The letting go –

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

Emily Dickinson 1862

‘The Letting Go –‘, the first solo exhibition of London-based artist David Birkin, features the follow-up development of the photographic series Confessions which was initiated in 2007, as well as new video works and a performance installation.

Having chosen the Dickinsonian poetic notion of ‘the letting go’ as leitmotiv, Birkin explores it at several levels and through different media. ‘The letting go’ is related to the personal experience of mourning and might also be associated to the overcoming of grief through time and remembrance as expressed by the Freudian notion of the ‘working through’. Moreover, it has liberating connotations related to the ability to free oneself from inhibitions and constraints, as it happens to the actor or performer who exposes himself corporeally and emotionally.  Similarly, the ‘letting go’ might also be connected to the unveiling of the most intimate secrets without fear of reproach, shame or guilt, as it may occur in a confession box, a psychoanalytic setting, or in the photographic process chosen by Birkin for his Confessions series. In fact, the artist allowed himself, his friends and family members to openly speak to a silent listener, the camera, thereby capturing visual remainders of confessional performances. These are more or less blurred according to the length of each confession, which determined the duration of the exposure. Paradoxically, every photograph appears as an index for both individuality and anonymity, intimacy and loss of identity.

According to the Flesh consists of extremely slow videos by means of which the artist has made his investigations on time evolve from condensation towards expansion. The artist’s words are elucidative: ‘My interest is in dilating and contracting time visually. In its essence, I think photography is a poetic illustration of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: that the more precisely we determine something’s position, the less certain we can be of its speed, and vice-versa’. In fact, these three new video works involve an attempt to record bodily change in enlarged, slow-motion images that force the viewer to focus his attention on the often overlooked, self-inflicted or naturally cyclic ‘letting go’ of the body, the shedding of its skin and flesh – the mutable body itself. In accordance with the content of each single video, the video triptych as a whole is displayed in a slow, ordered and cyclic sequence of visual appearance and disappearance which underscores its simultaneously diachronic and synchronic relation to time, the inextricable dichotomy between presence and absence and thus the ephemeral and at the same time permanent nature of bodily change.

In the central space of the exhibition, Birkin has installed Thought, Word and Deed – a confession box into whose intimacy and exposure the artist invites the viewer so that he may participate in the artistic and cathartic process of ‘the letting go’. The paradox of enclosure and openness inherent to the function and placement of the box itself is instantiated in the way the viewer is given the opportunity to unveil his secrets onto an audio recording system that immediately erases that which has been recorded. This recalls the Derridian notion of the archive as a place for both conservation and destruction – Eros and Thanatos –, a discussion itself inspired by the Freudian notions of pleasure principle and death drive. As far as the more specific notion of art as archive is concerned, Birkin’s practice seems to embody archival processes and modes of display that counter the enclosure of the conservation by incorporating openness, thus embracing the archival paradox. This openness encompasses sound erasure and visual blurriness, slowness and enlargement, as forms of displacement and disruption. (However, and within the (non)logic of the paradox, disruptive forms of archive are never totally deprived of a simultaneous urge for conservation, which one may acknowledge, for instance, in those same slowness and enlargement.) Furthermore, by bodily engaging the viewer, Thought, Word and Deed underlines relational aspects of the works beyond the archive, namely their performativity and the layered exploration of the multiple meanings of Dickinson’s ‘letting go’.

Ana Balona de Oliveira (November 2007)