Francesca
Woodman: on being an angel
It's difficult at times to find the proper words to
describe certain works. You just want to slip the images
right under the viewer's nose, feeling certain he will
understand and share the feeling that, yes, nothing need
be said. It's also demands a great effort to evaluate as
photographs, pictures that look like rehearsals, the act
of practicing in preparation for being an angel.
The photographs that Francesca Woodman took between 1975
and 1981 belong to this category. They cause the same
kind of confusion that's so common when we speak about
love: the ambiguity only increases with the strength of
the feelings involved. In these pictures ambiguity reigns
sovereign, fruit of the artist's respect for her inner
world and her curiosity concerning a fragmentary but
strong-felt reality.
Now that some years have passed, it's strange to consider
that at a time when photography and art shared the same
interest in what we called "de-constructionism"
Woodman preferred to construct her scenes by
superimposing various levels of the real rather than
breaking down reality to study the image's constructive
mechanisms. In a similar way, at the end of the 70s Cindy
Sherman appeared on the scene with a series of
photographic "Film Stills" that manifest the
influences of the film culture and a linear approach to
the image. Each picture was a "slice of life,"
walking the line between fiction and reality. Each
picture provided the viewer with a precise image of a
woman acting out our cliches concerning traditional
female roles. But in spite of the common ground shared by
these two photographers, Woodman never seemed interested
in the cultural model of today's woman: there is no
objective investigation in her work, only a personal kind
of research. Basically, while Cindy Sherman offered
— in image after image — a fragmentary vision
of women, Francesca Woodman gave us a cumulative one,
images that take on the woman's different models.
The influence of surrealism must also be considered for
its interpretations of the female body, which represented
a break with traditional models of representation. But
even in this case, it would be risky to look for
influences which, in the long run, might not hold much
water. If surrealism sublimated the chance events,
Woodman's photographs seem to be a complex of
combinations, a space for the transitory, for change, but
her work has little or nothing to do with the idea of
improvisation.
Woodman was photographer and model, subject and object,
at the same time. She utilized the female body to develop
her own self-knowledge and not some representative but
generic model of the world. The images of the body that
this young American was experimenting with suggest a
diffuse intimacy while tending to dissuade a voyeuristic
approach. Unlike most of the images we are faced with on
a daily basis, where the body is treated like a commodity
to be used and consumed, or an icon to adore at safe
distance, Francesca Woodman employs her body to initiate
a dialog with herself. She places her body in familiar
settings, though at the limits of our experience,
presenting it as a symbol of receptivity, a meeting place
between herself and the rest of the world, a
communicative model in which information about her
experience is presented and reflected upon. She uses her
own body as a model to investigate her own vision and not
another's vision of her body. Woodman projects images and
symbols, hopes and fears onto the female body. She uses
it like a gesticulative vector not fully known to her,
communicating to the viewer the novelty of her encounter.
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On the one hand, this attitude was motivated by the
artist' s own youth, since these pictures were taken when
Woodman was in her late teens and early twenties, in the
years before she committed suicide. Art critic Kathryn
Hixon wrote in her essay "Essential Magic"
(Zurich, 1992): "Woodman's pictures are not
de-constructive, but constructive. She added layers of
reflection and mimicry within the photograph to confound
the transparent recording of the real. The images become
psychological portraits of the identity of the body,
rather than identifying physical portraits that reveal
the psyche." To mention the psychological component
is very important in the analysis of Woodman's oeuvre.
The symbolic reconstruction of reality, without doubt,
can be considered as a mechanism in the
recognition/awareness of reality itself. It's as though
the artist were researching into the formation of her own
personality by exhibiting— sometimes even in the
photographs themselves — her impulses, reflections,
vulnerability, her awareness of the moment, and the
horror of sudden absence. Many of her pictures seem to go
in this direction, from the early images taken in
Providence, to the "Angel"; series and the
portrait multiples, in which three women were portrayed
with a picture of Woodman's face covering their own (an
homage to Meatyard?). These are psychological portraits:
not the visual records of daily existence but episodes in
which the expressive capability of the artist's
imagination is intertwined with the richness and intimacy
of her own life. Yes, we know, it takes a great effort to
become an angel, and yet her pictures are still
fluttering somewhere around our minds.
Gianni Romano - Milano Oct. 1998
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.
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