|
December 15, 2009
In von Hausswolff's 1993 color photograph from her 'Back to Nature' series, a naked woman lies face down in a shallow marsh, her pale, body half-submerged. Is it a staged crime scene similar to what we see on free-to--television crime programmes? An artist's model posing as a suicide? Sex and violence? A feminist depiction of rape?
The image is ambiguous in terms of its cultural meaning in spite of its simplicity:
Annika von Hausswolff, Back to Nature, 1993
What the image signifies is the postmodern turn to staged photography and to narrative, thereby transgressing If the photo carried the image into history (war photos) then the story telling came from captions or text, as in photojournalism.
In Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s Lucy Soutter says that the idea that pictorial work could function as allegory was extremely compelling; linking contemporary photography with the privileged discourses of literature and narrative history painting, the allegorical interpretation of works allowed them a satisfying complexity and multivalence and also created a new kind of viewer.
In the 1990s photography became a central figure in the postmodern art institution. Consequently, as Soutter points out:
unlike the audience of modernist art photography who expected to see a self-sufficient autonomous image the postmodern viewer could be relied upon to recognize oblique critical allusions without introductory explanation. In allegory, the speaker trusts the audience to make the metaphorical connection and to sustain it throughout the discourse. In essence, this metacritical mode allowed artists to maintain links with old-fashioned art values while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from them.
Allegorical readings often drew attention away from the formal aspects of the work, its explicit subject matter and its presentation. She adds that:
the current narrative work stakes its importance on [a] subtle complicity of its relationship with commercial culture. Its hipness is determined by the narrowness of the margin between art and fashion or between art and pornography; it dances on the razor's edge. In the same way that cutting edge fashion items are barely recognizable as apparel and cutting edge fashion photography makes it hard to see what is for sale, cutting edge gallery photography is barely distinguishable as art.
The tension between commercial and artistic applications of photography has always created status anxiety in photographers. In the l980s this anxiety could be seen in the clashing discourses of art and art photography. Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall are repeatedly referred to as "artists" rather than photographers, even though their work takes exclusively photographic form.
update
von Hausswolff's combination of traditional Nordic landscape painting and scene-of-the-crime in 'Back to Nature' photography refers to the work of Bellmer and Duchamp, where the eroticism of looking is closely linked to the female body and to sadism and voyeurism.
If her photographs expose the inner workings of the much maligned gaze of male desire to dominate and possess, then a good part of their attraction for us derives from her willingness to acknowledge that the sight of naked flesh can be oddly riveting. Her work both attracts and repels.
|
Looking at this image alone, it is actually non sensical as a (staged or not) crime scene. It's unlikely that someone would drown herself in the nude in shallows like this and it also doesn't look like a likely spot for a dumped body, since the body is exposed in the open rather than hidden.
Unless, of course the killer wouldn't even care enough to conceal the victim. I think v Hausswolff deals with the topic of women getting used and tossed aside, internet resources are a little on the scant side.
The title 'Back to Nature' seems cynical?