Paradise Misplaced: Jeanne Osborne's Performance Art

As the title of Jeanine Osborne’s mixed media project on display this month at the Ewing Gallery might lead us to expect, the opening sentence of “Walls of Paradise” creates a disarming sense of ambiguity: “the walls of paradise are white and transparent. You can see in but not out.” The beginning of Osborne’s prose poem could mean: something looks like paradise only so long as you remain on the outside looking in. Conversely, if you think you are already “in”, this must mean you are blinding yourself to everything that lies outside—which doesn’t sound like something we would expect people living in paradise to do.

Drawing upon a wide array of religious and literary sources (Genesis, The Book of Jonah, Paradise Lost, French Surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd), Osborne creates a work that invites us to take a closer look at how the idea of paradise has been discovered, abandoned, redefined and “lost” throughout Western history. Marked by frequent shifts in tone and point of view, the “Walls of Paradise” text seems to call for multiple, slow readings. However, Osborne’s “voice-over” narration and a cappella voice present the material in a manner which seldom gives way to an extended pause or slower tempo. By establishing such a “rhythm”, Osborne essentially forces the members of the audience to treat the prose poem as an opera (the significance of her words often lies more in the type of emotion they generate than the specific meanings they denote).

The “operatic” dimension to “Walls of Paradise” is accentuated by the projection of video images throughout the performance. And while the footage has been meticulously edited, the images we see and the voice we hear rarely correspond with one another in a direct way. This disjunction injects a certain sense of pathos and haunting symbolism into the project that is reinforced by the fact that each shot we see appears to have been carefully composed. Osborne is “captured” by the camera (she always appears either alone or among a group of people who act as though they cannot see her) alternately in close ups, in long shots designed to emphasize the scale of the rock formations towering above her on the Mediterranean coast, and in medium shots that juxtapose architectural ruins with what seem to be abandoned construction sites littered with pieces of industrial equipment.

These video images are at too few points intercut with images of Osborne’s “child-like”, flat, “action” drawings. In a manner that evokes the work of Paul Klee and the abstract expressionist William Scott, Osborne’s drawings seem to render dreamlike images with an exacting faithfulness which actually makes them appear more “real” and palpable than many of the objects of the external world recorded in the video clips.

This becomes readily apparent when we see recurring shots of Osborne leaning slightly forward, her face completely hidden from us by either her hair or the position of her head. She is in every such instance wearing what looks like an oversized white nightgown that seems to pin her arms by her sides. As if by way of meager compensation, the outfit apparently leaves plenty of room for her clearly dysfunctional wings that seem to turn Osborne into an absurdist character in league with the mythic figure portrayed by a solitary woman in Rebecca Horn’s early 1970s film Unicorn (Horn’s actress is filmed as she walks through the countryside wearing nothing but a few white bandages and a long, narrow white cone strapped on top of her head ).

“It is nonsense this paradise idea,” one of the voices from “Walls of Paradise” persuasively blurts out with sudden vehemence halfway through Osborne’s live performance. “It is a cheap invention, paradise, a stupid myth from a stupid book, a laughing matter. It stinks, cheating, shitting metaphors out of a dried legend.”

This tirade is clearly not meant to be taken as the final word, as Osborne’s intentions are once again placed in doubt when she takes on the persona of another character who sings a powerful ‘Requiem” toward the end of the video.

Actually there is no moment throughout the performance that could be identified as the “final word.” “Walls of Paradise” is in the process of being transformed into a Chamber Opera written by the American composer John Anthony Lennon, which means it is likely all the questions that have been raised about the “tone” of Osborne’s work will have to be renewed once it is performed in a still more expansive medium.