{"id":370,"date":"2003-08-20T22:48:32","date_gmt":"2003-08-21T02:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/08\/20\/glamour-is-a-dangerous-thing\/"},"modified":"2007-02-15T15:34:14","modified_gmt":"2007-02-15T19:34:14","slug":"glamour-is-a-dangerous-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/08\/20\/glamour-is-a-dangerous-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"Glamour is a dangerous thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> I was 29 when I saw Francesca Woodman’s retrospective at Wellesley College in 1986. Her allusions weren’t exactly foreign — they actually felt familiar — yet I felt unhinged by them. As an art historian familiar with Surrealism, I was completely used to images made by men that essentially spoke to men even as they professed Woman as their subject<\/em>. But here I felt that Woodman addressed me, as a female viewer, in that exact same familiar language, but she positioned me in a completely different space. I didn’t know where to stand. The images were smothering and occupied every common-place (every place to stand) with a kind of alienating and<\/em> enthralling alterity.<\/p>\n

Bellmer, Doll<\/a><\/p>\n

I couldn’t help but compare her work mentally to Surrealists from the 1930s and 40s, especially to Hans Bellmer. His Poupees<\/em> — “Dolls” — can make a viewer squirm, but with a bit of study, one quickly learns to deal with Bellmer’s aesthetic. It derives from years of brutalization at the hands of his militaristic father, for example; it’s a sort of externalization of a psychoanalytical process; it was a necessary step in getting the male psyche out of its prison house of language, logic, paternal restraint, taboo, and into the realm of dream, liberation, revolutionary freedom. And all that. To whit<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body by Sue Taylor. “…The Surrealist fascination with automata, especially the uncanny dread produced by their dubious animate\/inanimate status, prepared the way for the enthusiastic reception in France of Bellmer’s doll. His stated preoccupation with little girls as subjects for his art, moreover, coincided with the Surrealist idealization of the femme-enfant, a muse whose association with dual realms of alterity, femininity and childhood, inspired male artists in their self-styled revolt against the forces of the rational.” –Sue Taylor http:\/\/www.artic.edu\/reynolds\/essays\/taylor.php <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But what was Woodman up to, spilling the beans like that? And what was it that did in the end make her work so different from Bellmer’s? She was born in Denver, Colorado in 1958. But in 1981 she committed suicide by leaping from her Lower East Side loft window. On a par with self-inflicted fatal gunshot wounds, this is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular ways of doing yourself in. Essays hint at larger facts, but leave them unexplored<\/a>: no one wants to touch the personal psychology. Francesca Woodman was born in Denver, Colorado (April 3rd 1958) After the publication of “Some Disordered Interior Geometries” she committed suicide in New York on January 19th 1981.<\/em> She was not yet 23. The essays accompanying the 1986 exhibition, as well as those that followed subsequently, vehemently denied any connection to Surrealism or to Bellmer. It was imperative to see Woodman as unconnected to old-style European psychosis, to psychology, and to anything as trite as a Surrealism not utterly dictated by the latter-day followers of Bataille and Lacan. No one in the art history world dared to say that perhaps Francesca Woodman had personal demons, that she was disturbed. Her suicide was incidental and a bothersome psychological fact that had to be passed over in favour of her feminism and post-modernity. Maybe theory killed her. It was a family acquaintance of the Woodmans, a poet named Peter Davison, not another New York artist or art historian, who managed an essay that hinted at the person behind the photographs in a May 2000 Atlantic Monthly<\/em> article, Girl, Seeming to Disappear<\/a>. Davison’s article moves toward illuminating the person and the art.
\nAnother (male) reviewer, clearly conservative, heckles Woodman in a 1999 New Statesman<\/em> article<\/a>, but then adds a nasty aside that paradoxically points to a useful angle:<\/p>\n

An unspecified catalogue editor confirms, perhaps unintentionally, in a terse, non-committal biography, what I suspected the moment I saw Woodman’s frankly outlandish output: that what she really wished to be was a fashion photographer or some kind of photojournalist, but that she was torn between pursuing this goal and wanting to be the model in the pictures, the subject of the reportage, too: “She put together portfolios that she sent to a number of fashion photographers, among them Deborah Turbeville, whose work she had admired for some time, [but] her solicitations did not lead anywhere.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\n<\/a>Deborah Turbeville, Christmas<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

If you know Turbeville’s work<\/a> — perhaps remember it from 1970s and 80s issues of Vogue<\/em> — you’ll know that it was famous for combining decay, decadence, obsessive anorexia, otherworldly beauty, and above all unspeakable, unutterable glamour<\/a>. Her pictures conveyed desire unto death. Very pretty. And perhaps that was the aesthetic that Woodman was exploring, an aesthetic at the heart of fashion and at the heart of fashion’s appeal to women: self-annihilation in the service of consumer recreation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was 29 when I saw Francesca Woodman’s retrospective at Wellesley College in 1986. Her allusions weren’t exactly foreign — they actually felt familiar — yet I felt unhinged by them. As an art historian familiar with Surrealism, I was completely used to images made by men that essentially spoke to men even as they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}