Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography
Since December 13th I have been visiting my parents who live just outside of Washington, D.C. and live very close to the area metro so I can make a quick trip down the green line to take in some culture at the finer museums in the quadrant.
I haven’t seen much art since I moved out to Seattle, so I really took this trip home as prime opportunity to set out on an aggressive hunt for some long-lost culture.
The very first museum exhibition I saw was National Museum of Women in the Art’s Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography. I realized when I reached the last room I had entered the exhibit from the opposite end of the contemporary American photography spectrum since I found myself penetrating the feminist photography layers from the fables of feminity in the works of Anna Gaskell to the dollhouse domestics of Laurie Simmons.
The exhibition overall brought out a lot of questions, particularly as the show in its entirety was rounded out at the end (or beginning depending on one’s approach). This was intended as a survey of representations of feminine identity in contemporary American photography. Strains of the feminine could be found throughout in female patterns and accoutrement of Tina Barney and Angela Strassheim; the maternal instinct juxtaposed with the queer community that falls decidedly outside the rigors of the feminine; the blurring of the gendering eye in the work of Collier Shorr; the obscuring of identity and place in the work of Nikki S. Lee.
To start at the other end of the museum space shows the foundation for the work in the other galleries. The photographs of Nan Goldin are brief examples of a quest to document, share, and highlight the vibrancy and resolve of the community she found in New York City during the 1970s-1980s. In its most tangible (the image of two drag queens poised casually in the back of a taxi cab, “Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC”) to the indifference of relations (Goldin and Brian sitting on a bed facing away from each other in the golden glow of sunrise, “Self-portrait with Brian”), Goldin transformed and democratized image making with her slide show style of presenting images in succession as a document of her life and her world.
In the work of Catherine Opie, Nikki S. Lee, and Tina Barney this familiar theme comes across. Opie’s work bridges the divide between female photographers and the lesbian community showing warm images of Opie cradling a nursing infant against an ornate renaissance-inspired backdrop with the word PERVERT etched into her chest; “Oliver in a tutu” making fluid the innocence of play that defies gender roles; and domestic interiors showing relationships and connections between a community of lesbians captured in their everyday lives. Lee confounds the notion of community making the idea itself variant and changeable. Locking herself into a particular community for careful study she takes on the part of a femaled body she most easily fits into and documents her seamless integration. Barney captures the pattern and texture of New England privilege in her work, faithfully recording the WASPish community and the intimacy of its brocaded, floral interiors.
Eleanor Antin and Cindy Sherman weave a fabled narrative in their work where characters are grotesque or comical, historical or fictional. Sherman’s film stills evoke the voyeuristic expose of tabloids serving to place under glass the mystique of the 1950s woman, while color portraits of women in familiar film poses confront the viewer with an unsettling facade. Similar voyeuristic perspective is contained in the work of Angela Strassheim (“Isabel at the Window” and “Untitled (Yellow Tub)”), images that play on our desire to engage, but not be seen, as well promote the fantasy of the female form. Anna Gaskell produces images playing on the themes of fairy tale and fantasy with girls in brightly colored Alice in Wonderland outfits, but slipping around beneath the surface lies a feral feast of female rage.
The formative work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson gives way to race in contemporary photography. Confounding gender, Simpson presents a series of images showing a black woman in a suit sitting in a chair with only her mouth showing (“She”). The stiffness and awkwardness of the poses confronts the viewer not only with the ambiguity of gender, but the iconography of power – the suit. The work of Collier Shorr takes this theme into a different direction as she obsessively attempts to pin down the chemistry of femininity depicted in Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of Helga.
The work of Sally Mann includes delicate, smoky, richly detailed images of her children. “Hayhook” shows a naked female child hanging from a hook and is the brightest part of the photograph completely inert to the talking group to the left and right of the figure. The vulnerability and luminescence of the figure throws in detail the darkened areas, which surround and are indifferent to her. “Gorjus” is less compelling for the two girls at the center of the work than for the signifying elements encircling these two female figures. A dog grotesquely winds up in the background, the ground is littered with make up and mirrors, and a beat-up pick-up truck with license plate “GORJUS” hems in the two girls busy applying make up. “Miss Emily Jones” by Angela Strassheim in the first gallery throws into color those trademark vestiges of female identity: vanity items, a fake rose in a vase, a beaded miniature lamp — items that figure between the viewer and the figure like a proscenium arch in a theatrical production of girlhood.
Throughout these works was an enduring and divergent take on the placement (or lack of placement) of the self in the work. In the earlier work in the exhibition Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Nan Goldin present the self as the fabric of the work, even though the reception may have been intended to amuse or perplex. The documentary images of Mary Ellen Mark (“Tiny” series) turn the camera on to society and place the photographer behind the camera.
I walked away from this exhibition with varying ideas of what feminine identity is and the role women photographers play in the contemporary art world. Documenting community, domesticity, falseness, superficiality, the feminine as it exists outside of binary gender roles, identity, perspective, race, sexuality, environment, all to the effect of further fabling that elusive quality of the feminine.
