All 10 entries tagged Art

Visit to the National Gallery of Art in DC: The Age of Innocence, Gesture and the Fan.

Follow-up to Screening Intimacy Panel at 'Writings of Intimacy in the 20th and 21st Centuries'. from The Midnight Heart

When I was in Washington D.C. last week, I visited the National Gallery of Art where they have a show on at the moment: From Impressionism to Modernism – The Chester Dale Collection . There were some very impressive paintings on display, but what particularly struck me was a series of paintings that featured women in sumptuous surroundings holding fans.

Only recently, I wrote up a blog entry on gesture and intimacy from a paper that I saw by the film academic Steven Peacock at the Writings of Intimacy conference . In his paper, Peacock talked about Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence based on the book by Edith Wharton. Both the film and the book focus on the scandalous Countess Elena Olenska, whose separation from her husband causes ripples in 1870s upper-class New York society. Newland Archer is fascinated by the Countess Olenska, in spite of the fact that he is about to marry the innocent, pure, beautiful May Welland.

What Peacock talked about was how Scorsese uses gesture as a kind of power play between Elena Olenska and Newland Archer. Here is what I said about it in my previous blog entry:

Peacock analyzed the scene in the box at the opera in which Elena’s gestures are both declamatory and intimate. Elena extends her arm to Newland to be kissed, but her hand hangs there while he hesitates. They start to make smalltalk and in discussing her experience of the opera, Elena extends her fan over the spectators. When she does so, she is expressing her fondness for the place, yet it is also a gesture that claims dominion.

When I was looking at paintings in the Chester Dale collection, I remembered Peacock’s reading of The Age of Innocence. I was fascinated to note too that many of the paintings from around the time when The Age of Innocence was set (1870s) featured women with fans, and in each case the fan seems to signify something different,

The first painting was Madame Camus by Degas (1869-70):

Here, the woman, who might be another Countess Olenska, is sat up in her seat in sumptuous surroundings. We see her thoughtful face in profile, and the fan in reaching out and up from the chair suggests intention. The scarlet colours of the background, her dress and the fan suggest love, sexuality, passion even. Altogether, the picture presents a vision of someone on the verge of doing something and the fan is almost leading her there.

Next was The Loge (1882) by American artist, Mary Cassatt.

A loge is a small compartment, a box at the theatre or a separate forward section of a theatre mezzanine or balcony. In this exclusive space sit two young women, a decorous spectacle for the theatre-goers, and the scene is very reminiscent of The Age of Innocence. The two women, however, seem uncomfortable with the situation, and one is almost hidden behind her fan. These female figures resemble the good, true and innocent May Welland more than Countess Elena Olenska.

Finally is another painting by Mary Cassatt, Miss Mary Ellison (1880):

The title suggests that this portrait must have been a commissioned work, yet strangely the figure is picture of dejection. Staring into the distance, she is lost in her own thoughts, and the way that she holds the fan seems mechanical, as though she is merely going through the motions of proper manners and delicacy. There is also something very vulnerable about the figure, since reflected in the mirror behind her is the back of her head and her shoulders.

In each of these paintings, the fan works differently to suggest passion, shyness and dejection. It would be interesting to know whether Wharton or Scorsese were aware of paintings like these and to what extent they might have contributed to their renderings of The Age of Innocence.

Zoe Brigley : 03 Nov 2010 17:37 |  Tags: Art Edith Wharton Fiction Film Martin Scorcese |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Panel on Cinema, Feminism, Gaze at 'Violence and Reconcilation'

Writing about web page http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/criticaltheory/

Sorcha Gunne and I recently spoke at the conference ‘Violence and Reconciliation’. We were talking on narrativising rape and revising scripts of power in short stories by Isabel Allende and Rosario Castellanos. You can see our abstract here Alongside us were papers by Andrew Hennlich who spoke on William Kentridge’s film Ubu Tells the Truth and Xavier Aldana Reyes who discussed ‘Contemporary Horror and the Mediation of Violence.

Hennlich focussed on the links between Kentridge’s film about witnessing violence in South Africa (made in 1997) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1927). Hennlich analyzed the words FOR GIVE which appear onscreen and questioned whether to give is an act of compassion or an act of aggression related to the Afrikaans word ‘gif’ meaning poison. Often Kentridge’s imagery suggests that humanity is troubling, e.g. the pig’s head wearing earphones. One particularly interesting scene that Hennlich commented on was the moment when the camera becomes complicit in acts of violence itself; Kentridge shows it blowing up bodies, an act that was based on testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Even for the camera, it is impossible to recover those lost in the violence of Apartheid.

Reyes also commented on the legacies of violence describing the plots and motifs of some very disturbing horror films. The films discussed included Funny Games (1997), My Little Eye (2001), _The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007) and Untraceable (2008). Most of these films have plots relates to recording extreme violence and Reyes described them as Sadeian. Reyes also suggested that the films were not as popular as horror blockbusters like Hostel, because the plots are far more uncomfortable. These films reflect a wound culture, where people stop to look at dead bodies on the pavement and internet users are given the choice whether or not a person dies horribly.

We had an interesting discussion after the panel about the representations of women in these films. Reyes explained that in The Poughkeepsie Tapes, an FBI film analyst tells the other agents that after his wife saw a short extract from one of the tapes, she was so traumatized that she couldn’t let her husband touch her for a year. Again in The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a victim of the murderer who survives, Cheryl Dempsey, is unable to function socially and ends up committing suicide. I had a look on YouTube after the paper and found this disturbing video related to The Poughkeepsie Tapes – disturbing because half way through the “interview” with Cheryl, it becomes clear that she has been severely physically damaged. I actually find the representation of Cheryl extremely objectionable. All it seems to do is reactivate the same old scripts of gendered power and domination. From what Reyes told us about Untraceable, it seems that similar scripts are at work in the representation of the heroine, Jennifer Marsh, who at the end of the film (spoilers!) is caught and tortured before she finally kills the murderer. I am amazed that these exploitative representations of women are still being used, even if it is the horror genre.

Zoe Brigley : 14 Oct 2010 16:17 |  Tags: Art Feminism Film Horror Films South Africa William Kentridge |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Art Text and Violence Panel at ‘Violence and Reconciliation’

Writing about web page http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/criticaltheory/

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The first talk on this panel was on ‘Caravaggio and the Violent Event’ by Eva Aldea, and it began by highlighting Caravaggio’s painting The Beheading on John the Baptist (1608). Comparing this composition to paintings on similar subject matter by Cranach, Reuben and Tiepolo, Aldea pointed out that Caravaggio’s version was quite muted and that even though there is less gore, his imagining of the scenario is more violent. This beheading shows an audience watching while an executioner struggles to finish off the job. Aldea argued that Caravaggio’s work was far more violent than was normal in the traditions of painting at the time. She referred us to Raphael’s The Judgement of Solomon, which featured a similar grizzly scenario:
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In this scene where Solomon orders his soldiers to chop the baby in half and give half to each of the mothers who claim the child as their own. Raphael’s painting, however, offesr a staged, idealized composition, quite different to the shocking realism of Caravaggio who drew from models. Caravaggio presents dark spaces and the people involved are ordinary not glamorous. Aldea also discussed the word that appears in the painting written in John the Baptist’s blood: Fra. Michelangelo. Aldea speculates that this name refers to Caravaggio’s membership of the brotherhood of Malta, and that it represents Caravaggio being cleansed of his sins, baptised in the blood of the Baptist.

Next, Catriona McAra spoke of ‘Sadeian Women’, focussing on violence in the ‘Surrealist Anti-Tales’ of Leonara Carrington, Angela Carter and Dorothea Tanning. McAra (quite rightly) considered the dialogue between Leonara Carrington (Max Ernst’s lover) and Dorothea Tanning (Max Ernst’s wife) and discussed their links to Angela Carter’s writing. All three creators use the Marquis de Sade as a way of unravelling conventional ideas about the female Surrealist artist; it is his influence that encourages them to create ‘anti-tales’. These women don’t read Sade literally, according to McAra, but use his work to enable a rebellion for women. The credo is, I fuck therefore I am. Yet this is not reproductive sex that maintains women’s value in a currency of male lineage and power. Instead what emerges is dark poetry, dark fairy tales, the black humour of Sade. Concurrent with Carter’s idea of ‘wise children’, Tanning offers a vision of child women that resemble Sade’s malicious Juliet. Take for example, Tanning’s painting Children’s Games (1942). McAra goes on to study writings by Tanning and Carrington: Tanning’s short story ‘Blind Date’ (1943) and her novel Chasm (2004); and Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and her short story ‘The Débutante’. In many of these texts, McAra finds imagery of defacing, self-portraiture and violence figured as a dog or hyena, as in the paintings: House of the Dawn Hare by Carrington:
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... and Tanning’s Birthday:
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Natalia Font spoke last giving a fascinating talk on ‘The Bloody Museum’, which is if course a reference to Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and the aspect of the story where the narrator, the wife of the Bluebeard, tells of the works of art that is on the walls of her new home. This paper was particularly fascinating, because often in this particular story, Carter engages with art and its representations of women, and uses intertextuality to comment on gender. For example, the narrator tells us that there is a painting by Gauguin called Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go, which does not exist. It does, however, appear to be an answer to Gauguin’s real painting Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?:
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Another painting which is described as being on the wall is a vision of St Cecelia (by Rubens), which offers a picture of innocent charm. It is worth remembering though, Font insists, that Cecelia was beheaded, a story that hints at the fate of the wife of the Bluebeard. Another painting described of the Sabine women recalls David’s Les Sabines:
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David’s painting shows the women trying to reconcile the fighters, suggesting male violence and women as beseeching supplicants. Font did refer to other artists as well as to illustrators of Carter’s work, but this is all that I was able to note at the time.

Zoe Brigley : 13 Oct 2010 19:24 |  Tags: Angela Carter Art Caravaggio David Dorothea Tanning Gauguin Leonara Carrington Marquis De Sade Rubens |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Battlestar Galactica and da Vinci's Last Supper.

I have now watched the entire series of the new Battlestar Galactica and I am hugely impressed by it. It is a wonderful example of serious science fiction, referencing the Iraq war, the ethics of torture and the corrupt machinations of government. Above all, I like the way in which Battlestar Galactica considers complex ethical questions about religion, culture and human interaction.

I had to like the programme makers’ style too, when I saw this ad referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper

The Last Supper portrays the reactions of the disciples to Jesus’ announcement that one of them will betray him. They all react differently to the news. Replacing Jesus in the Battlestar Galactica ad is Caprica Six, who is a kind of mystical figure throughout the series, even though she is a robot.

Zoe Brigley : 07 Apr 2010 19:08 |  Tags: Art Science Fiction TV |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Hospitality and the Rat: Irina Aristarkhova on the Art of Kathy High

Writing about web page http://www.personal.psu.edu/ixa10/

Warning: If you have a rat phobia, you might not want to read this entry!

This week, I went to see Irina Aristarkhova (Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Visual Arts at Penn State) giving a talk about “Hosting the Animal: the Aesthetics of Hospitality.” Aristarkhova was discussing the artist Kathy High and the artwork Embracing Animal (you can see her website here ). High created an installation using transgenic rats created for drug experimentation. High explains on her website:

Transgenic rats are different than wild type rats. Transgenic rats are rats that have foreign DNA inserted into their genome. This means one or more genes from a non-rat organism (i.e. human, fish, plant or jellyfish) has been added, through some tricks of modern molecular biology, to every one of a trangenic rat’s cells. Transgenic rats are walking around with non-rat expressible molecules in their bodies, minds and even in the cells that go on to make their children. Sometimes referred to as hybrids, cyborgs or chimeras, transgenic organisms are an interspecies mix of DNA, a targeted collage of two or more organisms. The most important thing to remember is that their alteration is permanent and inheritable. This means that their kids and their grandkids with have the same difference that they do.

To create her installation, High bought a number of transgenic rats and took them into her home. She looked after these rats with painstaking care, as she explains (again on her website):

I bought them to try and make them live as long as possible and to see if they could become healthy given their prior genetic conditioning. I will treat them holistically with alternative medicines such as homeopathy, environmental enrichment, also good food and play! Stress is one of the triggers for their conditions. I know because I, too, have autoimmune problems (in the form of Crohn’s disease and Sarcoidosis). Thus, I identify with the rats and feel as though we are mirroring each other. I feel a great kinship with them. When I see them feeling tired I recognize that kind of exhaustion. I know they need rest in a way that is total. If they ache when being touched, I understand this is from fevers. I also know they do not know how to behave as pets. They are not pets. They are extensions, transformers, transitional combined beings that resonate with us in ways that other animals cannot.

Aristarkhova finds High’s project interesting in relation to the ethics of hospitality espoused by Derrida et al. High does not see the rats as pets but ‘injured guests’ in need of care and she has an affinity with them because of their shared autoimmune problems. Aristarkhova compares High’s installation with The Temple of Rats, Karni Mata and with Jainist beliefs about respecting the life of nature . What seems to be most significant about Kathy High’s work is that in hosting the rat, an animal that has such an intense stigma about it, she pushes the boundaries of how we define hospitality and reformulates what it should include.

Further Reading

Aristarkhova, Irina and Faith Wilding (2009) ‘“My Personal Is Not Political?”: A Dialogue on Art, Feminism and Pedagogy’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5.2. Access available online (accessed 19 March 2010).

High, Kathy (2009) Embracing Animal website. Access available online (accessed 19 March 2009).

Zoe Brigley : 19 Mar 2010 19:34 |  Tags: Art Ecocriticism Hospitality Irina Aristarkhova Kathy High |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Frida Kahlo – Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky

Writing about web page http://www.nmwa.org/

Here is a photo from my visit at the wonderful National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC. Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait dedicated to Trotsky stands alongside a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and other wonderful works by women artists:

For more entries on Kahlo, see this link .

Zoe Brigley : 18 Mar 2010 14:23 |  Tags: Art Barbara Hepworth Feminism Frida Kahlo Mexico |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Dream… But Not Yours: Three Turkish Films

Writing about web page http://www.nmwa.org/exhibition/detail.asp?exhibitid=200

Last week, I visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, where there is currently an exhibition of contemporary women’s art from Turkey titled ‘A Dream… But Not Yours’. I spent a summer in Turkey (mainly Istanbul) when I was a student, so I was interested to see the exhibition, and in visiting it, I found the quality of the films included to be particularly impressive.

Esra Sarigedik Öktem, who put the show together, has brought together some striking and fresh artwork with specific yet transnational feminist messages Canan Şenol’s film Exemplary (2009) had parallels for example with Nawal El Saadawi’s 1979 novel Woman at Point Zero.

As in El Saadawi’s fiction, Şenol’s animated narrative described a cultural situation in which the heroine never had a chance of being autonomous because of the institutions and traditions that regulate women and their bodies. Watching these women struggle in the mythical, fairy-tale stories of Şenol is extremely moving, as their desires and ambitions are rejected, broken, eradicated. What is perhaps particularly disturbing about Şenol’s commentary is that it is the mothers who force their daughters to submit to patriarachy’s norms.

Another fascinating film that featured in the exhibition is İnci Eviner’s Harem (2009), which is based on engravings by the German artist, Antoine Ignace Melling, who was invited by Sultan Selim III to produce sketches of life in Istanbul (or Constantinople as it was then known). Eviner cleverly uses the background of Melling’s Interieur d’une partie du harem du Grand Seigneur but transforms it:

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Melling’s courtly vision is radically altered in Eviner’s version; the harem becomes more like a prison or mental institution than a vision of luxury. Eviner inserts animated women into Melling’s background, but rather than being engaged in domestic or courtly activities, Eviner’s figures are all dressed in a prison-like uniform and their behaviour is odd, eccentric and disturbing. One woman wields a pick-axe, reminiscent of chain gangs; another reads while conducting an imaginary orchestra; groups of women carry inert bodies, while others kiss or rhythmically thrust in sexualised movements. The sultan of Melling’s original becomes a figure dressed in a teddy bear costume, who is offered a silver sphere by one of the “inmates”. The whole effect is fascinating and of course it reminds us of the traditional Turkish miniatures. In this case, however, the harem is far from being a site of pleasure and decadence. Instead it is a place where women are driven mad by the restrictions imposed upon them.

The desire for freedom was a theme of the final film that I wanted to highlight: Nevin Aladağ’s Raise the Roof (2007). This film features a number of women on a modern cement rooftop, each listening to music on an Ipod/walkman and dancing alongside one another to a separate rhythm. The location of the film is suggestive. Why a rooftop? Were the women looking for a secluded place to express themselves? Why couldn’t they have danced in the middle of a street? What the film suggests is that the woman are able in this empty and abandoned space to be themselves in a way that would never be possible in a crowded street. The film zooms in on their legs dancing and their heels making indents in tar. Aladağ’s Stiletto is exhibited alongside Raise the Roof and features the indents that each women’s heels made. There is something very satisfying in the fact that each pattern is different: each woman danced with the others but all the time to her own beat.

Zoe Brigley : 15 Mar 2010 19:56 |  Tags: İNci Eviner Art Canan ŞEnol Nawal El Saadawi Nevin Aladağ Turkey |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

Writing about web page http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

Date: 4th March 2010
Venue: Paul Robeson Centre, Penn State University

Last night I went to see Alison Bechdel talking about her most recent book, Fun Home. In the eighties, Bechdel invented the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For , inspired by the political and gendered issues of the time, and she has done a great deal of work since, including the 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

Thinking about why she became a graphic novelist, Bechdel suggests that it might have been because her parents had so many diverse interests in the arts; in poetry, literature, acting and interior decorating. Bechdel felt a little squashed by her parents’ interests, and rather than becoming an artist or a writer as their ambitions for her dictated, she became a graphic novelist/writer.

Bechdel gave us a great deal of insight into how she began to write and draw as a child. For her influences, she talks about the cartoonist Charles Addams and the clever slippage in his work between words and the images.

Bechdel recognized this kind of slippage in her own family. It was a family that she would later question when she discovered that her father had been suppressing his homosexuality because he longed to be respectable. Like the Gothic houses of Charles Addams’ sketches, Bechdel’s family house was a lovingly restored Victorian mansion that her father took pains to perfect.

Bechdel kept a diary as a child but was always aware of the power and complexity of language. This awareness first manifested itself by Bechdel contradicting herself. As a child, she would write down events from the day, but would often include a tiny doodle of the words “I think” as if to admit that she might be incorrect or fallible. Later this uncertainty manifested itself in crossing out the names of people written about in the diary which worked as a kind of ritual to protect them. Even later, Bechdel was crossing out entire pages and obliterating entire entries.

In addition to this slippage of words, first recognized in Charles Addams, another influence on Bechdel as a child was the map in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows:

It is not the map itself that intrigues Bechdel, so much as the detail and the animation of the characters, e.g. Toad driving his car badly through the landscape. It is this kind of animation that Bechdel wants to achieve through her use of pictures. This ambition also explains why Bechdel, when she is creating a graphic novel, creates photographs of the poses and obsessively looks up images related to the subject that she is drawing on. She calls herself a ‘method cartoonist’.

After explaining her intentions as a writer/artist, Bechdel read the first chapter from Fun Home alongside a projection of images. She read to us about growing up with her father’s perfectionism, his frustration and his sudden bursts of affection.

Though there is a great deal of humour in the descriptions of Bechdel’s family life, the conclusion of the chapter is hugely moving when she describes her troubled relationship with her father and her loss of him to suicide in her early twenties. I would really recommend Fun Home to anyone interested in stories about the family.

Zoe Brigley : 05 Mar 2010 17:51 |  Tags: Alison Bechdel Art Feminism Graphic Novel |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Marijke van Warmerdam at the Ikon Gallery

Writing about web page http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/index.htm

Today I went to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham where I saw an exhibition by Marijke van Warmerdam called First Drop. This artist works mainly in photography and film although there are also some conceptual art pieces, but in general the feeling generated by her work is strangely uncanny. In her art, van Warmerdam works with the strange and the familiar recasting them in new and innovative ways.

One of the first pieces that you encounter on the first floor of the Ikon Gallery consists of two large photographs featuring a cup and saucer which are suspended from the ceiling and which are turned by a fan. The piece is titled Take a long break I and II and it gives an idea of how van Warmerdam wants to recast familiar objects in unfamiliar guises. The suspended photographs pirouette alongside one another and it is no coincidence that the teacup and saucer go round in a circle as tea does when stirred.

Take a long break I and II is a rather whimsical piece yet sometimes van Warmerdam’s mingling of the familiar and strange can be revelatory and inspiring. Pancake is a photograph dominated by the great white circle of a pancake thrown from half glimpsed pan held by a hand in the corner of the frame. Yet the pancake appears in the photograph to be a round orb, pitted and rough, like the face of the moon and it seems that despite the background of shelves and kitchen condiments, the moon has suddenly transported itself to appear like an apparition in the everyday kitchen.

The tea-cup appears again in Stirring in the Distance , a film of intensity and beauty that considers binaries of inside and outside, the familiar and strange. In the film, a cup and saucer sit on the edge of a table in the right hand bottom corner of the frame and behind it is a closed window and beyond the window is a landscape obliterated by snow. The silent falling of snow is beautiful in itself, yet the black horizontal shape of the horizon can be made out in ominous detail through the white flakes. Something is ‘stirring in the distance’, but the link to the teacup in the motif of stirring may suggest that it the creature stirring emanates from or is already present in the familiar interior.

Nature can be very ominous in van Warmerdam’s photographs even though it is unmoving and static. Catch features a pair of outstretched hands and a brightly coloured ball suspended mid-air. On the index finger of the right hand is a ring, which initially seems to be a sign of maturity and wealth, yet there is no stone in the ring, but instead a child-like ladybird motif. Behind the hands and ball are winter trees drooping in a ghostly mist and behind the trees is the white orb of the moon that echoes the ball’s shape. The childishness of the game seems out of place in the ominous landscape and a feeling of tension is created by the suspended moment.

Throw is a kind of companion piece to Catch which features a length of lead pipe suspended mid-air and behind it are autumnal trees, a red tiled roof and one can just make out stacked logs in the dark space under the roof. The title is Throw rather than ‘thrown’; the lead pipe is still in the process of arcing through space and one wonders where it will hit the ground and what damage it will cause.

Underwater I and II presents a variation on the themes of Catch and Throw. The concept of the piece is like that of Take a long break I and II as it features two photographs again suspended the ceiling and turned by fans. The two photographs are not identical and unlike Take a long break I and II, there are different compositions on the front and back of the turning pictures. The photographs on one side of the turning pictures present different angled shots of a similar photograph. The composition is quite simple; a tree branches around one corner of the frame with a bird box on its trunk. At the bottom of the frame is bed of autumnal leaves, above it a green stream before fields stretch out and the eye moves to sparse trees on the horizon. In the second version of the pictures, water has been thrown in the air and it twists and bends across the frame like an apparition. The swoop and swirl of it suggests violent movement, interruption of the passive scene and an expression of powerful human emotion as it has been thrown by a human hand. As in Stirring in the Distance, sentinel trees look on from the horizon as an ominous presence almost like that of Birnam Wood in Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

The culmination of the installation is a film entitled Wake Up! which again features water being thrown across a landscape. This time the screen shows a bed of yellow flowers freckled by occasional red poppies and further away a bed of paler flowers before one comes to rolling mountains and the blue sky. Butterflies fly across the screen yet like the water that swoops across the camera’s view, the landscape is immutable, reactionary and emotionless. It does not wake up, but rather like Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native it is ‘like man, slighted and enduring’.

Above all in this exhibition, there is a sense of uncanniness as tea-cups, trees and mountains seem to become animated and alive. First Drop after which the exhibition is named, features a cotton-wool cloud with a transparent orb embedded in it like an eye. The orb suggests the emergence of water from the nebulous obscurity, yet it also the emergence of existence itself as the cloud takes on a life of its own.

: 11 Nov 2006 18:34 |  Tags: Art Articles And Reviews |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Some Thoughts on the Work of Hannah Wilke

Writing about web page http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhwil94.html

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises towards her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Sylvia Plath (1981, 173).

The body is a preoccupation for women artists and writers alike. Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mirror’, broods on the way in which women struggle with the juxtaposition of their bodily self and the ideal. The mirror cannot understand why truth should disturb its owner, but in fact the woman prefers the soft focus of the candles or the moon. When she is away from the stark light of day, she can pretend that she meets the standards of the feminine ideal. The mirror proves that youth, one of the most desirable commodities a woman can own in such an image-conscious society, has been eroded, and what appears instead is something alien, inert and sub-human. Hannah Wilke plays with these themes, the culmination of her life’s work being a series of self-portraits as she was suffering with cancer, of which she eventually died in 1993. In these photographs, she takes up traditionally feminine poses, but her baldness, her ravaged features subvert the image much like the ‘terrible fish’ of decay and deterioration in Plath’s poem.

This is so subversive because the woman’s face and body have so often been appropriated by artists, philosophers and writers as a token or substitute for some patriarchal notion. Often this token-woman is idealised – she is not the ugly, the deformed or the ageing woman, since as Greer states in ‘The Ideal’, ‘what man feels for the very different from himself is fascination and interest, which fades when the novelty fades and incompatibility makes itself felt’ (in Lovell ed., 1990, 12). For example, Barthes’ essay ‘Garbo’s Face’ has been inetrpreted as flattering to femininity, but in fact, it is more problematic. Barthes’ analysis utilises Garbo’s body severing all connection to her ‘authentic’ femininity:

Garbo’s face represents the fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the stereotype leans toward the fascination of mortal faces, when the clarity of the flesh as essence yields its place to a lyricism of Woman. As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event (1983, 57).

Roland Barthes poses Garbo’s face as a trigger for an existential sense of being; he considers her face as a symbol that is slightly detached from the bodily woman. His praise of Garbo’s face and what he calls its “lyricism of Woman” is an example of what Alice Jardine would call ‘gynesis’. Jardine indicates that as patriarchal dichotomies have started to vacillate, ‘an intensive exploration of those terms not attributable to Man’ has been initiated: ‘the spaces of the en-soi, Other, without history – the feminine’ (1985, 72). This exploration indicated to male philosophers that ‘those spaces have a certain force that might be useful to Man’ (ibid, 73). When Barthes uses Garbo’s face as a symbol for an existential idea, he appropriates the space of the female body for his own philosophical purposes. Barthes reaches for a face beyond mortality and carnality for a face that is a kind of ideal. Therefore it is hardly surprising that Barthes turns to the face of a woman to supply his need, since it is obvious that women have always been objectified as the statuesque and the ideal in patriarchal systems of representation. This appropriation of the female body has happened nowhere more so than in the sphere of art; John Berger’s infamous statement reverberates through the history of art:

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. (1972, 47)

Hannah Wilke re-appropriates photography, painting and sculpture to challenge the woman as subject of the male gaze and the woman as nude. Wilke uses nakedness, but she is never a faceless nude in mode of photographers like Edward Weston. Weston wrote: ‘If a photographer want to make a nude, […] he has only three possible options: the face must be averted, minimized by distance, or excluded’(in Hudson, 1982, 13). The ideal woman is a body rather than a personality. Wilke’s art is challenging and demanding using confrontation, parody and simulation. It is a direct gesture to a history of art that has condoned the objectification of women’s bodies.

However, Wilke was working against a tide of male objectification and disgust. In ‘The Body Politic’, Lisa Tickner addresses a Western tradition of bodily art that is separated into two polarities: the realist and the fantasist. This is the ‘mystery of woman […] an enigma to be approached with fascination or fear’ (in Parker and Pollock eds, 1987, 264). Salvador Dali’s picture, La Sirene, was produced in 1969 around the time that Hannah Wilke and her contemporaries were beginning to challenge the art establishment and it is an example that conveys the mixed messages of an artist who both idealises and fears the female body. La Sirene is a disquieting painting, because there is a mismatch of styles. The main focus is the large siren sketched in pencil – like all nudes her face is not the focus, so she is dehumanised to some extent. The stark representation of the siren’s body with folds, creases and hanging flesh expresses a male fear of the body that does not conform to the phallic ideal. The siren is gross, decadent and voluptuous creating a sense of overindulgence; the image of excess relates to the myth of the siren’s overpowering voice in Homer’s Odyssey. The realism of her body clashes with the vivid colours of the arching rock formation below her languishing body. The boat and the water are painted in the style of ancient Greek illustrations to poetry or narrative and this is oxymoronic with the modern style of drawing in the depiction of the woman’s body. In Homer’s Odyssey, men were of the real world while sirens were fantastical creatures, but here the opposite is true. The siren is realistically drawn while the boat belongs to the sphere of myth and storytelling. The colourless siren is separated from the small boat below by a rainbow of colours on the rock formation. Dali uses the female body to explore his own feelings about the power of the female body and a male fear of an earthly femininity in opposition with the male ideal.

The feminine ideal is the problem that faces all women artists. In her poem ‘Standing Female Nude’, Carol Ann Duffy writes: ‘It does not look like me’(1985, 46). Women want to be in control of the representations of their bodies. This is the message of radical artists like the Guerilla Girls who produce manifestos and political posters highlighting the prejudice of the art establishment. Get Naked (1989) emphasised the practical difficulties for women artists with its caption, ‘Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.’ The Guerilla Girls assert that it is not necessarily a good thing to be idealised.

Barthes praised Garbo’s face for representing a philosophical ideal and criticised the face of Audrey Hepburn for being an event. However, to represent the body as an event is in fact the aim of many contemporary female artists. The female body must be the phenomenological, the distorted and the abject and women artists go to extremes to display these ideas. This is a poststructuralist project that redefines the limits of the body; as Gina Pane suggests, ‘the body’s essential location is in ‘we’ ’ (in Grosenick ed., 2001, 428).

Pane uses “body experiments” to ‘show that the ‘body’ is lent by society, and formed by it: the objective of my experiments is to demystify the image of the ‘body’ as the citadel of our individuality’ (ibid, 428). One example, Escalade Non Aesthesiee (1971), featured Pane climbing up and down a kind of metal ladder bristling with lacerating points in accordance with her project of splitting open the body; the piece was also a metaphor for the escalation of war (‘American escalation in Vietnam’) and was self referential in that it represented the climb of the woman artist with the pain of rejection physically embodied (ibid, 430). Marina Abramović is similarly extreme; Petra Löffler describes her installation, Rhythm O (1974) with some distaste.

She functioned solely as an object among others, offering the audience not only such objects as a mirror, a newspaper or bread but to a pistol and bullets as well. Some viewers rapidly succumbed to their dark urges and abused the power they had over the helpless “object” (in Grosenick ed., 2001, 23).

The personae of Pane and Abramović are not satisfactory. Pane is self destructive and masochistic and this approach is not necessary to undermine the ‘wholeness’ of the body. Her sensationalist persona undermines the meaning of her work and creates a sense of self-indulgence. Abramović is similarly masochistic, but her persona is more passive. These projects do not contribute to the agendas of feminist art.

Hannah Wilke was more progressive in comparison with some of her contemporaries. Although her art is often confrontational, it is not self-destructive or passive, but playful and ironic. Rather than being hell bent on destroying her own body, Wilke’s art enabled her to physically gesture and act out her ideas; she wrote: ‘I didn’t separate my art from my body: it was just another part of it’ (in ed. Grosenick, 2001, 556).

In the So Help Me Hannah Series, Wilke’s diptych, Portrait of her the Artist with her Mother Selma Butter (1978 –81), juxtaposes a nude Hannah Wilke from the waist up, her health and beauty contrasting to her mother’s frail, scarred body. Her mother had just had a mastectomy and so this portrait is not only a display of the mother-daughter bond, but also a portrayal of emotional and physical loss. Wilke subverts traditional representations of the breast; the Madonna’s milk was sacred, even healing, and as the poet, Melissa Ashley, notes, ‘an entire school of Virgo Lactans iconography [has] developed’ (in Swift and Norton eds, 2002, 33). Wilke creates an image of a mother-daughter relationship but subverts it with difference; the breasts become sterile and without the capacity for milk challenging the traditional notion of motherhood. The breast is not the only signifier for maternity. The physical loss of the mother’s breasts is an image of difference and since biologists have suggested that the sole purpose for the development of breasts was to attract and retain males, it seems superficially that the woman who lacks the ‘proper’ breast will lack love and companionship too. As Greer states in her essay ‘Breasts’, ‘a play-thing that ceases to be amusing is bound for the trash can’ (1999, 55). However, Wilke is not willing to allow such assumptions; the mother is not pictured alone but beside her daughter in a kind of mother-child dyad. .

Another section of the So Help Me Hannah series included a video installation that featured Wilke nude except for high heels and a gun, moving excruciatingly slowly across ten TV monitors as she read aloud statements taken from famous philosophers, artists and political figures. Wilke utilises parody effectively as she re-enacts the substitution of women for currency in sites of male power; she is the mouthpiece for philosophy, art and politics, all of which have repressed women in the past. Women are only sanctioned entry to such spheres when they will act as passive matter to represent male power.

The gun is a symbol of male power appropriated by femininity and this symbol reoccurs in Wilke’s early work. In Snatch Shot with Ray Guns(1978), Wilke is featured naked in high heels grasping a gun. The title directs us to the main issues of the piece; ‘snatch shots’ reads like the title of an gun-toting action movie, but since ‘snatch’ is slang for the female genitalia, there are also connotations of pornographic photography. The photographs themselves create paradoxical feelings in the contrast between the vulnerability of the thin, naked female body and the gun. Wilke parodies the photographic style of pornography but the ‘ray gun’ shifts the meaning slightly. To Petra Löffler, ‘the ray gun, in this context, represented a weapon that made her invincible’ and there is certainly a sense that Wilke holds the gun, the phallus, the power (in ed. Grosenick, 2001, 559).

However, Wilke’s intentions were often misunderstood and installations like this one caused controversy. Whitney Chadwick has noted that although men are seldom criticised for their use of body-image, ‘foregrounding bodily experience often left women artists open to charges of narcissism’ (1990, 369). Hannah Wilke is not exempt from this paradoxical mode of thought. Barry and Flitterman severely criticised Wilke; in ‘Textual Strategies: the Politics of Art Making’:

Wilke seems to be teasing us as to her motives. She is both the stripper and the stripped bare. It seems her work ends up by reinforcing what it intends to subvert. It does not take into account the social contradiction (in Parker and Pollock eds, 1987, 315)

Feminism has a problem with nudity as some feminists hold the view that there is no possibility of using the image of a naked woman other than in an absolutely sexist and politically repressive patriarchal way. This argument has parallels with that of feminists for censorship of pornography, a standpoint that would repress the pornographic sexual fantasies of women. In response to this, I would highlight the views of feminists against censorship like Sontag and Carter; for these feminists, censorship cuts short the female subject’s exploration of her own sexuality. Sontag asserts, ‘the pornographic imagination is not just to be understood as a form of psychic absolutism’ and suggests that from all the evocations of a pornographic imagination, we may be able to regard some ‘with sympathy or intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sophistication’(1963, 232). In a similar way, Wilke’s work may be regarded as an exploration of nakedness and nudity that generates some interesting ideas about femininity and as Deborah Wacks states, ‘her version of feminism is completely valid because it invests her with control over her own representations’(1999, 3). Petra Löffler extends this analysis of Wilke’s position with emphasis on the parody that is often misunderstood or ignored by feminist critics, since ‘though she initially seemed to confirm clichés like the temptingness of the beautiful female body, it was only the better to unmask its marketing as a commodity’ (in ed. Grosenick, 2001, 554). Wilke’s project is to undermine the visual ideal of mass media culture.

This unmasking is the main thrust of Wilke’s most famous early work, S.O.S.: Starification Object Series (1974 – 1979); the title (“SOS”) indicates some kind of emergency, which is related to feminine identity, and the punning ‘starification’ indicates a kind of glamorisation, the price of which is bodily mutilation. At the installation, Wilke handed out pieces of chewing gum to the audience, which were later collected for her to make tiny vaginal shaped sculptures. These were consequently stuck randomly over her body as she posed as feminine stereotypes like the sexy housewife, the exotic lover and the fashion model.

In an examination of the model parody, it is clear that Wilke’s pose is ultra-feminine with the line of her back filling the frame and her head in profile looking back over her shoulder; it is a passive pose, but perhaps we should think of this pose less as something that feigns femininity and more as something that simulates femininity. In Simulations, Baudrillard says that the simulation is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. He writes: ‘To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t’ (1983, 5). Wilke’s feminine pose is the truth that reveals the fact that there is no true femininity.

The most startling element of the image is that the body is not a phallic one. The smooth surface is interrupted by lesions – the chewing gum vaginal sculptures that leak a grotesque sexuality. Wilke makes the ‘otherness’ of female sexuality visible; rather than being beneath the surface, invisible and imperceptible, it is marked or branded on the body of a simulated feminine pose. The absence becomes a presence.

This project of asserting female sexuality was extended in a series of works by Wilke that featured vaginal sculptures. Wilke’s reasoning was that ‘people are frightened by female organs because they don’t know what they look like’ (in Chadwick, 1990, 367). It was this kind of work that first promoted Wilke during the 1960s, when she was producing sculptures that challenged notions of gender like Phallus (Untitled) (1960), the proud phallic member transmuted into a snail head, or Rosebud (1972), a piece that represents the female genitals as a thing of beauty.

Vaginal sculptures are used again in Franklin’s Tomb Philadelphia (1975). This features a cardboard print of a crowd looking through railings and in the place of the tomb are vaginal shapes moulded from erasers. Benjamin Franklin was an 18th century businessman, philosopher and inventor who signed the declaration of independence and is regarded to some extent as an embodiment of the American dream, since he rose from poverty to being a businessman and American patriarch. He is well known for phrases like: ‘Remember that time is money’. The replacement of Franklin by vaginal sculptures suggests that the woman, the feminine, the female has become a site of archetypal authority and as Alice Jardine writes in Gynesis, for men ‘the truth can never come from a woman’s mouth but only from her genitals’ (1985, 35). In the wake of postmodernism, identity has fragmented so teleologies are shattered, but Alice Jardine suggests that ‘the inflationary feminocentrism of gynesis… has been confronting the breakdown of the paternal metaphor with nothing less than … that which is unnameable – God – or perhaps… Woman’(ibid, 40). Wilke’s substitution links to Jardine’s notion that woman has always been the passive matter which man could give form through an ever-increasing spiral of universals like God, money or the Phallus – an infinity of substitution.

The enclosure of the railings is also significant; the onlookers gaze through the bars at the spectacle of female sexuality, but the fact that the bars are present suggests something potentially dangerous about female sexuality. It has the power to subsume identity with its ‘otherness’. Wilke confronts an authentic if grotesque femininity.

Wilke is preoccupied with the representation of the vagina in art and culture and part of her project is to change the connotations associated with the female genitalia. In the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, people nervously avoid Gustave Courbert’s The Origin of the World (1866), the realist painting of the female genitalia, because the vagina is perceived with fear and often with disgust. As Wilke stated: ‘You can say a Gothic church is a phallic symbol, but if I say the nave of a church is really a big vagina, people are offended’(in Wacks, 1999, 3).

Geo-Logic 4 to One (1980–82) is set up like a ludo board and the vaginal sculptures set out like tesserae are the pieces with which you play. The sculpture is bright and colourful evoking connotations of toys, play and games. The title fuses a notion of world, mass vision in ‘geo-logic’, (‘geo’ meaning ‘of the earth’) with the game connotations of ‘4 to One’ which could be the odds on a bet or a move in a game. Perhaps Wilke is trying to create an image of female sexuality that is connected with innocence and play, but there is a sense of limit in the regulated space of the board. Pierre Bourdieu said that ‘because native membership in a field implies a feel for the game in the sense of a capacity for practical anticipation of the ‘upcoming’ future continued in the present, everything that takes place in it seems sensible, full of sense and objectivity’ (1982, 66). Although, the piece seems innocent, Wilke highlights that bodies can become regimented through rules that seem to be common sense.

Throughout Wilke’s working life, the focus of her work was on the unravelling of assumptions about the embodied woman and this was no different at the end of her life when she was diagnosed with cancer. Susan Sontag’s work, Illness as Metaphor, is very relevant here particularly when she writes that ‘illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship’ (1983, 8). Illness adds another layer of ‘otherness’ to the outsider status of womanhood. Wilke’s work after her diagnosis is a representation of the decaying woman, parodying her younger self and confronting her public with an illness which is felt in modern society to be ‘obscene – in the original meaning of the word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the sentences’(Sontag, 1983, 9). B.C. (‘Before Consciousness’ of cancer 1987 – 90) presents a diaristic series of self-portraits, a number of powerful, bold watercolours. Through the series, Wilke’s face changes as her awareness of cancer becomes stronger. This move to a more abstract portrait of herself implies a questioning of identity and the self. What is self and what is not self? How can something exist within your own body if you have no knowledge of its presence? This can be related to what Kristeva calls the symptom:

The symptom: a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non assimilable alien, a monster, a tumour, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear. In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject (1997, 238).

The woman has always been associated with abjection due to the potential for her body to contain another, an ‘other’, but Wilke confronts us with a figure of femininity whose contained ‘other’ will propel her even further into abjection. The body is travelling towards not-being without even realising it – the cancer is invisible, imperceptible, unknown.

In the Intravenus Series (1992), Wilke makes what is imperceptible and hidden visible, much in the same way that she earlier made female sexuality visible. This is a series of portraits, mainly of herself as she descended into cancer. The ideal woman of the male gaze is created through a long process of tidying, smoothing and perfecting an image, but these photographs are stark visions of a body decaying with all its creases, puckers and blotches. Wilke displays to us the alarmingly earthy aspects of the body in all its untidy detail. She shows us a voyage towards death and not-being and for feminists like Kristeva, the corpse is the ultimate form of abjection.

The corpsse that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cess pool, and death. Such wastes drop in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit- cadere, (to fall) cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled (1997, 231).

Wilke proves that the boundary of the body can be an event horizon, the boundary where one form meets its potentiality for transforming itself into another form or forms. She explores the self and not-self in Birdcage (1992) where a cage is filled with old syringes and pill jars. The theme of bars occurs once more, and there is a sense that the cage could in fact be Wilke’s own body. Her illness turns her body into a cage and the drugs are her life-force, her reason for being alive. Brush Strokes (1992) is a photograph of lost hair from due to chemotherapy; an actual bodily substance is presented as an artist’s material questioning notions of identity. The hair has been shed from the body and is therefore abject. However, we know that the hair of a person contains their unique DNA; it is separate from the body yet still contains the same unique code. The image is poignant because it displays a lost part of the self. As Sontag states, ‘cancer is a disease of the Other’ (1983, 69).

Wilke inserts her work and her illness into medical and political battles. Susan Sontag’s work on illness has noted the stigma associated with disease; for example cancer has been diagnosed over the centuries as an illness of repressed passion. Metaphors are constructed according to the trends of the times; illness is seen as a plague, a curse, a social or psychosomatic problem. Wilke confronts her audience with illness. We look at the photographs as into a mirror and empathise with the subject. Her diptychs are powerful because the subject looks back at us challengingly and Wilke takes up poses in a similar way to the earlier Starification.

#1 shows Wilke pictured with surgical tape and tubes, yet there is some bathos caused by the large hat on her head like a cook’s hat or a great shower cap. Her body seems large and maternal with one breast bare as though about to feed, but in fact, she is being fed through the intravenous tubes. Opposite, Wilke is shown in a pose from classical antiquity like the female figures which held up the pillars of temples. However, again the image becomes slightly farcical when you notice the modern vase with flowers that perches precariously on her head. The sinister aspect of the picture is created by the patches where her ovaries should be; there is a sense that something is missing from this feminine pose evoking connotations of sterility, disease and illness. Wilke treats her work with a macabre humour and as in earlier artwork, uses simulations of certain femininities to prove that there is no true femininity, although here she utilises the stigma of illness rather than mutilation of the phallic body.

In #4, Wilke poses in a blue shawl, a colour associated particularly with Mary, our lady, the virgin daughter who is the guardian of male power. The associations of courtly and childish love are subverted by the ageing face and its baldness; these negative qualities are connected to imagery of beauty, power and spirituality. Mary was supposed to be excluded from time and death, a figure unique and alone among women, yet Wilke presents an embodiment of the decay. According to Kristeva, the image created of Mary by men was in fact a repressed desire for the union of the pre-oedipal bond: ‘Man overcomes the unthinkable of death by postulating maternal love in its place – in the place and stead of death and thought’ (1997, 325). Wilke subverts this positioning of maternity, since in this image, motherhood is associated with deacy, disease and death.

#2 displays Wilke’s screams developing the notion that pain breaks down language into the pre-language of cries and groans. Those cries initiate a shattering of language. The colours of the clothes are significant; yellow is of flowers, the sand and sun, but it is also of urine, puss and decay. White is of the sky, snow and skin, but it is also of blankness. The image itself is a kind of language that communicates Wilke’s pain and through its separability from the body becomes an image that can be lifted away taking the attributes of pain with it. Elaine Scarry has said that the word work has the potential for pain or pleasure; she states: ‘The more it realises itself and transforms itself into an object, the closer it is to imagination, to art, to culture; the more it is unable to bring forth an object, or bringing it forth, is then cut off from its object, the more it approaches the condition of pain’(1985, 169). Perhaps in making these images, Wilke is trying to distance herself from her pain through its communication, through its remaking, through her control over her own representation. Wilke also subverts assumptions about cancer in this powerful expression of emotion. Sontag notices society’s prejudice that visualises cancer as ‘a disease of insufficient passion, afflicting those who are sexually repressed, inhibited, unspontaneous, incapable of expressing anger’ (Sontag, 1983, 22).

#3 is a triptych that shows a further stage in Wilke’s illness. In the first image she stands like a statue her face slightly averted, her hips protruding and her hands placed carefully to emphasise her hips. The connotations of baldness are extended from just that of disease or being child-like. Baldness is decay in the losing of hair; it is death in its comparison with the bald bone of the skull. Baldness is also trauma; the image of the shaven, bald head can never be disconnected from the heads of the death camps during the Second World War. The yellow colour and blotchiness of the skin intensifies its poignancy as an image of the decaying body. Wilke is becoming abject. The fact that she is nude except for a pair of slippers parodies her earlier work when she wore only a pair of high heels.

The final part pictures Wilke in the bath-tub lying flat on her back. Her legs are open and her vagina is exposed. Her thinning hair floats in the water like a kind of modern, ageing Shakespeare’s Ophelia or Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot. Ophelia is traditionally thought of as a young, pretty innocent who died of grief; here Wilke parodies this ideal but the tragic resonance remains that dominates Shakespeare’s play – an exploration of death. In Hamlet, IV.5, Ophelia says ‘Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be’ echoing Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech (1997, 1731). This thought reverberates throughout Wilke’s images referring to a lack of knowledge about how it feels to die, to become abject. It also highlights Wilke’s parody as she positions herself in poses made by her younger self; this specific image is a parody of earlier one in Snatch Shot with Ray Guns and on another level, it is a parody of a younger self without the knowledge of what she would become.

In #7, Wilke’s hair falls over her face like rain or tears or bars; she is trapped inside her illness, yet she can look through the bars defiantly and the transfer of her pain from her true body to a created body may be a kind of displacement. Wilke’s work should not be seen in a negative light – her self-portraits bravely reveal the ‘terrible fish’ of abjection, but by remaking herself, by controlling her own image, Wilke remains powerful. Wilke’s work is provocative but it is also very human. Barthes praised the situating of a woman’s body as a concept and Wilke’s final images of herself are both conceptual and human. In these images, Wilke’s face becomes a polysemic letter in the female alphabet. It is a parody of her younger self; it is a simulation of feminine poses; it is confrontation that presents a very different female figure. It is an act of transformation into ‘the eye of a little god’ that reflects back the feared, the loathed, the ‘other’, the abject: ‘A woman bends over me searching my reaches for what she really is’ (Plath, 1981, 173).

Zoe Brigley : 08 Feb 2005 13:41 |  Tags: Art |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem