Emilie Halpern, “Karina 2”, 2016, chromogenic print, 25 x 30 inches, edition one of three

May 4-June 3, 2018

At 25 inches high and 30 inches wide, Emilie Halpern’s Karina 2 assumes an ambiguous aspect ratio reminiscent of certain French new wave films at a moment when formats toggled between the hand- held, pedestrian aspect ratios of 16mm cameras, television broadcast, and slightly more elongated 35mm cinematic formats. Karina 2 is a chromogenic print of a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s dynamic and soul crushing black and white 1962 film Vivre sa vie. The photograph’s subject is the film’s central character Nana, played by Danish-French actress Anna Karina, her back turned. Facing away is a dominant motif
of the film. In fact, following the opening credit sequence, Nana sits side-by-side with her lover in a café, both of their backs turned to the camera for nearly five minutes. They are separating. The setup of the scene has more than a passing resemblance to Édouard Manet’s 1882 Un bar aux Folies Bergère which utilizes a full-frame-mirrored backdrop to constellate a complex web of viewpoints, notably conflating the subject of the painting as both salesperson and commodity. Likewise, Godard’s subjects face a reflective wall, making no use of the mirror to establish eye contact with the camera, or each other, implicating the viewer thoroughly.

Karina 2 is a to-scale portrait that draws from another moment midway through the film. Pulled from a montage sequence of different hands touching Nana’s bare shoulder, the scene conveys the variable, sometimes prolific, consistently indifferent relationship Nana has to her clients as she digresses from her acting pursuits into prostitution. The scene is shallowly shot and starkly and brightly lit with details limited to Nana, back turned, from the shoulders up, a right hand on her left shoulder, a wire hanger on the wall to the left, textured wallpaper, Nana’s shadow, and a thin chain necklace around her neck. Nana stands
in the center in Halpern’s piece, which recomposes and crops the original shot considerably, her necklace covered with an ecstatically colorful image of a lovebird feather dappled concentrically with cerulean blue, emerald green, brownish blackish, and castilleja orange - a bold compositional bullseye. Karina 2 is an overexposure of the original film still to the point of near disappearance, background now a deep white void space, contour of shoulders very subtly defined, jet black hair dampened with toner-like grain to a light black, only the bottom edge of the wire hanger visible, barely, a faint horizon line. The anonymity of the hand on Nana’s shoulder is doubly confounding due to the presence of an ID bracelet, seemingly blank or at least illegible but for its spare familiarity. Most conspicuous is the nape of Nana’s neck exposed by her French bob. In an analysis of Gerhard Richter’s well-known portrait of a girl looking away Betty, Laura Lisbon wrote, “The nape is literally the back of the neck, but it is the back that is the front we wish the face to be. The nape provokes an erotics that loosely composes a turning of thought around a spot that is a meeting of its subject.” The chromogenic Karina 2 operates statically, denying the projective point-of- view of cinematics, heightening our “turning of thought”.

There is a moment in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina where Princess Katerina (Kitty) Alexandrovna Shcherbatsky fixates on Levin while he sits with his back to her. “And she glanced with a strange feeling of proprietorship at the back of her husband’s head and his sunburnt neck. It is a shame to interrupt him, but he has plenty of time. I must see his face; will he feel how I am looking at him? I will will for him to turn round. There, I will make him. And she opened her eyes as wide as she could, as if to concentrate more strength into her gaze.” Kitty’s telekinetic focus works and Levin turns around and begins speaking with her, though she quickly encourages him to return to what he was doing. He persists in questioning what she is thinking of, to which she replies, “Oh! What was I thinking about? About Moscow and — the nape of your neck!” That Karina’s name was “given” to her in an off-the-cuff suggestion by Coco Chanel is not only a palpable alliterative association, but also an altogether additional conceptual turn, like a game of telephone.

Despite their visual allure and name, lovebirds are often regarded for their high-strung, aggressive, and cantankerous disposition, especially when protecting a nest or partner. They molt twice a year, in the
fall and again in the spring, and their old feathers are replaced with new ones. They mate for life and are sometimes androgynous. The romantic signification of lovebirds may have been first established in a 14th century poem by Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem, Parliament of Fowls, describes events occurring on St. Valentine’s Day, and tells a story about birds who gather to choose their mates. The birds speak as if they were human, and most of them find partners, but the leading female bird is desired by three male suitors. The poem ends with a year’s postponement in deciding the outcome of this romantic quadrangle. While the recipient of romantic overtures in Chaucer’s poem is a bird itself, a single feather reaches in the other direction, conjuring the tactile eroticism that has to do with the difference between a feather and a touch.

Karina 2 is an illusory, austere love letter of dynamically constellated visual semiotics. The work is a lifesize, vignette style portrait, facing away but at eye level. Though appropriative, the work effectively turns its back on its references and establishes a vivid autotelic presence. However, one hint of the works’ sources sets into motion a vibrant floating chain of signifieds. The carefully handled referentiality of the work buffers from the eclipsing abruptness of realization and understanding, even in the case of and especially in the title of the work which pushes away from the tragic trajectory of the film’s narrative and refracts

us into the real-life circumstance of Anna Karina’s bittersweet relationship and creative partnership with Godard. Karina not Nana. In her final answer to a New York Times Style Magazine interview in 2016 about her life with Godard, Anna Karina said, “We never thought the films would be so famous for so long. We were just happy to do things. It was more bohemian. We knew we were doing something we liked and it was not like everyone else. It was a happy world.”

Karina 2 favors presence over vividness, an idea that loops us back once-and-for-all to a propelling moment in the concluding section of Vivre sa vie titled 12 – ENCORE LE JEUNNE HOMME – LE PORTRAIT OVALLE – RAOUL REVEND NANA. The young man who unabashedly expresses his love for Nana reads aloud to her from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Oval Portrait – “The portrait, I have already said, was that of
a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom and even the ends of the radiant hair, melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back ground of the whole.” Karina 2 is an inversion of the portrait Poe describes, the “vague yet deep shadow” exchanged for a whiteout of re-photographed film grain, eye contact an impossibility, our gaze repeatedly regrouped by the enthralling chromatic plumage, making it very difficult to look away.