Echo and Narcissus (Ain't it Just Like the Night)

By Donald Goddard
June 2006

The nymph Echo could only repeat the last words she heard others speak, having been punished this way by Hera for some transgression of Zeus’s.  Encountering the youth Narcissus in the woods, she is spurned by him as she awkwardly expresses her desire, and in shame and sorrow “Her body dries and shrivels till voice only and bones remain, and then she is voice only for the bones are turned to stone,” according to Ovid’s version of the myth.  Others are rejected by him as well, until the goddess Nemesis exacts revenge for one of them by arranging for Narcissus to fall in love with the image he sees reflected of himself in the surface of a pool.  Soon recognizing the truth, he also pines away and dies knowing that he is beyond the reach of his own self-knowledge and desire.  What remains of him is the flower we call by his name, “with a yellow center surrounded with white petals.”  Voice, stone, and flower were once human consciousness yearning for existential (sexual) validation.  Whatever Echo and Narcissus want is outside themselves, not themselves.  Even Narcissus realizes that he himself is outside himself, and therefore unattainable.  The lips of the other are water, not flesh, just as Echo’s words are his words, not hers.  The circle is complete but impossibly and forever unresolved.

For this exhibition, Alan Scarritt has brought together his most recent sound, video, photo, sculpture and installtion work as well as past works that prefigure them.  He first used the title “Echo and Narcissus” for a performance he did with his partner Krystyna Borkowska in 2003, though the correlation seems always to have been there, intended or not.  His project is not about vanity any more than is the ancient myth’s, but about self-awareness and self-exploration.  In the mirror he sees himself seeing, not preening, an endless process that is constantly clouded by one’s own ruminations and actions.  It is a painful process, just as Echo’s repetition of Narcissus’ utterances is a painful process of yearning, one that ultimately associates Eros and Thanatos, life and death, in the circle of knowing and not knowing.  The image is most graphic in Pinwheel of 2005, which has four photos of skulls arranged around the center like a Narcissus flower.

Zero and one, from nothing to something, are separated (and joined) by infinity in Scarritt’s work.  The chain of connections begins with Digital Delay of 1974, a vertical diptych of two horizontal photographs posing the binary numbers zero and one.  This is his earliest juxtaposition of the numbers, and they are expressed through his own physical being, as though he were the numbers themselves.  He photographs his index finger and thumb forming a zero in the upper photo and his index finger as a one in the lower.  The images are close-up, fuzzy, the focus being on the angled mirror behind them, which in turn reflects Scarritt’s reflection from another mirror, so he is seen in profile with the camera to his eye as he photographs his outstretched hand forming the zero and the one, thus the delay between the shooting and the image as well as the zero and the one.  The image is like that of Narcissus, a physical reality and an illusion (the two mirror images) at the same time, now apprehended as a further process of consciousness, a work of art.

There is also a literal, if not at first intentional, link to Narcissus in the “Photograms” of 1981, in which the artist makes ripples in water above photographic paper, his fingers generating unconscious images formed by the wave interference patterns from two different actions performed in total darkness.  This is another kind of digital delay and a form of drawing that is present throughout Scarritt’s work.

            In Re:Naissance, a video sound work originally done for the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1981, the delay is between two tape machines, with the tape going from the recording reel of one to the playing reel of the other.  The first deck has a camera attached to it that is aimed at and recording the digital zero and one as they are formed by Scarritt’s hand in front of the monitor on the second deck.  Here the delay causes an overlapping of images and a reversal of perspective in the resulting video, with each hand larger as it appears behind the hand that came before it, upsetting our ability to determine exactly where these images are (a punning reversal of Renaissance one-point perspective).  But the pun is also about rebirth, or regarding birth, about the manner in which images, or things in general, come into being from the same matter (or matterless ether).

Two sounds are constant in Re:Naissance, a low static rattling and a higher, purer tone, not the sounds of machinery but of something electronic or cosmic, in the family of what one might imagine accompanies the eternal movement of cosmic forces, though fading at times.  They are the sounds of audio feedback from the tape delay, counterpart to the double image of Digital Delay.  In Broadway Video of 1996 the sound is that of a harmonica, looped and slowed, as a camera, hung from the ceiling, passes in an arc over a four-foot-square mirror on the floor of a loft studio, like a Foucault pendulum obeying the gravitational pull of the earth (and push of the artist).  Sound and motion are inseparable, as they were for Echo, until there was only sound.  Literally, sound is movement, vibration in space, and profoundly associated with the shaping of space, our place in it, our perception of it.  The movement over the mirror seems not so much to be attended by sound as to be propelled by it, as by breathing.

What the camera sees is the mirror, with crosshairs taped on it, reflecting a tangle of wires, the ceiling of the studio, with its pipes and beams, walls, columns, and windows descending from above—everything in reverse, everything upside down.  But it also sees the wide boards of the floor around the mirror (so that the space of the room is collapsed, ceiling and floor on the same level) and sometimes ventures out into its expanse (like an ocean around an island or space around a star) as though to escape the strictures of the mirror’s picture.  In the end the artist has drawn this picture and everything in it, inside and outside the mirror.  It is his movement, his drawing.

Present Tense of 1991 is a piece that hangs on a wire from the ceiling, like the camera and wires in Broadway Video and like several other works since the 1980s that seem to be compasses for exploring the typology and forces of the universe in all directions.  Only the compass is now quite contained and has something of the numerological providence of the “hanged man” in the Tarot deck.  A small, circular mirror rests within the two larger circles that are joined at three points, and a chain suspended from above, as indeed the entire structure is suspended, slumps on the mirror, as Caravaggio’s Narcissus slumps by the side of his pool, Buddha sits in meditation, or the twists of DNA carry on their work.  Only that which is within the circles is to be seen here.  What appeared to divine outwardly has now turned into the mirror, into the self.

Boundaries are intense in all Scarritt’s work: the circles of Present Tense, the edges of mirrors and pictures, the walls, ceilings, and floors of rooms.  Drawing takes place within these boundaries, hoping to escape them.  When Scarritt draws arcs in the corners of rooms, as he has done several times since the 1970s, he subverts the quintessential three-dimensionality of this configuration, almost as though the corner no longer exists within the continuous elliptical encirclement of his drawn line.  It is no longer a space subject to the definitions of our particular conventional reality.  The elimination is made literal in the arc drawn for this show, with the white dust created by cutting plasterboard obscuring the lines where floor and walls meet.  It becomes the space Scarritt has been exploring all along: most recently the distance between the vivid blurred skull and the turned figure of a nude young woman in the 2005 photographic diptych Hello Goodbye—Eros and Thanatos, Echo and Narcissus, zero and one, binary opposition, Digital Delay.

Donald Goddard