Freezer series

Text accompanying the exhibition:
Johanna Burton, "A Slippery Tectonics: Orit Raff's Mobius Strip", 2002

The first time I heard that the inner ear’s delicate structure is called a ‘membranous labyrinth,’ I found myself thinking of the aural in a whole new way.  Sounds had to make their way in and around what I imagined to be a complicated loop, a membrane that sometimes let things pass through and sometimes didn’t.  I started picturing imaginary looping structures everywhere, inhabiting spaces as circuitous gatekeepers.  When I encountered the mobius strip, in some science class, I suppose, it presented itself to me as the perfect membrane- where inside and outside were constantly shown to really be the same surface, even while appearing emphatically discrete.  The mobius strip made me dizzy, let me imagine my entire body turned into one complex membranous labyrinth.  

The vertiginous feeling the mobius strip produces is one the inner ear gives evidence for.  If the balance of the ear’s labyrinthine structure is disturbed, by deep sea diving or chemical imbalance, a person develops vertigo, a radical and deep-set feeling of unbalance, a constant and unstoppable dizziness.  When things come undone inside the body, so do they outside it.  Membranes separate the world and join it: paper-thin divisions that allow and stop passage. 

To make her piece, Thirty Times the Length of My Breath, Orit Raff, armed with a waterproof video camera, sinks to the bottom of the deep-end of an Olympic-size swimming pool, brimming with chlorine-blue water.  She is able to hold her breath for exactly two minutes.  While she waits for her lungs to panic for oxygen, the video camera takes in the pulsing breath of the pool’s yawning refuse-drain.  As water, hair, and dirt make their way into the pull of the drain, the sound of water resisting and submitting creates a dull rhythm, an anatomy of the membrane.  The seamlessly looped video extends Raff’s two-minutes without air into a full sixty minutes of sustained breathlessness.  As the rhythm of the water becomes more and more like the breath of a watery body and the vent grows in size and power, it is as though I am standing before a wintry landscape, a gated cave that frightens and attracts.  The water is a living body I become a part of, and as I succumb to it, what would rationally be purely claustrophobic becomes meditative.  And because Raff perpetually defers her ascent for air, I stay underwater with her, lulled by the banal terror of sinking without ever rising.

Raff’s series of untitled photographs of polar landscapes continues the task of keeping me outside of breath.  Studies of her never-really-empty freezer, the bluish images are printed at such a large scale as to offer the somewhat sinister suggestion that our bodies should take up occupancy.  The slow but steady configurations of frozen condensation assume the shapes of stalagmites and stalactites in arctic caves.  The walls are definitely closing in, but at a rate that is impossible to discern, one that is only captured through months of observation and documentation.  In one image, the ice has taken up the billowy shape of furry snowballs; in another, the drooping roof of the aluminum box has frozen just in time to keep a single drip of water from escaping its ossifying grasp.  Geometrical shapes still inhabit some of the images: places where lima beans or orange-juice cans have retained petrified freshness until their eventual use as human sustenance.  One photograph shows a blue and white icepack embedded deeply into an almost fully frozen-over icebox.  The icepack looks like a sleeping bag or pillow entrapped in a now clearly disappearing space.  Raff’s images conjure the moment where the domestic becomes unfamiliar, uncanny in its ability to flip from comfort to cold, from manageable to impinging.  The freezer offers no hope for a warm meal but instead suggests the possibility of cold, wet inescapable bodily interment.  Here, as at the bottom of the pool, we sit with Raff, contemplating what it means to be in familiar terrain that no longer feels recognizable.

If it hasn’t become clear by now that Raff will turn any notion of comfort inside out, she does so explicitly by disemboweling an entire apartment.  Not only does she move out the occupants and their belongings, but she disassembles the walls, the structures, and the supports of the architecture, as well.  Rending and rendering the domestic sphere a place of slippery tectonics, vertical planes become horizontal, scales shift, and ambiguous traces of humanity are emphasized with near-monstrous relentlessness.  Walls lean against walls, while tenuously balancing images of usually imperceptible stains that attest to daily living.  Whole rooms stand on their sides, with floors now propped one hundred and eighty degrees removed from any natural position; imprints of the four posts of a bed frame are pushed heavily into the otherwise naked carpet.  The apartment’s walls have become suggestive skins: two-by-fours tracing space but allowing my view to cut across otherwise invisible boundaries.  I can wander through an entire dissected home by turning in a circle.  Raff shrinks proportions here, where in the freezer she has magnified them, but the effect is the same: Alice in Wonderland, we are always too small or too big to escape the impinging presence of nothingness.  An overwhelming reminder, an emphatic remainder.  The evacuation of food, of breath, of furniture, of people, Raff’s traces take on a phantasmatic urgency.  This domestic tectonics does indeed fold and fault surfaces we otherwise take for granted, highlighting in size, position and detail the abjectness of the otherwise invisible.  

Raff asks that we look long and hard at spaces of repetition and accumulation; that we look hard enough to make our vision blur, to make our ears fill, to let vertigo hit; to look long enough that nothing is recognizable after all; to, for a moment anyway, ride the mobius. 

Johanna Burton
February, New York

Ms. Johanna Burton is a critic and writer living in New York. She is the 2002 Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She writes regularly in ART FORUM.

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This article has been taken from:
Johanna Burton, "A Slippery Tectonics: Orit Raff's Mobius Strip", 2002

freezer 01

Freezer #1

1999, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm

freezer 02

Freezer #2

1999, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm

freezer 03

Freezer #3

2000, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm

freezer 04

Freezer #4

2000, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm

freezer 05

Freezer #5

2000, Archival print

100/127 cm

freezer 06

Freezer #6

2000, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm

freezer 09

Freezer #9

2000, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm

freezer 10

Freezer #10

2000, Archival pigment print

100/127 cm