Jan Verwoert
Michaela Melián, Life as a Woman, 2001
Published in: Frieze Magazine, London, 2002

Historical research has informed much of Melián's work of the last decade, which often pays tribute to women whose achievements have been misrepresented or forgotten. Life as a Woman, Hedy Lamarr (2001), for example, is a homage to the famous actress remembered for being the first woman to fake an orgasm on screen in 1933 and who later became a Hollywood icon. What is less widely known is that Lamarr invented the technique of 'frequency hopping' and donated the patent to the US army in 1943. Initially conceived as a safe method for the remote control of torpedoes, the technology was subsequently used to encode radio communication. Without it there would be no mobile phones. Images of Lamarr bathing nude and dressed in a glamorous robe were repeatedly printed on to the wall with rubber stamps to form a frieze. At the centre of the space was a wooden structure with a silk cover shaped like a submarine. The frailty of the construction stood in sharp contrast to the bombast of conventional monuments. The piece was a monument to Lamarr, but one that called into question the very idea of monumentality

Jochen Bonz

The Function of the Veil: On the Constitution of Meaning in a Work of Art by Michaela Melián
Published in: RISS: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse: Freud–Lacan, Heft 52, Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2001

Is it possible to make a statement and at the same time, to address its conditionality? Can a contingency be expressed? Not to question what has been said, but to point out that it is indeed grounded upon a necessary assumption, that it takes place within a certain framework? Or, in a situation permeated by the feeling that the world is simply a construction, how can meaning be created at all? These questions are perhaps not explicitly posed, but they nevertheless pervade today's art. Everywhere, people are trying to question discourses and, at the same time, fabricate significance. This is also true for the artist Michaela Melián. In the early summer of 2001, Melián’s installation, Life as a Woman, created for the Böttcherstrasse art award exhibition at the Bremen Kunsthalle, puts the phallus on display. The work shows how the phallus, as a signifier, organizes the field, constructs a perspective, and creates meaning. Simultaneously, the installation utilizes the power of this signifier.

A room at an art show: in the center is a wooden scaffold about three meters long, covered in light beige silk taffeta. Due to its long shape and the characteristic dome in the middle, it is instantly recognizable as a submarine. Behind it, a blue-on-white stripe runs chest-high along the wall. Two alternating images are stamped in a row. They depict a woman’s upper torso coming out of the water and the same woman in different pose. Thanks to the rich contrast of the pictures (reduced to white and blue), the woman’s style of clothing, her gestures, and the fact that the two photographs continually alternate along three walls of the room, one is reminded of the movies – the 1920s and silent movies. The “film” leads to the third element of the installation: a cubicle, also covered with light fabric, about one-and-a-half by two meters wide and three meters tall. A picture of a woman’s head is projected onto the fabric, which is also light beige. It is easy to recognize the head from the film. Both film and projection meet at the same height. The head wanders over the fabric on the cubicle; in some places it appears fuller than it does in others; then, it is colorful and seems to stop moving, to stay still for a moment. One can enter the cubicle. Inside, one realizes that a slide projector is the source of the projection; it projects the image through a revolving prism. Once inside, the effect of the projection is even stronger.

The installation is entitled Life as a Woman and is by Michaela Melián. The fourth (or, apart from the title, the fifth) element of the installation is the following text, which the visitor can take from a pile of papers lying on the floor. These are like the information leaflets found in some museums.

LIFE AS A WOMAN

Hedy Lamarr, legally Hedwig Kiesler, was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna.

In 1933, in the movie Ekstase, she simulated the first orgasm seen onscreen in cinematic history; in another scene, she swims naked in a lake. From 1933-1937, she was married to Austrian munitions factory owner Fritz Mandl. Afterward, she emigrated to the USA.

MGM’s Louis B. Mayer extolled Hedy Lamarr as the most beautiful woman in the world. In her first Hollywood film, she established a new type of woman in the American cinema: the exotic, dark-haired, enigmatic stranger. In her ex-husband’s Salzburg villa, the immigrant had seen plans for remote controlled torpedos, which were never built because the radio controls proved to be too unreliable. After the outbreak of the Second World War, she worked on practical ideas to effectively fight the Hitler regime.

At a party in Hollywood, Lamarr met George Antheil, an avant-garde composer who also wrote film scores. While playing the piano with the composer, the actress suddenly has an important idea for her torpedo control system. Antheil sets up the system on 88 frequencies, as this number corresponds to the number of keys on a piano. To construct it, he employs something similar to the player piano sheet music that he used in his Ballet Mécanique.

In December 1940, the frequency-switching device developed by Lamarr and Antheil was sent to the National Inventors' Council. A patent was awarded on August 11, 1942. The two inventors leave it up to the American military to figure out how to use it. Actually, Lamarr’s and Antheil’s Secret Communication System disappears into the U.S. Army’s filing cabinets. Finally, in 1962, as the Cuba crisis is brewing, the technology now known as frequency hopping is put to use. Its purpose is not to control torpedoes, but to allow for safe communications among the blockading ships – whereupon the principles behind the patent become part of fundamental U.S. military communications technology. Today, this technology is not only the foundation for the U.S. military’s satellite defense system, but is also used widely in the private sector, especially for cordless and mobile telephones. 

It is possible to form an impression of Hedy Lamarr’s life from this installation. Yet if this were the only goal, it would have sufficed to simply display some brief biographical information. The installation space, essentially shaped by three elements (submarine, film, and projection), appears to be much broader, much larger. It is possible to situate Lamarr’s story in the space, yet the connotations of the story do not dissolve into the space, but remain around it, beside it. The space in Life as a Woman demands more: more general and more fundamental questions. To more closely define the space, I will start with the phallic quality of the submarine. A paradox is connected with it: the phallus must appear to be effective and at the same time, must be exposed as the effect of pure superficiality.

I stand in the room, which is created through the elements collected at the site, and feel certain that the submarine designs the room. Using it as the signifier, I perceive the line traced by the movement of the two female images as if it were the horizon, waves that have calmed. The nose of the submarine points to the projection room; it is located at the spot where, if elongated, the submarine would meet the film images. Seen this way, the two sides of the “film” and the submarine produce a triangle, whose top is the site where the female head is projected. Yet as a connotative space revealed by the work of art, it goes beyond biography (which is also doubtless one of the installation’s topics). The film, too, leaves the triangle as it extends behind the boat and moves along yet another wall. Accordingly, meaning always depends upon the connections produced in conjunction with both the artwork and the standpoint of the viewer. Simultaneously, the film constantly refers to the fact that the artwork is not exhausted in any of the interpretations. Or that at least the potential significance of the elements of the work is not exhausted in any of the manufactured contexts of meaning… The boat is an effective signifier; it has the shape of a phallus and is simultaneously not a phallus. It is just simply a fragile wooden scaffold covered in a taffeta veil. However, what purpose does taffeta serve, if not mainly to flatter the female figure for the benefit of the male gaze? Shouldn’t we rather see the function of the submarine as something expressing the female position in the symbolic, the site where the phallus exists simply as a lack of phallus? After all, the veil does not exactly force the phallus to disappear from the installation.

In his lecture on object relations, Lacan explains the function of the veil in connection with fetishism – that is, with an especially intense relation of the subject to an object, in which Lacan recognizes the function of the veil. The veil covers, as it is usually said. But to Lacan, the veil exposes. Materializing in the veil is that which makes an object valuable. The value of the object is not inherent, but exists externally. It is the thing that one never gets when one obtains the object. Or at least, it is the thing that never remains with one. The thing that creates desire, the pure significant, the signifier, the phallus. It sticks to the object; it is inside of it, but only because of its absence.

The idea that Lacan then develops takes its plausibility from the indisputable attraction of the veiled object. He says that “absence is projected onto and imagined in the veil.” This is what manifests in the veil: “a man idolizes his feeling about this nothing, which is beyond the object of desire… One could… say that through the presence of this curtain, something that appears to be lacking on the other side tends to be realized as an image. Absence is inscribed in the veil.”[1] It follows that the veil is the material the phallus uses to create effects. Yet it is also the visible limit where the power of the phallus fails. A wooden scaffold shaped like a submarine and covered in taffeta makes it clear that the phallus only exists when it produces an effect. The phallus itself has nothing inherent in it. However, in the symbolic dimension, in the framework of a symbolic order, in symbolic contexts, it has power. That means it requires a certain belief in order to give it meaning.

Life as a Woman is about creating meaning. How is meaning created? By creating a relationship. Things have meaning, when one believes in them. Let us take a love relationship as a somewhat elevated example. How is love created? According to Hesiod, Aphrodite or Venus, the ancient goddess of love, was made in order to create the world; her appearance is connected to the end of a multiple incest situation, a family knot in the worst sense. Overcoming this means setting up a symbolic order that creates desire using rules and laws, the result of a blow for freedom that gives rise to love as THE source of desire. Gaia has one of her sons cut off the penis of his father, Uranus. He throws his father’s body part into the sea, whereupon “white foam arose around the godly member, yet a virgin grew out of its midst.”[2] Aphrodite of the seafoam. From that moment on, she rides upon waves and shows us how to fall in love. Wherever she is, things have meaning, because one is connected to them, because for the subject, the love relationship makes everything meaningful. Love sweeps meaning along with it like a wave.

This constellation of the beginning of the creation of meaning is recreated in Melián’s installation. The elements are a phallus, conveyed and made recognizable as a phallus (and what does Uranus’ severed member represent but the member that is not simply a body part, but the symbolic phallus?!) and the smooth sea, which, in the projection, creates waves, so to speak, right where the image of Hedy Lamarr appears. Venus arises from the water, thus creating her presence and her function. 

Melián’s work uses essential aspects of Lamarr’s life as a pivotal point. From this point, which I have described as a triangle, her particular life story can be told. Yet its elements have further significance. From the point where these reciprocal relations meet, the creation of desire can be presented, be narrated. I have tried to do this here. One should not overlook the notion that, because of the necessary relationship between the three essential elements (film, boat, projection), it is possible to always compare the potential interpretations instigated by the many connotations of the signifiers. These interpretations could be placed in relation to each other. So, for instance, in Lamarr’s real life story, the power of the submarine as a signifier is present, because it is also Hedy Lamarr, who, through her invention, has been given new meaning and visibility as a pioneer and patent owner.

Translation from German by Allison Plath-Moseley

[1] Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre IV: La relation d’objet, (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 155, quoted from the unpublished German translation by Gerhard Schmitz. An English translation is slated to appear later in 2003.

[2] Hesiod, quoted from the German translation of the collected works, Luise und Klaus Hollof, translators (Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin: 1994).