Let's change how we’re thinking about Lucy Gunning's Climbing Around My Room

by Gwen Egan | @gwnegan

Like most children, I played a lot of “the floor is lava” growing up. My sisters and I would charter a route along the wilds of our living room floor on couch cushions, sometimes pushing ourselves forward like we were riding across the River Styx. 

Lucy Gunning elevates the childhood game into an excellent form of performance and video art with the same feeling of precarious wonder contingent upon succeeding in a goal (not touching the floor) in Climbing Around My Room (1993).

For a good portion of the work, the woman’s head is just out of frame, creating a sort of depersonalized, objectified view and an everywoman representation. She’s not a person at all or she could be any woman, even the viewer, even someone they know. While Gunning is often confused for the woman in the video, she’s actually the person behind the camera, following the girl in the red dress’s path unseen. 

The video inspires thought. It inspires thought specifically about your own space, and how you might challenge the typical way you move within it. 

Gunning was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1964. Her work is internationally renowned, including Climbing Around My Room and her other popular early video work The Horse Impressionists (1994), which she created while pursuing her master’s degree in fine arts. 

Climbing Around My Room became the first moving-image piece donated to the Harris Museum in England in 2000, and has such a profound, lasting impact that other folks have even re-created the media.

In many recreations of the work, the camera sits stagnant in one corner, unmanned, with the performer makes an effort-full traverse around their room, unlike Gunning’s original version. The original climb isn’t just standing on her desk and leaning over.She’s crawling, heaving around on wall fixtures and door jams wearing a rather impractical outfit. It’s almost difficult to watch.

The work itself is also played on a small, square TV, creating further boundaries for the performer. She’s bound by the confines of what is physically possible inside the room, she’s bound by the feminine dress she’s wearing, she’s bound by the physical capabilities of her body, and she’s bound inside an unfeeling piece of machinery as the video plays. Despite these bounds, the performer tries her best. Despite the bruises on her calves and the shaking of her hands, she continues on her journey. 

There’s also Gunning’s invisible journey. She’s following the performer around the room herself, unseen and unheard. Maybe she’s wearing a practical outfit, maybe she’s not. Her struggle (or perhaps lack thereof) is swallowed by the viewer’s perspective.

On first glance, we’re transfixed by the performance, not thinking about how the work might’ve been created. That’s how the work invites the viewer in. The physical challenges that the performer endures for the camera invite the viewer to stay and see her safely to the other side, as if the act of watching itself is an act of protection. 

There’s a parental feeling of you should get down from there before you hurt yourself, learned from being on the receiving end of fear from guardian figures about making sure playtime doesn’t result in a visit to a local hospital.

“Animal Instinct,” an essay about Gunning first published in Frieze Magazine Issue 21 (Mar–Apr 1995), analyzes the work as sexual, saying the work is a hedonistic, almost auto-erotic piece.

“With its elusive goal, its protagonist's extravagant exertions, her endless, rhythmic circling of the limits of the space, and her thorough exploration of the room's secret nooks and crannies, it is difficult to resist interpreting the scene as a metaphorically sexual one: the body might be the bedroom, and the act, played by a solitary performer, auto-erotic. This is not to reduce the piece to crude symbolism or to sexual theatre (although, with its emphasis on real time and energy, Climbing [Ar]ound My Room is related to physical theatre) but to try to account for its strangely arresting effect,” reads the essay.

And while a red dress can be associated with sex, while women can be associated with sex no matter what they do, red is also associated with power. The struggle for power over one’s own space rather than an act of sexual defiance.

It’s understable that a woman grunting with effort would have a “strangely arresting effect” when her head is cut out of frame allowing for potential objectification, but it’s the easy way out. It’s simple. Sure, you can say that a woman doing a deadlift puts her in a sexual position. Or, you could look further at her counting her reps, adding weight, and understand it’s enduring physical challenge for the sake of getting stronger. 

And while this performance piece is inherently different because it is a performance, there’s an opportunity now to look deeper. 

Why create challenges? Why purposefully create work centered around said challenges? Gunning could just have easily set up a series of obstacles for the performer to cross just like my sisters and I used to, but she did not. She could have had her performer wearing next to nothing, but she did not. The performer wears a dress more suited to a girl in her early teens, and struggles like those same young girls who aren’t afraid to scrape their knees. 

Through struggle, she charters a path through her confines, and successfully makes it to the other side, with her companion Gunning along for the ride and probably celebrating her success at the end.

~

Gwen Egan is a writer and designer based in Boston who loves themed double features and moral imperatives. She is working on being better at pool. More of her work can be found on instagram @gwnegan