A room of her own

We are quite often interested in artists who have
exceptional lives. And if those lives involve scandal, intrigue, or illness, we
become fascinated.

            This fascination manifests itself
not only in the biographical, but in the work itself. We want to see the life
illustrated in the work of these artists — Vincent Van Gogh the madman,
Caravaggio the murderer, Picasso the womanizer. But after closely examining the
paintings, sculptures, or photographs, we come to realize there are no obvious
clues or answers. Picasso’s paintings are not misogynistic revelations of his
conflicted feelings about women. And just as Van Gogh’s paintings are not
suicide notes, the photographs of Francesca Woodman do not provide answers to
why such a talented young woman chose to end her life.

            Woodman produced over 10,000 images
during a brief photographic career of six years before taking her own life. She
died a few months before she would have turned 23. Born into a family of
artists — her father a painter and her mother a ceramicist — Woodman was
encouraged from an early age and had been taking pictures since she was 13.
Many of these images are almost exclusively of Francesca herself or Sloan
Rankin, her best friend and classmate at the Rhode Island School of Design.

            I first heard of Woodman a few years
after her death in 1981. Since then I have seen her work mostly in reproduction
and only occasionally. So this exhibition at the Johnson Museum — consisting
of many images never previously publicly exhibited — could have held the
answers to her tragic mystery. Instead, it only leads to more questions.

            Woodman’s photographs are hauntingly
beautiful and exude a Victorian romanticism. They are also gothic and, at
times, surreal. I could feel myself being sucked into the myth of the
melancholic, self-critical artist who eventually committed suicide. But what
haunts me about the work is not just its dark and mysterious veneer. It’s the
other “ghosts” in the pictures — ghosts of the 1970s contemporary art scene.

            Connections to photographers like
Duane Michals and his surrealistic photo narratives,
with their whimsical and mysterious twists and turns, are clearly evident. Also
apparent is the influence of Aaron Siskind, whom
Woodman met while a student at RISD. References to Siskind’s
lyrical abstractions can be seen in Woodman’s backgrounds — peeling paint,
worn out wood, and other architectural structures revealing surfaces beneath.

            You can also see associations with
the work of artists like Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. Like Nauman, Woodman was
intent on making her work in the studio, which was her living space transformed
by constant experimentation into a photographic construction. Ironically, her
concern, not unlike that of Van Gogh’s, was that the work not be purely
self-referential and autobiographical. Indeed, both artists were very much
connected with the here-and-now of their respective art worlds. For Van Gogh,
it was the idea of how to deal with expressive color in relation to both the
scientific and cultural theories of his own time. For Woodman, it may have been
a question of how to approach the idea of balance, both figuratively and
literally.

            In her photograph Providence 78 (1975-79), she suspends a
door, like a black mass cutting across the picture plane. The door is
just a shape, but it is holds all the connotations of being closed or open, a
barrier, a doorway to somewhere. The door is juxtaposed against the body of a
woman, either Francesca or Sloan. The edge of the photograph falls off into
darkness — again, both literal and metaphorical. We can read this image in
many ways: One may be a kind of poetic push-pull between the actual and the
unknown (or unrepresentable), all balanced within the
confines of the picture frame. We can look at it as a purely formal exercise in
balance and composition, reducing objects into contrasting forms and shapes.
Or, it can be both the poetic and formal in a dialogue of ideas, not unlike the
work of the sculptor Richard Serra, whose elegant
line is transformed into many tons of raw steel.

            In a very conscious minimalist
aesthetic, Woodman gives us a limited amount of objects to see. But, through
layered juxtapositioning, these few objects are
loaded with all sorts of meaning. As with many artists of the late 20th
century, the meaning is ambiguous, fractured, always deferred somewhere else;
sometimes, even, back to the viewer in an endless game of hide and seek.

            We will never know what would have
happened to Woodman’s artistic trajectory were she alive today. But that
doesn’t matter. Her work stands as a testimonial from a human being caught up in
the intricacies of “being” in our contemporary world,
and as an artist who did some quite amazing work in a very short time.

Francesca
Woodman: Photographs is on display at The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at
Cornell University through October 26. Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10
a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission is free. Metered parking is available
in the lot next to the Museum. Info: (607) 255-6464.

This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2003.