A NA-NA’S PARALLAX — ISABELLE LUTZ

The na-na’s

︎︎︎︎︎︎

MANIFESTO

FROM DIMINUTIVE TO INSUBORDINATION

The feminine is the product of a historical and social construct — an assignment to become an object of desire, as Simone de Beauvoir would say — as well as of systems of representation and a plurality of narratives, both symbolic and political, which shape its place under conditions of subordination.

The na-na’s stem from this marginalisation, from this grey area where language and the social body relegate women — the "second sex" — to a role of entertainment, almost innocuous, while seeking to strip them of their sovereignty. They emerge at the heart of this ambiguity and bear the stigma of disparagement, where infantilisation still too often remains a tool of neutralisation. In French, the very term "nana", beneath its apparent lightness, encapsulates a social tension between colloquial address and a pejorative connotation: it relegates women to a trivialised, accessible place, albeit one that is statutorily devalued.

Cinema, and more specifically what Laura Mulvey termed the "male gaze", has historically organised visual pleasure around a vision moulded by male desire, in which women often become both spectacle and receptacle inside a closed economy of looking.

A na-na’s parallax has emerged from this ambivalence and stands in opposition to this unnamed violence. The occupation of space is thus no longer ornamental: it becomes an affirmation. The na-na is not merely represented; she is modulated, performed and, through the repetition of the pattern, thwarts attempts at appropriation.

It is therefore not simply a matter of placing female figures within the field of the picture, but of altering the scopic regime that ordinarily constitutes them as surfaces of projection. Parallax intervenes here as a critical operation: it shifts the angle of perception, decentres the authority of the spectator and substitutes, for the motif offered up for identification or desire, a device of counter-address, capable of undermining the anchor point from which the image is consumed, down to the silent grammar through which visibility is granted.

Moreover, the hyphen in na-na opens a breach in the word. It disjoins and reiterates. It suspends self-evidence, fragments its continuity and reveals what familiar usage tends precisely to mask. On the one hand, it suggests "nana" as a common designation for the feminine, laden with lightness; on the other hand, it introduces the childish resonance of an onomatopoeia capable of disqualifying and reducing women’s speech to the realm of caprice or frivolity.

But this syllabic duplication also takes on the value of an objection: na-na, in its phonetic proximity to "no-no", is no longer just a nickname. The insolence lies in this subtle reversal: taking up a condescending name, countering its authority, then breaking free from the codes to the point of making the signifier itself the site of a claim and formal insubordination.

︎︎︎︎︎︎

THE NAME AND THE FRAME

VISIBILITY WITHOUT SURRENDER

There is a long history of the impact images have on women. This distinction, which feminist theory has taken decades to formulate precisely, lies at the heart of Isabelle Lutz’s practice: a body of installations (video, photography, multimedia) that takes as its raw material not the female body per se, but the system of conventions that renders it visible and, in so doing, instrumentalises it — reduces it to a sign whose legibility is conditioned by the viewer's subjectivity.

The characters that populate this body of work are called the na-na’s. The term is not innocent, nor was it chosen by chance. In French, "nana" belongs to that category of words that seem innocuous yet are in fact agents of social classification. Roland Barthes would have recognised here one of those common myths that operate all the more effectively because they pass for natural: language that names by categorising, that designates by fixing. Isabelle Lutz takes up this term and splits it in two — na-na, with its hyphen, its repetition, its resemblance to a refusal uttered in a low voice. The appellation thus becomes a small apparatus of reversal.

This act of linguistic appropriation cannot be separated from a reflection on what it means to portray female characters today. Since the 1970s, from Cindy Sherman to Martha Rosler, from Nan Goldin to Yoko Ono, female artists have relentlessly revisited the codes of representation — the pose, the costume, the framing, the gaze into the camera — to dismantle the mechanisms by which a photographed woman is, by default, an artefact governed by conventions that precede and determine her. What Isabelle Lutz brings to this lineage is a keen awareness of mass culture as her field of operation: not grand painting or academic art history, but magazine covers and popular formats as so many prescriptive matrices that have organised the visibility of the feminine according to unspoken rules that no one has ever openly enunciated.

The na-na’s do not exist as final artworks but as identities awaiting their own space, which is that of installations. It is there, at the heart of the spatial dispositif, within the duration and the viewer’s experience, that they unfold what they are: constructions that render visible the very process of their making. The costume is not a disguise — it is a demonstration that every body in the public sphere is an artifice. The pose is the convocation of an expected posture, sufficiently off-kilter for the normative reading to falter.

This is precisely what Isabelle Lutz calls parallax — and the designation deserves our attention, because it conveys something more precise than subversion or détournement, two qualifiers worn thin in the vocabulary of art criticism. In optics, this notion refers to the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in the observer’s standpoint: seen from two different vantage angles, a single fixed mark appears in different locations within the field of vision. Applied to the economy of the gaze, it ceases to be merely descriptive: it is not a matter of destroying the machinery, nor even of overturning it, but of deflecting the point of observation — so that what seemed natural reveals its contingency. The na-na does not attack the regimes of the visible head-on; it cracks them open: it occupies the space where it was expected, but not quite on the terms one might have assumed.

What distinguishes this approach from a purely critical art — from an act that would be content to denounce — is that it does not renounce visual pleasure, humour, or formal energy. The na-na’s are inhabited figures, endowed with a sense of irony and, at times, a quiet violence. They exist as active forces — neither victims nor heroines — that know the rules, and choose how to play with them without losing themselves along the way.

Perhaps this is what na-na’s parallax brings into play: not the promise of an escape from the symbolic apparatus — a promise the work carefully refrains from making — but the possibility of introducing a sufficient gap to make perceptible the power relations that constitute it, including within the images that claim to be emancipated from it.

︎︎︎︎︎︎