Calling art "adolescent' is usually a slur. During her precocious and prematurely arrested career, Francesca Woodman created art whose theme, appearance and purpose was superficially similar to what many intelligent artsy adolescent girls expressed. But unlike those other young women, Woodman was not simply narcissistic or polemic. Instead her work resounds with timeless poetic intensity, haunting beauty, philosophical poignancy and extraordinary talent.
Woodman committed suicide in 1981 by throwing herself from the window of her loft studio in Manhattan's Lower East Side. She was 22 years old. Because this was how her career ended, Woodman's destiny is to be remembered as New York's feminist Chatterton, the young poet whose tragic legacy as a doomed progeny was secured by his suicide at 17. Woodman's death has brought a following of critics, collectors and viewers eager to give her work the sensitive attention they imagine she lacked in life. Her talent deserves more than a doomed artist's homage, however, and while clues foreshadowing her suicide are there to be read in her work, many other elements are present as well.
The title of Woodman's thesis exhibition, "Swan Song," frames the works she hung in 1978 at the Rhode Island School of Design's square Victorian gallery as a unified suicide note. But unlike other artists whose tragic biographical threads seen in their art retroactively spell out 'cry for help', Woodman's beautifully troubled and troubling self-portraits are compelling because she was producing art in an era when feminism pioneered the idea that the personal was also political.
Woodman's biography is brief but evocative. More than any of her self-portraits, the available information about her creates a clear and compassionate image of a remarkably bright, sensitive and prolific co-ed. She studied at RISD, through which she received a grant to study for a year in Rome, where she had her first solo exhibition at a bookshop specializing in Surrealism and Futurism. At the time of her death, she had produced over 800 photographs using innovative techniques such as long-term exposure and double exposures that enabled her to create images reminiscent of Victorian spirit photography.
From Angel Series, Rome, 1977-1978
edition of 40, gelatin silver estate print
25.4 x 20.3 cms
According to a statement by her father George Woodman, included in the press material from London's Victoria Miro gallery, her family discovered the prints she had included in Swan Song bound in a tight roll in her studio years after her death. The prints were so brittle and fragile that Woodman's parents could not unroll them. It was not until they connected with Nora Kennedy, the conservator of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the family donated her 1980 'Temple Project' series, that 'Swan Song' was seen again. By raising the ambient humidity of the prints, Kennedy was able to flatten them and restore the highly damaged delicate paper to a degree that allowed the images to be reproduced with computer technology.
The five large-format photographs and 30 smaller works comprise the second solo exhibition of Woodman's work hung in the airy industrial upstairs exhibition space of the Victoria Miro gallery. In addition to this exhibition, Phaidon Press has released a major monograph of Woodman's work with essays by Chris Townsend and her friend at RISD, Betsy Berne, a New York-based artist and novelist. Woodman's posthumous success is justified, but it raises questions about how her work would have developed and been perceived as she matured.
House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
edition of 40, gelatin silver estate print
20.3 x 25.4 cms
Woodman's brand of misery was, and sadly still is, common among young women. By producing such piercingly intimate art, Woodman (perhaps inadvertently) embodied some of the most salient and sadly persistent concerns crippling young women. An image that Woodman produced of her nude torso with her head cropped out of the frame, sitting against a painted backdrop pulling and aggressively squeezing the skin on her belly into folds, is a compelling image of female self-loathing. Incorporating her thin frame and lithe beauty, that vision of self-hatred appears pathologically akin to the amateur "art" self-portraits girls take of themselves on anorexia fan-club websites. Yet unlike those photos, where the only appropriate response is pity, the real frisson that comes from Woodman's work is that her art is simultaneously feminist and existentialist. Though her perspective is distinctly a young woman's, she explores and engages her humanity through an investigation into ideas and ideals of femininity. Unlike other, weaker adolescent artists, or artists whose work attempts to lend the political and personal, Woodman's art is deeply tender and thoughtful because it is at once personal and universal.
Because Woodman was working at a significant time in the development of feminism, the scope of her artistic inquiry and use of her own body conceptually position her as related to self-consciously feminist artists from later in the 1970s such as Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta and Karen Finley. This assessment of Woodman's art is supported by Berne's statement that Woodman "loved fashion and loved looking at women, more than men, really; she had chronic 'girl crushes' or intense jealousies, sometimes both at the same time, aimed at the same person." But regardless of whether Woodman was intentionally producing work in sync with feminist theory or political concerns, her art is universal in its message and impact.
Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1976
Edition of 40, gelatin silver estate print
25.4 x 20.3 cms
The majority of the images in the one metre-square works from 'Swan Song' and the smaller images in the Victoria Miro Gallery's show are haunting nudes of Woodman in sparsely furnished, starkly decorated rooms. Her face is often obscured - either cropped out of the frame, blurred by her movement or covered with an object. In these images, she seems to be self-objectifying with almost painful pragmatism.
Like many other significant female or feminist artists who used their own bodies to represent all women's bodies, Woodman is beautiful. She had a dancer's physique which was graceful, strong and slender. Her awareness of her beauty comes across less as vanity than as an artistic sensitivity to the meaning of female beauty in an image. It is striking that at times Woodman seems to identify with her body, but that she mainly appears to regard it as a prop. She brilliantly embodies feminine concerns about the importance of physical beauty and beauty as an identity, primarily because she so often appears completely disconnected from her own body.
In one of the smaller, untitled images, Woodman's features are erased as she moved her head, but the thick patch of hair under her raised arm is arrestingly clear and matches the matted fur on the vintage stole she draped over her naked torso. The relationship between her body and the dead, decorative thing she has accessorized herself with is highlighted by the fact that her face is a blur. In this image and others, Woodman is clearly capable of using her body as if she were a hired model. This objective understanding of her body personifies Laura Mulvey's 1975 insight about women's split identity, "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1978,
Edition of 10, digital c-print
110.2 x 115.1 cm
Berne described Woodman's personal style as "almost Elsa Schiaparelli-esque" and a "performance." In this context, her clothed images function as more revealing self-portraits than her nudes. In a number of the smaller prints, Woodman's combinations of floppy chiffon-patterned peasant dresses, oversized rain-boots, mangy fur stoles and braided hair are an eerie premonition of nineties grunge style. In one image, Woodman is situated in the center of the frame, wearing an unstructured 1940s-style housedress and loose braids. Her accoutrement resembles what the sharecroppers' wives photographed by Walker Evan wore. She hunches her shoulders and coyly looks away from the viewer. Wrapped around both of her arms are circles of Birch bark which, when one knows her history, come to resemble gauze bandages covering her wrists after a suicide attempt while her self-effacing stance and demure dress become undermined by the morbid message of the image. But like Victorian girls photographing themselves in fairy poses, Woodman's use of the bark makes her seem both ethereal and haunted. She could be a playful wood nymph, a fairytale victim or simply a sad young woman taunting death.
In one of the most affecting images in the show, Woodman is seated on a white wood stool with only her legs and arms visible. Her hands are clasped between her knees and she is nude, except for a pair of black Chinese slippers. The photograph's piquant high contrast causes the wood wall, floor and window to appear supernaturally white, as Woodman contemplates the black imprint of her body left on the dusty floor. The dense outline of her absent back and buttocks could be read as a sharp satirical comment on Yves Klein and his treatment of his female models. With the young woman who is both artist and model seen contemplating this iconic form on the floor, this photograph could be easily be identified as a feminist attempt to 'reclaim' the female body that Klein gleefully objectified - an intellectual project taken up in the sassy and smart performances by Karen Finley. But unlike Finley, the image is less a clever attack on patriarchal art history than an possible insight into a young woman's psychology as she considers the impact her body can have on her environment, its weight and perimeters, while struggling with thoughts of her mortality. And unlike the ephemeral shape her body left on the floor, Woodman's legacy is not fading.
Having myself attended the ultra-artistic, female focused and intellectually challenging Sarah Lawrence college, I recognize Woodman, though she was over twenty years my senior, as a peer. Her art is poignantly familiar to me, and the stories told about her by Berne and her family fit seamlessly into a framework I recognize from my own Manhattan upbringing and liberal arts education.
Woodman's work remains raw, ripe and rewarding because she seems like a woman one would know and want to know. It is a great loss that younger generations of women will only know her through the extraordinary work she left behind, but, as each group of girls hopefully grows further away from the torments she embodied, her art remains an undying document of a deeply intelligent, beautiful and self-possessed woman artist.
Ana Finel Honigman
Francesca Woodman
Until 28 July
Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW
T: +44 (0)207 549 0422
www.victoria-miro.com
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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