I’m currently in Rotterdam on an artist residency. Much like the aim of this blog I came to Rotterdam to gain some understanding and produce some work. I have been here a month and have managed to solidify nothing and confuse myself even more. Trying to force a city to stimulate work has proved stupid, what could It or I possibly have to say about each other? It is the first time I've lived away from London, being by myself almost all the time is hard, the port and the docks are beautiful but I still haven’t figured out what to do with this information. Surely this new environment should change and inspire my practice in some way?
On the other hand my exhibition expectations have been fulfilled.
1. Nan Goldin Poste Restante at the Nederlands Fotomuseum
This exhibition put me in mind of John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing which I recently watched my way through. Produced in 1972 for the BBC the four-part television series was adapted from Berger’s book of the same title. It criticised ‘traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images’ particularly focusing on the tradition of oil painting. Although dated in style the critical theory still stands up to discussion, if only because society seems to still live by and consume these ‘traditional Western culture aesthetics’ that Berger criticised over thirty years ago.
The second episode is on the female nude and the following is an exert of how Berger began;
“A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, perhaps even then by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father she cannot avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and particularly how she appears to men is of critical importance for it is normally thought of as the success of her life. A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans is first and foremost a sight to be looked at.”
After hearing this quote from Berger and visiting the Nan Goldin exhibition I was struck how readable the sentiment expressed in the extract was in Goldin’s work. The exhibition was made up of three new collages of photographs and four slide shows set to specifically chosen music. The slide shows were indicative of this habitual surveying that Berger suggests. Goldin not only surveys her own physicality through direct self portraits and mirror shots but she also surveys herself through her friends and family. Using these slide shows she creates an exploration and explanation of who she is, where she comes from and how through time she ended up as she is now. Her photos have the quality of snapshots and the subjects range from drug addiction, to her friends having sex, from transvestites to domestic abuse. They are gritty and beautiful, realistic and ridiculous because we aren’t used to being faced with such true images of life presented as idealistic memories, which is the feeling that is, for me, created through the specifically selected ‘soundtracks’ to each piece.
Here the gender of the glance doesn’t play such a big role as it did to Berger’s argument in 1972 but Goldin certainly feels the need to “survey everything she is and everything she does.” How Goldin is appearing to others is of critical importance, not only because she has created a situation where this appearance is her livelihood but also because she plays to this idea that she is only something, her life is only something, her friends and her relationships are only something if they are being looked at, therefore qualifying them. She is subject to constant surveying; as an artist she surveys herself, then as an artist she surveys her audience's reaction and then there is the audience actually surveying her.
From Top;
Simon and Jessika Makng Love, Jessika Coming, Paris, 2001. ‘Nan One Month After Being Battered’, 1984. Nan as a dominatrix, Boston, 1978. Simon + Jessica In The Shower, Paris. Self Portrait in my Blue Bathroom, Berlin.
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