Susan Sontag once wrote that “we aspire to become images.” This observation is vividly realized in Julika Rudelius‘s video installation Forever. Rudelius selected five mature American women known for their beauty and wealth. Posing at upscale private swimming pools, they reflect on their ideas of beauty, the ways to obtain it, and its relationship with privilege. They list their most beautiful features and share their thoughts on clothing, makeup, and plastic surgery. The fact that the questions they are asked remain unheard endows the piece with intimacy, as if each woman is simply sharing her most personal thoughts directly with us. The work is punctuated by scenes of the women taking their self-portraits with a Polaroid camera. As in Hannah’s Still, they stand still in order to arrest an image of themselves. The Polaroid camera, in this case, serves as a mirror for the subjects, symbolizing the act of looking itself. Throughout this video, the women appear to be in a constant state of becoming images; we can feel the camera burning itself into their consciousness as they recline in lounge-chairs like odalisques, or walk back and forth by the pool as if modeling on a runway. The pool, like the Polaroid camera, serves an aesthetic as well as a symbolic function, since pools and lakes symbolize self-reflection (stemming from the myth of Narcissus and his gaze at his own reflection, which ultimately led to his drowning). From an aesthetic point of view, the different pools and backyards look almost identical, though they are all different; this fact highlights the homogeneity of these women’s worldviews and shallow aspirations. Although it may seem almost obscene to see such affluence after watching clips from Chechnya, Palestine, and India, Rudelius does not make it so easy to judge these women, who speak candidly about their lives, health, and sense of self.
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