Disembodied in Wonderland
There is comfort in the idea of sailing off the end of the world, falling clean off the edge of a cliff, where choice is removed and there is no decision left to be made. It is done. Such is the experience of Virgil and Dante after entering the gates of Hell in The Divine Comedy with the invitation to “abandon all hope”[i]. With all hope gone, the question of whether to hope or to not hope is removed; and there is freedom from that exquisite and irresistible torture of wondering ‘what if’. Disembodied Adventures of Alice does not allow such peace of mind in the clarity of pure hopelessness, warning instead at the outset of the “shred of hope that poisons the [intoxicating purity of] the utmost despair”[ii]. From here, we are taken on a journey to what lies beneath and back again, exploring the edges of the senses and of life itself: love, desire, birth, death, rebirth. The film hypnotizes, and like the wide-eyed unblinking actors, the viewer can hardly look away; and at the end, they remember to blink and breathe again and look around, a bit stunned, before catching step with the rhythm of time and life again, not really sure what they have seen, yet deep down knowing they have seen something, been somewhere, experienced something, perhaps Freudianly “uncanny”.[iii] Like an overwhelming moment, this strikes the viewer dumb. The usual words are inadequate to this; they are instead tipped into wondering.
What is it to wonder? Perhaps it is to be full of wonder (wonderful), and perhaps in a wonderful way, perhaps even in a wonderfully wonderful way. Each inquiring step that attempts to get closer to the meaning of the word paradoxically creates breadth and distance in ever more degrees, spiralling backwards and outwards ad infinitum. And what of ‘Wonderland’? A place of wonder, which is perhaps wonderful, or where one wonders, full of wonders or of wonder? It is as alive with pulsating potential meaning as the word ‘wonder’, yet when it is used to name, as in the title of the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it must sacrifice all of this. It becomes purely a signifier of something fixed, a fictional place in Lewis Carroll’s classic tale. It has been taken ‘off the shelf’ so to speak, put in its place, become ‘married off’ to one special designation. In Disembodied Adventures of Alice, Van der Grijn prises open the tightness of this union, taking intertextuality to another level, both boldly appropriating the classic text and loudly announcing this appropriation, loosening the bond between the word and the thing in the title and simultaneously evoking wonder, the very experience the title originally intended, yet which is so easily and often overlooked post definition.
To wonder at something is to be in relation to it in a particular way, without agency. We cannot choose to wonder; wonder arises spontaneously when thought comes to an end, as does laughter, at the moment we “get” the joke. In fact, all originality arises in wonder. Wonderland untethered, which actually points to the thing in itself denuded of its name, also points to the wonder that is stamped and sealed in every word that names a thing: the pure pregnant potential that language captures and imprisons in the process of naming. Van der Grijn, in prising open and loosening definition, reveals and the nameless thing in itself. But it is not just the thing in itself that is revealed: at the end of the film, like Alice, the viewer also feels disrobed.
It becomes gradually more difficult to respond to van der Grijn’s film without acknowledging her previous ones. While there is no continuity of narrative, context or characters between the films, motifs and props and stage create the sense of strange déja vu, mirroring the content of the film, which evokes something strangely familiar and unfamiliar in us; in fact, that relationship between familiar and unfamiliar that shoots us back to the origin of a conception, the ground of experience. We know we’ve been here before, but we cannot remember in an overlying sense. Instead, we feel it, we remember it through the senses, as in a post-traumatic flashback. We are stripped of our skin like the hare, catapulted into a state of strange hyperarousal, like a newborn infant. We are stripped of our emotional skin like the thing is stripped of the word.
Krzysztof Kieslowski, in his Three Colours trilogy, also threads motifs across films that do not share a narrative. Van der Grijn uses props in a similar way to how Kieslowski uses actors in the final ferry scene: either her props are actors, or his actors are props. Props provide continuity, but also a progression, not of narrative, but of theme development. Bits of van der Grijn, she is coming closer and closer to her work: skulls, mask, eyeballs, breast ducts, tongues: here in Disembodied Adventures of Alice, van der Grijn lies hidden in plain sight (she replaces Alice in the coffin in the funeral scene). The artist continues to take more apparent shape in her work, coming closer, moving personally into the scene, the stage.
Shifting dimensions is a dominant theme across all of Van der Grijn’s film, bringing above below, below above, and hanging around in the space between. The above-below of going under water in JUMP is mirrored here with breathlessness of laughter and going under the table, and the mask of ‘down there’ is handed up in an attempt to bridge dimensions, the image of the caterpillar holding the teacup after donning the mask so beautifully and geniusly showing that things do not work the same: he can breathe, but not drink. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake cracks open the language of above; and Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky”, hardly audible, muddies the language of below. In both scenarios, the language insists on presence and attention through its ‘uncanny’ strangeness. Coming up from below again, like having been a dream within a dream (Inception-like, but here there is no totem), Alice utters the line “I need to hear green”, the only sentence that does not issue directly from the original, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This mixes up the senses. It introduces the conversation, the extrasensory conversation, Walter Benjamin’s “silent language of truth that all thought strives for […] pure language in which all languages harmonise, in silence, meaning arising as from an Aeolian harp.”[iv]
The nature of language is two-fold: a powerful creative force, and a tool to be used in communication. This former aspect is all too often overlooked, and some words more than others remind us and highlight the importance of using language with precision. Van der Grijn already addresses the theme of language in FLUX with the disembodied tongues: mute, of words, but not of sound. Here she goes a step further again. That one line, “I want to hear green”, uses language in a different way. While much of what happens in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland seems strange and impossible, linguistically it all makes sense. This extra line does not. One cannot hear a colour. This heralds another shift, beyond the senses to the extrasensory. In the dialogue that ensues between Alice and the caterpillar, the sounds do not issue from the vocal cords for the tongue to make sense of in speech.
And this in no way interferes with the communication; on the contrary. The words are more perfectly formed, uttered hesitantly, carefully, tentatively, as if speech itself is learning to speak for the first time. We are again brought back to the beginning of things, the beginning of language and the process of naming things, back to the unfamiliarity out of which the now familiar originally arose; and continues to arise in spite of our unawareness. Such a beautiful, colourful, deeply and richly sensuous scene, with words being spoken so warily and carefully that it is reminiscent of the dialogue of difference between Martin Heidegger and Japanese art critic Shuzo Kuki that is described in Heidegger’s text “Dialogue on Language”[v], a dialogue between East and West, in a language of the West, attempting to understand the Japanese term Iki outside of its own culture. In attempting to approach the meaning of the Japanese term, Heidegger and Kuki acknowledge that it is language itself that is the problem, and not the difference between the languages or cultures. Heidegger describes how the danger of their dialogue was hidden in language itself and was not in ‘what’ was discussed or indeed ‘how’. In other words, the problem was the way in which words attach to things in language as they are named and the vibrancy and colour that is sacrificed by what is being named: the price of a name. And he goes on to describe “the colourfulness of Count Kuki’s wife’s clothing making the danger ever more clear, with its luminescence.”[vi] It is precisely the luminescence of reality that language puts at risk, that is the cost of a name; and van der Grijn highlights this luminescence throughout the film, illustrating how, not just language, but also the body can deluminesce. Similar to the word being prised off the thing to release the trapped luminescence, the disembodied Alice is luminescent.
This preoccupation with naming and labels is not new for van der Grijn. In an interview with RTE in 2104 regarding her show Ambivalence, she described how someone had playfully called her “mad as a box of frogs” and how uncomfortable that label had felt. Through creating an artwork and calling it ‘Five Victorian Frogs in a Box’, comprised of five taxidermy frogs in a box, she found a way to externalise and throw off the label that had been foisted on her, while at the same time illustrate the danger of labelling, both through stuffing and sealing previously live bodies and through putting them in a box. Each generation feels the constraints of the generalised labels of their time and wants to throw them off, struggling to breathe, to move, to be, becoming, to create themselves. We throw them off in a variety of ways, and although we may expand the repertoire of labels to include a multitude of categories, the label is invariably still just replaced with another. What is misunderstood is that it is the label as such, the name as such, the word as such that is the problem. Individuals are attracted to a dynamism, a movement of a certain moment, information usually before it has become defined. It is this alive un-namedness that holds this heady attraction, intoxicating, stripping bare. Wonderful nakedness, freedom, life lifing, before it is named. Whatever movement we are inspired by, whether beatnik, hippy, punk, queer, etc., we throw off our previous labels to be free, or at least free to label ourselves, be the authors of our own ‘holding cells’.
Identity may be more nebulous than bare physical facts, but it is more powerful as a ‘holding cell’. It attempts to name so much more than the physiological facts of our embodiment; it attempts to use language for more than it should be used; it attempts to name (and thus prescribe) how we present. Identity is problematic unless it is fluid and free (and thus unnamed). It must remain undefined if we are to remain free to be ourselves, minute by minute in the immediacy of experience. And whether it is society naming us or us naming ourselves, it makes little difference. Once we say who we are with words, we are bound by a memory of the past or an expectation in the future. Here, now, we are, plain and simple.
Alice says that she cannot explain herself because she is not herself. This wonderfully creates a space between Alice and herself, prises open the relationship between the individual’s identity and the self, liberating, if only momentarily, from the union of the individual with the self, to wonder. This denuding of the identity from the name, of the thing from the word, is mirrored in the image of the skinless hare, evoking a sense of hyperarousal while also foreshadowing birth and death, and ultimately rebirth: Alice witnesses her own death and attends her own funeral.
In a more overlying sense, Alice is stripped of her identity at the start of the film, naked, shaved head, androgyny. We should not mis-associate this androgyny with current identity trends, which would be to fall into renaming; instead, this is, like many of van der Grijn’s themes, classic and timeless. In fact, if anything, against the popular trend of going back and reinterpreting previous art in accordance with the fashion of the day, van der Grijn bucks this trend and gently mines the past in the context of a classic, not to change the interpretation of the classic into one that is illustrating current day ways of seeing, but to bring the timeless truth content of the classic to bear, to life, in the current day, so opening up the tightness of the modern day, all too binary political and cultural discourse and illuminating the wonderful space in between, which is ultimately where dialectical resolution and progression must originate.
She is faithful to the original that she is, in a sense, translating. It is word for word, recognizing the importance of words in themselves and not presuming to interpret what they mean. With one exception, every word in the film is lifted directly from the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. No new words. Instead, we are compelled to look at the same words anew. In this way, Disembodied Adventures of Alice draws attention to the ‘surface level’ of any trend by showing it to be nothing new (there is no new thing under the sun), nothing ‘special’, just another visitation to a point on a loop. This looping is mirrored in the film. In the pool, not swimming back and forth in the pool as might be expected, but completing and repeating a loop; this looping, living, linearity and circularity of time and lives lived going on in the background of that beautiful kiss, which is outside of normal time. In the background, the masks are still on. Same shit, different day; just as the film comes back to the beginning again, with Alice waking up and repeating the morning: Groundhog Day. Van der Grijn is saying the same unsayable thing over and over, in different ways: Finnegan’s Wake, pointing at it in language that has loosened its folds, Einstein’s forever to remain unfinished theory of everything.
While we are all driven to throw off labels at some point, feeling them weigh heavily on our being, usually the overwhelm of attempting to remain in being overcomes us, and rather than look away from this fountain of being and risk losing it and never finding it again, we call it something. Originally perhaps as a marker to remind us of where we last saw it, but invariably the word comes to replace what it was initially intended to designate, and we are even further away from being, destined to bicker over terms and concepts and stumble around searching for that moment in the landfill of concepts left by the passage of time.
Tetsuro Matsuzawa at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute postulated the Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis, whereby humans have sacrificed their short-term memory ability for a superior language faculty. Short-term memory is not the only thing that was sacrificed. The language we speak also robs us of our immediacy of experience and freedom to be purely in a moment. We will, someday, perhaps evolve to be able to throw these labels back off and keep them off, thereby and then living in a world of individuals, all unique and free. Defined, if at all, by how we present moment by moment; each individual, the standard for their own being, in each moment, and each of us meeting the reality we see with openness and curiosity, without preconception or expectation. Disembodied Adventures of Alice takes us there, breaking open our minds and holding them for as long as we can suspend language (the usual words don’t work there).
Attempting to prescribe new language to avoid paying the cost of a label will not work; instead, the way is to back out of language, methodically remove the concepts one after the other like layers of clothing until we arrive at the barest of descriptive words, which are the most pregnant with descriptive potential, and ultimately self-creative potential. Again and again, van der Grijn brings us back here, unlocking the doors to our holding cells of self-identification and gently beckoning, if we are brave enough to take a step towards freedom.
by Dr.Veronica O Niell
[i] Alighieri, Dante (1321) The Divine Comedy.
[ii] Stendal (1822) On Love.
[iii] Freud, Sigmund (1919) The Uncanny.
[iv] Benjamin, Walter (1923) “The Task of the Translator”.
[v] Heidegger, Martin (1959) “Dialogue on Language”.