Look With Your Ears, Episode 2: The Figure

“In my art,” the Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi writes, “I wish to present myself through multiple lenses.  In short, I wish to resist stereotypes.”

You’ve probably seen her work before.  She photographs female figures with their bodies covered in henna, a dye that temporarily pigments the skin, which is commonly used in ornate decorative patterning for celebratory events in India, the Middle East, and Northern Africa.  The henna here is spelling out intricate, loosely rendered Arabic text, which then extends from the body to the rest of the image, acting like a transparent screen between the figure and us.  And this use of text as a kind of decorative veil is particularly resonant in one of her most famous images, “Les Femme du Maroc: La Grande Odalisque” from 2008, where her subject adopts the same pose and coquettish audience-facing glace as its namesake, the famous Orientalist painting “La Grand Odalisque” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, which you’ve also probably seen before.  And you’ve also probably heard of Orientalism before, but even so, here’s a quick refresher: in the context of art history, Orientalism refers to a period in the 19th century of western fetishization of non-western, and particularly Middle Eastern and North African imagery and symbolism, in what can only be described as a pretty essentializing and paternalistic way.  And it resulted in, for our purposes, two key things: utterly gorgeous paintings, and the flattening, and, yes, stereotyping, of entire cultures. 

You’ve also probably heard of this before.  There’s an awful lot of it in art history.  Plenty of perspectives have been elevated over others; plenty of narratives have been inadvertently flattened.  And little by little, we’re seeing artists like Lalla Essaydi address this.  While the exploration of Orientalism and how problematic we all recognize it to be hasn’t done anything to lessen the value of an Ingres painting, it’s certainly helped to reframe it.  And it’s evolved the way that we, as an audience, process the art we seen hanging on museum walls.  Because there’s a lot that goes into any painting.  There are multiple lenses.  Any single artwork is going to resonate with and be interpreted by an artist and any number of larger societal contexts and individual perspectives, experiences, and identities.  Essaydi, just as an example, is a woman, a Muslim, a photographer, a scholar of art history.  And because of this, her photograph isn’t static; it feels itself like an evolution.  And with multiple lenses inevitably come contradictions.  For example, she presents an Islamic woman both veiled and revealed by Arabic text – she’s not covered by verses from the Quran, these are words from Essaydi’s own journal, musings on personal freedom and identity.  Meanwhile, she is at once referencing, respecting, and rejecting the version of herself as depicted by an Orientalist French painter.  “Ultimately,” she writes, “I wish for my work to be as vividly present and yet as elusive as ‘woman’ herself.  Not simply because she is veiled or turns away, but because she is still in progress.”

This is a lucidly important statement about the figure in art.  Because it is so often in progress.  Not because the art itself changes, but because we do.  We the audience.  Ingres might stand still, locked in an ornate 19th century frame, but his figures are open to the responses of anyone who sees them.  And sometimes, as we see with Essaydi, that interpretation can itself be turned into art.  And perhaps this kind of response, this staying in progress, is how we can truly resist stereotypes.

In this episode, we’re going to look at the figure in photographs, and the myriad ways that artists have used bodies, and often their own, to probe stereotypes, and to present these multiple lenses.  We’re going to explore the idea, which is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a cliché, that art history has been created by a western male gaze, to understand what that means for the object of that gaze, and especially when that object takes that gaze back for themselves.  I’m not going to lie, we’re going to be looking at a lot of photographers, and mostly women - Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Sally Mann, and Dawoud Bey.  Like Essaydi, they’re altogether artists who have grabbed the handlebars of narrative, of stereotypes, and of multiple lenses full force, and are showing their audiences what this newfound control means to them.

So let’s start with Laurie Simmons.  Simmons is an artist, who, in her words, is less a photographer than an artist who uses photography.  She is a core member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists from the 1970s, lumped together by critics, as they so often are, because of their use of photography as a means of pushing the boundaries of conceptual and post-modern art, rather than, you could say, the medium of photography itself.  And it’s true, her work is less about refined photographic technique than the exploration of how to exploit a medium that we’re predisposed to trust and allow it lie to us.  After all, photographs appear to document reality, and “I was excited,” she said, “by the idea that a photograph could lie.”  And so, this photograph, “Woman/Kitchen/Sitting on Sink” from 1976, which is both early in and formative of her career, is a prime example of the power of intentional artifice, both in its technique and its content.  The content is a doll playfully and unsettlingly arranged in a dollhouse scene, and is a classic example of her early style; in her retelling, Simmons was a young art school graduate in the early 1970s looking for freelance commercial photography work, and in order to get a job working for a toy company catalogue, she began photographing dollhouse furniture.  The job never panned out, but she was smitten with its artistic possibilities.  And here, we see a classic 1950s housewife sitting on a sink, engaged in the performance of her domestic duties, but the authenticity of the scene can’t help be questioned given how artificial it all is.  It is a doll, after all.  It’s beautiful and perfect in the way anything poured into a mold can be.   This isn’t even a kitchen, it’s a playset.  It’s pure simulation.  It’s not a photograph that’s documenting reality, it’s a playful exploration of a medium that is participating in the artifice.  In these figures, the stereotype of elegant 1950s femininity, like the character of June Cleaver, is both venerated and subverted.   The artificiality of it highlights how damaging this kind of fiction could be to women conscripted into making it real.  As Simmons wrote, “I was simply trying to recreate a feeling, a mood, a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time.”  The proscribed role is unveiled as a playful, pristine, and dangerous fantasy.

And this fantasy, or at least this fiction, is also seen in the work of Cindy Sherman.  Sherman, a fellow member of the loosely gathered Pictures Generation, and good friend of Simmons, is known almost exclusively for roleplaying in her work.  She is almost always her own subject, but the images are never self-portraits.  Instead, she creates personas; she dresses up in various costumes, wigs, prosthetics, and disappears into these transformations so seamlessly you’d be forgiven for not really being able to recall what Cindy Sherman actually looks like.  Here, for example, we have “The Actress (Daydreaming)” from her series Murder Mystery People, which began in 1976, a forerunner to her Untitled Film Stills, which are credited for putting her on the map.  It was a project that she created while still a college student, where she meticulously staged stock characters from classic Hollywood movies – here, we see an actress in a 1940s bathing suit, vamping at the camera.  But there is no movie.  Her character exists as though on a trading card, with all the narrative implied but unrealized.  And Sherman holds in her hand the cable release cord to take the photo, again removing this character from her proscribed role and pushing her into our space.  But for what purpose?  What is the point of creating this actress, or a detective, or, in her Untitled Film Stills, a character caught in frame from a movie that never existed?  In a way, it calls to mind the isolated comic book frames of Roy Lichtenstein, the idea that a pop culture frame in isolation, if properly chosen, can be representative of everything that comes before and after that frame, and that we as the audience can actually fill all of that in on our own.  And it begs the question, particularly with Sherman’s characters, about how we’re going to do that.  What narrative journeys have her women been on?  Where are they going?  And how have we been shaped by larger societal forces to consider ourselves empowered with the ability to tell her story?  Like with Simmons’ dolls, there’s a remarkable amount of truth about ourselves that can be gleaned from this fictional tableau.

And this idea that we fill in sparsely-provided stories ourselves brings us to Lorna Simpson.  While Simmons and Sherman used photography as an avant garde artistic medium, Simpson was actually trained as a documentary photographer, and brings that gimlet eye to her own exploration of how conceptual the photographic medium can be.  And this is reinforced by the way, like Lalla Essaydi, and fellow photographer Carrie Mae Weems, she embeds her images with text.  And the images themselves are largely serene, elegant, non-confrontational images of black figures.  Unseen faces, cropped figures, collarbones, necks, shoulders, delicately wrinkled white garments, like we see here in “Screen 4” from 1986.  The text, though simple and declarative, is ambiguous: “she was no more exotic than the sparse room she posed in.”  And this ambiguity is intentional, because it requires more from us.  We’re absorbed by these fragmented pieces of people and recognize how much of the narrative we unconsciously piece together.  And this is how Simpson plays with multiple lenses, with narratives, and particularly with the identities of black women.  We don’t actually know this person’s story; we’re only experiencing her objectified fragments, and this taps into chilling historical precedent when we consider the way that black bodies have been dehumanized, reduced to their parts, and even auctioned off.  But Simpson invites multiple readings as well; again, like Essaydi, she embraces contradictions.  The simplicity of her work can also lend itself to our appreciation of the beauty of the subject itself when removed from its context: the curve of a shoulder, the elegant geometry of a collarbone.  We admire and we fetishize.  We steer the narrative and, like with both Sherman and Simmons, become aware of the way we have allowed this narrative to be shaped, our role in it, and how perhaps an artist calling our attention to it is the only way to resist it.  And so, there’s a tremendous power to this work’s simplicity.  It’s amazing, when you engage your viewer, how much can be said with so little.

Onward to Sally Mann.  Again, here we have another photographer without formal photodocumentary training, capturing female bodies who are themselves playing with roles, trying on stereotypes, feeling how they fit.  Mann hit the scene with an emphasis in her work on motherhood, creating beautiful, liberated images of her children, and particularly her daughters as they teetered on the edge of their own girlhoods, probing womanhood with their toes; Mann manages to both capture the innocence of childhood and subvert it, point out the way innocence itself is a fiction, and touching on the moments of anxiety, insecurity, and bravado that come hand-in hand with adolescence.  In, “The New Mothers” from 1989, we see girls confronting the camera, prickling with attitude.  One stands in a brazen contrapposto, resting a hand on the stroller that holds her doll; the other, younger, parroting her sister, protectively holds her doll with another hand on the hip, vamping over her sunglasses, to borrow from Cindy Sherman’s starlet.  The image is both adorable and weirdly unsettling.  The role of mother is clearly pure artifice, yet the authenticity of these girls caught so vulnerably in their pre-pubescence is almost startling to behold.  This photograph, taken by their own mother, is a particularly striking account of the way little girls imagine and process the idea of motherhood – contrasting their instinctual nurturing with their artificial playacting.  It’s as though Mann is aware, in her maternal wisdom, that they are embodying the very stereotype they will grow to smash.

And these ideas – our complicated relationship with stereotypes, the plurality of perspectives, and the subversion of the gaze - bring us to our final photographer, Dawoud Bey.  Bey was gifted a camera at the age of 14 by his godfather and immediately took to the streets, pouring himself into what is now called street photography, a style of documentary that captures the unvarnished compositions of lives being lived, those deliberate, specific details that speak for a larger whole.  And it was important to Bey to turn his camera on lives that are historically underrepresented in the art world, and certainly in art history, where black figures, if represented at all, have almost exclusively been relegated to the background, or representative of a flattened trope.  When Bey moved from the street into the studio and began taking large-format single-subject portraits, like this one from 1992, of a performer and composer named Alva Rogers.  And he brought with him into the studio not only an exquisite eye for details that speak volumes, but a desire to capture this woman in all the human complexity that had so long been denied of black subjects in art.  Where Simpson deliberately withholds identity in favor of an audience-guided narrative, Bey revels in the specificity of this woman, shown in a diptych, one looking away, inward, private, the other making eye contact, direct, confident, and welcoming.  Both images are consumed by her billowing black hair and the photographic precision of her features, revealing the incredible attention to detail required to make a snapshot of a woman in progress feel so spontaneous.  Alva is a black woman, beautifully representative of her multiple, immutable identities, and also more than their sum.  To resist stereotypes is to resist being cast into a narrative that flattens, either by means of dehumanization or veneration.  This woman is no less or more than she’s always been.  Her dimensionality is a product of her details, some of which he is uniquely capable of capturing, and so many others that she keeps for herself.  Who among us would choose to see ourselves any differently than this?

It’s a funny thing, the gaze. As though it can ever be objective. As though it’s ever possessed by someone who isn’t themselves captured by their own human insecurities, by the way they’ve been shaped by the world. As though it can ever fully capture the subject in its sights. And it’s funny, too, the idea that someone who holds a camera somehow holds an arbiter of truth, of accuracy, when it’s also just an easily manipulated tool, as vulnerable to subjectivity as the artist who operates it. And in this way, it’s a fundamental necessity for art history to take a look at these photographers, and countless others, and appreciate how deftly, subtly, overtly, they’re calling out this idea of a singular and omniscient gaze, and how much humanity, and depth, they’re injecting into a discourse, that is, and will always mercifully be, in progress.