The Gaze That Stands Between You and Everything Real: An Interview with Artist Alex McQuilkin

by Rebecca Scherm

Alex McQuilkin is the New York-based artist responsible for “Unbreak My Heart,” which uses the Toni Braxton weeper as a way to talk about magic and witches, Salomé, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, images of heartbreak, and gender performance. Her earlier work includes “Joan of Arc,” in which she films herself as a mirror image to the Falconetti film; “Romeo and Juliet (I Wanna Be Claire Danes),” in which she reenacts the death scene of the Baz Luhrmann film playing both parts; and “Fucked,” her cannonball into the art conversation in 1999.

Can you walk us through the opening of “Unbreak,” director’s commentary style? We start with a creepy kid voice, whispering in Latin:

Do you have the translation? It’s A Woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade. And the tears of a woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.

That’s from Seneca, Tragedies, re-quoted in the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches). So this young girl is repeating this text and the first thing you see is the wallpaper, which was a starting point for me. It was inspired both by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman whose doctor husband commits her to the attic and doesn’t let her write and she goes totally nuts and starts hallucinating people running around behind the wallpaper, and Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

Having a kid read an ancient Latin text that was historically used to control women starts the piece out in a strange place — it’s not a man condemning a woman, but a little girl who doesn’t know what she’s saying.

It got me thinking about “witches” in terms of the sexy-dancing we’re about to see, that old stupid thing about women leading men astray by being sexy.

The music box music is from “The Dance of the Seven Veils” from Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé.

And there’s some very witchy dancing we’re about to see.

Like a lot of my work, it’s walking a really fine line, investigating the stereotyping and damning of women not directly through a male view, but as that view has been carefully woven into the social structure and internalized in women.

The character starts out looking possibly dead, but just before Toni starts there’s a twitch of life.

The song, like pop music is supposed to, brings something to life in her, so she’s kind of reborn somewhere between Salomé and American top 40 — a really confusing place to be. “Unbreak My Heart,” which I sincerely am moved by, is asking for magic to be done — it could be considered an incantation for love to undo damage. There’s something about this plea, this begging of another person to fix your insides. The phrase “say that you love me” is repeated so many times.

Once she comes to “life,” this crazy strip tease begins, hair first. Should I be decoding the double wigs?

There’s not too much code. I mean, one layer of falsity under another, and the blonde/brunette dichotomy — two different sets of imagery with baggage attached. On a personal note, the blonde wig is the wig I’ve worn in almost all of my videos. It’s kind of like “my” character.

Ah, I wondered if I was recognizing those wigs from “Romeo and Juliet” or if I was looking too hard, as I do.

It means something to me, but its meaning is very personal, I think. “Unbreak My Heart” has more layers than any video I’ve ever made. It invites the viewer to connect on whatever level they choose to.

I’m glad you said that, because “Unbreak My Heart” feels different to me from your previous work.

How so?

I think layering is the right word. “Fucked” is an idea that you can describe to people and they will get it, even if they haven’t seen it. But this video is weaving so many ideas together. You really have to see it unfurl.

The next thing to go in the striptease is the shirt with the giant wound over the heart, revealing that there is no wound or perhaps that there was a wound but it was something that could be easily eliminated.

And then the whole body gets eliminated! It’s such a cool trick, both visually and metaphorically. She does this sexy dance and the body, the “sexy” thing, disappears.

As she strips, you expect to get the usual reward of seeing forbidden flesh, but the viewer actually gets denied more and more, and all hope of sex is denied. I think that’s kind of a joke on the viewer, but at the same time, it’s devastating for the character, because she destroys herself in doing it. It’s incredibly sad to me — and she ends up being the one decapitated.

I think most of the best jokes are devastating in the background, right?

Yeah, tragicomic. That’s always my goal, to get under the viewer’s skin through humor and, once there, to sink in something really devastating and sincere. It’s like when you laugh, you open up and things can enter you in a way that they can’t when you are just looking critically at art. It’s been the same in my work since “Fucked.”

The first piece of yours that I ever saw was “Romeo and Juliet,” which blew me away. I think I felt that my interests had been legitimized. I remember being shocked by the naked, sincere interest in teenage girlhood. And all the crying and the jokes.

A lot of crying.

So much crying, in your work! What do you think about when you film crying? What are you trying to see?

Well, with “Romeo and Juliet,” the whole piece started from how moved I was by Claire Danes’s crying performance in that final scene when she wakes up and finds Leonardo dead. Talk about a performance that got under my skin!

It is a scene many of us have watched… a few times.

So many times! And I always long to feel what she was feeling in that moment. It’s like a longing for a sincere experience, even if that experience is one of pain.

And on film, the pain is both really intense and really pretty.

I’m really interested in the aestheticization of female suffering.

The Decorative Cry.

It’s definitely a major theme, and again, a fine line to walk because the phenomenon I’m talking about is not one I’m looking at critically, from afar. It’s something that has a very strong pull on me — going back to the internalization of a male gaze.

I remember talking to some male friend about that moment in childhood when you first felt “watched,” just doing your homework or whatever, and the sense of imaginary gaze. He had no idea what I was talking about! I think some of your videos are performing that imagined gaze, right?

How about the first moment you felt yourself watching yourself! The line between authenticity and performance becomes really blurred, and then someone eventually damns you for that. Coco Chanel famously said “A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”

Whoa.

It really makes you look at advertising and film differently. That way of looking at yourself as an object isn’t something that can be turned on and off.

And creating your “self” as your ideal object.

Well, that’s why those ads work — they make us feel a strange hope and potential.

Of merging your real self with some ideal, created self until they are indistinguishable, even to you?

It’s the mirror phase! Well, what happens I think is that your “real” self (if that exists — I think it’s too blurred from the start) becomes obliterated. It’s eventually eroded to make way for the self you want to see yourself as. That’s a lot of what “Joan of Arc” was about as well.

On the subject of tensions between images of ourselves and ourselves, let’s talk about Britney. There’s a lot of Britney in your work, isn’t there?

There is a lot of Britney. Do you recognize where that shot came from in “Test Run”?

It’s from “Everytime!” And “Joan of Arc” was made during Britney’s rough period, right?

Oh, God. Yes. Bad timing. I shaved my head for that video one day before she did hers, and everyone thought it was about her. It was interesting how deeply horrifying that was for me — for people to think I was emulating Britney.

Even though your work is often about teenage icons?

Emulating Joan of Arc seemed totally legitimate and honorable. Actually, “Joan of Arc” was really difficult for me. I gave myself this costume for the video, but I couldn’t take it off after the shooting was done. It shook my identity a lot to suddenly have no hair. Thus started a long chain of work using hair as a way to explore that same mirror-stage stuff.

This seems like the right time to ask you about using yourself as a performer/actor. Was that a thematic choice or a logistical one? I mean, it has become thematic regardless, right?

Definitely, though I don’t think it’s necessary at this point. A lot of my work has been about the blurred line between that character and me, to the point that my work is constantly being called “autobiographical” though every piece I’ve done is fiction.

Maybe because there’s so much about adolescence, even though you show distance from it — you seem utterly sympathetic to the strength of those emotions.

The emotions don’t go away just because we learn to act more composed. We all still walk around trying to be these images we have in our heads that come from various screens and billboards and pages. Teenagers are just way more embarrassingly obvious about it. They haven’t learned to hide that ambition.

Where did this thematic interest start for you? I read some of Ways of Seeing when I was 18 and had a “holy shit” moment, but I didn’t really know what to do with it yet. It was a partial epiphany.

It started with Lacan, with the mirror stage, and I guess the area where that meets the Chanel quote. “Fucked” was very influenced by it. When I was asked to contribute a statement about “Fucked” for a catalogue, I wrote “’Fucked’ is a video about missing the forest for the trees.” Recently a friend talked to me about this feeling of “being at the banquet of life, and starving.” It’s incredibly sad, this idea of missing your life because you are obstructed by this gaze that stands between you and everything real.

When you did “Fucked,” what was the reception like in terms of, I guess, interesting questions versus dudes creeping?

The first question I’m always asked about that piece is “Are you really getting fucked?” That says a lot, the obsession with whether it’s “real” or not.

I got a great response from women, not to say that the audience for that piece is gendered. It’s speaking about a universal phenomenon through one particular example, but I think the example I chose spoke more clearly to women. They could put the imagery and the larger emotional impact together. Most of us have had that very specific experience of putting on a (makeup) mask — men do too — it’s a metaphor for missing out on “real” experience because you are so blindered by getting to the place, image-wise, in your head, where that intimacy could occur.

Have you seen the official Toni Braxton video for “Unbreak My Heart?” It also has a vanishing person, but it’s the man.

I didn’t remember that! The video didn’t play much of a role in my conception — it’s really more about the song. The twisting up of sexuality and sadness is the same thing I’m playing with, but they didn’t do it in a very subtle way in the official video.

She regains all her strength and powers at the end, which I think dampens the plea somewhat.

Completely. It’s not at all convincing. It negates both positions — they don’t coexist like that.

How did you choreograph the dance for your video?

Ha. That is a funny question. It’s taken from Carmen Electra’s “Fit to Strip” aerobic striptease DVD. Really special, right? You should watch those DVDs. They are amazing. I have them all.

You can see more of Alex McQuilkin’s work here.

Don’t leave Rebecca Scherm in all this pain; don’t leave her out in the rain.