“My Laws are My Whores.”
When I walked into Paul Chan’s exhibit at the Renaissance Society, I expected to see nine portraits of the Justices of the Supreme Court, which I had seen reproduced alongside newspaper reviews and press releases. It took me fifteen minutes of walking around the small gallery to realize that the portraits were hung at the absurd height of several meters high. At such a height, the portraits did not seem like lords ruling above we lowly serfs, but rather made them comically cut off, as if they existed in a higher atmosphere, like aristocrats in hot air balloons breathing the finer aether of the upper air. The drawings, which have the look of an official portrait, betray themselves; each justice has a pair of rubbery lips curled in an odd smirk, looking like a slightly embarrassed fish. Despite the pristine order of the Renaissance Society gallery, Chan managed to evoke the tawdriness of a bureaucratic hallway. Rather than the grandeur of the Supreme Court’s chamber, the installation recalls the awkwardly proportioned halls of the court in Kafka’s The Trial.
My Laws Are My Whores, installation view.
My Laws Are My Whores.
On the opposite side of this wall is a video projection, Untitled (After a Certain Chateau), a reference perhaps to the castle in the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. In the video, human figures vibrate furiously in sexual positions amidst the silhouettes of rectangles and arches. The shapes signify perhaps windows, perhaps portraits, a chateau or a portrait gallery. Either way, they connote the “official space” of an institution, though apparently an ill-kept one: slowly, one at a time, the rectangles begin to tilt and eventually fall off the wall altogether. The figures, meanwhile, continue their revelries at an inhuman speed. The effect is like a video stuck alternating between two frames, so the figures appear to vibrate, constantly caught replaying some tiny movement, unable either to abandon or complete it. The revelers seem to repeatedly flip between the two poles of Sade’s sexuality, the libertine excess and its ultimate disappointment. Desire, once excited, imagines endless repetitions, but once satiated, as Sade wrote, “one always has too much when one has had enough.” No matter how transgressive, every sexual act becomes mundane with infinite repetition. The only thing desire cannot withstand is satiety. The limit to transgression, the point at which it is completely self-defeating, is the act of murder, which renders the object of torture (and the torturer’s pleasure) numb and inert.
Untitled (After a Certain Chateau).
Murder kills passion, and it is passionless murder that Sade found completely insensible. The travesty of the laws is not that they kill and punish, but that they do so without pleasure. The state imprisons, tortures, and kills because the laws dictate it must, and all the while the keepers of the law remain separated, detached. Law never kills for pleasure, and hence it is never satiated. Sade gave no value to human life as such, but the man who sought out eccentricities found this legal murder flatly perverse: “an ambitious sovereign can destroy, at his ease and without the least scruple, the enemies prejudicial to his grandiose designs … Cruel laws, arbitrary, imperious laws can likewise assassinate millions of individuals and we, feeble and wretched creatures, we are not allowed to sacrifice a single being to our vengeance or our caprice!” On a table to one side of the gallery, Chan placed a keyboard with keys molded like gravestones, out of which a cord dangled onto the ground, the male end of a plug exposed on the floor. A state execution lacks the passion or caprice of murder, and Chan’s blank graves, equated with the seriality of a keyboard, portray death as ultimately anonymous. As Sade put it, “virtue, vice, all are confounded in the grave.”
Writing mostly from prison, he could only fantasize about the crimes he wished to commit, but this probably served his purposes better than any massacre. The disappointment of pleasure, the coincidence of satiety and repulsion, the enough that is too much, left only the image of sex, its elaboration through narrative and fantasy. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, “It was not murder that fulfilled Sade’s erotic nature; it was literature.” Without description, without the duplication of the sexual act in writing, sex becomes obscene, not because it displays uncovered bodies, but because the sexual act is uncovered by any meaning (romance, love, even desire). It becomes a random biological act, an intermediate term between birth and death.
Along the long wall of the gallery, Chan has ten framed paper sheets, each representing a different body, some taken from Sade’s fiction. On the sheets are written a string of words, sometimes simply sounds, mapped over the alphabet and select punctuation, and each sheet seems to describe the sexuality of the depicted character. The work entitled The Body of Oh Narcisse is a string of pre-verbal noises, while The Body of Oh Justine is a long series of misfortunes and resistances, echoing the heroine of Sade’s novella, the victim of a constant barrage of vice. It is appropriate that the bodies of these figures are composed of language, because it is only with language that life, even sexual life, becomes more than a physical fact of existence and gains meaning. Ultimately it is the body of language itself that Chan is interested in. By mapping sexual utterances over the alphabet, he tinkers with the anatomy of language, its basic parts, till it is unavoidably sexual. These “fonts” are available for download online.
The Body of Oh . . . , installation view.
The Body of Oh Justine.
Chan uses this Sadean strategy, of corrupting language itself, to subvert the language of law. In law, language gains deadly force, sometimes by bringing the violence of the state fully to bear on its object, but at least as often by removing its protections, by casting a minority as outside of the law. Chan resists this in a two-fold way: he exposes the substitution of the body by language, its embodiment of sexuality, and then he attempts to re-inscribe the legal, authoritative language of law with the subjective, almost pre-verbal utterances of pleasure. In The Mother of All Episodes, a video work displayed on the floor of the gallery, footage from an episode of Law & Order is subtitled with the episode’s script written in Chan’s sexualized fonts. The string of moans passing along the bottom of the screen while the police are interrogating a murder suspect was at first comic, as I tried to calibrate the image to the text underneath it. The result is a suggestive nonsense, a reversal that renders the law ridiculous. Together, Chan’s videos and word portraits demonstrate how the language of law displaces the body as the battleground over sexuality. As the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres used piles of candy or stacks of paper to take the place of a lost bodily presence, so Chan’s framed sheets seem to represent the bodies lost in the abstraction of law.
