Murder Mysteries -Same Difference

“Two young women share a spotless enclosed space – the proverbial white cube of contemporary art practice perhaps? – littered with the clichéd markers of femininity and insular, domestic life. They indulge in the minute rituals of the female quotidian: drinking tea, wrestling with clothing, applying make-up to each other’s mirror images, sprinkling their bland interior with fetishistic, ‘girlie’ signposts of hope and joy. It is a perfectly ordinary day in the perfectly ordinary life of two perfectly forgettable personae.

A small camera mounted on a tripod that ceaselessly travels through the space, however, alerts us to the staged nature of this seemingly peaceful, homely environment – or, better still, to the fact that this interior can, at any given moment, be transformed into the stage or film set of a Beckettian Kammerspiel. The ‘actors’ use the camera to record actions and events that seem both random and studiously choreographed. [Most of them actually seem innocently absurd or just faintly disturbing.] Witnessing the performance taking place in its entirety inside – meaning: inside the demarcated space or ‘white cube’ – we hardly recognize the traces that have been left behind for all to see on the monitor outside. ‘What happened?’ seems to be the only appropriate question to be asked. ‘What was that?’ Thus a ‘thriller’ is made – in more than just one sense. Subtly phrasing the fateful progress of the actions and events that are taking place ‘inside’, the background presence of Bernard Herrmann’s classic Vertigo score subtly serves to underline the Hollywood point of the kitchen space (and/or the bathroom, and/or the living room – in short, any room that can be constructed as ‘feminine’) as a much-loved ‘scene of the crime’ and site of the uncanny.”