the new narcissi
by Douglas Messerli
Viola Krajewska and Piotr Krajewski (directors),
Marie-Jo Lafontaine (artist) Les larmes d’acier
(Tears of Steel), 1986, film 1997 [film of video installation]
The film version of Belgium artist Marie-Jo
Lafonaine’s 1986 work Tears of Steel was made presumably when it was
featured at the WRO Art Center in Wrocław, Poland. But I first saw this quite
monumental sculpture/video when it was presented at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art by my husband Howard N. Fox in the summer of 1988.
The work,
itself a large video installation, consists of 27 monitors and 6 laser discs
and players, all embedded with a large black hominoid figure that might also be
an expressionistic vision of the man it presents pulling weights. It is backed
by large rigid-like structures that could be perceived as the muscles of the
quite beautiful athletic young man-in-training’s back.
As Fox writes of others of her video works:
“…Lafontaine’s human protagonists are shown in
states of extreme physical or psychological stress boxers fighting in Round
around the Ring (1981), two “leatherboys” alternately abusing or caressing
each other in La Voix des maîtres (His Master’s Voice), a matador
engaged in mortal combat with his intended victim in A las cinco de la tarde
(Five O’clock in the Evening) (1984)—urging themselves to some other
state, which can only be imagined. Her videos are about exertion,
transcendence, and transfiguration.”
In Les
larmes d’acier the male body becomes a kind of machine, working itself out through
an intercourse with lifts and weights that turn the human almost into a
machine. Lafontaine herself suggests that the work came into being after
observing so many men dressed in pin-stripped suits entering Manhattan
buildings to slave out the day, and then seeing some of the same men later in a
nearby work-out space abandoning their bodies once again to the robot-like
machines that might make them over into the perfect examples of themselves.
Tears
of Steel, on one hand, simply presents the full duration, 10-minute
work-out of a young athlete working weights, as Fox puts it “pushing himself to
the point of exhaustion.” In a sense, he too has become the machine, a kind of
behemoth depicted in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis. Yet through the
lovely young man’s out-of-sync images of his workout presented in 27
simultaneous different moments, with the almost beatified look of his face, he
becomes a living presence, a kind of Narcissus looking for his own lost image,
or perhaps the one he hopes to discover.
With the penile-like metal pinions pounding into the holes of the weight-lifting machine it is
nearly impossible to perceive this would-be adonis without the sexual
implications his body-perfect endeavor entails. He is an erotic god sexually
interacting with his own future self. The echo of the machine’s gears are metaphorically
like the nymph Echo whom Narcissus attempts to chase.
Clearly Lafontaine places him in the
Romantic tradition, accompanying her beauty’s gestures with Maria Callas
singing Bellini’s “Casta Diva.”
Drowning
in his own sweat and tears, this young man is totally engaged in the transfiguration
of his self without a clue to the existence of anyone else. And his image can
only become, accordingly, a kind of erotic/homoerotic figure that has no time
or space for any other being, beautiful but brittle to the human touch. He
fucks the machine simultaneously as it fucks him.
Ultimately, his tears are inseparable from the oil of the machine’s
gears, tears of steel, without any possible human emotion except determination,
perhaps the same force that sends the businessmen off to the warrens early each
morning. As Fox suggests, the real becomes the ideal, lost to human interaction
and intervention, perhaps in the end, not so very different from artist Robert
Longo’s besuited men lined up horizontally across his canvasses, dancing
themselves like Medusa into death.
Los Angeles, April 20, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April
2026).
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