A bare left hand is holding a desert rose, as naturally as looking with the naked eye. What to say about that stone? Can we call it naked? Does that even exist – bare or naked stone? In English, they say ‘naked rock’ or ‘bare stone’. This desert rose is uncovered, uncarved even. Let’s call it naked.
These photographs weren’t taken under a naked sky or somewhere in untouched nature, because the background most closely resembles a smooth inside or outside wall. It’s impossible to decipher precisely where these scenes were shot. But apparently that isn’t relevant for Replacements; the only thing that seems to matter is the relationship between the hand and the stone. Both are clearly something rather than nothing. And both are utterly naked.
Desert roses in a bare hand are the sole subject of these images, leaving us to fully concentrate on the manipulations of the hand and the shapes of the stone. In fact, two hands of one individual are at play here. The artist’s right hand is invisible, it’s operating the camera. With her left hand she keeps showing different stones, with her right she establishes and reveals the distance to her naked eyes, her head, her camera.
Unless you assume an all-encompassing view of Life – in which earthly life and earthly death are mere moments in time – you cannot say a desert rose is alive. It’s a special effectof an exceptional eco-system. Of itself, inorganically serial, dead material in an infinite number of forms. But is a severed hand alive?
Imagine if I were to make a 3D print of these images: flesh and stone would become one. Like a marble hand touching a marble surface: Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. I know of no other work where marble is so transformed into skin. The pinnacle of creation, of a myth, of eternal life, merged into one, incomprehensibly well preserved: gossamer-fine dead material. You know that under the skin of this work, this marble, there is nothing but the same dead stone, no flesh and blood. Daphne’s fingers mutate into laurel branches, vegetal, in stone. Apollo’s left hand grabs Daphne, he wants to embrace her: his left index finger makes a little dent in her stomach, the three other fingers brush against her thigh, which has been transformed into bark, in stone.
What we see is the left hand of a white woman holding a desert rose. Twice naked: alive and dead. A part of a human being and a sample of a type of stone. Tissue of a living organism and fragments of a crystalline structure. What reveals itself is as clear as it is cryptic. A bare fact represented so that the sign language of the relationships between the hand and the stone invites questions about possible intimate links between alive and dead naked. Bare hand, bare desert rose,bare as in the expression ‘bare reason’ (bloße Vernunft, used by Kant in a title), probably untranslatable, given the many variations in English: bare reason, mere reason, reason alone. Why not naked or nude?
Desert rose is more fragile than marble. It’s not suitable for carving or supporting something. Desert roses can scarcely support themselves: if they’re not discovered on time they perish, because they erode if left on the surface. They’re at their most beautiful if found concealed, covered and well preserved by desert sand. Replacements captures shapes of disintegrating dead material, almost stone dust, held and preserved by a bare hand.
These are also self-portraits of the naked body or a bare part of the artist’s body, together with unhewn stones and rocks: Self Portrait (1972)by Imogen Cunningham and Judy Dater’s Self-Portrait with Stone (1982). Except that Replacements is a series of portraits in full colour.
Let me try to capture some aspects of these dynamic images in words. The hand lifts the stone, like an icon, grasping it firmly between all its extended fingers; squeezes it tightly between thumb and index finger, or lets it rest on its bent knuckles; clenches it between index and middle finger like a burst cigarillo, or reveals it like a treasure, a find; locks it securely between its fingertips like the setting of a precious stone or the poles of a primitive tent; lets it rest, wrist flung backwards, between index, middle and ring finger; sometimes the desert rose is so large the hand can’t contain it: it sticks out in all directions or towers out above the hand with all its jagged edges; other times the hand clutches the stone like a kind of prehistoric axe; enfolds its darkness and deep crevices in its hollow; plucks it like a piece of fresh fruit, alternately a ripe cherry or a firm apple; hugs it closely as if it could lose it at any moment; clasps its preciousness between two fingers like an ancient coin, an arcane insignia, an exotic species; catches it like a starfish freshly ensnared or an autumn leaf just fluttered between its fingers; in this artist’s fingers, two or three spherical stones look soft, delicate, untouchable; her fingers firmly pinch the tip of the stone, like the tail of an exotic insect that could fly away at any moment; the stone lies on the palm of the flat hand, as if being weighed; perhaps the stone was a gift to the hand, a cheap sweet or a diamond; the hand is poised to launch the stone into the air like a paper airplane or discard it like a deadly missile.
Hand and stone often blend into one. Sometimes it’s as if the fingers are juggling with the stone. Yet the relationship doesn’t change: the hand always fulfils the same function, that of pedestal. Pedestal in the form of a bare hand; barefooted. Sometimes the hand serves as a kind of handle. Severed at the wrist, it holds the stone: a base, a support. Naked stone supported by naked hand.
Replacements has at least three effects, all of which can be called mimetic. The first is primarily photographic: images of the artist’s hand and a desert rose captured in such a way that a series emerges, of many hands with different stones – sometimes the same stone from different angles. A random, finite series of a versatile, naked hand with bare crystalline stones. Snapshots, somewhere in between photography and film, stills perhaps.
A second mimetic effect is achieved not through the series or between the images, but between the hand and the stone, per image. Each time anew the hand shapes and positions itself differently according to the crystalline form. The creases in the skin and the lines of the hand are at times so deep they make the same impression as the grooves, lines and shadows of the stone, whereby the appearance of the naked hand mutates into that of the naked stone. The hand does something with the stone, and, at the same time, this act seems to reverse itself. But what could the stone possibly be doing with the hand? At one moment, the hand extends itself to almost become a surface of the stone, at another it clenches itself into a fist beneath a round desert rose. Metamorphoses with two outcomes, one of them possibly real: petrified hand with crystalline desert rose (fossil, 3D print); the other possible but unreal: living hand with desert rose come to life.
Apart from mimesis in the sense of serial imitation (repetition) and in the sense of penetration of structure (mimicry), a third effect relates to the performative fact that the artist’s hand continually appears to be doing something with the stone. Breakable desert rose, found or plucked, so to speak, by that one hand. And yet. That separate piece of stone is continually shown with the same part of the human body that itself has been separated or severed: carved out by the eye and the mind, and, with the right hand, by the camera and the frame. Through these excisions, attention is focused on yet another interplay between hand and stone: the right hand cuts loose the left hand. The right hand thus adds something both visibly and invisibly to the preceding states of mimesis, or perhaps more aptly, eliminates something from them. The quest for other than reciprocal effects carries over into the relationship between subject and object, particularly with respect to the function of support. Since we, involuntarily or not, associate a body with a hand (it is only and exclusively a hand because it belongs to a body and that body supports a hand), and since it’s almost impossible to conceive of a hand as a thing in itself or to imagine an individual organism with only one hand, it’s difficult to see a living hand as a separate thing, as an organ without a body (no offence to Deleuze), the way we do a solitary desert rose. And that is precisely what Replacements asks of the viewer. From this perspective, it’s as if two independent entities are depicted, and that affects the implied relationship between supporting and being supported. This relationship – analogous to the one between a canvas and its paint – doesn’t just reverse itself: hand and stone are both stripped of supporting. And so this haptic work offers something unfamiliar to reflect on: the artist’s invisible right hand poses a question about a free hand and a free stone. The question about what supports or holds them. Who or what brings them together here? In each image, a bare truth is exposed: hand and desert rose are neither supporting nor supported, nor do they share a body, pedestal or underlying surface, other than the skin of the paper. They merely touch – stark naked.