Sue de Beer

Accompanying Sue de Beer’s installation Black Sun (2005) is a small booklet, My Daily Journal, with the words ‘Do Not Touch’ scrawled faintly in red pencil on its jacket. The journal consists of emails between Shamim Momim, the exhibition’s curator, and De Beer. It is ostensibly a diary of the work’s creation but really a no-holds-barred declaration of their ‘bestest-friendship’. In the hyperbolic fashion of overexcited teenage girls Sue and Shamim send each other meaningful quotes from the books they’re reading and discuss their boyfriends, their childhoods and their ever so slightly unstable emotional states. We find out that Shamim’s had a really tough year, having curated the Whitney Biennial and endured the break-up of a ten-year relationship, and that both women are insomniacs. Sue even proposes making a music compilation for Momim, to which the latter gushes: ‘Hey, Sweets – make me a mix tape! That’s the coolest thing ever’. Sue replies: ‘Hey, I will totally make you the mix tape now.’ The booklet ends, ‘I want to rock this edit so hard before my feet touch American soil. xoxo, S’.
The foregrounding of this kind of breathless exchange – the booklet is the exhibition’s primary document – sets the tenor for De Beer’s video installation. Her semi-autobiographical meditation on girlhood relishes the sort of gauche teenage sentiment that might make the more cynical of us retrospectively cringe, not to mention fear for the state of contemporary feminism. Little girl motifs pop up throughout the installation, from porcelain kittens in the video to cut-outs of white trees and pony heads decorating Altria’s midtown atrium lobby. The split-screen projection is structured around fragmentary girlhood memories, acted out by three women: the first dances in her bedroom; the second drinks with her boyfriend in a graveyard; the third (the same actress as girl number two) takes an airplane trip; and an older woman (girl four?) sits on the edge of her bed. These scenes are intended to construct a sense of feminine subjectivity, after Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic treatise Black Sun (1989), but their lack of narrative cohesion means neither storyline nor subjectivity ever kicks in.
This lack of climax is a pity. De Beer’s intentionally amateurish-looking sets and props demonstrate her skill for articulating the fraught dissolve between emotional and physical realities which is so heightened in adolescence. Girl number three settles down for her flight in a seat covered in white frilly paper, puts on an obviously homemade eye mask, naps, eats airplane food that looks suspiciously like a Chinese takeaway and drinks Coca-Cola from a wine glass. It is as if the character has constructed the whole scenario herself, out of ignorance and fantasy, but this creepy inference is negated because it leads nowhere. The opportunity to use the work’s stronger elements to reinforce the weaker, as opposed to jumbling them all together in a disparate mélange, is missed elsewhere. The video is projected within a large doll’s house structure (fitted with black carpet and black beanbag chairs). When I was there, viewers who didn’t fancy finding space on a beanbag watched through the windows, which established a real sense of voyeurism in contrast to the predictable strip scene on screen.
Monologues taken from Dennis Cooper’s Closer (1989) and Period (2000), recited by the second girl, are likewise diminished. There is a perverse enjoyment to be had in watching an earnest German teenager with big brown eyes gaze into the camera and speak, carefully and with a faint inflection, such American words – for Cooper’s texts are neither universal nor Western but very specifically a product of how-far-can-you-go-when-you’re-bored suburban America (though the work was filmed in Germany). But, in an uncomfortable disconnection from Cooper’s writing, the lines quoted are some of the very few in the books that do not relate directly to homoerotic or asocial encounters. Both novels are dotted with scenes not to be read with a hangover. In a gentler example from Closer the character of David describes an encounter in the mall: ‘We went back to his house. He tried to fuck me. I bled all over the place.’ Cooper’s obsessive documenting of confused depravity gets deep under your skin; Black Sun, in contrast, is tame.
Not only does De Beer’s structure fail to maintain its glimpses of genuine intensity, but the art world’s current fetishization of teenage life in general indicates a particularly regressive nostalgia. Rather than face up to the Bush administration’s distressing attitudes toward women – its increasing encroachment on abortion rights, for example – it is so much easier to assume a foetal position and relive the excruciating minutiae of your teenage years.