Duchenne’s Smile

Survivals and Displacements: writing (oneself) into the story

A forced smile: on the performativity of “passions”

The starting point for my reflections are the photographs by Duchenne de Boulogne chosen by Su Alonso and Inés Marful, Effroi mêlé de douleur and Effroi, sujet vu de profil (1855-56). These images are examples of the type of photograph that raised Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875) to fame: the use of electric currents as a stimulus to express emotions. Using electrodes -those small metal rods that he holds in his hands and places on the patient’s forehead-, the scientist and specialist in the study of nervous illnesses applied low-voltage electrical currents to the face’s muscles and nerves. The anonymous patient is wide eyed, his eyebrows raised, making deep furrows in his forehead, his mouth gaping and the muscles of his neck tensed. Depending on which muscles he stimulated, the Frenchman could generate emotions ranging from ecstasy or lewdness to fear or pain. The term ”Duchenne’s smile” has become famous in reference to the characteristic expression of joy and laughter, generated as a result of the contraction of the frontal lobe (through synergy between the zygomatic major muscle and orbicularis oculi muscle of the eyelid). Duchenne’s smile is a forced smile.

These images tell a multitude of tales. First of all, they bear witness to the history of medicine and, more specifically, to “physiognomy in movement”; that is, “the psychology that deals with different ways in which humans express their emotions through facial movements”.¹ de Boulogne himself photographed his patients, stimulating facial emotions: that is, (to cite Buffon’s Natural History “our secret agitation” and even “passions” and “feelings”. Emotions are “painted” or form a “picture” on our faces through the contraction of nerves or muscles. The illustrated album of the seventy-two photographed subjects also reflects the incipient visualization of mental illnesses, the history of photography and the portrayal of «ailing» bodies in images.The great «exchange» between reason and insanity (the latter reflected on by Michel Foucault and epistemologically situated “outside” or in “another part” of the cogito²) can be traced back to the Cartesian paradigm that prevailed in the mid 19^th century and to the origins of modern clinical psychiatry. Madness was banished from reason, and ill bodies were set against healthy ones in a contrast that emphasized their otherness. The grimaces caused and photographed by Duchenne de Boulogne were thus forms that acted on the individual’s face, just as Charcot’s magnetism would act on the bodies of the hysterical. Both are testimonials to the emergence of a modern scientific vision of otherness, an obscene alienating one where photography is used as a tool. The insane emerged from behind the curtain of invisibility to which they had been relegated in classical times and they began to be scrutinized and studied: they were granted access to portraits. During this process, their faces’ portrayal was fundamental. Indeed, “from the moment of its birth in modern times, clinical psychiatry invented a visual system whose paradigm was the portrait”.³. A portrait is the representation of a subject in so far as they may resemble or differ from others.

What interests me here about Duchenne’s approach is the fact that it was he who generated the facial expressions artificially from scratch. With the method he devised, first came the simulation- in a medical scenario with the tools that he used for electrostimulation purposes-, followed by the photograph. In other words, the photographs not only record the expression of different emotions but also the scientific mise-en-scène, his performance. When we look at these photographs, we see vestiges of their performative facet: a performance of the emotions, a performance of a scientific vision of otherness, a performance of the epistemological framework for modern subjectivity.

This is the aspect that Alonso and Marful concentrate on: the artists highlight the performative nature of early photography’s representative mechanisms. All the photographs are a pretext for appropriating images in a process that legitimizes the invention of new subjects, new othernesses and new emotions.

“Re”: the dérive: a transitory, ghostly force

The system they came up with is based on the concept of a dérive. By reviving these historical photographs (by Duchenne de Boulogne and August Sander), Alonso and Marful spark off a chain of works by all the artists involved in the re-action. The initial changes are often concentrated especially on the face through modifications to the emotions that are expressed : the gaze seen in their works is a dark, scrutinizing, challenging one. Is it Inés Marful and Su Alonso’s gaze or that of a model destined to represent the counter-canonical pathway forged by their images? Whatever the case, a new subject inhabits the portrait. In their dérives, another recurrent motif can be observed: the violence implicit in the images is explicitly shown through splashes of blood. Its organic presence is splattered crudely onto the surface of the photograph, evoking the physicality of victims of abuse. In most of the works, the bodies share a similar pose and wear similar attire to the photographic matrix. Thus the frontal pose of August Sander’s Painter is repeated, albeit at a progressive distance. In Salla Tykkä’s work, the figure is no more than a distant ghostly one, squashed under a doorframe. Other fragments of bodies are landmarks in the dérives: feet are portrayed alone in a second dérive by Chantal Maillard, while arms and a falling hand persist in Veru Iché, Marta María Pérez Bravo and Cirenaica Moreira’s works. In these works and in their persisting drapery, the body wrappings are progressively reworked, undergoing transformations or reversals, moving into the distance or moving closer.

Through the preservation of certain motifs (traces of blood, corporal presences) and the invention of radically new forms (the image by Senga Nengudi or abstraction of Susan Schwalb’s work), RE-ACTION aspires to achieve a transitory ghostly sense of momentum, based on a process of rewriting (with traces of coloured crayons in Tania Bruguera/IMI’s version) and borradura (the partially illegible page from Wikipedia by Kate Gilmore). The transitory ghostly force that I am trying to describe is consistent with a vulnerable, performative type of narrative , which today strikes me as essential in feminist conceptions and feminist thought. When Alonso and Marful suggested that I should form part of this initiative, it immediately occurred to me to reflect on the forms of transmission that this “game of almost interminable borrowings” triggers. How can a story be captured in which we have been constructed as an otherness? Can we closely inhabit emotions trapped in imposed frames? How can forms of empowerment be conceived from the forced smiles of the past?

Displacement: The Story and the stories

These are the personal and political issues that are raised in my RE-ACTION. I transmit them with all the more enthusiasm because I am currently exploring them in depth in my work as a historian. Like Katy Deepwell, I believe that the “tactics of displacement” that are activated by these dérives are ways of writing a story. Displacement means starting out from one point and from one object and moving them toward others, and this tactic is not only applicable to the creation of a series of works, but also to a series of tales.

To carry out the performance (or ACTION, to use the term used in the project), each artist must appropriate the form of the preceding work through a document, retrieval, testimonial or captured idea. If the photographs originally chosen by Alonso and Marful are regarded as performances, special emphasis can be lent to the “re-thinking” aspect of the work within the framework of a project that explores performative gestures: re-playing, re-acting, re-doing, re-enacting, re-visiting. In my research into 1970s feminist performances, several performers recently spoke to me of their growing interest in oral transmission.⁴ As they see it, through verbal discourse, it is possible to refer to related or background aspects of a work, to convey the emotions that it generates, and also to involve the spectator in the testimonial. In my opinion, oral transmission implies a physical, narrative or subjective commitment present in the contents of the tale that we create. My subjectivity is contained in the narrative of the works that I describe.

I would like to conclude by proposing a narrative dérive, not aimed at creating a contemporary work from a given image, as Alonso and Marful intend the artists to do, but at adding a work from the past to the succession of reactions, incorporating it through a tale in furtive style like a spectre. The work in question is Pierres déplacées (Displaced Stones) by Gina Pane, a 1968 performance in Orco valley (Italy). Seeing a heap of north-facing stones covered in moss on a marshy piece of land, she decided to move them to an open south-facing site.⁵ In this way, the stones, which had never been exposed to sunlight, were given a new lease of life in a sunny location: the performance transformed the objects’ existence through a change in location. I believe that an echo of this discrete performative feminist gesture can be found in RE-ACTION. The displacement that takes place in RE-ACTION is also an attempt to transform the existence of the subjects depicted in the original photographs. The violence of the gender relations in the portraits of the painters working and the alienatory mechanisms that are disclosed in the photographs of the marginalized, just as they occurred throughout the 19th century, both form part of our shared history. Alonso and Marful’s project opens up new opportunities for re-appropriating emotions and for re-appropriating the subjects oppressed and conditioned by that history. It is not simply a question of suggesting that feminist issues can warn us of the ideas imposed in history’s prevailing versions but of realizing that the issues raised by feminism have always been there.

NOTES

1 Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne (de Boulogne), Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine ou analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions, Paris: Librairie J.-B. Bailliere et Fils, Second edition, 1876, p. 49.

2 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie l’âge classique, París: Gallimard, (1972), 1988. (Published in English as Madness & Civilization).

3 Bruno-Nassim Aboudrar, Voir les fous, París: Presses Universitaires de France, Collection Histoire/Épistémologie, 1999, p. 11.

4 I must thank Nancy Buchanan, Esther Ferrer, Cheri Gaulke, Susan Siegel, Barbara T. Smith and Nil Yalter for the time and dedication that they devoted to this task. Without their voices, I would not have been able to modulate mine in this article.

5 Gina Pane, Pierres déplacées (Displaced Stones) 1968, Documentation for the performance. François Pluchart collection, INHA-Collection Archives de la Critique d’Art.