Behind the Mirrors: Francesca Woodman
With
her radical self-portraits Francesca Woodman not only questioned herself,
but also the medium of photography. Works by the photographer are
currently on view at the Deutsche Guggenheim. In the "Freeway Balconies"
exhibition, Collier Schorr shows Francesca Woodman, along with Richard
Prince and Raymond Pettibon, as one of the positions that has decisively
influenced her own work. Oliver Koerner von Gustorf presents the
U.S. artist, who died in 1981.
Francesca
Woodman
Self-portrait at 13,
Boulder, Colorado, 1972-75
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
Everything is already there in the black-and-white portrait
that Francesca
Woodman took of herself when she was 13 years old: the body, the pose,
the style, the shutter cord, the backdrop-like room. Long before Jodie
Foster established the prototype of the distraught, emancipated
anti-Lolita in 1970s mainstream culture in the movie The
Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), Woodman's photographs
showed breathtaking, precocious self-determination. Her figures, which are
turned away from the viewer and seem to sink in the fuzziness of the
pictures, and the hair which hides their faces make it apparent what it
must be like to be 13: neither belonging to the world of childhood nor an
adult, driven by lusts and secrets, completely unapproachable yet also
fully vulnerable. This sensitivity alone distinguishes Woodman's photos
from customary teenager portraits.
But there is also the
astonishing experimental setup, attesting to a virtually impudent attempt
by a 13-year-old to create a link between herself and the space, to
analyze the relationship between body, camera, and image. The wiggly cable
of the release she's holding in her hand runs through the picture like an
ethereal beam. That she exposes photographic instruments so
demonstratively and playfully removes every shred of false sentimentality
from the situation. To be sure, Woodman is half a child in the pictures.
Yet she is also an artist through and through. While her left arm is
resting in relaxed fashion on the backrest of the sofa, the entire tension
lies in her right arm operating the release. She turns her face away, as
though she can't bear looking into the muzzle of a spring gun, which,
however, is not shooting a bullet but freezing a moment which is lost the
instant it's captured.
Her Self-Portrait at Thirteen marks
the beginning of one of the most original photographic oeuvres of the 20th
century, a body of work emerging over only 10 years. When she jumped to
her death from the window of her loft in New York's East Village, Francesa
Woodman was only 22 years old. She had only moved to New York two years
previously. Behind her were her studies at the renowned Rhode
Island School of Design, where she made a large part of her work. As
the child of the well-known artist couple George
and Betty
Woodman, she embodied the ideal of the highly talented, sensitive
young woman. She grew up in a liberal home that promoted her talent and
had a strong affinity for European culture. In the 1960s her family spent
ever-longer periods in Florence, where Woodman attended elementary school.
Later, she would also spend summers in Italy. In 1977 she studied in Rome
for a semester on a scholarship. After she moved to New York, however,
everything that had begun so promisingly seemed to stagnate. In 1980,
Woodman fell into a depression due to the lack of resonance of her work
and a failed relationship. A friend of hers expressed it as follows:
"Things had been bad, there had been therapy, things had gotten better,
guard had been let down."
Francesca
Woodman
Untitled, Providence,
Rhode Island, 1975-78
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
After she died, Woodman left behind thousands of negatives, countless contact
sheets, several artist's books, and around 800 photos - carefully arranged
setups in which she tests the limits of physical and psychical perception.
Even though she is always completely present as the subject of her
self-portraits, "Woodman is never quite with us, never quite with
herself," wrote Chris Townsend in his monograph published by Phaidon
in 2006. Indeed, the photographic cosmos that she created through the
1970s seems strangely otherworldly, somnambulistic, like a dream divorced
from time, a cryptic continuation of Lewis
Carroll's Victorian children's story Through
the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
Francesca
Woodman
Untitled, Boulder,
Colorado, 1972-75
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
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In Carroll's book, Alice steps through a mirror on a
summer's day into a room that looks exactly like the room in front of the
mirror because she wonders whether what she cannot see continues exactly
like in the house. But whereas Alice finds a fantastic wonderland behind
the mirror, Woodman shows the Victorian house in front of the camera.
Alice no longer lives here. The artist has taken her place, roaming like a
ghost through the remains of a past life, no longer knowing whether it is
another's or her own. The rooms are abandoned, the walls cracked, the
paint and wallpaper peeling off. As though separated by a glass panel, we
see in Woodman's photographs herself and her models acting as if they have
to assure themselves that the room and their bodies exist. Woodman submits
to peculiar procedures in some of her works. In Untitled Boulder
(Colorado 1972-75), her naked torso is riddled with clothespins
attached to her nipples, her upper stomach, her navel. In Horizontale
(Providence, Rhode Island, 1976) she swathes her legs with tape,
which cuts deep into her skin. What can be seen as an autoerotically
motivated torture is also an experimental distortion, an intervention in
the body's symmetry.
Francesca
Woodman
House #4, Providence,
Rhode Island, 1976
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
In Woodman's photographs the body is a delicate, fleeting
thing. In series such as House (Providence, Rhode Island, 1976),
she makes it look blurry by means of time exposure, the movement ethereal
like an apparition. It almost looks as if it is being absorbed by the
surrounding space, as though it is being sucked into the cracks and walls
or, as in the series Space from 1977, disappearing behind the wallpaper.
In Untitled (Providence Rhode Island, 1976), Woodman's shadow
detaches from the artist who is sitting in a chair and disappears in front
of her in the floorboards like a runner in the mist. That Woodman makes
floors and walls look like diaphanous membranes surely has more than a
surreal intention. It is a clear renunciation of the American tradition of Straight
Photography, which with prominent representatives such as Paul
Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel
Adams still characterized mainstream notions of photography in the
70s. Woodman casts doubt on the maxim "no photography without reality."
Her consistently staged pictures do not document objective reality but
rather define the photographic image as something made, as a means of
representation and manipulation.
Francesca
Woodman
Untitled, Providence,
Rhode Island, 1976
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
Just as fragile and mysterious as the dilapidated surroundings
in which she stages her body pictures are the manifestations of herself.
According to Chris Townsend, "With Woodman's self-portraiture, we have a
"fabricated" subject. One aware of its own constructed nature, and a self
as aporian enigmatic space that we must explore precisely because it is
unknown." Woodman's excursions are by no means narcissistic
self-experiments, however. Her pictures are not so disturbing, say,
because she exposes herself exhibitionistically to the camera, but because
of the analytic consistency with which she takes all possible roles,
attitudes, and constellations to the physical limits. No matter whether
she portrays herself as a water-driving, pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, as a
crucified person suspended in a door frame, whether she experiments with
mirrors, foils, fur, masks, shellfish, or stuffed animals - she invariably
also uses different possibilities of female self-portrayal to probe the
symbols, allegories, and models at the root of these depictions.
Francesca
Woodman
Self-portrait talking to
Vince, Providence, RI (RISD), 1975-78
Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman
For example, the Self-portrait Talking to Vince made
between 1975 and 1978 contains layers of all kinds of associations. On
initial viewing the picture is reminiscent of the manipulated spiritistic
photographs taken at the end of the 19th century with which an effort was
made to scientifically prove paranormal phenomena. Something is streaming
from Woodman's mouth that looks like ectoplasm. But a closer look reveals
that a plastic garland is prying open her mouth in an almost violent way,
like a silent scream. The inability to articulate is juxtaposed with
traces of the letters the garland is composed of: an uncontrollable
language that forces itself out of Woodman as though it were a medium.
Simultaneously a mythological model can be discovered in this photo: the
nymph Chloris that the
Renaissance painter Sandro
Botticelli portrays in his famous painting Primavera
(1478). In this painting, one of the most well-known and most frequently
reproduced works of Western art, Chloris is fleeing from the wind god Zephyr
yet at the same time looking into his eyes while he is preparing to rape
her. Rose blossoms are pouring out of her mouth. The aura of this violent
act is discernible in Woodman's photo, and like an insinuation a fabric
with floral ornaments is hanging next to her.
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