Body Language

We all pose. We habitually assume particular postures and act in certain ways to display ourselves to others, even when there’s no one around. This little theatre of gestures may in fact be the most intimate way of reflecting who we are. We pose knowingly at times, but more often than not we do it spontaneously – the body doing what it knows how to do. The truth of posing, it seems, must therefore lie close to that zero-degree of theatricality which marks the way people carry themselves in everyday life. It is precisely this basic vernacular of body language that Hilary Lloyd studies, stages and celebrates in her video and slide installations.

As she takes pictures of people casually displaying themselves, Lloyd frames the intricacies and implications of their gestures. What is special about the way she shows people posing, however, is that her images are in a sense too real to be classed as ‘social realism’. As she combines an unconditional attention to detail with a stance of relaxed detachment, you just see that she is not out to categorize people and identify social types according to their behaviour. You could rather call her perspective radically phenomenological. Her works immerse you in the particular ways in which bodies not just occupy space and time but actually ‘modulate’ them (as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it) through their unique presence.

This experience of presence is heightened by the way Lloyd momentarily suspends the codes that would render these gestures readable as the rehearsed performance of specific social roles. You thus get a glimpse of the beauty of a pose before its codification. Yet there is no mystery involved. The people Lloyd records are ordinary people doing ordinary things: working, playing, going for a walk, getting dressed or undressed. Because they are real people, the features of their body language that betray their identity in terms of class, race, gender, profession or pride are also always clearly visible. Still, there is more in Lloyd’s images than the traces of identity; there’s a certain existential glamour that defies easy categorization. By highlighting this surplus of physical presence which poses can produce, Lloyd in fact picks up on the ideas of filmmakers such as Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger, who celebrated the mindless beauty of the pose as it manifests itself in the opaque gestures of rituals. Lloyd retains the focus and fascination of their films, yet the beauty that Deren and Anger sought in the ecstasy of ceremonial cults she finds in vernacular gestures.

Rich (1999), for instance, is a silent short film of a boy called Rich getting his head shaved. He sits there bare-chested in low-slung jeans, patiently tilting his head, eyes closed, as another guy moves an electric razor over his scalp. He gets up, sits down again, smiles and allows his mate to proceed. Given that the skinhead cut is supposed to make the boy come across as ‘hard’, the care, bordering on tenderness, with which his friend shaves his head is unexpected and stunningly beautiful. (It mirrors the dedication with which the protagonist of Anger’s Scorpio Rising, from 1964, dresses up and polishes his motorcycle.) Despite its latent eroticism, the head-shaving ceremony is essentially a basic, casual performance. It is Lloyd’s unobtrusive but highly attentive camera that turns the gestures into a visual event. For Colin #2 (1999) Lloyd picked a young man, Colin, as a performer and set him the task of taking off a red tank-top and putting it on again as slowly as possible.1 Filmed by a static camera against a black background, this is what you see Colin do. The slowness of his motions is phenomenal. He takes minutes to slip the top from his bare chest over his arms and head and then eventually back on again with infinite calm. Because of their extreme slowness, his motions have the intensity of a ballet dancer concentrating on controlling every muscle in his body. As he makes you adjust your attention span to the tempo of his gestures, Colin draws you into a time capsule of his own. By being so slow, he effectively turns time into empty duration.

The presence of the performance is further emphasized by the fact that Lloyd chooses to display her videos on industry-standard equipment, which in itself acquires the material presence of a sculpture within the exhibition space. She uses professional monitors in box-like metal casings which she installs on Unicol units, functional television stands with a single chrome column. Colin #2 is split between two such monitors (on one stand): one shows him undressing and the other shows him dressing, yet they face in opposite directions. Both tapes are looped. In order to watch Colin go through the cyclical motion of undressing and dressing you have to walk from one monitor to the other and thus circle around the work yourself, like when you want to look at a piece of sculpture from every angle. Cool and silent, the monitor units closely resemble Minimalist sculptures, and Lloyd uses them very much to achieve the same effect as artists such as Robert Morris – namely, to heighten the viewers’ phenomenological awareness of their position in space in relation to the art object. Michael Fried accordingly perceived the Minimalist sculpture as having a ‘stage presence’ in the gallery not unlike the ‘silent presence of another person’.2 You could say the same about Lloyd’s video sculptures, except that she inverts the metaphor. Rather than charging objects with the aura of people, she gives the performance of the people in her videos the unassuming but persistent presence of an object in space. The gestures of the performers thus literally become objectified. And as such material events, the gestures transform the space around them into a place.

This experience was particularly strong in the untitled installation that Lloyd presented in the group show ‘Never for Money, Always for Love’, together with Janice Kerbel and Silke Otto-Knapp, at Kunstverein Graz, Austria, in the summer of 2006. The videos Myrdle Court (2005) and Rolando and Tango (2003) were shown on two industry-standard monitors suspended at chest height by two Unicol chrome columns fixed to the ceiling. One monitor faced away from the room towards its end wall, while the other, installed some distance away, faced the first at an oblique angle. Despite the impersonal appearance of the units, their close relation created a certain intimacy in the space between them. Stepping into this place felt like entering a circle or joining a conversation. To the left you saw Myrdle Court. The video shows a long pan across the rooftops and redbrick labyrinth of a London neighbourhood under a bright blue sky. As the shot comes full circle, the camera pans down to film the artist’s sneakers on the roof of the apartment block. To the right was Rolando and Tango. It shows a boy on a beach, time and again chucking a stick for his dog unerringly to fetch. The sky is blue and the surf is calm, but the air seems cold. It must be spring or autumn, and it is clearly a beautiful day. Both videos are looped. The moment repeats itself as you keep watching. Time dissolves into space. Just as the two protagonists remain on the roof and beach retrospectively, so you remain rooted to the spot. The more you focus, the more you relax and zone out, or rather the more you tune into the attentive concentration of the camera movement and the floating looseness of the boy’s motions. The particular physical quality of these gestures creates the situation that you are now a part of.

The way that small gestures can create and control a situation is something that Car Wash (2005) shows beautifully. The work consists of four slide projections, each with 80 slides. It was the centrepiece of Lloyd’s recent solo show at the Kunstverein Munich; stepping into the main exhibition hall, you found yourself surrounded by four projections with the size and brilliance of a cinema screening. The installation did in fact have a cinematic feel to it, except that the transitions between the slides was naturally much slower, like a frozen movie, arresting your gaze and intensifying your experience of place by unhinging your sense of time. The slides show a group of young Arab men working at a car wash in Sheffield. The camera stays close to the men throughout and picks out a wealth of details about the way they dress, move and pose. You see how the biceps of a guy in a vest ripple as he lifts a hose to rinse a car, how tight sports pants tugged into knee-high rubber boots emphasize the athletic build of one of the other guys or how a gold necklace glitters between the zip of a tracksuit, opened just wide enough to reveal it. You sense that the guys just know how to let these things show. It’s part of their act and a demonstration of pride. What you are seeing is not wage slaves scrubbing cars but princes performing. They run this show and make the limousines they clean seem like mere props in their performance. The social implications of the work are clear. Lloyd pays tribute to the body politics of a group of immigrant workers who erase the stigma of a low-paid job and assert their power simply through the way they carry themselves.

But besides issues of class and ethnicity, this is just as much about fashion politics. The boys at the car wash in fact have exactly what the fashion industry trades on. They have ‘it’ – attitude – but they didn’t buy it or sell it; they just have it. It is the invaluable surplus of that extra bit of glamour and sovereign physical presence that they know how to produce in their poses. Many a stylist, model or musician would give his right arm to have this know-how. But it’s not for sale. Local Boy’z (2005), another slide projection piece, plays with this idea. Here Lloyd shot a series of slides of the front of a derelict shop. It is boarded up, but there is still a sign up. It says ‘Local Boy’z’ in big letters. Some slides depict the sign from different angles, others successively frame the letters one by one as if slowly spelling out the word. The slides revel in the opacity of the sign and the humorous fact that, although it’s impossible to tell what this shop had to offer, it’s obvious that it must have been ‘it’. The aura of pure attitude surrounds the shop even more now that there is nothing for sale. The sign is like a gesture towards an open secret; and it is because of its emptiness that the promise contained in this gesture is so powerful.

You could probably say the same about the gestures in the other works. Their beauty lies in the empty fact of their very particular appearance. No doubt, the way Rich has his head shaved, Colin undresses, Lloyd films London, Rolando plays with his dog, and the boys at the car wash pose says a lot about who these people are. So in this sense their gestures are full of meaning. Still, they are not plain declarations of identity. After all, what do they really tell you about these people? Not much in terms of a story. But a lot in terms of the existential attitude, the singular way of being that comes through in the way people display themselves. Except these displays are always also empty in the sense that they just display the act of showing. Lloyd’s works make you see the power of gestures in terms of asserting pride and presence, and modulating time and space. It takes a strong love for watching people pose to show precisely this: that this is how they do it.

Jan Verwoert is a contributing editor of frieze and teaches at the Piet Zwart Insitute in Rotterdam. His most recent book is Bas Jan Ader – In Search of the Miraculous (Afterall Books/MIT Press 2006).

1 The work was recently displayed in the group show Love Letters at Herald St gallery in London
2 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, University of California Press, 1968, pp. 127–8