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Essay by Pansy Duncan Fantasy seems quite at home at home: lying on the couch, hanging out in the garage, at ease in pyjamas and casual wear of all cuts and kinds. We are most ourselves where we are free to become other people; or conversely, home is a space fitted out and furnished for its own transformation. There is something definitionally domesticated about fantasy, as if it formed the lining through which we come to find ourselves at home at all. Each part of the series, the photos in Soo Ah Kim’s Copy Cats might be said to stage the production of fantasy space as one of the rituals that enable us, photographically and fantasmatically, to inhabit our bodies, our lives. Yet if the issue of fantasy in Kim’s Copy Cats is immediately legible, it is just this legibility that takes the ground out from under us as viewers. At once tempting and mocking, evoking the glibness with which discourses of cultural and national difference can be invoked in critical and aesthetic discussion, Kim has documented her friends tricking themselves out as their superhero in a mise-en-scene of cultural fantasies that don’t quite know where to call home. It is, after all, in the nature of fantasy to be in a muddle about just who it belongs to (is this a collective thing, or is this just me?) as, fluidly and fluently, first, second and third persons switch places, change costumes, swap masks. Fantasy turns the photographic project inside out — the project, that is, which I might begin in making inductions about class, race and background by evaluating the furnishings, noting the technologies, scanning the posters in these images. The force of fantasy adds something that eludes the smug and seemingly self-evident realist mode through which we might ordinarily read photographs of this kind. For, as these figures propel themselves into another space that is precisely no space at all — as a boy in the mirror makes a face at the opposite wall, as a Spiderman leering from a bathtub takes gravity perhaps too lightly — the photograph stages not a realist moment, but a discrepancy between what we see and what they imagine. The subjects have already left the building. As, it seems, have I. Jubilant in the act of recognition of just who it is they’re “meant to be” (“Is that Spiderman? And them — are they the Men in Black?”), I am already absorbed into the fantasy these photos stage: not "looking", but fantasising. The most interesting effect of “fantasy” is its ability to collapse the distinction between reality and fantasy on which its use depends in the first place, such that the suburban home so fully hallucinated in the background, right down to the technological wizardry that animates the fantasy, is revealed as itself a fantasy of a globalized, neutralized suburbia. Furthermore: looked at in series, the photos seem to play out, in their poses, postures, gestures, the episodic permutations that structure fantasy into a kind of labour — into work. I confess I like to call this series boys at home. Or are they men? If, in writing about them, I have trouble settling on even the most vacuous of nominations, on the other hand I have no trouble at all identifying (or misrecognising) the characters they’re pretending to be, as if, unlike the ground, the surface of a photograph could provide perhaps the only stable place to stand. Fantasy rides on the cusp of such points of indistinction and indefinition between subject and object, personal and collective, male and female: the paradox, for example, of an image that too clearly performs its masculinity in a visual field where performance itself is overly coded as feminine; that is most personal where it cleaves most to the social; that is most at home where it is least itself. I’d watch my step before these photos. As fantasists, these kids refuse to flatter, or even acknowledge through disguise, mimicry or imitation, the vanity of a spectator who likes to believe that they were somehow the point of the picture all along. If fantasy is itself a performance, it also defeats performance, as if the subjects of the photo don’t really need us here at all. The essence of fantasy, after all, is precisely its ability to screen the other out (fantasy, according to Zizek, is the smokescreen than covers the abyss of desire); though only, in the case of these photos, in order to suck us back in, again and again.1
Pansy Duncan is completing an MA in the Film, Television and Media department at the University of Auckland with a thesis on the rhetoric of tears in the melodramatic field. Her theoretical interests include critical/queer literary and film theory and contemporary poetics. Her writing has been published in Sport and Crease and exhibited in the show Dialectric Constant.
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