2016
Single Channel HD Video with sound
32 minutes
Courtesy the artist
and Hollybush Gardens, London
BRIDGIT begins with a view of curtains in front of a daylit window. Two crossed feet in New Balance sneakers are propped up on a couch. Music is playing from a radio somewhere off-camera. There’s a slight rhythmic feeling to the image, a gentle movement which gains gravitas as you realize the source of the movement is the artist’s breath. Shot entirely on Prodger’s iPhone, BRIDGIT is constructed of shots up to four minutes in length, the maximum determined by the data storage system on the phone. Video and photography are usually captured through a camera viewfinder which positions the artist’s eye behind the camera’s body. This positionality allows the audience to plausibly imagine seeing what the artist saw when they were capturing the image. iPhones allow us to place the phone at arm’s length while using the camera. This slight displacement introduces a third position in the construction of an image, distinct from both artist and viewer. BRIDGIT feels at once more intimate to Prodger’s body and also more separate from her gaze.
Frances Whorall-Campbell writes in, “The Queer Subjectivity of Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT,” “BRIDGIT dwells in particular on this concept of prosthesis, proposing various contemporary, historical and bodily technologies as ways through which the ‘I’ not only expands but also mutates, absorbing the fragments of others without ceasing to be itself.” Prodger brings consideration of prosthesis into the narrative of the video by referencing and reading from Allucquére Roseanne Stone, a pioneering theorist in the academic field of transgender studies. Stone’s important essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Postransexual Manifesto,” grounds the act of ‘passing’ in Post-structuralist theory as, “reading oneself aloud….”
The power of reading and of being read find their grounding in parallel to the act of naming and the power of names. “Sandy” Stone is herself a homonym to “standing stones”. The Neolithic stones appearing in BRIDGIT stand still while our names for them and our attention to them fluctuates. Prodger unearths a metaphor for gender fluidity and the social construction of gender in our understanding of the stones. The proximity of these ideas is enough to queer the literal and metaphoric ground of the video. Returning to the title of the piece, Prodger reads from a passage in Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian about naming in the ancient world, “Bridgit couldn’t possibly have been her name, because her Neolithic contemporaries all had one-syllable names.” Cope explains that ancient deities had many names, “Not only were they known by different names in different places, but they often had at least three different phases: old, middle-aged and young, which were all known by different names in one place.”
Prodger explains, “The weight of different names by which Bridgit was formerly-known is because of the vast timescales across which she operated…..The idea behind taking a name appropriate to one’s current circumstance was that identity isn’t static.” This paradox of self perception and expression “holds the tension between the self’s essential continuity and inevitable mutation.” The landscapes depicted in BRIDGIT are given the same care and consideration by the artist allowing each place to be distinct, irreducible, and to retain some of its mystery. Prodger foregrounds her own subjective approach to place through the use of voiceover which imbues the landscapes in the video with their individuality and specificity.
The audio in BRIDGIT combines scene sound from Prodger’s iPhone with her voiceover which was recorded separately. The close recording of the narration abstracts her voice from the audible resonances of a physical setting into a psychological space. This intimacy is doubled in one of the alternate narratives in the video. Prodger shares the story of her own visits with anaesthesiologists, preparing for and recovering from anaesthesia. The conversations she had with the medical staff and their care and thoughtfulness with her become structured moments of passage and transition in and out of self-consciousness. The recovery nurse made a 3D animation which is included in the video. “His job is to be there when people regain consciousness … managing and assisting their various altered states.” BRIDGIT leads us through an awareness of the concepts mentioned above. Rather than discrete experiences, the theories of reading, transitioning, passing, names and naming, are deepened beyond a singular story or anecdote. They open pluralities for us as viewers creating space for us to become resensitized to our everyday as carefully considered empathic and somatic experiences.
BRIDGIT was screened in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and online from November 10-22, 2020.
Further viewing:
Charlotte Prodger, Turner Prize Nominee 2018, TateShots
Frances Whorall-Campbell, “The Queer Subjectivity of Charlotte Prodger’s ‘BRIDGIT’,” Another Gaze, September 30, 2019
Related events:
Victoria Pitts-Taylor: "Deep pasts and failed futures," a work-in-progress reading