Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s Soul Strip Tease

‘I invited men into my hotel room and asked them very personal questions about their lives’ is an exhibition that positions speech as the primary means of sexual differentiation. Lili Reynaud-Dewar is the titular hostess, her likeness reproduced 14 times in ten mounted, aluminium-framed prints and four cylindrical, printed-silk lampshades (all 2022). Here, continuing a decade-long practice of representing her body unclothed yet painted, Reynaud-Dewar’s naked skin is coloured a shade of vermillion. The scale used in these images is slightly less than that of real life, with the resulting impish quality of the red figure recalling Anne Carson’s winged monster Geryon in her 1998 novel Autobiography of Red, but without any of the queer, adolescent angst. Instead, the artist guarantees the figures’ self-assuredness through the act of questioning: each of the wall prints are underscored by a ‘very personal’ question, printed below each image – for example, ‘How do you relate to masculinity?’, ‘What are your views on private property?’ and ‘Do you own real estate?’

Three video works – shown on wall-mounted screens and flanked by the many red bodies – respond to these questions. Their titles name Yassine Bouzid, Paul Alexandre and Patrick Potot as the occupiers of rooms 501, 502 and 506 of the Hôtel du Pré, Paris. With Reynaud-Dewar’s questions edited out, the men in these videos are soliloquists rather than interlocutors, seeming to speak almost continuously (in French) for the best part of an hour, recounting their experiences of housing, work, drugs, relationships, politics, activism and sexuality. The gallery offers transcripts and an introductory text to the video works, the latter describing these videos as the first in a larger, planned series. Insofar as they look forward, the videos also refer back to Reynaud-Dewar’s longstanding practice of making biographical interviews that expose subjects to a scrupulous yet intimate examination through the camera lens (e.g., 2019’s Rome, 1st and 2nd November 1975).

The cramped hotel rooms in the videos are illuminated by red artificial lighting. As light sources, the screens’ interaction with the exhibition’s four white lamps has the effect of creating a discordance between the works. Alongside this, an impasse seems to be created between the men in the videos and the naked woman in the static images – an effect exaggerated by the juxtaposition of French speech (in the films) and English text (in the prints). Unfortunately, although the directness of her gaze, the conceit of her poses and the continuation of an established practice of appearing naked all serve to make plain Reynaud-Dewar’s awareness about the role she is playing, her presence in this spatial arrangement has the effect of relegating the female body to that of a framing device or another piece of furniture. The men being asked very personal questions about their lives, although they are subject to a degree of scrutiny, are at least subjects who inhabit a realm of nuance.

The absolute separation of male and female figures in the exhibition could almost act as an illustration of Jacques Lacan’s well-worn statement (first made in 1970) that ‘There is no sexual relation’; Lacan’s suggestion was that the unconscious prevents subjects – men and women, in particular, though not exclusively – from ever reaching one another in a truly intimate sense. The identification by the exhibition’s introductory text of Reynaud-Dewar’s interviewees as ‘close friends, former students or family’ seems to insist that these are not sexualised exchanges. However, the seediness of the setting poses another question: If the sexual relation is non-existent, when and where does sex as we think we know it begin? The red light, the female artist’s naked body and the continuous thematisation of the men’s complex relations to masculinity and (potential) propertied status together stage the interviews as sexualized transactions, consummated as intercourse only by our voyeurism.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s ‘I invited men into my hotel room and asked them very personal questions about their lives’ is on view at Layr, Vienna, until July 30, 2022. 

^{Main image: Lili Reynaud-Dewar, ‘I invited men into my hotel room and asked them very personal questions about their lives’, 2022, installation view, Layr Vienna. Courtesy: the artist and Layr Vienna}