Ramin Schor 1997

This seems to be the initial question of Georgia Creimer’s object pair Sleeping Bright and Sleeping Dark. Her answer is not easy and never can be.
To ask again: what is a FACE? She answers with one, with her face. But it is not the uniqueness of Georgia's face that is at stake here, but the face of an artist as such. Associations towards the theme of the self-portrait – as in the case of Jasper Johns’ Souvenir of 1964 – thus led the wrong way. No subliminal narcissism is involved. The face as an image is the subject, but not in the sense of literalness, rather as an allegory, including all its meanings since Benjamin’s epochal study of the baroque (1). And as a matter of fact, the word “baroque” also appears in Georgia's poetic comment (2). 
The face photographed in various ways through different exposure values is a reproduced face, a pure area in black and white, alienated further through a slight magnification that resembles a transformation. Dürer dreamt of this: “With his 'Four Books on Human Proportion' and the idea that you arrive at different forms of the face by way of geometrical transformation“ (3). 
The deduced face, the phantasm of deduction – this story still has to be written. It leads us to the ideal of that featureless quality and to Musil’s idea of the “mathematical face“ (4). When Georgia speaks of the “face of the artist as such” and employs such abstract tones, she is part of this sketched tradition. What does this mean now?

I. Thesis: From the face to faciality.When I visited Georgia’s studio in the spring, she showed me the two works and this brought about a conversation. I said that one of the four books by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Mille plateaux” (A Thousand Plateaus), would partly read like a comment on her works. Above all the seventh chapter, entitled “Year Zero: Faciality” (visagéité). Then she started reading the book and confirmed my view. To examine the philosophical work of the century more closely would go beyond the scope of this essay. The surprising parallel passages have to suffice. Deleuze and Guattari introduce a system-creating pair of concepts in order to define the face: the “white wall” and the “black hole” (5). The “abstract faciality machine” is based on this system and “enters into a coma, a hallucination”. According to them, the face was not part of the body but rather a “surface”, a “map”, thus a “body without an organ” (Artaud).The ideas then lead to a relationship between face and “landscape” (6) as well as to face and language: “A language always remains attached to faces”, because the face is a “downright mouthpiece”. What do the titles Sleeping Bright and Sleeping Dark now stand for and how are they related to the face? Let’s look at the face again. The eyes are closed and the lips are mute, gaze and language are absent. She has fallen asleep. She is sleeping. This double absence means the real absence of the face, since here – and only here – is the basis of its absolute presence (Picasso was fascinated, his Sleep-Watchers are evidence of his fascination). In Sleeping Bright she has just fallen asleep; in Sleeping Dark she is in a deep sleep. 
In between there is a gentle transition into the “dream”, into another “room” far away (7): the hour of the “faciality machine”. 
The face is rooted in the “black hole”, there is its “rhizome”, the “elementary face”, the primal face. It emerges from the “white wall” and runs through the telescopic “tube”. The viewer sees an affect image, an image of birth, of the creation of the face as the ineffable face of a silent sleeper. Language has taken leave of the face (8).

II. Anti-thesis (free after Lacan): The FACE does not exist!

Can there be a synthesis?

1 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Berlin 1928 (written in 1925).

2 Cat. Georgia Creimer, Objekte, Galerie im Traklhaus, Salzburg (5 May - 3 June 1995), p. 4. At the time the objects were still called Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1995.

3 Claude Lévi-Strauß, Mythos und Bedeutung. Vorträge, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1980, p. 230. Lévi-Strauß dates the historic origin of Structuralism back to Dürer.

4 Robert Musil, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden. ed. by Adolf Frisé, Hamburg 1995, p. 166. Further information in Peter von Matt, ... fertig ist das Angesicht. Zur Literaturgeschichte des menschlichen Gesichts. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1989, in particular the passages on Kafka, p. 13-60 and 249-263.
5 Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2. vol.: A Thousand Plateaus, 1972-1980. trans. Robert Hurley 1987, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. The sequel to L’Anti-Oedipe was published in Paris in 1980.
6 Amazingly, some words from Georgia’s comment (s. note 2) correspond to those from Mille plateaux, so “black-white”, “sleeping” and the further-removed association “Landscape” should be mentioned. The correspondences continue on the word-work-level: “Face”, “White Wall” (installation), “Body without organ” and “tube”.
7 cf. note. 2 and 6.
8 This belongs to a Logic of Sense. In his last years Paul Celan traced the interaction of the “face of the speaker” and the “face of language”. Yet for him they supposedly did not act independently of each other. Cf. Gerhart Baumann, Erinnerungen an Paul Celan, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1992, p. 141.



Ramin Schor, from “Was ist ein Gesicht?” catalogue “45 Künstler gründen eine Baumfabrik”, 1997