violence is part of a well-considered, structured project relevant in our American culture in which we are all asked to process profanities like the Columbine High School killings, Jon Benet Ramsay's exploitation and death, teens throwing babies in dumpsters (again, just for starters). De Beer embraces these events without shame, and explores them in depth. She has an interest in the evolution and production of violence, researching everything from set construction on films like Nightmare on Elm Street, to the particular family histories of school shooters, to the various landscapes of each game level in Quake. Simply, she is a kind of a fan or hobbyist, a close reader of what is not traditionally allowed in mainstream culture.

Her compositions tend to be highly structured, even diagrammed, but spare and lacking surface level passion. The ennui of the latest body of photographs is as deliberate as other formal aspects of their pictorial fluency. Quiet on the surface, the photos allow various contradictions and challenges built in to the experience of consuming horror to move into the foreground. For example, in Bed, based on a slasher film, blood dripping from a ceiling is one quiet part of a Ĺsomething wrong' architectural scene: the photo posits a number of spatial contradictions while a body falls apart. Or the photo of the artist giving birth to herself in a bloody mess (Untitled) inspired by a scene from Dennis Cooper's Frisk asks questions about bodily limits, fusion, and logic. Here, physicality, volume, the shape and line of the arms, the marble-white skin, these elements register while the overall affect is fairly flat. Consequently, the challenge of one adult giving birth to another seems corporeal rather than horrific, and the experience of looking at Untitled is troubling. In more character driven works like Sasha, a shot of an extra from a horror film, one almost forgets about the splayed abdomen on display in light of the sitter's ennui and Sargentesque diffidence. Though fictional, Sasha and the film she could have been in, the film's sets, codes, lighting, etc, these have their own virtues, possibilities and protocols that interest de Beer.

Jon Benet Ramsay was found bludgeoned to death in her parents' home in Boulder, Colorado in 1996. Jon Benet was a frequent contributor in child pageants, winning ĹLittle Miss Colorado' the year before her death at age six.

*** One of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) made his fortune and reputation as a portrait painter of the beautiful and influential. President Woodrow Wilson, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelist Henry James, and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sat for him.

Common sense tells you the scene is simulated. A close look at the edge of the photograph reveals a glimpse of the unfinished wood frames supporting the stage set walls. To establish the illusion, the set has been built upside down: an old film trick. The image alludes to a scene from Wes Craven’s grisly masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in which Tina Grey’s body is dragged across her bedroom ceiling by the phantom Freddy Krueger before, and after, her murder.

Most of de Beer’s photographs evoke specific moments as well as generalities from the horror genre—one that is quite unique for its obvious, at times funny, yet still terrifying fakery. An obsession with gory tales is nothing new for this photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist. This time around, however, de Beer’s project revolves around the formal details of professional slasher film production.

The artist’s imitations are purposefully low-tech: the stage sets have been built imperfectly to pronounce their artificiality. The artist relies on deliberate quirks and distortions built into the sets, as well as plenty of fake blood and guts, to further align the work with the movies she references. The bizarre pictures possess a haunting aura heightened by their muted color palette, head-on point of view, and flat, even lighting.

While de Beer’s characters share a disaffected demeanor, their bodies are frequently severed, and the disparity between calm and gruesome intensifies the surreal aspect of the work. In Sasha (1999), a young woman’s lower torso has been dismembered as she lies in bed, calmly enjoying a cigarette. Noticeably, de Beer has not sufficiently cropped the image, and a glimpse of the actor’s leg is revealed from under the bed sheets at the bottom of the photograph. In examining artistic practice and the vehicles of popular culture, Sue de Beer revels in the phony.

Auch bei den Massakern an US-Schulen, hat sie beobachtet, nahmen Filme die Realität vorweg. Ein Albtraum, dem die 28-Jährige mit surrealen Albtraumsequenzen künstlerisch kritisch entgegentritt. Zur Zeit verwirklicht die neue Preisträgerin des Philip Morris Kunststipendiums ein Videofilmprojekt über jugendliche Täter im Klassenzimmer. Die werden oft wie ihre Opfer heldenhaft verehrt. Aus dem Internet weiß die Horrorexpertin von Amokschützen, die zu Robin-Hood-Figuren geworden sind, und zeigt Bilder mit der Aufschrift «Tears for Eric and Dylan» von einer Webside. Die Mörder tragen Basecaps und blicken naiv in die Runde. In ihrer Filmarbeit, die die Stipendiatin an der American Academy erst im kommenden Jahr fertig stellen wird, sind die Kerle vermutlich nicht wiederzuerkennen. Sicher ist nur: Es wird Blut fließen.

Da ist die mit Motiven aus Kino, Popmusik, Jugend- und Hochkultur spielende Künstlerin, deren Werke bereits in renommierte amerikanische Sammlungen Eingang fanden, nicht zimperlich. Ob sie uns in der Fotografie «Sasha» eine rauchende Frau mit unappetitlichen Eingeweiden präsentiert, in ihrem Videofilm «Heidi 2» den Mythos vom blonden Mädchen verfremdend weiterspinnt oder sich selbst am Computer so manipuliert, dass ein blutiger Riss durch ihren Körper geht - immer bieten ihre Arbeiten Stoff zum Nachdenken. Über Manipulation und Originalität, Fiktion und Wirklichkeit. Aber auch über die morbide Faszination des Makabren, von der Filmemacher und TV-Produzenten ebenso profitieren wie Künstler.

Dahinter steckt die Frage, warum Gewalt cool wirken kann - solange sie nur keinen persönlich trifft? Sue de Beer untersucht die Absicht der Täter und die Reaktionen der Öffentlichkeit. Man darf gespannt sein, zu welchen Ergebnissen sie während ihres Aufenthalts in Berlin kommt.

Cuisine camelote, gadget mais aussi cuisine de camé.

Abe I et II, Play Station, éd. GT Interactif, 379 F.

THE BIRTH

C: So Josefina, what happened first in the film?

J: Well, what happened first was this birth. It was a big thing that happened. In the way it was presented. This enormous vagina… very impressive. And also in the sense that this vagina was so active in itself… so as to push this thing out of itself. And you could see this activity there under your eyes. I liked the way they set up the expectation… the time for something to appear… till the head pops out. Of course I could see the rejection in the faces of other people, trying to run away.

C: Because when the baby comes out, it's not a pretty baby.

J: I was amazed to see this. I never saw my babies by the way, because at this very instance there is no mirror in front of you when you have a baby. You're just pushing. You don't see it in a mirror, that's the only way to really see that moment. You can only see it in somebody else. In the movie, it's a horrible thing that comes out, I would say.

C: Like an alien.

J: Like an animal. It looked like a piggy I would say this one.

C: So you think this vagina is Heidi's and she is having a baby Heidi?

J: I was thinking is this a real thing? Is it a real vagina, and is it a real photograph of a birth? Since I never saw a birth… I think it is not true that it is so tremendous…

C: Wasn't the vagina moving or talking? I don't remember. There were some words.

J: The vagina I don't think was talking. There was a voice-over with words spoken. But it was active, very active. Also I was impressed by the color, it was white what came out of there.

C: The baby, you mean?

J: The baby is inside of placenta. And you could see this.

THE INSTALLATION

C: So what is the next scene after that.

J: I was very much watching these diseases.  I went back to look at the sofas and the diseases.

C: Yes, this gallery installation with Astroturf carpet and stuffed tigers and urethane foam seats.

J: I was thinking why are we sitting on the disease. And I had to resolve it very quick, and think well we are sick because we speak. I'm not sure if it was exactly the next scene but I remember when she's in the cradle and she looks down and sees the doll. And she transforms from herself into the doll.

HEIDI THE DOLL

C: Like the mirror stage?

J: Well there is something before that I would say. When the child is born, she is the mother. In the beginning she is the mother inside. She really is. Then she is born. First there is something with the breast. And the desire starts when you are tiny, when the lips move, when you are hungry and there's the breast that the child stays with when they are not hungry at all. This would be the breast of the desire. But I think the first moment when they feel different from the mother is when the breast falls, when they don't get breast fed anymore, something is taken away. And now they desire it… You know desire is a lack of something.

C: In the movie they don't show any of that, the nurturing mother, who feeds the baby.

J: I don't remember any nurturing mother. What happens in the mirror stage is that she sees her image and she believes this is she, although the image is different, it's never the same. And she puts this image, like you put a dress, on top of her. She invests, or revests, herself with this image. And she says this is me. But maybe we could take that to the doll. In the film she invests herself with that image of the doll, she becomes the doll - an image outside herself.

C: What does she do that makes it seem that she invests herself in the doll?

J: Well you see her turn into a doll. Her face turns into the doll. And also a mask is very much something you put on. You dress your head as a mask and a baby dresses himself with his own image. She dresses herself into a doll, this is what she is in the film, right? I wonder why she called her Heidi. Maybe because Paul McCarthy did, but Heidi is una campesina, you know, like a girl of the wood, the mountains. But her doll could be Heidi. That's why I think she could have called this Heidi. Maybe her doll was Heidi, like Shirley Temple or Barbie.

C: In Kelley and McCarthy's Heidi, the men played important roles, the grandfather and Peter. In this one, Heidi the mother and Heidi the daughter play bigger roles.

J: I think it's much more about the relation between mother and daughter, much as the other one was the relation to the father. The drama here is with mother and daughter.

THE OPERATION

C: Let's talk about the last scene.

J: The mother tells her to stab the stomach with this pen.

C: Why does the mother have her do that?

J:  She's stabbing her stomach and there's some juice coming out, which could be ink, black ink. She writes and writes and writes, and she makes a total mess. At some point she's finished. And the mother comes and peels that off.

C: Peels off…?

J:  No I think more than peels it off, she takes a piece of the stomach, like opening the door, and takes viscera out. And I was thinking it could be the heart, like a Pinocchio. And what she says is "You have a sex or you have soul."  So she pulls this out, and puts the television in place of that.

C: Is the television the soul?

J:  I had another fantasy. She's pulling out the soul, the heart, which is more connected to the soul, and saying have a sex. But don't have a soul. It's like an advice; if you have a soul and a sex you're doomed.  I have no idea, but that's my interpretation. She puts in a television, which is a cold technical thing, where everything tells a story, but it's a cold apparatus there.

C:  Television seems to play a large role in the film. The grandfather is always watching the television. Peter and the grandfather watch the television. And then she gets a televisionSˇin her. That's kind of strange. She gets that thing that they have been staring out through the movie inside of her. You see, I think this is trying to invert all the things…

J:  Invert the theory.

C: So suddenly she has the desire of Peter and the grandfather inside of her, almost like a phallus.

J: She becomes it, you say?

C: She becomes what they are going to look at.

J: At the same time, you know Pinocchio? He didn't have a heart. And then came the fairy to put the heart in. But this one…

C: …gets the heart taken out.

J:  Well maybe the girl can look at the television, at whatever's happening to her in there. She can look at the story. If she can look in her story, there probably is a distance to not have a soul. I think that's a very good way to put the message of the mother. You have a sex or you have a soul but if you have both you are going to suffer too much.

THE AMERICAN ABJECT

C: I wanted to ask you one more question. These artists are American. I wanted to ask you about this whole abject esthetic. The abject.

J: To me it's a Derrida word. It's very subjective, but if America brings something, it's the esthetic of the jeans, let's say. Everybody has jeans. They uniformed the world. And I think they are something everybody wants to have. Jeans are as revolutionary as the Beatles, although the Beatles aren't abject. If you think of fashion, Dior, Chanel, this small group of people directing fashion, I can't think of something more abject. I think this is how the word works. I think now there is another term going a little further. I think America has a lot to do with the new esthetic. Like Coca-Cola for instance. America covers enormous surfaces with these things. And these things are abject in the beginning. From the diseased chairs they have you sit on. The birth, the throwing up, the stomach of the girl. There is some disgust you go through. I like that sensation. It goes together with opening up, it makes your scope bigger.

C: Of your thought?

J: Of your possibilities? Let's say you love someone, get close to the abject of that person. Just get close and love it. The abject was hidden, covered. The American esthetic, it is a new esthetic, it puts it there for you to love it.

Heidi 2 was billed as a sequel to Mike Kelley Paul McCarthy's Heidi (1992). It is not uncommon for a sequel to be handed over to a new director, often a hack who takes the original's most salient features and then exaggerates them. This is especially the case in the horror and sci-fi genres, in which the sequel promises more abundant gore, updated technology and cameo appearances by current or fading celebrities. De Beer and Parnes make overt references to this paradigm. Aside from the pressures of re-telling a familiar story and following in the footsteps of a recent film, they confront the anxiety of influence that is particularly pronounced in the art world - it could be said that Kelley and McCarthy are the contemporary art world's equivalent to film directors such as Wes Craven or David Cronenberg.

In Kelley and McCarthy's Heidi, Grandfather is a raging abusive character who controls the household and trains Heidi in the lessons of life. The dull-witted shepard boy, Peter, is the frequent object of Grandfather's sadism. Perhaps concerned about an oedipal take-over of the family, Grandfather keeps him helpless and mute. De Beer and Parnes turn the tables and portray the old man as a couch potato who seeks male companionship from Peter. Despite one scene in which Grandfather (played by Guy Richards Smit) spanks Heidi- launching her into a flight of fantasy- his role has been reduced to that of a struggling has-been. Are Kelley and McCarthy meant to be equated with Grandfather? If so, Heidi 2 is more than a sequel: it takes on the quality of a revisionist history. In this extension of the Spyri narrative, Heidi 2 (performed by De Beer) gets her education from her mother, Heidi 1 (performed by Parnes), who teaches her to perform an auto-abortion, a scene which satisfies the bloody requirements of the sequel. Yet by preventing the birth of what might have turned out to be Heidi 3, De Beer and Parnes seem to pre-empt the possibility of a trilogy.

De Beer and Parnes' commentary on the film industry targets movies like Disney's Heidi (1993) which starred Jason Robards as Grandfather and Jane Seymour as Heidi. It takes good actors to update out-dated roles, and so De Beer and Parnes cast Eric Heist as Leonardo Di Caprio (Heist wears a mask), who in turn plays the shepherd Peter. The shepherd is now the love interest and apparent father of the aborted child. Having canceled the threat of an offspring, Heidi 2 and her mother fill the void in her belly with a television monitor - just like the Teletubbies. Unlike the Heidi of the novel, who rejects big-city life in favor of a healthy rural exsistance, Heidi 2 wholeheartedly embraces the trappings of culture.

De Beer and Parnes bring the saga further up to date though a Hollywood-style merchandising campaign. Accompanying the movie are blood-red posters and grotesque knee-high dolls that come in vacuum-packed containers. It's an approach which has a parallel in the art world, since it is now common practice for artists working in film and video to produce multiples and sell photographs to fund their large-scale projects (Matthew Barney is the undisputed king of this strategy). By 'branding' their product, the artists seem to be attempting to usurp the terrain formerly occupied by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Firmly ensconced in the gallery and art school systems, these established artists have come to represent the repressive authority figures who have to learn to accept the presence of youthful exuberance - just as Grandfather learned to love Heidi.