because

the night

Chris Burden, Bed Piece, 1972, performance documentation.

Courtesy: the artist and Gagosian, London © 2017 Chris Burden / licensed by The Chris Burden Estate, ARS,
New York and DACS, London, 2018

How do representations of
sleep reflect contemporary culture?
by Erik Morse
 ‘We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master
entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.’
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (1955)
‘Sleep is surely one of the most puzzling of all human
behaviours,’ declares neuroscientist Matthew Walker
in the opening pages of Why We Sleep: The New Science of
Sleep and Dreams (2017). ‘When you are asleep, you cannot
gather food. You cannot socialize. You cannot find a mate
and reproduce. Worse still, sleep leaves you vulnerable to
predation […] Yet sleep has persisted.’ Walker’s bestseller
attests to the persistence of a discipline that has generated
both academic and popular curiosity at a time increasingly
plagued by sleep deprivation and disorders. The sleep field
received its most significant boost with the 2017 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for research on
circadian rhythms. Developed by an American team of
biologists – Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbach and Michael
Young – the findings uncovered key facets of the body’s
sleeping and waking clocks at the genetic level.
If these conclusions appear, at first glance, as
somewhat self-evident – we intuit that daytime suits
waking life and night-time encourages sleep – such
common sense disregards sleep’s psychic and biologi-
cal histories. In the article ‘Temporal niche expansion
in mammals from a nocturnal ancestor after dinosaur
extinction’ (2017) – published in the journal Nature
Ecology & Evolution – a team of British and Israeli scien-
tists claim that our earliest ancestors were nocturnal in
origin and only re-oriented to a diurnal regime following
the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
Subsequent human sleep regimes have continued to vary
widely, from the hunting clock of the pre-Neolithic tribes-
man to the seasonal calendar of the agrarian serf and the
illuminated night crawl of the Edisonian boulevardier.
Appropriately, visual representations of sleep have
existed nearly as long as recorded civilizations. One of the
oldest extant examples is of a clay sculpture, discovered in
Malta, known as The Sleeping Lady (c.3,000 BCE). Another,
from Cyprus, is a terracotta totem depicting a mother
cradling a sleeping baby (c.2,000 BCE). Both objects pres-
age two motifs that have dominated Western art’s figurative
representations of sleep since the Renaissance – the nude
woman in repose and the nativity – as well as marking the
domain of sleep itself as the purview of the feminine.
In the modern tradition, most art-historical narratives
of sleep were yoked to late-19th-century romanticism and
the early surrealist movement. Their championing of
abstract forms (for example, in the paintings of Odilon
Redon, J.M.W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler) and
symbolic archetypes (in the paintings of Giorgio de
Chirico, Max Ernst and Félicien Rops) became the pictorial
corollaries to literary meditations on dreams popularized
by psychoanalysis. Texts such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872),
Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation
of Dreams, 1899) and Henri Bergson’s Le Rêve (The World
of Dreams, 1901) conform to John Ruskin’s observa-
tion in ‘The Mountain Glory’ (1862) that: ‘Great art may
be properly so defined in the Art of Dreaming.’ But, in
celebrating the possibilities of the dream state, these texts
also depreciate the act of sleeping itself to a mere psychic
incubator or a blank screen preserved by the dream, which
would communicate significant meanings or desires
across the gradient of consciousness. Freud himself writes
frieze no.193 145
in The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘I have had little occasion
to deal with the problem of sleep, for that is essentially
a problem of physiology.’ Likewise, Carl Jung’s career-
long research into dream analysis and mythic archetypes
emphasized the dream’s salutary benefits in waking life.
In one of his earliest texts, Sigmund Freud: On Dreams
(1901), Jung concurred with Freud’s claim that dreams
were a mere facade and a ‘guardian of sleep’; however, he
did not elaborate beyond Freud’s mechanistic verdict on
sleep itself.
Sleep’s knotty relationship to the 20th century’s
emergent technologies, and the subsequent popularity
of futurist ideologies, may have contributed something
to the fracture of these romantic and psychoanalytic
assumptions. The sensorial ruptures produced by cinema,
recorded music and early multimedia performance were all
of a piece with the industries of high-speed transportation,
telecommunication and electrical gridding: what art
historian Jonathan Crary, echoing Karl Marx, refers to in
his 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2016) as ‘meta-
morphic’ and ‘alchemical instruments’ that began to alter
‘durational processes’ of consciousness. Such alterations
challenged the secular-humanist origins of 19th-century
psychologies like Freudianism, which pivoted on the
scientific traditions of the rational, bourgeois subject.
These transformations, however, did not register
in official surrealist doxa. When in the Manifeste du
surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto, 1924), André Breton
asks: ‘When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping
philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to sur-
render myself to the dreamers,’ his musings were still
entranced by a romantic portrait of dreams. Writing
in 2013 about Joseph Cornell’s experimental film Rose
Hobart (1936), the theorist Michael Pigott takes great
pains to distinguish between the late surrealist’s views
on sleep and those of his French counterpart: ‘It was
as much the poetry of sleep that attracted Cornell, as it
was the poetry of dream […] The banality of sleep, its
literal and necessary everydayness, and the privileged
and peculiar interiority and subjectivity afforded by
the sleep state.’1 Cornell, who became acquainted with
the Russian prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova in the
early 1940s, was particularly inspired by her role as
Princess Aurora in ‘Aurora’s Wedding’ (1922), Sergei
Diaghilev’s one-act divertissement of The Sleeping Beauty
(1890), which served as a backdrop or motif in many of
the artist’s boxes. Cornell often explored sleep’s tempo-
ral or nostalgic pleasures through a mutual passion for
gadgetry and bricolage, using the avant-garde formats of
the assemblage film and shadow box. His work also bears
similarities to Marcel Duchamp’s various experiments;
the French artist was a friend and central influence on
Cornell. Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled (1916, depict-
ing a so-called impossible bed), Sculpture for Travelling
(1917–18) and Étant donnés (Given, 1946–66) reference
the modern complexities of sleep outside the panacea
of dreams.
Subsequent, time-based experiments – such as Andy
Warhol’s five-hour film Sleep (1963, originally screened as
an installation with a La Monte Young soundtrack), Terry
Riley’s ‘All Night Concert’ series (1967) and Chris Burden’s
march 2018
 two-week-long Bed Piece (1972) – reproduced sleep in ‘real
time’ with all of its incumbent mundanities and soporif-
ics. These works were also conceptually indebted to fluxus
happenings such as Ben Vautier’s Sculpture vivante (Living
Sculpture, 1962), a storefront installation in which the artist
worked, ate and slept in public view, and Yoko Ono’s widely
reported Vietnam protest series, ‘Bed-In for Peace’ (1969).2
With the fluxus valorization of so-called concrete art –
a term employed by founder George Maciunas to highlight
mundane experiences and readymade objects over abstract
or imitative works of art – the act of sleep was not merely
analogized but literalized as an artistic gesture. Rather than
mediating or representing the idyll of slumber by visual
artefact, fluxus artists enacted the direct experience of sleep
itself as a rarefied performance of everyday life.
The shift away from romanticism and toward a politics
of the quotidian also acknowledged the affective estrange-
ments associated with sleep (or lack thereof). Boredom,
restlessness, fatigue – all were symptoms of a postwar ennui
haunted by the trauma of global industrialization. Literary
theorists Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas,
anticipating the late-20th-century turn to poststructural-
ism, rejected the notion of sleep either as a salutary psy-
chological state or as the momentary death it had so often
been compared to in the philosophical tradition. Instead,
viewing it through a prism of mysticism, they described
sleep as a threshold or limit positioned outside the ‘natural’
prescriptions of unconsciousness and night – where it
“Boredom, restlessness, fatigue – all were
symptoms of a postwar ennui haunted by the trauma
of global industrialization.”
becomes a precondition of consciousness itself. In such neg-
ative ontologies, even the very nucleus of sleep – the act of
repose – is thrown into doubt. ‘The first night is welcoming,’
writes Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire (The Space of Literature,
1955). ‘We enter into the night and we rest there, sleeping
and dying. But the other night does not welcome, does not
open. In it, one is still outside.’ For Blanchot, the world
of sleep does not belong to the sleeper – it is a suspension
between life and death. It is an ‘other’, a border zone, a space
that can be approached but never entered or fully traversed.
Installation works such as Claes Oldenburg’s Bedroom
Ensemble (1963) and Edward Kienholz’s While Visions
of Sugar Plums Danced in their Heads (1964) visualize
something of Blanchot’s conceptual impasse. Both art-
ists replace the sleeper with the architectures of sleep
– denaturalized bedroom set pieces that frustrate any
possible repose. Oldenburg’s geometric abstractions of
domestic furniture are visually flawless but practically
unusable, while Kienholz’s horrifying vision of domestic-
ity transforms the site of the bed into a sexual encounter
between an estranged husband and wife. Similarly, Bill
Viola’s multimedia installation The Sleep of Reason (1988) –
a titular reference to Francisco de Goya’s famous etching
of a nightmare, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
(The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1797–98) –
envisions a domestic setting’s nighttime idyll interrupted
by video projections of insomniac imagery with a strident
soundtrack. Viola’s convulsive images, foreshadowing both
the sensory torture techniques employed by the US military
at Guantánamo Bay detention camp and the millennial
frieze no.193 146
omnipresence of electronic screens, portray the nightmare
of sleep as sleep perennially deferred.
In the works of Sophie Calle and Julia Scher similar
architectures of sleep evoke the more lurid themes of
voyeurism and surveillance. For both artists, the roam-
ing presence of cameras or recording devices inside the
bedroom calls attention to the power of the mechani-
cal gaze to reduce familiar objects and bodies to images
and the ways in which the dissemination of these images
depersonalizes the sleeper’s experience of refuge. Calle’s
career-long fascination with hotel rooms and voyeur-
ist imaginaries – from ‘Les Dormeurs’ (The Sleepers,
1979) and Suite Vénitienne (Venetian Suite, 1980/96) to
L’Hotel (The Hotel, 1981) and Room (2011) – many of which
are referenced in her recent retrospective ‘Beau doublé,
Monsieur le marquis!’ (Beautiful Double, Mr Marquis!)
at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature – fetishizes the
sleeper through his or her literal or figurative absence.
In her series ‘Surveillance Beds’ (1994–2003), Scher
employs voyeurism to explore a more interactive instanti-
ation of technology’s creep into private (and unconscious)
space. In Always There (1994), for instance, a network of
video cameras and live monitor feeds craned over a narrow
pink bed invites the prospective sleeper to record and then
watch him or herself in the intimacy of repose – though
where the archived video is stored or shared is in question.
This simultaneous experience of self-gratification and
public performance in the most private of spaces marks
the viewer’s increasing internalization of surveillance
as part of the first internet era. As with much of Scher’s
work, the conflation of domesticity with scopophilia also
complicates the fragile boundaries between empowerment
and exploitation.
For Calle and Scher, the bed is also a space of feminist
politics. Rather than maintaining the sanctity – and
invisibility – of the bed as a site for domesticating sex, they
bring it into public space and view. This act of recontext­
ualization is echoed in comparable bed pieces by Louise
Bourgeois (Femme Maison, Woman House, 1994); Tracey
Emin (Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95, 1995, and
My Bed, 1998) and Cornelia Parker (The Maybe, 1995/2013).
Alongside the pioneering studies of sleep spotlighted in
2017 was the 40th anniversary republication of Ray Meddis’s
landmark The Sleep Instinct (1977). A tendentious text among
early sleep scientists, Meddis’s book claims that sleep, far
from serving a regenerative function, is an environmental
trait that protects animals during hours of high predation
or hostile weather. Meddis offers the possibility of ‘nonsom-
nia’, a biological correction he foresees for the near future
that could switch off the sleep instinct altogether.
While Meddis’s theory has been repudiated by most
scientists, its vision of a sleepless (and highly productive)
society continues to gain symbolic currency. Perhaps
now, more than ever, sleep’s contested status is a nexus
of competing discourses from the medical sciences, the
social economy and the public imagination. But after
a century of art having been influenced and interpreted
by myriad doctrines of dream analysis and other cognitive
march 2018
Unknown artist, Sleeping Lady, c.3,000 BCE, recovered in the prehistoric Hal Saflieni Hypogeum burial
site, Paola, and now housed in the National Museum of Archaeology, Valletta. Courtesy: Alamy

Giorgio de Chirico, Ariadne, 1913, oil and graphite on canvas, 1.4 × 1.8 m.

Courtesy: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and DACS, London, 2018

147
 Sophie Calle, The Sleepers, 1979, photograph, 15 × 20 cm. (‘I asked people to give me a few hours
of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. To each participant I suggested an eight-hour stay.
The occupation of the bed began on 1 April 1979 at 5pm and ended on 9 April at 10am.’) Courtesy:
the artist and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2018

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, somniloquies, 2017, video still.

Courtesy: the artists

Frank and Patrik Riklin with Daniel Charbonnier, Null Stern – the only star is you, 2009–ongoing, installation
view. Courtesy: the artists; photograph: Claudio Baeggli, 2017

148
 psychologies, has contemporary art experienced its own
conceptual fatigue in relation to sleep?
One approach that continues to foster pre-modern
narratives of sleep is the so-called slow movement, which
has encompassed various experiments in art, architecture,
cooking and cinema since the early 2000s. Although
Arden Reed’s critical history, Slow Art: The Experience of
Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell (2017), makes few
explicit references to sleep as a central motif in slow art,
artists such as Jim Findlay (Dream of the Red Chamber:
A Performance for a Sleeping Audience, 2014) and filmmakers
including Scott Barley and the collaborative duo Véréna
Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor explore the expressive
potential of semi- or un-conscious states.
Barley’s glacial meditation Sleep Has Her House (2017),
screened throughout 2017 and at the EYE Filmmuseum in
Amsterdam in January, is shot entirely on an iPhone, and
mixes high-resolution digital and pictorialist imagery
of ghostly landscapes with infrequent cuts or obtrusive
camera movement. The film’s methodical use of long-shots
and protracted dissolves produces an experience that is
both soothing and discomforting for the contemporary
movie-goer, weaned on a language of close-ups and jump-
cuts. While Barley’s earlier films rarely extend beyond 20
minutes, Sleep was conceived as a four-hour installation
that encourages viewers to sleep in front of the screen. Like
Warhol’s earliest films on sleep, sex and eating, and the
“Visual representations of sleep have existed
nearly as long as recorded civilizations.”
fluxus experiments before them, Sleep Has Her House uses
a composite of new and old technologies to recalibrate the
audience to a slower, more primeval clock of waking and
sleeping life.
Commissioned by documenta 14, Castaing-Taylor and
Paravel’s film somniloquies (2017) uses the sleep recordings
of 1970s singer-songwriter Dion McGregor – originally
released as The Dream World of Dion McGregor (1964) –
to produce an audio-visual immersion into the sleep
experience. Accompanying McGregor’s babbled routines
and vignettes are distorted close-ups of unconscious bod-
ies that writhe and twitch. The eerie montage of image and
noise, at times synchronizing and at others falling out of
phase, creates a hypnotic sensorium from an extended,
perceptual twilight.
The slow movement is part and parcel of a larger
trend towards neo-gothic representations of technolo-
gized bodies in contemporary art. Like its Victorian
incarnation, millennial gothicism spotlights the psychic
crises and breakdowns of contemporary society through
an exploration of the bizarre, dysmorphic or sublime.
Artists associated with this tag – from Jake and Dinos
Chapman to Abigail Lane and Marnie Weber – often
skewer the excesses of science, technology, religion or
other normative discourses. Chief among these aggres-
sions is the development of what neoliberalism and fu-
turism critic Teresa Brennan calls ‘bioderegulation’.
Brennan, whose research into the psychological and
social disorders of late capitalism marks an important
turning point in biopolitics, defines bioderegulation
as the technologization and financialization of ‘human
time’ – from sabbatical to sex and especially sleep – as
productive labour.3 Transforming Meddis’s utopian
frieze no.193 149
vision of nonsomnia into a grotesque, neo-gothicism
challenges the effects of bioderegulation by invoking
pathological monsters – sleep walkers, insomniacs,
opioid addicts and other psychogenic casualties.
Such imagery appears strikingly in the work of writer
Chloe Aridjis and painter Vincent Desiderio. Aridjis’s
Benjaminian descriptions of hypnagogic characters, who
amble between urban and domestic reveries, personify
the bewitching fatigue haunting the hyperreal empires
of Europe. In both Book of Clouds (2009), her debut novel,
and ‘Kopfkino’ (2013), her essay on insomnia, sleep acts
as a sort of missing character who, like the sonambulist
in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), impels her outsider-
protagonists into the dark margins of urban space and
culture. Denied the pleasures of unconsciousness, these
insomniacs experience only dizzying phantasmagoria or
tedium – the curse of Charles Baudelaire’s boulevardier. For
Aridjis, sleep is a secretive, almost medieval, ritual whose
omission from modernity makes of it a sickly landscape
beneath which history’s fantastical architectures repose as if
on a baroque curve. Her forthcoming novel, The Antikythera
Mechanism, promises to mine the rich, oneiric territories
of the author’s own biography. Similarly, Desiderio’s elabo-
rate, (Lucian) Freudian portraits of sleepers trade between
sublime extremes of tranquillity and abjection. His most
celebrated work, the 24-foot-long Sleep (2008), assembles
an orgy of naked bodies contorted in varying degrees of
somnolence in a Dutch mannerist style. In the similarly
panoramic Theseus (2016) – the centrepiece of Desiderio’s
show at Marlborough Gallery, London, in January – dozens
of nude figures arranged in geometric tessellations are
tortured in their sleep by monstrous insects.
A comparable gothic thread runs through recent
installation and environmental art dedicated to urban
architectures of sleep and recovery. In 2005, for example,
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The House of Dreams, filled the
Serpentine Galleries in London with a network of enclosed
tombs and cubicles for tired visitors, creating a menacing,
hybrid interior of funeral home, cathedral and sanatorium.
Conversely, Frank and Patrik Riklin’s seasonal Null Stern
Hotel (Zero Star Hotel, 2009–ongoing), a hotel bedroom
installation, trades on the sublime idyll of the mountain-
side: a recurrent motif from the gothic novels of Horace
Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764) to Ann Radcliffe
(The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794) and Bram Stoker (Dracula,
1897). The ‘hotel’ is simply a double bed, side lamps and
bedside tables in the middle of a field, with a panoramic
view of the Alps. Sleep has returned to the bosom of
nature – at least for the night B
1 Michael Pigott, Joseph Cornell versus Cinema, 2013, Bloomsbury,
London, p. 79–80
2 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 2002, University of
California, Oakland, p. 121–132
3 Teresa Brennan, Globalization and Its Terrors, 2003, Routledge,
New York, p. 19
Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon (2004) and Bluff City
Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South (2012).
march 2018