:Music Research Group

SENSING THE PASSIVITY OF TRAVEL: 

CAT HOPE’S VOYEURAGES 

 In the late 18th century, cosmopolitan Europeans devised “the grand tour” as a way to finish the education of a young gentleman or lady. Upon coming of age, the scions of Europe’s upper classes would partake of a journey stretching from the Acropolis of Athens, to the Vatican in Rome, from the cathedrals of France, to the craggy, Romantic mountains of Germany and Switzerland. The aim was, in the spirit of Rousseau or Locke, to come to know oneself by gazing at the landscapes, customs and peoples of foreign shores—generally from a position of knowing authority or distance. Goethe may well have traveled to Italy, but he did not ‘go native.’ His infinitely refined sensibility enabled him to marvel at the passions of the Mediterranean, while retaining his own sense of contemplative superiority over the object of his gaze, the sounds of the Roman markets, and the scents emitted by the inhabitants of the Eternal City.  From these origins comes the contemporary phenomenon of tourism. Although now far more inflected with the spirit of capitalism and consumption—with a model of the world as some kind of grand buffet from which bourgeois tourists can sup—the basic philosophy of travel remains, by and large, the same. Here in Australia, the trip around the world has come to be seen as a highly desirable if not essential part of the acquisition of self-knowledge and maturity. But if we travel only to know about ourselves, do we ever really travel in any meaningful sense at all? Does travel for purely self-reflective purposes turn the world into a kind of mirror into which the Western tourist Narcissistically gazes, without really ever seeing the places she or he visits. Instead, many tourists see nothing but themselves. It is this sense of dissonance, of abstraction, of travel as a kind of willful, self-devised fiction which we play over our bodies and our senses, which Cat Hope puts into play with her installation Voyeurages. A series of figures, naked from the waist up, stand in a space while images taken from the window of a train or a boat are played on their backs, while in the mouth of each of these living statues is held a small microphone giving out the garbled sounds, snarls and crackles of some distant, populous locale. The body becomes a kind of recording place—a site of sensorial memory—where image and sound is first taken in by the traveling body and then given out to the audience to the exhibition, a conflation of fleshy sensation and pre-recorded audio-visual data. This act or relocation, of re-reading, of the body is further emphasized by the placement of these ‘memories.’ The scapulas become a kind of retina as the images play across them, while the mouth is sewn up or blocked by the microphone—and yet still this figure speaks, in a fashion. The bodies in Hope’s installation are like those other living statues found in Alain Resnais’ film Last Year At Marienbad (1961), in which barely moving figures debate and muse over the question of whether they met here, last year, at the holiday spa and casino of Marienbad—or perhaps somewhere else. Like the protagonists of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film-script, Hope’s characters seem to be forging an entirely new space through a collective act of mute will, imagination, dreaming and technology, a kind of mnemonic fiction which may or may not have ever really existed in three dimensional space and actual, lived time. 

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