L.A.Raeven, Wild Zone 1, 2001, video still 30 x 40 cm
Yearnings to be thin and searches for a "soul mate" fuel countless women's magazine editorials, internet empires and relentless self-loathing inner-monologues of women throughout the West. Yet as artists L.A. Raeven demonstrate, women who desperately deny themselves food, and binge on self-help books, on-line dating sites and seminars about "compatibility" should be more thoughtful about what they wish for.
Identical Dutch twins Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven, who work under the conjoined moniker of L.A. Raeven, have made the stifling reality of a joint existence and the torment of unhealthy thinness into the subjects of their art.
By demonstrating the perverse extremes of two drives, which too-often and too-easily tip into obsession, the twins hope to force women to confront and examine their insecurities and moderate their sense of inadequacy in the face of society's pressures.
But the result of this ostensibly benevolent and "sisterly" motive is that the twins have became focal points for debates about eating disorders, and ironically have been invested with the status of icons on
'pro-ana' websites which support anorexia as a life-style choice.
In 'Wild Zone 1', the sisters carefully and fastidiously share a cracker and lounge lethargically, in tank tops and oversized trousers, on the hard gallery floor. Their bodies are painfully emaciated, yet their single-minded focus on ritualistically dividing and sharing the meager food is methodical enough to be captivating. 'Wild Zone 2' was shot on site in the ICA, and focused on two identical male twins dressed as goths who re-enact the ritualized eating of "L. A. Raevendom." For those watching the videos, the gallery space was infused with a perfume conveying a faint scent of urine and decay, concocted from the artists'
combined body odor and emissions.
Since they exhibited 'Wild Zone 1' in Holland and then 'Wild Zone 2' at London's ICA gallery, L.A Raeven's work has been distilled to its most freakish aspects by the mass media. For example, The Observer's Sean O'Hagan centered his description of 'Wild Zone 1' around their "anorexic worldview." "The twins stare out at the viewer," he reported, "their gaunt faces unreadable . . . Occasionally one of them will take a cracker, break it in half and feed it to her sister."
Under the heading "anorexia, art, war, rant," blogger "Culiblog" wrote that, "LA Raeven were launched into fame in February 2002 when they created a huge kafuffle with Wild Zone 1 & 2, a video installation exhibited at the ICA London. It was the first time that the twins showed themselves in their work, lolling about and being overly skinny amidst half-drunk glasses of white wine and a floor littered with the occasional mini-nibble. The gallery was infused with the artists' own feral scent, reportedly concocted from their very own pee. Of course the bourgeois art press found it so scandalous that female artists with anorexia should be able to express themselves about body image, that they censured the artists' call for participation before the exhibition, and a goodly deal of the exhibition's press. Just like in China!"
The Culiblog author was responding to an interview on BBC NewsNight, in which L.A. Raeven's work was ravaged by Susie Orbach, the author of 'Hunger Strike' and 'Fat is a Feminist Issue' and to the furor that
resulted from the artists' attempt to post a personals ad to recruit an "L.A. Army" of "ideal individuals" with 17-inch waists, "no full breast development", under-developed "secondary sex" characteristics, "thin fingers" and "unusual eating habits," which the Guardian refused to publish.
Reductivist readings like these undercut the twins' genuine academic and intellectual creditability. They both attended Amsterdam's Jan Van Eyck Akademie, where Liesbeth studied with Philip-Lorca DiCorcia and Nan Goldin, and Liesbeth worked with Jean-Paul Gaultier. After art school, the twins separated for six years. During that period Angelique worked as a nurse and reportedly carried a healthy body-weight. But she claims that she can only be happy when close to her sister, and though her weight has fallen since they were reunited, their creative collaboration adds gravitas to their unique and situation.
Ironically, feminist critics of L.A. Raeven's art often objectify the artists and dismiss their own interpretation of their work. Though it is difficult to believe, despite their emphatic denials, that the sisters do not suffer from an eating disorder, their bodies' actual medical realities should be less important than the fact that their art does succeed in shocking audiences into rethinking their ideas about privileges allotted to thin women, and women who are not seen as single or alone.
I began this email interview with Liesbeth Raeven for a short piece that I wrote about the twins to accompany two of their images in a spread I curated for the "Issue 18: Structure/ Choas" issue of the Berlin-based Sleek magazine. For the spread, entitled "Moments of Clarity," I had gathered a group of six artists whose work addressed various addictive behaviors in their work. In contrast to Will Cotton's sugared cornucopia, Laurie Hogin's Sir Edward Landseer-styled paintings of tweaked-out pill-popping guinea-pigs, Artists Anonymous' rants against rehab and a photograph by Gareth McConnell of a junkie injecting horse into his bleeding groin, L.A. Raeven's self-portrait from 'Wild Zone 1' has evoked the most intense, consistently strong responses from viewers.
And though I incorporated L.A. Raeven into the Sleek project on the assumption that they were making a 'Pro-Ana' statement, the email responses I received from Liesbeth (speaking for herself and her sister)
prompted me to extend the interview and engage them further for this forum.
L.A.Raeven, Thin Line, 2006, photograph 101 x 101 cm
Ana Finel Honigman: How do you respond to criticism that your work is less art than the flamboyant flaunting of a genuine disease?
L.A. Raeven: We consider that as an insult. We also dismiss it as an obviously superficial reading of our work. That comment is often made by people who have nothing to do with our work. We acknowledge that we are somewhat complicit in this process, since we produce provocative work. But that level of provocation is only the upper layer. There are many layers underneath.
AFH: What are your responses to intellectual women's justifications, or illuminations, of their eating disorders?
LAR.: You only can get rid of an eating disorder if you want to rid yourself of it. But most women with an eating disorder don't want to be free from it. They feel that they win something with it. That feeling of victory enables them to justify it for themselves. As for us, we don't believe that anyone with an eating disorder can ever be completely happy or satisfied with her or his situation.
AFH: Are you familiar with books like Rudolph Bell's 'Holy Anorexia', which ties the history of women's self-starvation to depictions of female saints and pre-feminist creativity? How do you respond to the theory, held by many self-identified anorexics, that anorexia is a form of performance, a statement or even an act of faith?
LAR: Yes, I know these books, but I don't agree completely with their premise. I see anorexia more as a 'refusal to engage with adulthood' than some expression of pre-feminist creativity. Anorexia usually
strikes its sufferers when they hit puberty. It arrives when the changes in a woman's body scares her.
AFH: Do you feel that the surface or upper layers to your work can and should be put aside by critics, or are you weeding out shallow viewers with the more controversial aspects to your art?
LAR: A lot of critics copy quotes from other critics, instead of engaging with the work directly. They don't have an open mind. Especially in Holland, critics refuse to look further than the obvious. To us, it appears that they have a preconceived opinion and that makes us feel that their judgment is often unfair. It is not our intention to scare people, but we want to make people think.
AFH: If critical response in Holland seemed aggressive and often insensitive, why did you decide to show your work in England, where there is a strong tradition of the press attacking artists and over-simplifying their work for the sake of "shock horror" headlines?
LAR: We were surprised that people reacted so aggressively in Holland, and we thought it was just critics being "typically Dutch." We didn't except the same reaction in England because we thought that the public
had seen things that were even more shocking. In fact, the curator, Martin van Niewenhuizen, was even more surprised. I don't know whether he would have chosen to work with us if he had known all this before.
AFH: Is there a particular conclusion that you want people to reach when regarding your work?
LAR: Some people think that we make an easy set of statements. But they are not aware of how much research is involved in what we do. Before we make a work, we do extensive research into the medical and scientific background to our subject.
AFH: Does the research matter if the only information received by your audience is a 'quick and easy' statement?
LAR: Not everyone reacts so simplistically. People either like or hate our work. There is no middle-ground. So, yes I would say that the research still matters to some. Yes, the research still matters.
L.A.Raeven, Wild Zone 2, 2002, photograph 101 x 101 cm
AFH: Can you give an example of what kind of foundation you develop for your work?
LAR: In "Wildzone," for example, we were inspired by Deleuze.
AFH: Explain that reference for me, please. I am unfamiliar with how "Wild Zone" could play into his theories.
LAR: The title '"Wild Zone' was not chosen by us. It was the title of a 2001 group show at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, where we were asked to contribute a new work. When we heard the title, we remembered a text by Deleuze in which he describes a 'Wild Zone' as a group of outlaws who live outside society. According to his text, those within society want to keep outlaws out because they are scared of them. This fear is caused by the outlaws' role as a prediction of all kinds of things which can go wrong within a society. For that reason, society actually needs outlaws. Outlaws enable society to become aware of its own profound problems. The way that I am explaining Deleuze's theory simplifies it, but essentially we were wanted viewers of "Wild Zone" to despise us and feel scared of us. We wanted the reaction to be as negative as possible.
AFH: Were you aware that you were risking having your anti-social stance taken literally by viewers and critics, or did you assume that your acting out the position of the "outlaw" would be understand by audiences as a form of conceptual performance?
LAR: To show ourselves as being miserable, ugly, useless individuals was not easy. I had to really talk Angelique into doing it before she accepted my plan. Once we both decided to go forward, we knew that we would be in trouble. We knew that we would hurt a lot of people through the piece.
AFH: Was that personal level a genuine concern? Were you worried about your family and friends misunderstanding your motives?
LAR: It is not that we don't care about other peoples' feelings. We grew ten years in a month due to the stress we suffered from producing and presenting that work. We were not proud to be so thin. In fact, we were ashamed of ourselves. People don't realize that. It hurts us when critics describe "Wild Zone" as an easy form of shock. They don't have to rub it in about how awful we looked then.
AFH: So, you feel that critics are predisposed to judge your work a certain way, but do you also feel judged in your daily life because of your appearance?
LAR: We look normal now. A lot of critics assume that we will still look like we did during "Wild Zone" but we did a performance last year in Zurich in which we posed on a hospital bed like Siamese twins, and I was very afraid people would make nasty comments along the lines of "they are now fat'" or "look how they gained all that weight!" But instead, a Dutch critic actually still described us as anorexic. When I read that,
my response was 'did you have your eyes in your pocket or what!"
AFH: But are you saying that these issues are absent from your everyday life?
LAR: We do feel judged in our every day lives, but not because of how we look, as much as because we do everything together and people always see us together.
L.A.Raeven, 5200 ml..., 2006, photograph 101 x 101 cm
AFH: Why do you feel that people are put off by your closeness?
LAR: I think that they consider it sad, because they assume that we have no free will. And it can be very difficult to see us fight over things that are nor important to other people. I also suppose that they find it
sad that I can never have a boyfriend. What they do not understand is that we are more partners than sisters. Sometimes we feel like we're trend watchers. We are aware that there is something happening with a small subculture, but eventually it will become normal to larger society.
AFH: Which subculture are you referring to? Are you saying that you two function as a "small subculture?"
LR: I guess that we are referring to ourselves as our own subculture. We are not living in the culture in which most people live. We have different rules and a different relationship. We do not have a normal
sister-relationship, yet we also can't refer ourselves as "partners." What we have is something which goes further than even what exists between lovers.
AFH: How does your relationship to each other reflect larger cultural trends?
LAR: Society has an enormous influence on us all. As twins, we are more aware of that influence because our genes are the same, but our environment can still affect us.
AFH: What conclusions have you reached about "nature vs. nurture?"
LAR: If you change your environment, then you can end up feeling guilty if the decision turns out poorly because you can compare your circumstances to those of your identical sister.
L.A.Raeven, Love knows many faces, 2006, video still 30 x 30 cm
AFH: Do you think that contemporary society overvalues individual independence?
LAR: I think individual independence belongs so much to our society that one thing can not go without the other. It is so important to our society, that you can not even say whether it is overvalued. People do not know how lucky they are that they are unique individuals. Instead, they try to submit to an "ideal." What they do not understand is that being unique makes you so much more beautiful and special than being part of a prescribed ideal. In our Western society, appearance is very important. For a lot of people, it is the subject that they worry about and think about most. But somehow, they don't want to see it being directly discussed in art. Maybe it is just too close to home, for many viewers.
AFH: Do you think feminism has really changed the pressure on women to adhere to society's beauty standards?
LAR: Not really. The image has changed but not the pressure.
AFH: Is it women or men who make these rules?
LAR: I think that women are more responsible.
AFH: Do you find women or men respond more passionately to your work?
LR: Definitely men.
AFH: What do you consider beautiful?
LAR: The definition of "beautiful" is different for everybody and difficult to describe. But for us 'being special and different' is important.
AFH: Are you saying that you are "unlucky" to have each other because your ties mean that you are no longer individuals with unique beauty, but instead you are an interlocked unit?
LAR: Yes. We both wished we were never born as a twin.
AFH: Are you hoping that viewers can extrapolate about other types of intimacy through observing yours?
LAR: We want to intrigue people with the ideas of what it really means to be a twin. We want to destroy all images people have of twinlife. We want to make it clear that being a twin is a cruel joke of nature,
especially in our society.
L.A.Raeven, Echoes of Dispair, 2007, video still
All images courtesy the artist and ellen de bruijne projects
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She is Art Editor of Alef (alefmag.com) and contributes regularly to such publications as Style.com, Grazia, Tank, Sleek and Harper's Bazaar.
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