ChrisThompson.ca Programming and making art in Vancouver, BC

Scott and I went to Europe in June 2007 and while sightseeing in Amsterdam, I visited the Reflex Modern Art Gallery.  The gallery, small and several blocks from the Rijksmuseum, was exhibiting large photographs of women (and one man) variously standing and sitting alone in modernist interiors.  The photographs were enormous and filled the walls.  I was immediately drawn to the cool tones and slick quality of the images.  I found the portraits, by an artist named Erwin Olaf, variously compelling, peculiar, disturbing and provocative, and when we got back to Vancouver I sought Olaf’s website in order to revisit them at length.

I was nearing the end of a survey course in visual studies and so I decided to put some of what I was learning to use.  I employed Stuart Hall’s theory of representation and its corollary, social constructionism, to analyze this series.  I also engaged Stuart Hall’s notions of viewing positions and adopted what cultural theorists call a negotiated-to-oppositional point of view.  I wanted to examine whether social constructionism would help me appreciate Olaf’s art.  Would enlisting representation theory help identify and decode the conventions and rules employed in the photographs and the impact those conventions have on the ways I perceive and understand Olaf’s art?  Could I sort out why I liked it?

So why use Hall’s theories of representation and viewing positions, why arrange them side by side with social constructionism?  What is the intriguing peculiarity created by yoking together these models of representation into a single configuration?  I was learning that culture is made up of representations, and it would be impossible without them.  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.  I operate within, am a part of, and must negotiate on a day-to-day basis a mainstream culture which has actively and consistently used ideological and repressive state apparatuses to naturalize and normalize the marginalization of my sexual orientation and to perpetuate a discourse of generally violent homophobia.  I am by nature excluded from a great deal of the heterosexist interpellation and encoding which takes place everywhere all the time and which heterosexuals assume is simply normal or natural, if it’s even noticed at all.  As Hall and his fellow cultural theorists emphasize, all representational systems are implicated in power relations and this is abundantly clear through my gay blue eyes.

In fact, it would be almost pointless to point out that I am particularly interested in and perhaps can’t help but see the operation of power in culture because I identify with and am a part of a marginalized sub-culture—in fact I can go further and suggest that no marginalized person would not actively look at and consider (at length) the marginalizing operations of power.  So I tend to view the world from a somewhat oppositional point of view.  But I am still part of an overwhelming capitalist culture and I am still encoding and decoding signs using a conceptual map that I have been taught and which I share with others.

This reflective posture I was trying to adopt while studying Olaf’s art enabled me to engage such theories of representation as Hall’s, using them as interpretive strategies to describe some of the interactions and relationships between the images I was looking at and power in culture.  I found the process difficult and even a little irritating, but eventually I saw the value in it, and since then I’ve been more aware of how I inevitably operate within a system of constraints that facilitates certain insights and prohibits others in order to effect some control over me.

So.  The photographs.  The modernist interiors which form the background in Olaf’s images drew me into considering formal Modernist concerns such as structure, organizing principles and the arrangement of colour.  There were a total of fifteen Grief photographs on Olaf’s website, seven in landscape format and eight in portrait format.  Grief is, in fact, two series: Grief, composed of the seven photographs in landscape format, and Grief Portraits, composed of the eight photographs in portrait format.  The aspect ratio of the Grief images is 16:9, while that of the Grief Portraits is approximately 3:4.

Attention to modernism includes attention to the décor, the hairstyles and the clothes, all of which seem to reference the early 1960s.  Examining one photograph in particular functioned by synecdoche to describe the series, and I chose the one where a woman with grey hair stands in a pink dress with her face in her hands.  The first observation I made, in fact what first caught my eye, is the furniture—it looks expensive and I want it all.  The richly stained and artistically configured wood of the coffee table and the sumptuous leather and shiny, highly polished stainless steel or chromed metal of the sofa and ottomans suggest affluence and a particular and refined taste.

Though I risk lapsing into soft decor porn, I have to continue and point out that the sofa is reminiscent of a Le Corbusier sofa loveseat, features an external metal frame and cushions of honeycombed honey-brown leather.  The ottomans match the sofa and are aligned with one another at ninety degrees to it.  The lines are clean, straight and precise, but the seats do not look brand new; the leather has the delicious patina of regular use, and there is the impression that someone of not unsubstantial size has perhaps been accustomed to sitting on the right-hand seat on the sofa.  Leaning against the sofa on this side is a dark, thin attaché or portfolio which is only just visible.  It intrigues me.  What secrets are inside, and what cultural program of suspicion compels me to suggest these possibilities?

The woman in the picture is alone and stands somewhat off-centre to the right in the photograph, at approximately the golden ratio.  She is facing the window and turned slightly toward the camera and consequently visible in profile.  Her hair is grey-white and arranged into an elaborately awesome and time-consuming up-do that exposes her neck which seems slightly slack with age.  She is Caucasian, not obese, and in fact what portion of her legs are visible below the hem of her dress suggest, in tandem with its cut, that she is in fine physical shape with an hourglass figure which has withstood the decades.  There is a barrette or hair-band just visible above her forehead.  Her head is bowed, her eyes are closed.  The woman wears a salmon-colored dress of relatively stiff fabric which has long sleeves fitted to high armscyes, a well-tailored bodice, wasp-waist and a full calf-length skirt which is probably worn over crinoline.  The dress is attractive, stylish in a retro sort of way, and well-fitted.

She looks like she’s on the cusp of crying, I see it in the sag of her shoulders and the angle of her head.  There’s no happiness to her stance, no joyous spontaneity to the tilt of her head, no calm peaceful gaze of contemplation resting upon the yard on the other side of the window.  I doubt very much whether she is aware in any meaningful way of the room around her; she seems captivated by thoughts which consume her, ensconced in a throne of melancholy pensiveness which separates her from the world.

I found that a lot of tension is created by the contrast between an evident internal disorder and a pristine, predictable setting.  The subjective and personal clashes with the resolutely objective and impersonal; there seems to be a struggle to contain an emotional catharsis, to repress the expression of emotions which might fracture the illusion of Golden perfection.  I wonder: is this photograph (and the series) a depiction of how a big rich European patriarchy grieves the loss of the patriarch?

Armed with my theoretical tools, I turned my attention back to the study photograph and note that it is a woman in a room.  A woman who looks sad and hopeless.  A woman who is made to look sad and hopeless by the artist.  Never mind any intention that the artist may have; that’s not supposed to be my concern.  My concern is recognizing that the artist has perpetuated a patriarchal discourse on women which presents them as passive direct objects of an undoubtedly male gaze.  It seems unlikely to me that a woman operating in contemporary thrice-post-feminist discourse would consent to photograph a woman in a setting which perpetuates a stereotype or myth of incapacity and immobility in the face of male agency.  Or maybe she would.  Regardless, the woman in the photograph has been cast into a countenance of needing comfort which, I suspect, most people feel unwittingly compelled to offer and this renders her powerless.  Further, I might suspect that there is even a sense of the woman being cast as an accessory, representing yet another successful purchase, another object with a rich and well-documented provenance in the patriarch’s superiorly grand modernist home.  Hers is not to feel or weep or think, even; she seems held back and restrained from outright sobbing by the social expectation that hers is simply to bear children, to bear witness to his rise to power, and to bear the burden of being left behind, all whilst looking fresh and fantastic!

Interestingly, I found myself considering a certain satisfaction which eclipsed the empathy that I trust the dominant-hegemonic viewer feels without reservation.  Here is the image of a woman who is made to seem a wealthy matriarch of a large, attractive family caught in a humbling position of weakness.  Since I am viewing this image from the margin, I might feel some pleasure knowing that her source of power and wealth has been dimmed, if not completely destroyed.  Will her position as a grande doyenne bourgeoise be threatened by the loss of her husband?  Do I consider that a just and fitting reward for a hubris which the privileged are expected to commit?

The woman is wearing long hair which is elaborately styled and a (frankly) gorgeous dress.  The discourse of beauty is in operation here; women must, even when in the throes of despair, wear high heels and sweep up their hair and be ready to anticipate the needs of the world of men around them.  The slick and attractive composition of the image frames it in a desirable and sophisticated glamour.  There is artifice here, and I am forced to wonder: does the artifice extend to her grief?  Does grieving correctly mean that we are to draw the curtains shut and ignore the world?  Are we to isolate ourselves and seek chemical numbness?  Is there a formal programme of grief which we must follow in order for it to be acknowledged as such?  Is the woman truly grieving because she feels grief or does she feel compelled to play a role and secretly rejoice at a sense of patriarchal weight being lifted from her shoulders?

So cultural studies is not supposed to be about answering questions–it’s about asking them.  And there is an expectation from the oppositional side of the viewing spectrum that images require decoding in order to see how power is distributed and knowledge is organized.  By identifying several discourses, such as those of sexuality, consumerism and beauty, and considering how they and other signs in the photograph can be decoded as operatives of dominant and hegemonic ideologies, I tried to examine how grief is represented in this image and how this representation can be codified into a set of conventions and rules of conduct which tell us what to see and, by extension, how to think.  Is there anything I can identify that helps me understand why I like these slick, modern portraits?  Yes, maybe.  I still can’t afford to buy it, though.