Victorian Visual Culture

The exhibit at the MHC Art Museum, Matisse Drawings, Curated by Ellsworth Kelly from The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, is a striking display of seeming simplicity. Forty-five sparse pencil, ink, and charcoal drawings set in white mats and blond frames don’t stand out from a white wall when you first walk in, but as you move past them the striking movement contained in them becomes apparent. You expect women formed from a few bold lines to flutter the suggestion of their eyelashes; acrobats caught mid-movement appear poised to lift off again at any moment, while you struggle to assign order – leg, arm, head, breast – to their half-realized forms; a boat – a rectangle with a few lines of ‘oars’ – paddles off to sea as you question your view of it (Through a window? Oh yes, and that’s a palm tree). The sheer simplicity of Matisse’s lines allows for a huge range of potential motion purely because the line-work is so sparse. It is difficult to perceive restriction of movement in an arm formed from the same line as the torso and neck it flows from.

There were two elements of Matisse’s work I thought were particularly interesting given the topics we’ve covered in class. First was the gaze of his portraits. Take for example his femme en fauteuil:

She’s undeniably looking directly at the viewer (in contrast to our noticeable trend of ‘women looking sideways’), drawing you to engage first and foremost with her eyes before moving down to the casual slant of her shoulders, the curve of her back, the pattern on her clothing. And yet, when you do look in her eyes, you find yourself thwarted; where typically there would be a concrete meeting point for the gaze, la femme has only a few spiraling squiggles. Are they eyelashes? Pupils? If they are pupils, where exactly does one look to interact with the subject? In the world of portraiture, the aim of the artist – and the expectation of the viewer – is that the portrait is, in a way, a person in and of itself; a capture of the ‘person-ness’ of the sitter and something that can be interacted with and understood. Matisse’s femme – and indeed, many of his other portraits – do not allow this. They are clearly interacting with the viewer, and yet the viewer can’t interact back; the cycle of looking and being looked upon that is so common in portraits is being unconventionally broken, leaving the viewer the bereft party.

The second element of Matisse’s work I wanted to comment on were his drawings of dancers and acrobats. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any of the pieces in the exhibit online, but here’s a similar piece entitled Grand Acrobate:

Several of his dance studies focused on a specific dancer – Christiane. It made me wonder – if the subject is identified in the name of the piece, rather than simply being a dance study, what does that do to the piece? Is it still simply a study, or is it now a portrait? Is it neither? Could it be both? After looking at his dance studies, studies of acrobats, and even several studies of couples, I think perhaps it is a portrait, but not of any specific person. Maybe it’s now a portrait of dance, of acrobatics, of a couple. If a portrait of a person is supposed to convey a sense of the subjects ‘personhood’, then isn’t a drawing which conveys a sense of the movement and feel of acrobatics a portrait of acrobatics? And similarly with dance, or romantic entanglement? We’ve focused so much this semester on portraits of people and what they can convey and it was striking to be examining something labeled as a study and think, ‘but couldn’t that be a portrait?’

The exhibit of Matisse’s work is certainly an arresting one, and one I enjoyed. It’s power comes not only from the depth of feeling and movement that arises from such initially simple pieces, but also for the way those pieces interact with you as a viewer and challenge the traditions of art which we’ve been studying.

Approximately two months ago, I attended a screening of Sharon Hayes’ Ricerche: three in Gamble Auditorium. It was a slightly surreal experience: Hayes and her partner, Brooke O’Harra, had shot it a year and a half before, and it was startling to see some of the friends who had accompanied me to the event on the screen. I knew many more of the film’s subjects, too, either personally or by sight. Most of them had changed drastically in physical appearance in just the span of time between the film’s creation and the moment we watched it: short hair had grown out, long hair had been cut — even gender identities had shifted. This tangible fluidity embodied the spirit of the film, which aimed to capture a moment in time. In her address to the viewers, Hayes focused on the temporality of the event: it was significant, and a crucial part of the project, that the views expressed in the film were specifically attached to the moment in which they were captured.

The event itself was an extended conversation, framed in a series of questions and answers delivered by Hayes and a group of 35 Mount Holyoke students, respectively. Hayes borrowed the format and tone of her project from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’Amore. In the earlier film, Pasolini asked a series of blunt and provocative questions to citizens on the streets of Italy. Hayes called this film a “contemporary inquiry into the ‘sexual problem,'” and the clip she showed did indeed feature such topics as sex, sexuality, love, homosexuality, perversion, and inversion.

Hayes also focused her dialogue on questions around gender and sexuality. In her lecture, she noted that her choice of population was not merely an accident of proximity. Hayes was interested in the women’s college atmosphere for the fascinating combination of its strong foundation in tradition, including traditional notions of femininity, and its more contemporary progressive and liberal attitude toward sexual identity and gender politics. Furthermore, she felt that Mount Holyoke presented a unique opportunity to explore this attitude in a more global context, given the extent of its international population.

On the April day on which the film was shot, Hayes gathered the group of students, a sample she and O’Harra felt was representative of the overall Mount Holyoke population, on the Delles Hill. Both the students and the questions felt distinct and rigid at the start of the film. Hayes directed questions to individual students at random, involving sex, virginity, the decision to attend Mount Holyoke, gender identification, religious and cultural values, and so on. These students attempted to give “correct” answers to the questions, while the surrounding crowd looked on somewhat awkwardly. As the questions progressed, however, the discussion became more cohesive. Students responded to previous responses without being directly addressed and began to deliver answers more confidently. At first, the atmosphere was generally tense, as students struggled to understand Hayes’ purpose in asking these particular questions; however, it became apparent that the questions were meant to inspire a dialogue, rather than well-formed individual answers.

It worked. Tension lifted; genuine laughter replaced awkward giggles. By the end, the focal point had shifted entirely from Hayes to the collective mass of students on the hill. A heated debate broke out, almost to the point of conflict. Hayes had hoped for such a conclusion, she revealed to our audience, though not necessarily in the form of a fight. She had hoped to capture some heightened form of human interaction based in these questions. She emphasized her desire to situate the personal within the collective in order to develop broader insights into the human experience. To that end, she didn’t assign physical spaces or any sort of instructions about how to behave to the individuals in the film. Instead, she allowed students to stand in “affinity groups,” which had the dual advantage of indicating relational structures and elevating comfort. These groups, she said, became “operative” in constructing the dialogue. “We are always ourselves inside of collective affiliations.”

Some of the students who had been interviewed on the hill that day were in attendance, and they were all invited to participate in a talkback. This, too, made the temporal aspect of the project evident. Students reflected on their views then and now, and when they were invited to answer questions, some of them had difficulty recalling the exact parameters of their earlier mindsets. Poorna Swami, a friend of mine as well as a participant in the project, spoke on the importance of recognizing that all the statements made at the time of the film’s shooting were attached to a “singular time in a singular place.” She also noted the limitations and biases of the film: “At the end of the day, this is an elite liberal arts institution.” However diverse the population may have been, the points and arguments made during that conversation were reflective of a certain standard of education. That idea was strangely appealing to me: of course this group wasn’t perfectly representative of the larger human experience on all levels. A precise encapsulated version humanity remains elusive, which is human in itself — the idea that such an endeavor must necessarily be flawed. Overall, Sharon Hayes did a beautiful job examining tones and modes of dialogue in the context of the personal and the collective in a particular moment in time.

On September 18th, 2014, a wide array of people, ranging from the toddling daughters of Frances Perkins scholars, to traditional college students, to the Weissmans who fund the Weissman center, to members of the wider community, all braved the unairconditioned Gamble Auditorium in the late September heat in order to hear the renowned artist, Carrie Mae Weems, give a lecture on Arts and Humanity.  It was standing room only and students willingly gave up their seats to members of the community, opting instead to watch her presentation, with a slideshow component, from the back.  By way of introduction, John Stromberg, the Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art Director,  discussed his friendship with Weem’s and highlighted how her various perspectives and transformative pieces have redirected the flow of contemporary art, winning Weems not only a 2012 exhibit at the Frist Center and a retrospective at the Guggenheim (she is the first black woman to be awarded this honor), but also the Prix de Roma and the MacArthur Genius Grant.

The artist took the stage to loud applause.  She was poised and smiling and the audience immediately fell silent as she began to speak.  Over 300 hundred members in this diverse audience, and you could all but hear the click of Weem’s mouse.  She immediately proved her right to a Genius Grant by seamlessly navigating the opening and operating of her powerpoint show without any technical glitches or apologies, a feat previously unheard of on Mount Holyoke’s campus.  Moving through her photographs, the selection of her pieces is not chronological.  That could be exhausting after a thirty-year long successful career as an artist.  Rather, she began her presentation by discussing how photography is an art that informs you, providing you with the opportunity to look back and reflect on “what you are up to”.  This selection of images is reflective and thematic, sliding from some of her best known pieces, such as “The Kitchen Table”(below) to images of recent signs she created and then posted around her neighborhood  in response to the gang-related killing of a young boy who lived only a few streets away from her.

The juxtaposition between family, art, and civil dialogue was reflected on throughout Weem’s presentation.  This movement between her pieces examined the circuits that run between relationships, contexts, and engagement.  These links are central to Weem’s formation as an artist and to her body of work.  She said that one of the question she seeks to asks both herself and others through her art is: “How do you activate?”.  Weems’ work does a wonderful job of engaging people in a wide discourse on civic identity and engagement.  She communicates differences and similarities simultaneously by her works’ emphasis on resistance and the placement of not only images and text but her own body within specific contexts.  Her work represents her multi-faceted identity as a black female visual artist living in a country where racism, while always prevalent, moves between the honeyed smile of elitist micro-aggression and obvert state-sanctioned brutality.

Her coming to Mount Holyoke College in the wake of last year’s Mohonest campaign and the Ferguson protests made her discussion of race, presence, and context especially poignant and timely.

One of the most powerful moments in her presentation was her showcasing the images from her Louisiana Project and her Roaming series (images from both are pictured below).  In these images, Weems inserts herself and other black women into historical, and historicized images of both Louisiana and Rome, contextualizing wealth and culture in a narrative that has been visually white-washed and historically sanitized it their representations of race. During the question and answer portion of her talk, a member of the audience asked Weems why she used her self in her images.  “Because it is convenient,” she replied to laughs from the audience.

The Louisiana Project, 2003

Roaming, 2006

Her inclusion of her self, with her multi-faceted identities, however, becomes more than convenient.  It becomes a political and social statement on what spaces are deemed appropriate and accessible for different races.  A question she received while traveling and working in Rome was “What are you doing here?”.   This was a question asked by friends she had already met and worked with in the United States.  They were surprised to see her moving through the setting of Rome, as the recognized space of cultural privilege that it is.  The implication of this question, as Weems noted, was that she didn’t belong there.  It was a space for wealthy white tourists and intellectuals. This led to the most powerful part of Weems’ Art and Humanity lecture, as she stated, “Nigeria isn’t the only place I need to visit.” The audience applauded loudly at this, as Weems talked about the prejudices and assumptions of the art world that limit people of color and people of lower socioeconomic classes in terms of their exposure to culturally significant ideas, places, and museums.  She encouraged the audience to question who they shared certain ideas with and not to assume that seemingly ‘hallowed’ cultural ideas and spaces belonged to specific groups of people.   These images, showcasing the black female body, allow the viewer to enter into the images from the inclusive viewpoint that Weems has curated.  Her pieces, and her discussion, exposed the lack of inclusion and awareness that the absence of not just her body, but all bodies and identities, and the history  and assumptions that are attached to their images, engender.

    A taste of Weems’ dedication to bearing witness can still be had, though the event happened in September, at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, with its recent acquisition of Weems’ piece, “I Looked and Looked to See What so Terrified You.”   In this self-portrait, Weems is wearing a beautiful patchwork dress, her face is lit by light and she looks beautiful as she gazes into a handheld mirror, a pastiche of the classical image of a woman arrested by her own reflected image, to see her reflection as a black woman that ostensibly is so threatening.