Friday 24 April 2009

How to Disappear Completely


Dear Readership,


The next two articles I have in mind are, to borrow David Byrne's words, 'kinda big'; so I am a little averse to undertaking them with exams ongoing. In the meantime, here is a review of the current exhibitions on display at Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery.

Yours,
Luke.


Despite the generally subdued, melancholy atmosphere of all of the works in the Ingleby's partial retrospective of the late American photographer Francesca Woodman, there is considerable variety within this collection. One recurring theme, however, is such that - in light of Woodman's suicide at the age of 22 - I can't resist linking to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story about madness and depression, 1891's "The Yellow Wallpaper". This is the notion of hiding, of creeping into nooks in space. Gilman's protagonist does just this. Confined to a single room for the sake of 'The Rest Cure', she has little else to do but study the room's eponymous wallpaper intently. Gradually losing grip of reality, she comes to believe that there are women trapped in the paper:

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over [...]
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

The narrator's intense identification with these phantasms means that by the end of the story she is found, by her husband, 'creeping' on her hands and knees, along the walls, mentally 'inside' the wallpaper's pattern if physically excluded:

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

The parallels with Gilman's work are evident in many of th
e works in this display, though perhaps none more so than this 1977 image, part of the artist's Space2 series.



In all cases Woodman appears to want to embed herself in some impossible portion of space - behind the wallpaper, between the fireplace and the wall, inside a tree trunk. She is in the process of disappearing into domestic space without a trace (in a discussion with friends yesterday, we hit upon the idea that perhaps the only effective way to imagine your own inexistence is to picture the room you are stood in, empty). This does not read solely as the image of self-annihilation Woodman's biography might suggest, though - I am aware of the limitations of reading prophetically from hindsight. There is undeniably an element of that in Woodman's work, but it is intermingled with a desire to know the magical in the everyday - to embed oneself not just in a vanishing point, but also in a fantastical 'Second World' of the imagination. This is visible in Woodman's more surrealistic images, images such as "yet another leaden sky, Rome, Italy, 1977-78", below.




The paradox of Francesca Woodman's work is that it figures retreat-into-the-imagination (whether willed or brought on by mental illness; for better or for worse) as a literal vanishing act, even as her works snowball towards an increasingly singular visual identity. The maker's mark is present in 2 untitled works, both produced in Providence in 1976. In one, 3 naked women cover their faces with images of Woodman's face - a reversal of the artist's philosophical camera-shyness; in the other, another naked woman - perhaps the artist herself (for, like in so many of Woodman's works, we don't see the figure's face) is seen s
at by an Yves Klein-style body-imprint. But these are notable exceptions, and for the most part the works in this exhibition function on the paradigm of redress-through-escape, of incessant-creation-through-incessant-self-abnegation (That this conclusion arises from autobiographical precepts is a necessary hypocrisy). In the exhibition's final work the artist is nearly out-of-frame, she sticks out her arm as if to wave goodbye.


Also on show at the Ingleby is Tommy Grace's show Dummy. Three rather eclectic thoughts coloured my appreciation of these works: the knowledge that 'show-throughs' could be a source of bawdy - and sometimes subversive - humour in the newspapers of
Fin de siècle Paris; the joke, 'what is the last thing to go through a fly's mind as it hits a windscreen? answer - its arse'; and certain Tintin frames involving newspapers. The first and second relate to the works "Recto Verso (day & night)" and "Recto Verso (dawn & dusk)" (both 2009), which present the (largely unviewed) back-sides of Michelangelo's sculpture groups "Day and Night" and "Dawn and Dusk" on opposite sides of thin kozo paper, allowing the light shining through them to create a 'show through' effect; and enacting a comically graceless (no pun intended) 'arse-through-mind' implosion, collapsing these sculptural masterpieces into 2-dimensional images that look as if they need to be awakened by 3-d glasses.




The latter thought is pertinent to the collages "Volodorper", "Dolum" and "Greeking" (again, all 2009). These make play with Lorem Ipsum, the graphic design industry's 'standard dummy text', which is seen in newspapers read by the characters in Elipse/Nelvana's animated television adaptation of
Hergé's Adventures of Tintin (1991-92). Tintin, in all its media appearances, is an interlingua comparable to this 'dummy text'. Its images are exportable to all manner of contexts; its protagonist was even labelled by the creator of the series, Hergé, as the 'degree zero of typeage' (for more on Tintin-as-dummy, and, indeed, Tintin-as-incessant-self-abnegator, see Tom McCarthy's superb text, Tintin and the Secret of Literature). But embedded in the title of Grace's show is a mocking attitude towards such attempts at international interlinguas. Perhaps the artist, owing to his 'alter-ego as a graphic designer' (that's according to the exhibition's information leaflet), is simply sick and tired of Lorem Ipsum, in which case these works too have a certain bitter humour to them. However, that mocking attitude is also arguably turned towards Malevich's Suprematism and other similar internationalist avant-gardes, which are referenced here by the geometric patterns Grace uses to construct his collages. Grace may take his place among the mass of artists renewing criticism of early 20th-century utopianism.

Francesca Woodman and Tommy Grace: Dummy run at the Ingleby Gallery until 13th June.


Sources
:

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte.
"The Yellow Wallpaper".
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html (accessed 24/04/09)

McCarthy, Tom.
Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Croydon: Granta, 2006.


Thanks to Chris Tregenza for his input.

2 comments:

  1. I think the Lorem Ipsum / Newspapers / Tintin connection is only in the animated series. In the books, the text was either two small to be readable or was relevant to the plot.

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  2. thanks for the challenge. it's definitely something i need to check up on. i could swear i've seen it in one of the books but i may be thinking of the series. if you're right i'll adjust the text accordingly...
    (and generally thanks - you're the first commentator i've had - do you enjoy the blog?)

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