Francesca Woodman
Untitled,
Boulder, Colorado, 1972-75
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
The radicality with which Woodman positions her body in front
of the camera to explore such complex role pictures puts her in retrospect
in the company of contemporaries such as Ana
Mendieta and Hannah Wilke.
At the same time, today she is regarded as a predecessor of post-feminist
artists like Cindy
Sherman, Nan
Goldin, and Sarah
Lucas, who since the 1980s have engaged with forms of female
representation. While she has become famous posthumously, during her
lifetime Woodman received very little attention. Gallery owners found her
work "not mature enough," and she had only a few exhibitions in project
spaces in New York and Rome. Only one of her books, Some Disordered
Interior Geometries, was published, shortly after her death. It is
only since the middle of the 80s that she has been represented in numerous
international exhibitions. In 1998, the Fondation
Cartier devoted a large-scale retrospective to her which toured
Europe. And since 2006 at the latest, when a selection of her photographs
was shown at the Berlin
Biennale curated by Maurizio
Cattelan, Massimiliano
Gioni, and Ali
Subotnik, her work has experienced a new reception from a young
generation of artists. This is also reflected by the exhibition project Freeway
Balconies that the New York photographer Collier
Schorr is currently presenting at the Deutsche
Guggenheim. Schorr, one of the most prominent young U.S.
photographers, shows Francesca Woodman, alongside greats such as Richard
Prince, Bruce
Nauman, Raymond
Pettibon, and Adrian
Piper, as an artist who had a strong impact on her own work.
Francesca
Woodman
"On Being an Angel #1",
Providence, Rhode Island, 1977
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
The fact that it is only in the last decade that Woodman has
advanced from an "insider's tip" and a "photographer's photographer" to an
icon of U.S. art surely has to do with her biography, which threatens to
overshadow the formal and intellectual audacity of her work. It is
occasionally implied that Woodman's photographs hint at self-destruction
or even anticipate her suicide. Indeed, her work contains numerous dreary,
eerie elements picking up on the gothic tradition: abandoned houses, a
ghostly presence, mirrors, veils, and a clear predilection for Victorian
literature and fashion. Woodman loved Charlotte
Bronte's novel Jane
Eyre and was enamored of vintage second-hand clothing. The look
that she developed in the mid-70s, however, also calls to mind the
post-hippie posh of musicians such as Kate
Bush and Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood
Mac, who embodied a new, cryptic, elfin type of woman. The nostalgia
and longing for death, the morbid lust so often ascribed to Woodman's
works, were part of the youth culture of the time. In films such Peter
Weir's Picnic at
Hanging Rock, Robert
Altman's Three
Women, and Brian
de Palma's Carrie
the erotic awakening of young women is coupled with paranormal
devastation: a loss of identity, obsessions, mysterious disappearances.
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While parapsychology
was discussed on TV shows and in magazines and Hollywood and the fashion
industry devoted themselves to past epochs such as the Roaring Twenties,
teenagers wore clothes expressing nostalgia and folklore look and were
fans of Patchouli,
necromancy, and Pink
Floyd's Dark
Side of the Moon. Thus Woodman, who wanted to make a name for
herself in New York as a fashion photographer, revered Deborah
Turbeville, whose dreamlike, blurry photos in magazines like Vogue
alluded to the style of Victorian photography and were on view at the 1977 documenta
6.
Francesca
Woodman
Untitled, Rome, 1977-78
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
The unique aspect of Woodman's photographs is how they combine
these mass-cultural tendencies with conceptual thought and Post-minimal
influences. The critical attitude with which she investigates connections
between photography and physical and spatial representation, the
radicality with which she uses her body as a measuring instrument to gauge
height, width, and depth, also calls to mind the architectural
interventions of Gordon
Matta-Clark and the approaches of Bruce
Nauman, who in his video performance Walking
in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square
(1967-1968) walks across his studio based on exact specifications. The
contradiction between the actual spatial and temporal experience and the
depiction of this experience in photography is a fundamental problem that
Woodman's work addresses.
Francesca
Woodman
Untitled, Providence,
Rhode Island, 1976
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
"I must therefore submit myself to this law: I cannot go into
the Photograph," wrote Roland
Barthes in his essay 1980 Camera
Lucida from 1980, "I can only sweep with my gaze, like a smooth
surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in all senses of the
word, that is what I must admit." When Woodman was working on the series Charlie
the Model between 1976 and 1977, in which she is seen together with a
nude model from the Rhode Island School of Design, she wrote at the edge
of the photo: "I guess he knows a lot about being flattened to fit paper."
In Woodman's oeuvre, this appears as a violent act: She repeatedly shows
her body clinched, framed, crimped, pressed against the wall or against
plates of glass, as though she wants to make the process of photography
physically palpable. But Woodman was certainly not someone who simply
accepted this constellation. She tried to create a kind of counter-model
in her work - despite her constant awareness that she would inevitably
fail. She made it very clear that photography is a cruel business, a
Sysiphean task. And no one faced this challenge as unwaveringly as
Francesa Woodman.
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