Sorel Cohen
"Sorel Cohen" by Diana Nemiroff, Fall 2008, pp. 150-51
Sorel Cohen’s recent exhibition returns to a subject she explored in her 2003 show at the Centre culturel canadien in Paris: the psychoanalyst’s couch. Whereas those photographs, collectively titled “Wounds of Experience,” were taken in Paris, the 14 images that make up “Divans Dolorosa” were all shot in Quebec, mostly in Montreal, where the artist lives. There are certain sociological differences between the two series—unlike the Parisian works, in which one glimpsed elegant apartments, the Quebec series now and then reveals the familiar homeliness of suburbia. There is even a view of the consulting room of a psychoanalyst specializing in children, with hand puppets on a table beside the couch. But these documentary distinctions are of less importance than what the images share.
The heart of the matter for Cohen is the couch, the “divan” of the title, which—its Latin modifier recalling the via dolorosa of Christ’s journey to Golgotha— conjures up the psychic suffering that leads us secular moderns to the talking cure, where once we might have consulted a spiritual healer. Each image, then, is a painful stopping place on the way to a resurrection of understanding, reconciliation with the past and, maybe, hope for the future. Each one focuses on the point where the head of the couch and the chair of the analyst meet—a gap that is bridged by the camera alone, for the Freudian orthodoxy of this encounter dictates that the eyes do not meet. The connection is mediated entirely by words.
If it seems perverse that Cohen (a Jew descended from the People of the Book) should attempt to translate such an essentially wordy subject into images, I hasten to add that she uses many words, beginning with the punning encounter of the sensually Turkish word “divan” and the achingly Christian “dolorosa” in her title. Each of these pregnant images bears a caption etched into glass — “Daddy’s little girl” or “irrational anxiety,” for example. So words do hover around them, calling up, on the one hand, the Stations of the Cross and, on the other, the analyst’s notebook.
But Cohen is a photographer who specializes in ghostly traces. Her earliest works, from the late 1970s, chastely captured the repetitive gestures of household tasks like making the bed and transformed them into fields of colour. She quickly moved into more erotic territory, however; one remembers the blurred flesh of her nude wrestlers (one of the hundreds of images found in Francis Bacon’s studio archive after his death was a photo, torn from an art magazine, from Cohen’s After Bacon/Muybridge series). Linking the early and late works is the motif of the bed. In the later works especially, her empty, unmade, rumpled beds suggest the wounds of the body by way of their messy folds. In contrast, the daybeds in these photographs are resolutely mute. Turned to the wall, away from the analyst, they evoke a psychic turmoil whose relief, as W. B. Yeats intimated in his late poems, is to be found mostly in art.
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