In this over life-size two-channel video projection, Janet Biggs examines the way society constructs gender, using the horse as an emblem for masculine power. Two large images are projected perpendicularly in a corner. Using architecture to articulate narrative in this way, Biggs immerses the viewer literally and figuratively in her vision. Extended all the way to the floor of the gallery, the left image, a close-up, shows a horse strenuously treading water, while the right is a long-shot projection of young women practicing synchronized swimming. The soundtrack consists of the strained breathing and snorting of the seemingly panicked horse (actually in training for a race) on one side, and the muffled sounds of music and swimmers recorded underwater on the other. By filming the young women kicking their legs to stay afloat or swimming upside down underwater, Biggs focuses on the mechanics of the sport and, by extension, the construction of femininity.

Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s created many film genres directed toward a female audience. Melodrama, for instance, personalized the psychological tension between female desire and socially endorsed femininity to elicit highly emotional responses. Overly stylized and, by today’s standards, over-the-top, Busby Berkeley’s musicals of the same period often incorporated synchronized swimming numbers. Biggs’s Water Training reads against the grain of these genres. The symbols of excess in the histrionics of the synchronized swimmers readily evoke Judith Butler’s “performative theory of gender,” which argues that gender is a set of expressions that can be put on or taken off. Biggs’s piece pairs this performance of femininity with an image of a single “masculine” horse struggling to stay afloat. The close-up of the horse head—his veins and muscles visibly taut—generates emphatic discomfort in the viewer. We are witnessing something that is usually concealed, activating the myth of natural strength in both horses and men, representing masculinity in training and therefore in crisis. This staging of gender also emerges from Biggs’s decision to project the images next to each other, such that the corner itself functions as a visible suture, replacing the invisible editing of Hollywood and its hidden gender constraints. While Biggs definitely quotes from cinema she also negates it, as she foregrounds its structure.