Backstage as off-screen
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THE UNDERSIDE OF THE IMAGE
Backstage — Aldi’s Chickens in love, video installation (2 min. 40 sec.), 2012.
INTENTIONALITY, PROCESS AND PERFORMATIVITY
Backstage images are often treated as functional documents, produced out of logistical necessity and intended to remain on the margins. This reading rests on an assumption that merits closer examination: that the artwork begins the moment the form is fixed, and that everything that precedes it belongs to another register — one that is preparatory, instrumental, and devoid of meaning. Yet this boundary remains, at heart, a division — one of the many conventions by which a culture organises the value of visual regimes.
In Isabelle Lutz’s practice, this limit is structurally put under strain — as the logical consequence of a creative economy in which the body is simultaneously the instrument of creation and its raw material. She devises the set-ups, orchestrates the spaces, directs — and performs. This dual role is not incidental: it redistributes what is presented to the viewer, since what happens between takes has its own consistency. It is here that na-na — a composite figure whom the artist inhabits and builds through staging — takes shape, where the character tests itself before being framed, where something akin to presence prepares and conditions the final version.
Certain identity constructions exist only in and through their repetition — they have no original of which they are a copy, but arise through the iteration of the operations that embody them: the body seeking its posture, the light defining itself, the shot finding its form through approximation. Richard Schechner sheds light on this point when, in Between Theatre and Anthropology (1985), he theorises what he calls "restored behaviour": every performative gesture is a behaviour "lived twice", between spontaneity and fiction, where the body triggers a number of behavioural sequences before reaching its point of completion, without thereby constituting the finality towards which everything would converge. Yet what unfolds behind the scenes functions here as an off-screen element — a stratum that emerges where the final form had to sacrifice its earlier stages in order to come into being.
Isabelle Lutz’s approach is distinguished by the weight she places on intentionality and process — less as preparatory steps subordinate to the result than as places where the method finds its centre of gravity — which, far from serving as a prelude, establish a territory. It is in this porosity between the phases — and not in their resolution alone — that the piece finds its density. This dual anchoring reflects a broader conviction about what it means to create — about what is recognised as falling within the realm of art.
This stance is part of a lineage of practices which, each in their own way, have rejected the hierarchy between what deserves to be shown and what must remain in the shadows. Since The Personal Is Political (Hanisch, 1970) and the consciousness-raising groups, 1970s feminism has asserted with radical clarity that what was relegated to the domestic sphere was not situated outside the power structure, since it was a product of it. This assertion has had direct repercussions in contemporary creation: in Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969), which declared everyday interventions — washing the floors of a museum, shaking hands with 8,500 New York refuse collectors — to be art in their own right; in Martha Rosler, whose Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) imbued culinary movements with a critical charge that no conventional medium could have conveyed so directly; and finally, in Allan Kaprow — heir to the minimalist economy of Brecht’s event scores (Water Yam, 1963) — who theorised in the 1970s that the line between art and life should remain ‘as fluid and indistinct as possible’, and that the most mundane activities — washing, cooking, walking — could become the very substance of art, provided one shifted the gaze upon them.
The demarcation between what is granted the status of art and what is excluded from it has never been ontological — it has always been instituted, with its gatekeepers, its exclusions and its beneficiaries. What these currents have opened up is what Dewey was already articulating in 1934 in Art as Experience, namely that aesthetic experience does not lie in the object produced but in the continuum of the act that runs through it.
This re-qualification of the off-screen finds an echo in Philip Auslander’s (2006) reflections on performative documentation: the latter does not capture an event that would have preceded it — it contributes to the conditions by which the performance itself attains its legibility. This change in focus has direct consequences for the way in which stage documents are interpreted; they thus become a mode of existence, temporally displaced yet not subordinate to their origin.
From this perspective, the archive is no longer a repository of memory: it represents a deferred scene — a space where the tension of the search continues to exert its influence long after the event has taken place. What emerges in a photograph taken off-camera — a hesitant frame, light in limbo, an undetermined figure — is the piece in the making, in one of its most intimate and confidential phases.
Isabelle Lutz’s corpus redoubles through these visual fragments that were never intended to go public. Their fragility — the fact that they were not conceived for exhibition — gives them a resilience of their own: partially removed from the codes governing productions intended for an audience, they bear the mark of a vision not yet directed towards its reception. It is here that the question arises of what presides over the circulation of an image, of its subsequent legitimisation, and of what is reconfigured when it moves beyond the framework assigned to it — the work then poses its questions from a parallax that intentionality had not anticipated occupying.
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UNFRAMING
SCOPIC REGIMES AND THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE
Whenever the female body is depicted, there is a stage that precedes the address to the spectator — a moment when nothing has yet been decided as to the manner in which it will be presented. Most visual devices strive to make this stage disappear: the finalised image erases the successive operations of shaping and submits to public judgement a result gives itself out as natural. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Laura Mulvey demonstrates how Hollywood cinema has institutionalised an economy of male desire, so deeply embedded in formal conventions — of framing, lighting and editing — that it naturalises itself and passes off as self-evident what belongs to a historically situated scopic regime.
By interrogating the historical and discursive conditions of the construction of the feminine, Griselda Pollock expands on this diagnosis in Vision and Difference (1988): the resulting configurations, far from being mere iconographic or aesthetic choices, participate in the production and stabilisation of a dissymmetrical symbolic order, through which gender positions are fixed. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972), had formulated this with a precision that remains decisive: women are born into a culture that teaches them to watch themselves, to internalise the observer’s point of view to the point where it coincides with their own perception. The mediated female body is therefore never simply shown — it is always formatted. In this sense, feminist theorists of the image — from Griselda Pollock to bell hooks (who refused the capital letter in her pseudonym) – have brought to light the depth of this inscription within a social body structured by power relations that define "who looks — who is looked at", and according to which modalities this transaction is negotiated
Yet Isabelle Lutz’s na-na’s "look — before being looked at". They display themselves frontally, with that almost impertinent insistence of figures that defy assignment. Their appearance has the character of a summons: a na-na exposes herself, and in so doing, it is the apparatus of visibility that purports to make her available that is called into question. Simultaneously, something eludes capture while the image offers itself to sight: the codes of seduction are indeedmobilised, but diverted from their ordinary function. bell hooks, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), theorised what she termed the oppositional gaze — that way of staring back that counts as an act of active resistance, a genuine claim to spectatorial agency kept out of frame by power relations in which patriarchy articulates with race and class. A stare that scrutinises and withdraws from the logic of passive identification in order to produce, instead, a critical reading — and, moreover, to anchor women in a capacity for action that has been confiscated from her.
By occupying the scopic field without allowing themselves to be entirely circumscribed by it, the na-na’s introduce a subtle inflection: without stepping outside the frame, they highlight its boundaries — and thus denounce its arbitrariness. Inhabiting closed sociofugal spaces, they seem to hold themselves in a state of psychological suspension, as if confronted with their own inadequacy to the world. The ensuing sense of strangeness manifests itself in the tiniest details: a posture, an asymmetry of the face, a silent closeness between two individuals. In the same vein, secondary characters assume the role of mirror-presences and crystallise this sense of displacement: the other thus becomes the catalyst for an acknowledged vulnerability. Whether it is a na-na, a child, an animal or a fantastical creature, each being seems to share the same experience: that of an existence on the fringes, where the question of belonging remains open.
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WHO LOOKS BACK?
Figure — in Killing Me Pop, acrylic on linen, 160 × 200 cm, 2009.
Figure — in Mya & The Humpty Dumpty's, acrylic on linen, 130 × 160 cm, 2010.
My daughter — in Nana & the Technodrastics, acrylic on linen, 200 × 160 cm, 2009.
My son — in Nana & the Technodrastics, acrylic on linen, 200 × 160 cm, 2009.
Nana — in Nana & the Technodrastics, acrylic on linen, 200 × 160 cm, 2009.
Figure — in Waiting For My Dog, acrylic on linen, 130 × 160 cm, 2007.
In a private collection, Paris — Killing Me Pop, acrylic on linen, 160 × 200 cm, 2009.
In a private collection, Paris — Nana & the Technodrastics, acrylic on linen, 200 × 160 cm, 2009.