Performing Observations: Recent Work by Warren Neidich

Warren Neidich’s new performative video works emerge out of an ongoing project which has taken various forms over the past few years in photography and in curatorial pursuits. Essentially, “the project” is concerned with investigating structures: specifically, the overlay of the linguistic and cognitive structures in the face of “art” and aesthetics and the institutional and cultural structures that uphold a certain version of the so-called “art experience.” For the purposes of this investigation, Neidich opened a gallery called Spot (his own studio) from 1994–1996. For one year, Spot operated as would a non-profit legitimized exhibition space, but with a self-conscious eye on its own process of concretization and institutionalization—much like a case study of a gallery curiously positioned to question the authenticity of the “art experience.” In its initial stages, the gallery/art project invited artists like Diane Lewis, who built a “warped” wall to deconstruct the physical disposition and function of the white cube. Other projects included Telephone Line: 645-9537, when six artists were each invited to create a piece for the outgoing message on the gallery’s answering machine. The gallery became a forum for collaborations between artists and other curators in a way that was casual enough to subvert hierarchical roles and serious enough to spawn innovative productions and processes—much like the spirit of other “galleries as art projects” by artists like Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Kosuth. Yet, after three years as an art project, Spot ran its course and eventually came to an end. In 1996, Neidich decided to return to his own art work.

Figure 1.

Warren Neidich, Brainwash, 1997. Video stills. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.

Warren Neidich, Brainwash, 1997. Video stills. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3.

Warren Neidich, Double-Vision Louse Point, 1998. Video stills. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.

Warren Neidich, Double-Vision Louse Point, 1998. Video stills. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5.

Warren Neidich, Phantom Limb, 1998. Video still. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

With a background in neurobiological studies (as a research fellow in neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology), Neidich began to do art projects in the eighties which were based in photography and were mainly concerned with questioning authenticity and historical documentary practices as well as photography’s specific role in the construction and obliteration of memory. Largely affected by photographers such as Edweard Muybridge, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Pierre Moliniere, Neidich began considering their work as well as the work of Marcel Duchamp in terms informed by his medical practice—particularly as studies of brain impulses. For instance, in essays such as “Pierre Moliniere and the Phantom Limb,” he explores the terrain of what he calls “neuroaesthetic theory” and makes a case for the phantom limb as seen through the psycho-sexual phenomena of the foot fetish. He explains that by studying the phantom limb, a phenomena in which an absent limb continues to be experienced, a neurological basis for the heretofore psychoanalytically delineated entity of the foot fetish can begin to be unveiled. In his own words,

The Phantom Limb phenomena recounts the body’s attempt to re-negotiate its own loss through an internalized re-schematisation of its own form. . . . The phantom limb is about the representation of the physical body and the role that the psychic body plays in its formation. The fetish is about the absence in the psychic body. ¹

His main intention to produce work and writing that moves through the frameworks of neurobiology, psychophysiology, aesthetics, and art historical theory—is a marrying of ideas which may still be considered unorthodox practice in their respective fields. Much of the theory and information behind the work is usually so hermetically sealed and laden with science-speak that the project, as complex and ambitious as it is, runs the risk of imploding under its own weight...