The Brooklyn Rail

Don’t let the sex appeal of Alexandra Bachzetsis’s Notebook distract you. This is an altogether wildly provocative, dazzlingly smart body of work. Look beyond the latex gear donned by Bachzetsis in her performances or the sensuously charged exchanges between the artist and her repertoire of collaborators and there is a radical statement being made, one that foregrounds the myriad ways in which bodies become sites of objectification and ultimately, commodification. Adopting gestures and forms through which sexuality manifests—voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, and other isms, too—the three performance-based video pieces and accompanying installations that make up Bachzetsis’s Notebook deploy erotic tropes as a way to underscore their capacity to transform their subjects into objects of transaction and observation. Notebook is a meditation upon the dynamics of power. Marcuse stans take note.

Premiering in 2023 at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland and now reprised in New York, Notebook brings together live performance and video installations created by Bachzetsis in collaboration with several artists, the result of a creative process she refers to as a “dialogic method.” Analogous to the archetypal artist’s notebook filled with sketches and flashes of inspiration, Bachzetsis’s model for collaboration presents her works as ongoing and observational, a platform for testing pieces as well as revisiting them. With every staging of a performance or an exhibition, Bachzetsis’s Notebook responds to its setting and performers, and thus continues to evolve.

Such is the case with Denim (2023), one of three video installations included here. Staged first as a live performance at the exhibition’s opening night—featuring Bachzetsis and her collaborator for the piece, Antoine Weil—the video version of Denim stars a duo clad head-to-toe in the ubiquitous indigo-dyed fabric, their heads covered in denim hoods. Sensuously writhing together on the floor, the pair is locked in the perpetual embrace of the video’s looped format, forever rolling, flipping, and responding to each other. Incorporating highly suggestive amatory gestures, this piece is equal parts frottage and wrestling. And yet, despite all the touching and tussling, the starring duo never progress to the sex act itself. Instead, Denim acutely portrays the often furtive nature of the erotic maneuver, with Bachzetsis and her interlocutor foregrounding the dance between antagonism and enticement which defines the sexual encounter. You can’t have foreplay without the play.

Meanwhile, the artifice of fetish and its performative qualities come to the fore in the three-channel video Mermaid Porn (2023). Filmed at an in-door aquatic park, Mermaid Porn follows three storylines starring a trio of women, Bachzetsis included, and an ever-present man filming them with several recording devices (played by Bachzetsis’s collaborator, French filmmaker Michel Auder). Interspersed between scenes of the women donning and posing in latex fetish gear in a shower room or coquettishly eating würst and French fires at the center’s commissary is underwater footage of them swimming with latex mermaid tails attached. Like in Denim, Bachzetsis and her counterparts in Mermaid Porn engage in a variety of gestures and behaviors associated with concupiscence that are emptied of their potentiality for consummation. The ever-present filming of Auder, the posing, the demure cooing and lascivious gyrating of the women in latex, even the jagged, crinkling sounds of their outfits as they move, all of it is exaggerated for effect. Deprived of sincerity and replaced with performativity, Bachzetsis transforms the sexualized encounter into a series of ritualized exchanges in which there are designated performers and consumers.

Presented as a diptych of vertical screens, Sophia the Robot Sees Her Reflection for the First Time (2023) features Bachzetsis and her counterpart, the Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair, sitting opposite each other. Reciprocating various caressing gestures and flirtatious glances, the film’s mise-en-scène calls to mind the famed, unattributed 16th century painting Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses soeurs, which depicts two bare-breasted women, one reaching across to pinch the nipple of the other. Like Denim and Mermaid Porn, Sophia cultivates a sense of improvisation developing between the two performers as they respond to each other. The measured and studied exchanges between Bachzetsis and Sinclair lend each action a heightened, symbolic quality. If Mermaid Porn could be said to deploy a hyper-exaggerated, stylized affectation as a means to surface the power dynamics animating sexual behavior, then Sophia relies on far more subtle elicitations to achieve the same effect.

Notebook is a body of work with big ambitions. Most compellingly, in Bachzetsis’s “dialogic method” there exists a model for overcoming the mechanisms of alienation—think cruising apps like Grindr or Tindr—which can reduce sex to a consumer experience. Understanding Bachzetsis’s use of erotic tropes as a critique of their very ability to become parodies of themselves, it also becomes clear that her method of achieving this is itself a model for how to engage with sex beyond the transactional. In a framework which conceives of sex as a communal experience, always additive and improvisational, the possibility of its reification becomes ever more remote.