Volume
III
Issue 17
Summer 2001
Till Death Do Us Part: Put Another Frog on the Barbie, Klaus
by Odet Unielsan and Tody Linnaeus
Revenge
(Anonymous vintage photographic collages)
Pages from an album c. 1870
Ricco/Maresca Gallery
New York City
5 April - 12 May 2001
It has become a modern perceptual necessity to view photographs as if looking through transparent two-dimensional windows. We must sometimes overlook what is in order to see what we are looking at.
Opposing this visual practice, these small hand-made collages, with their seamed and colliding fragments intervene across the photographic act, producing early examples of a proto-surrealistic visual playfulness, here at the service of an obsessive-compulsive photographer with an urge to vent the unspeakable. It is provocative to consider how photography might carry the weight of Victorian misogyny in the full bloom of its imagination, and how these scenes of staged beheading and implied burning at the stake embrace that tendency.
The first group in this episodic melodrama of executions about to happen or having recently transpired includes one male figure who wields a sword, poised to sever the head of a female figure. Her hands are tied and her head is subsequently served on a plate. A slaughtered duck also appears in the same scene. Its blood drips into a bowl placed directly underneath its suspended carcass. In another example, the male figure wears a flannel shirt and is surrounded by props, including a chopping block, a scimitar and a pillow resting on a bed of hay, all against a backdrop of simple moldings and wall panels. Both figures are in a state of suspended animation waiting for the scene to start up somehow and play itself out.
These collages are made and remade from photographs of characters and props in a shallow space - a process that could be a direct unschooled response to the materials at hand. Their style seems invented from scratch, repeated over and over as if each example was a prototype for the next and perhaps without the tutoring of any known precedent. Progress was slow and seemingly limited to only two variations.
Generally, all the examples in one group are collaged black and white prints depicting ritual murders or figures posing with tools of maiming, death and execution and, sometimes, the heads of their victims. In one particular example, two figures stand at their separate stakes: he stares upward in contemplation with a pained San Sebastian look, in black and white; she, in roughly hand-colored clothes complete with apron, sits before a stake painted hot orange like the head of a match, lit but not yet burst into flame. Both figures arepasted above a woodpile in black and white.
In the second grouping of pictures, the same female victim appears over and over. However, she is often accompanied by other women who are to suffer the fate of the burning stake, and sometimes she is joined by the bearded man from the first group, in loincloth or drapery, always barechested. The montage technique allows the figures to change and exchange clothing and aprons in alternating colors. Their expressions, however, remain as wooden as the pile of logs they are perched on. They are frozen into their roles as victims, staring out with an ironic iciness, seemingly unconcerned with the imminent horror of the burning flame. Love becomes a funeral pyre.
Anonymous,
Untitled, c. 1870, mixed media photography-based collage, 10
x 8 inches.
Image courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC.
The implied violence of these collages tends to suppress any sympathetic or cathartic possibilities within their secret narrative. Unrequited rage is played out in the simple but repetitious format of one or two characters cut from another context abstractly floating in a blank, airless field of white. Viewing collage after collage strangely generates little or no dynamics of character or action. As the record skips, Mr. DJ sleeps at the knob.
The virulent machinations of this studio photographer from Lyon carried all the gravitas of some unknown vendetta. A sacrifice of obvious photographic verisimilitude by cutting and pasting fragments allows the photographer to catalogue the means of execution and have his actors function as props within a macabre staging of excessive self-gratification, achieved through constant repetition and entirely visual in nature. For the anonymous assembler, these collages serve as a mechanism in actualizing the fantasy role-play of power and control that escapes any other means of making it real. The repeated images of execution at the chopping block and the implied burning at the stake (à la Joan of Arc) are, in fact, pages meant to be turned in succession to reveal another, at times almost identical, execution scene. These photo collages are less forthcoming with biographical information about their subjects, but here, made for private consumption, they do re-enact the horrific ritual of burning the accused and accursed at the stake.
The lack of a grounded context, however, dislocates the gravity of this situation. The abjectness of these troublesome objects might have immersed the viewer in some sympathetic reaction or repulsion, but their possible conceptual expansiveness is stunted. The infinite variety of possible meanings in a photograph depends heavily on the context in which we find it and the changing significance it accrues. Without a stable moment of origin, they exist only in a continual state of fabrication and refabrication.
In this early photography, the authentication of realism opened up an uncharted area of representation; an indirect means of expression laid out all the aggressive tendencies assumed by "taking" photographs of people, including self-portraits.
The body is a place photography must interrogate if it is to understand any deep-lying motivations and provide some explanations of the perverse spectacle of its behavior. This is clearly a personal statement of misogyny or misogamy.
In Europe, at the time, the dual concerns of spiritual questing and sinful degradation gave rise to homiletic metaphors depicting life as a battle between higher and lower elements. A misogyny of the imagination, fueled by paintings and literature, developed a particularly toxic strain here in these anonymous works.
In Paris around 1860, the "street of crime" documented as Boulevard du Temple and Boulevard Saint Martin, was so called because melodramas were the overwhelming choice of theaters' fare. In the same precincts, photo studios such as those of Disderi, Majer & Pierson, and, ultimately, Nadar, rose to meet the demands of the portraiture trade. All were caricatured as "torture chambers" for their practice of using such devices as neck braces and other sadistic contraptions to immobilize a subject's pose and expression for the fifteen minutes of fame it took to expose the photograph. There was no lack of subjects willing to embrace whatever pain it took to satisfy their engagement with the undeniable visual posterity of their likenesses. Plenty of photographers were willing to administer the restraints called for. The resulting pictures, resembling death-like masks with stern and unhappy features, were all the rage.
The social atmosphere was thick with self-justifying sentiments obsessed with women's inferiority. Women were the scapegoats for life's failings, and according to Freud (guilty as charged), "...this response of misplaced negativism [misogyny]...may derive from a disillusionment...[stemming from] man's own narcissistic injuries, especially the desecration of his childhood dream of a perfect mother." Fear drives the image of embattled manhood under siege into a deep masochistic self-involvement that leads this male protagonist to the brink of self-immolation.
Anonymous,
Untitled, c. 1870, mixed media photography-based collage, 10 x 8 inches.
Image courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC.
These photos cannot be accurately placed in a respectable history or context, except one born of their own dislocation, because they are torn from a lost album. They have fallen before the dictates of a commerce wherein single images command greater monetary value than complete vernacular artifacts. Any material grounding of the photographic object within an historical future yet to be written is eroded and marginalized. How were these images organized by their author? Who made them, where was the album discovered, and what can we really know of their object-ness?
The hidden hands of most of the characters - either under aprons, in pockets or tied behind backs - speak of an underlying lack of connection and touch. These chosen few - isolated, cut out from other references, reconfigured with other orphaned fragments - eliminate any bodily linkage that would support either a contextual reassurance, as in most photo albums, or any control at all.
In another scenario, turning album "pages" could re-insert a motion back into the viewer's experience of rituals, as well as in a more abstract cinematic sense. This would suggest the illusion of animation produced by the turning of pages with our own hands, reinvesting photographic history with connective tissue.
About the Authors:
Odet Unielsan is the pseudonym of a student of early photography and art history. Tody Linnaeus is the pseudonym of an art writer and photography collector. Both authors can be emailed in care of the editor at editor@arts4all.com.
Resources:
The exhibition Revenge appeared at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 529 West 20 Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10011, from 5 April to 12 May 2001. The gallery's website is http://www.riccomaresca.com
The photographer-artist who created the Revenge photo collages in France in the 1870's remains anonymous.
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