Francesca Woodman's Dark Gaze

The Diazotypes and Other Late Works

Claire Raymond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317133384
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Focusing on the later work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Claire Raymond takes up the question of the disintegrative condition of the art she produced in the last year of her life. Departing from the techniques of her earlier compositions, Woodman worked in the diazotype process for many of these late pieces, most importantly the monumental Blueprint for a Temple. Raymond shows that through her use of diazotype, a medium that breaks down when exposed to light, Woodman created art that is both supremely evocative aesthetically and inherently unstable physically. Woodman, Raymond contends, was imaginatively responding to the end of the durable image, a historical reality acknowledged in the way her work plays the ephemeral and evanescent against the monumental and enduring. Raymond focuses on the theoretical and the curatorial issues surrounding Woodman's diazotypes, a thematic and practical distress that haunts much of her later art, especially the artist's book and photo series Some Disordered Interior Geometries and Portrait of a Reputation. Rather than conceiving of Woodman herself as fragile, an artist chronicling and seeming to yearn for her own disappearance, Raymond juxtaposes Woodman's career-spanning documentation of her own image against other post-war witnesses of trauma - an artist standing in the museum ruins where she emerges most distinctly as a figure of postmodernity.

1

The Dark Gaze, Blanchot’s Postwar Aesthetic

L’on ne peut faire œuvre que si l’expérience démesurée de la profondeur—expérience que les Grecs reconnaissent nécessaire à l’æuvre, expérience où cette æuvre est à l’épreuve de sa démesure—n’est pas poursuivie pour elle-même.

—Maurice Blanchot, “Le regard d’Orphée”

Maurice Blanchot ([1942] 2002), in the novel Aminadab, likens the experience of the creation of what he calls the true work of art to the act of meeting Eurydice while not looking at her, thereby turning from this figure, Eurydice, that for Blanchot represents the essence of the work of art.¹ Despite this intensely gendered typology of artistic creation, Blanchot nonetheless puts his finger on an aspect of aesthetics that is central to Francesca Woodman’s intent in her later works: the willingness to risk the work on the brink or edge of legibility. (Indeed, as I will discuss, she deconstructs the gendered trope of artistic creation from within and turns it inside out.) It is hard not to connect Blanchot’s aesthetic of the abyss with Theodor Adorno’s ([1970] 2012) similarly motivated notion of art as that which is “true” only when willing to destroy itself, thus making itself unintelligible: aiming toward “blindness,” “a darkness that must be interpreted, not replaced by meaning” (Blanchot [1942] 2002). And it is hard not to connect both Adorno and Blanchot’s revisions of aesthetics as deeply influenced by their memories of the abyss that was World War II. The knowledge, then, of the holocaust works its way into twentieth-century aesthetics. Woodman, who is not directly responding to the war, yet reflects in her work a deep engagement with the core of nothingness, suggested by postwar shifts in aesthetics and philosophy. She engages this absence by creating art that risks illegibility—the risk that the work might be produced and yet never be comprehended or even seen. Her blueprints exemplify this risk because they chance themselves at the brink of dissolution, the result of the chemical properties of diazotype.

Blanchot writes of the aesthetic, “Orpheus’ work does not consist of securing the approach of this point by descending into the depth. His work is to bring it back into the daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure, and reality. Orpheus can do anything except look this ‘point’ in the face, look at the center of the night in the night” ([1942] 1981, 99). Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple is the consummate representation of the figure that also is always retreating into illegibility, through the material’s vulnerability. Materially, the “center of the night in the night” for a visual work, for a photograph, is its becoming illegible as a result of chemical decomposition. The history of photography begins with this specter of illegibility, as William Henry Fox Talbot and Nicéphore Niépce struggled not to produce images but to produce images that did not chemically degrade into illegibility.

Whereas attention to Woodman and the positioning of her importance as a photographer has focused on a kind of symbolic cataloging—as it were, a memorial project, establishing her reputation—my consideration of her seeks to disengage our understanding of her work from the ends of a biographical reading, however forceful (and in many ways relevant) that story is.² As in my earlier monograph, Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime (Raymond 2010), my aim in returning to and deepening a consideration of Francesca Woodman’s photography is to theorize our understanding of her in a more expansive cultural and philosophical matrix. I am concerned with positioning her significance both within and beyond the goals of a feminist critique. If she represents the end of the line, it is not as a suicide but as an artist contending with the defunct classical, the exhausted visionary.

What does it mean to produce the abject art object, that is, the art object that will disintegrate or will need special curatorial attention to survive? In what ways can we interpret the aesthetic of Woodman’s blueprints as geared toward the crepuscular, the liminal, the unreadable? I differentiate the term “illegible” from invisible to argue that her use of blueprint is not an attempt to disappear but, on the contrary, an effort to forge the image that marks the boundary of the legible; in this sense, her work is a manifestation of persistence. By harnessing immensely readable, indeed clichéd, cultural images such as the tiara, the odalisque, and the caryatid, Woodman’s blueprint work juxtaposes this illusionary ease of interpretation with the blueprint’s impetus to disintegrate into illegible blur. Just as Lindsay Smith (1998) has argued of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography that blur is a response to the problem of reading the image, so also in interpreting Woodman’s blueprints, I suggest that by invoking illegibility, she responds powerfully to the cultural moment—the postwar era—in which she worked.

Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple, displayed once at Manhattan’s Alternative Museum in 1980, performs architectonic femininity in ways that I interpret by taking up her project’s material cues: her choices of medium and models, both human and architectural. The large-scale diazotype (only partly reconstructed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, so that half of the work remains submerged in the privacy of her parents’ collection) is materially fragile and records tactile relationships among young women whose bodies, clothed in makeshift peploses, together with images of New York City’s East Village bathrooms form the building blocks that construct the temple. The work alludes to a cornerstone of Western aesthetics and architecture: the Acropolis and the Porch of the Caryatids (plate 5). Woodman’s uses of architectural motifs and the curatorial reconstruction of her project uncannily merge in this piece.³ Her invocation of caryatids is aligned with Dorothy King’s (2006) definition of a caryatid as “female architectural support with one or both arms raised, wearing a polos on her head and surmounted by … a Doric architrave.” The exception is that Woodman’s caryatids do not support real weight but only the visible illusion of weight; indeed her construction of the lighter-than-light collage, built of thin paper and rubber cement, suggests weight being removed from the caryatids’ shoulders. She merges, if not visually then conceptually, the ancient caryatids at Delphi with the more obvious reference to the Acropolis (plates 1, 2, and 5). The Delphic caryatids and the Siphnian Treasury before which they stood are ruins, fragments unearthed; and if Woodman’s visual allusion in Blueprint for a Temple appears to be the Porch of the Caryatids, she also references the Delphic caryatids in her studies for the completed work. This invocation of the Delphic caryatids, older and more ruined figures than those of the Porch of the Caryatids, signifies Delphi’s symbolic connection with the visionary realm.

Woodman’s intimate artistic and working relationship with female friends is evident in the Blueprint for a Temple project: her friends, portrayed as caryatids in the blueprint, bear the temple’s visual structure. The collaborative situation in which this art was produced should be noted: Woodman made use of her friends’ images to create Blueprint for a Temple. The work raises questions regarding the borderlands between erotic engagements among young women and the act of using other young women’s bodies as photographic objects. In this regard, one may also compare the ways that she diverges from, for example, Womanhouse, a 1972 work that preceded Blueprint for a Temple by less than a decade. Even as the two works share the gesture of troubling how gender, architecture, and possession of built space cohere, Woodman’s temple differs in obvious ways. First, Blueprint for a Temple is not a habitable, three-dimensional building. Whereas Womanhouse was an actual house, her temple is two-dimensional conceptual architecture: a blueprint. Likewise, Womanhouse was a performance, whereas the temple is a performance of the most disembodied and esoteric sort—it performs in the absence of Woodman because the chemicals used to make the image continue to alter it. If in conversation with 1970s feminist discourse, then her disarticulation of embodiment corresponds to larger trends in postwar aesthetics and should be placed in that context. Moreover, one must also consider the queer angles of her collaborations, that is, the ways that the bodies of the young women replicate and record intimacies—intimations that generate part of the power of the collage.

Illegibilities

Woodman’s final artistic projects—her blueprints or diazotypes, her fey artist’s book—in uncanny ways draw on formal, classical, geometric structures whose orderly symmetries recast a monumental stability that has been evacuated of permanence by medium or design. Her materials, thematics, and techniques critique and put at risk—or deconstruct—the art historical, monumental edifice with the evocation of which her late work is also deeply engaged and by which Blueprint for a Temple is inspired (plates 1 and 2). Not a “girl seeming to disappear” (as Peter Davison [2000] styled her image), Francesca Woodman, at the end, is to be seen standing in the museum ruins, a figure of poststructuralism, in the sense that Blueprint for a Temple has been laboriously reconstructed and preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Although I focus on Blueprint for a Temple in this book, I also draw connections between this work and two more photographic works, coming at or predicting the close of her artistic production. Woodman provocatively documented a negative metamorphosis in Portrait of a Reputation (1975–76), a short series of photographs. The theoretical and thematic implications that she deconstructs and reenvisions in her images of iconically feminine bodies reinterpret late twentieth-century aesthetic discourse, thereby refocusing identity on the emblematic but incompletely articulated space of the feminine.

The afterlife of Francesca Woodman and her art may be approached not only by considering the degree to which later photographers seem influenced by her aesthetic project but also by examining the aftermath of the artistic and cultural history in which she placed herself, signaled especially by her larger scale late works—not only the more popular early photos. Photographer Anna Gaskell might seem an inheritor of Woodman’s haunted girlish motifs, and yet the similarity surely ends with the facile truncation of meaning into fairy tale that one finds in Gaskell’s work. Bruce Hainley contrasts Gaskell’s simplistic and superficial handling of the thematic of the teenage female body with that of other artists in his 1998 review in Frieze magazine: “Whether or not they ever literally or explicitly name Alice, much of the radically different work of Karen Kilimnik as well as that of Richard Kern (and even Sally Mann) is a gloss on what Alice was, is, has and will become […] she gets fucked up on drugs—she sips potions (Drink me!) and nibbles cakes (Eat me!), acts which trope her psychic chaos […] she gets anorexia nervosa or sticks her finger down her throat to vomit up her being.” Hainley then argues that this so-called girl photographer, Gaskell, does not contend with the rough stuff of adolescence, much less any other form of depth. By contrast, Woodman, who actually was an adolescent during the time she produced much of her oeuvre, works against memorialization of girlish gloss, thereby invoking instead decrepitude and devastation. As such, it would not be Gaskell but rather Carrie Mae Weems, especially in her photographic installations Ritual and Revolution (1998), who takes up Woodman’s thematic of profound social disease, as well as her use of the large scale and the diaphanous (as in Blueprint for a Temple), deftly colonizing the large space of the gallery through ethereal membranes in her use of inkjet print images on cloth (plate 6).

Weems uses the photograph to explore and critique nationalist discourse as written across the female body, an approach she shares with Blueprint for a Temple.⁴ We may also consider the strange echoes of Woodman’s attention to form in the work of Sarah Charlesworth. Of Charlesworth, Courtney Fiske memorably writes that, in her work, the “female body is made present by its absence,” and notes, “It’s as if, she suggests, reality must be made strange […] so that it can be encountered again as a representation: a string of pale copies, hollowed out and rendered in halftone” (2014, 142–3). Thematics of social decomposition and of the female body’s troubled persistence are shared between Charlesworth, Weems, and Woodman. In other words, the photographers who carry Woodman’s concerns and style are not “girl” photographers but, on the contrary, serious, grown-up, women photographers.

Angles of Approach

My project, then, is to untangle from previous notions of the girlish Woodman a new way to read her photographs. Her later works, forays into the question of whether formal, classical lines can inhabit the space of art in the after-the-end-of-art era, risk illegibility. Indeed, these images question the place of the aesthetic after the end-of-art.⁵ Is not illegibility, as the disintegrative diazotypes tend toward the illegible, itself a form of refusal, indeed of protest? In making her images contend conceptually and materially with the illegible, the unreadable, and the impossible to sustain, Woodman questions what is and what might become legible as art, readable as art. By creating her images in blueprint materials that disintegrate, by secreting her work in a mathematics textbook—Some Disordered Interior Geometries (1981) — and by creating a series of photographs that invoke disfiguration as a “bad reputation” in Portrait of a Reputation, she asks questions about the permanent legibility and future of the artwork.

Their relationship to future audiences is provocatively troubled by the way she mobilizes disintegration of these works into illegibility: the photographic work that is a defaced mathematics textbook, the reputation that is a smear on a wall, the blueprint that is a photographic collage, mapping a temple that cannot be built.⁶ The photographs converge toward the limits of seeing and toward the limits of the concept of seeing. How is it that we see as art the cultural artifacts we call art: here is a question that Woodman’s works ask by exploring the codes and functions of the almost illegible image.

The illegible is not the opposite of the formal but instead a turn within the formal.⁷ The state of formalist readings in the early twenty-first century are summed up by Nick Zangwill, who says, “Aesthetic Formalism has fallen on hard times. At best formalist analysis of images receives unsympathetic discussion and swift rejection” (1999, 610). And yet Woodman’s work is formally delicate and precise, obsessed with the parameters of linear perspective, with the way that space flattens behind the figure; the lure of her art is to evanesce and manifest as depth. As such, her work demands formalist interpretation. In Portrait of a Reputation, for example, the concept of the vanishing point is turned to yield the theme of vanishing into one’s reputation through images structured by the idea of the vanishing point: the marks on the wall at the end are literal vanishing points. Likewise, the caryatids in Blueprint for a Temple step forward on chairs whose shadows are almost submerged in the blue background of the diazotype, as if they lacked the stability, the stillness, that the photograph gives them. The artist’s book Some Disordered Interior Geometries evokes geometry as its visual pun, for the disorder of the geometry is in Woodman’s use of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Color Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The End of Art and the Question of Legibility
• 1 The Dark Gaze, Blanchot’s Postwar Aesthetic
• 2 Caryatids and Silent Girls
• 3 Sanctuaries and Architectonics
• 4 Wite-Out: Spectral Geometry and Disorderly Interiors
• 5 Portrait of a Reputation
• 6 Photography, After Fashion
• Conclusion: Hauntings
• Works Cited
• Index