Susanne Kass

III. ro!nk, Intermedia 3

Traces of Bodies and Tracing the Body


The body is the vessel that we wear through life. It changes without pause, a living organism that
contains with in it a complex system of living organisms. It craves care and nourishment, it can
get sick and will one day expire. Living bodies of both animals and humans are of the earliest
representations in art, and it seems the subject can never be exhausted. The depiction of the body
has gone through many styles phases and forms and although the body as a performer of ritual far
back into prehistory it is only recently that bodies, their forms and actions have been able to be
reproduced in the form of photographs, freezing actions and moments in time with the ability to
be reproduced, cloned visually as it were over and over again.

An artists practice must undeniably be connected to a desire to express inner impulses to
externalize what is experienced internally. This mark making as it were has developed into a vast
variety of forms and mediums, the is self always present through the gesture, decision or
command. But it is not so long ago that the self as a subject really started to appear, although the
awareness of a self (with a name, role, finite history in the sense of burial rituals and so on) has a
long history.

The individual as a subject is a complex phenomenon, and is a rather recent development in
Western thought. Heidegger calls this representation, and in Descartes Meditations it emerges
that the world ceased to be a book that one must learn to read and became a picture constructed by his look.
The human subject also stopped tracing the similarities between himself and other beings; he strove to be
unique, freestanding and identical to himself.
1
Maybe the roots of this can be traced to many different
sources even further back and the causes defined by certain shifts present in history, but one thing
that seems apparent through the development of art, philosophy and theory over the past few
centuries is that it has taken much adjustment to try to come to terms with confrontation with the
self, at least in the Western tradition, and these conflicts which arise from ones relation to the
group and simultaneously themselves as an individual are far from resolved.

There are some interesting aspects to this. One is the attitude towards death and our finitude, it is
one of the things that connects us all, because no one can escape it, no matter what your place in
the world.
2
Another interesting aspect is the act of projecting feelings on another person, looking
outside the self in search of another, possibly complimentary part, or mirror to see oneself in and
the shortcomings of that endeavour. As the dialogue between parties has developed in the subject
object relationship, the object has also started to develop its own voice, and this brings with it a
whole new set of complications.

According to Susan Sontag All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in
another person's (or thing's ) mortality, vulnerability, mutability
3
if this is the case, does that mean that a
photoraphic self-portrait is our own memento mori? The photograph is the mirror that can lie, if we
seduce it in the right way, the painter is the potential culprit of any lies that make it onto the
canvas, but a photographer can only lie to the camera by being aware of its weaknesses and
knowing how to manipulate them. This is not only true in an aesthetic sense, but also in regards
to playing tricks on time. Photographs are among the first things that can begin to feel dated and
bring forth a special kind of nostaliga for just that reason. However the images of photographers
like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston dont really suffer from this kind of nostalgia, they seem
almost timeless, even though a multitude of people working with similar subjects and probably
more technically precise materials can easily feel rathe kitchy. Maybe it is simply a trick of the
subject, there are few if any characteristics that set them in a specific time context. So if you
understand the secrets of the camera, you can make it lie at will.


1
Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh p.2
2
Ibid., p.4
3
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Though it might be possible to manipulate the process and result of a photograph, what happens
later and how this affects the images one has created is maybe less predictable. Two artists,
Francesca Woodman and Ana Mendieta were both photographers who often turned the camera
on themselves, carefully planning their actions and documenting them through photography.
They traced marks with their bodies, both physically in the spaces where they worked and on the
negatives. These negatives are the traces we have after their lives were both cut short, as they each
died quite young.

Maybe no photographer takes a self-portrait with the full knowledge of what it will mean in the
future. For some reason it is very different to look at a photograph of someone in their youth who
lived into old age compared with someone who didnt. But probably the main reason that this
strikes me in the work of these two artists is what a fasicnation they had with trying to disappear,
and especially in regards to performing these disappearing acts specifically for the camera.

Ana Mendieta, originally from Cuba, used her camera more than anything as a tool to record her
actions and interventions. Although her relationship to the camera is more a witness who she
brought along on her expeditions, in contrast to Woodmans very staged-for-the-frame scenarios,
the images where she is physically present and not presenting a mere trace of her presence she
seems fully aware of her presence in the context.

Nature and metamorphosis are always nearby in her work. Sometimes she just changes her hair or
decorates her body in a ritualistic way, with blood, feathers or other peoples hair. Her earth-body
works began around 1972 with Grass on Woman and eventually she stopped including her own
body in the images and instead left traces of her actions with a surrogate material, blood, sticks,
stones, glass, gunpowder, pigments, mud, ice and show. With the Siluettas series her physical
body is absent although the silhuettes are life sized and based on her own form. The constructed
traces of her actions reflect burial rituals from Mexico, which she adopted as a surrogate home as
she was unable to return to Cuba. This isolation and longing she felt for her homeland was a
strong influence throughout her practice until she managed to return to visit Cuba in 1980. She
says:

I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my
homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out from the
womb (Nature).
My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal
source.
These obsessive acts o reasserting my ties with the earth are really a manifestation of my thirst for
being. In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche.
4
(1983)

In 1975 she started using fire to
ignite her Siluettas and as a symbol
of purification and transformation.
At this point her work becomes
more fluid, less ontological and
more unpredictable in its physical
form, though a more definite lines
and forms begin to appear in her
work in the early 80s, although the
familiar silhouette of her body has
now transformed into other shapes
and forms.

These works which are heavily
influenced by Central American
and African cultures and religions and in the Western tradition, our perceptions and relationships
to our bodies and our attitudes to finitude are very different. Although Mendieta often returned to
sites and worked more than once with the same Siluettas they had to be photographed because
most would be swallowed up by nature again and the photographs and film documentation could

4
Unseen Mendieta, quote by the artist from 1983
freeze them and make them last much longer than their natural form. This may be the bridge that
connects Mendietas work to the Western tradition. Here, there is a desire to trick time and keep it
still, prolonging life, stopping the clock and fighting the inevitability of death have long been a
fascination, which ironically enough plenty of people have dedicated their lives to.

In Flesh of My Flesh, Kaja Silverman writes about our relationship with our finitude through the
myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This myth once has a strong influence on Western thought, but
after Freud turned his attention to the story Oedipus, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice has lost
some of its importance.

In the story, Orpheus deeply distraught by the death of his newly wedded wife, retreats into the
underworld to bring her back. Silvermans reading, the driving force behind this difficult and
frightening task is, at least in some of the many interpretations such as Ovids, not really his love
for Eurydice, but his desire to win a victory over death. In essence, Eurydice becomes
disconnected from being a person, whom he loves, and becomes a vehicle for him to win a battle
against his own fear of death.

And on what is this fear based? The fear of the unknown? Is it even logical to fear something that
must inevitably happen? In Mendietas work there seems to be no fear of death as an impending
event, in fact by embracing the rituals around it she can connect to her ancestors to whom death is
already fact. The separation that Orpheus struggles to accept makes death feels distant and final.
To fight it is to make it an enemy, and the only possible victory in this case, is to survive as a
memory.

Throughout the work of Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981) life and death seem very close. We
know that she committed suicide when she was only 22 years old, and knowledge of this fact
seems somehow difficult to shut out when looking at her work.

Woodman began taking photographs when she was only thirteen, embarking on an expansive
love affair with the self-portrait, although she also made use of models. But her own body is her
most striking subject, as she is most open and clear in her own gestures. She played an endless
game of hide and seek with her camera, submitting herself as the subject but often with some kind
of will to disappear. She hides, disguises herself and often portrays herself as a ghostlike figure or
an angel.

Through the medium of photography which she captures the physical in a real time and place, her
attempts to escape her body are somehow futile, but it seems somehow clear where she wants to
go in her images. She wants to become a shadow or a reproduction, measures the body against
dead eels and disected fruit. She juxtaposes their textures with her own, sometimes re-enacting
their forms.

This exploration is very much about boundaries. The spaces she uses are always very important,
and her investigation of them is complex and well articulated, both visually and verbally:

I am interested in the way people relate to space. The best way to do this is to depict their interactions to the
boundaries of these spaces. Started doing this with ghost pictures, people fading into a flat plane ie becoming
the wall under wallpaper or of an extension of the wall
onto floor.
5


She works most successfully in black and white.
The colour images are few and seem almost like
a failed experiment. It is hard to say why her
imagery works best in grayscale, but considering
much of the strength of her work lies in textures
and forms rather than colour, we should
probably be glad she didnt stray from it often.


5
Francesca Woodman, Excerpts from Notebook #6
The fragile but ontological qualities of the body bring life to the photographs. The exposures are
sometimes long and the movement is caught, but these ghosts that she creates seems to be almost
mocking the idea of actually becoming one. I am disappearing but I must be here in order to
disappear, or something like that. If she knows that she will one day really be gone, is she scared?
Somehow this seems to be the wrong question. If she is scared, her on camera persona is
something between a clown and an acrobat, always moving and changing her shape to escape a
stillness, a monotomy that might swallow her up faster than anything else.

In one photograph from the Angel series, she stands legs apart on tiptoes facing an imprint in the
dirt which clearly corresponds to her own legs, a pathetic shallow grave which she is either
preparing to enter or has just risen from. In this photograph it is not clear whether she is
submitting to it or has won over it, whether she wants to be the angel or has just become one.
Either way she is no Orpheus. She does not want to battle against the idea of herself as an angel,
she wants to face it and embrace it. If this is so does that mean that the subjective self has
conquered its own finitude? That through living through ones own body and persona, we can
create our own immortality?

But not all of the images in the Angels series are so confident. In some other prints there is a clear
atmosphere of distress. In Splatter Paint she is exiting the frame, almost like an exiled Eve on her
way out of Eden, and a an almost Baconesque image with Angels handscribbled in the corner, she
leans back awkwardly and her mouth is open in a desparate cry. That these contrasting images
belong to the same period somehow brings us back to square one. There are moments of anguish
as there are moments of boldness, other images in the series present an approach of playful
lightness. Becoming an angel is clearly no easy task, but Woodman was compelled to try.

That she uses her body to try to become an angel is, I think, significant. It is clear she is the
subject, she does use models at times, it isnt always easy to know if it is her, as in Untitled (1976)
where three women (but probably Woodman in her signature Mary Jane shoes) all hide their
faces behind a life-size Woodman headshot. But even if some of the women in her images are not
actually her, they act more as a body double. In other images her male models, presumably
friends or lovers, inhabit an entirely different space as she is either also in the image or they are
looking at her behind the camera.

That she doesnt clearly expoit the other doesnt mean that she distances herself entirely from the
role as the projection (often depicted as a woman, as in the Orpheus myth, in many Munch
paintings and countless other examples) far from it she seems to embrace these other standpoints
and use them. It is clear that she understands how to use clothes and nakedness (sometimes in
collaboration) as well as the allure of the female body to create an almost mythical being (like an
angel) to be projected upon. After looking at Francesca Woodman it is difficult to meet a silent
projection. Everything alive has a voice, even if you cant hear it or theyve been struck dumb.
The projections live in some parallel world we cant touch, they are after all imaginary, often
nightmares in fact.

But this being said Francesa Woodman was no projection, and the only reason I think she
succeeds in this association is because she doesnt confont us with her presence as many artists
making self-portraits might. We are always
somehow left guessing who she is and what
she wants to say even if she is right there
staring back at us in the picture, and the fact
that it is an open mysteriousness somehow
makes it all the more impenetrable. The
projection never lies, it always tells us exactly
what we want to hear.

How can someone seem so alone and yet be
so communicative? She seems surrounded by
friends but yet the director of her own world
where everyone else is just extras. In several of
her images she presents and outstretched hand
or open palm. This should feel like a gesture
that reaches out, but it doesnt. The hand feels dislocated and suspended there like a flag, or a
signal. Open like a an offering, but unbearably distant to touch.

This clear voice rings out as the subject that is
searching for itself in the mirror. The mirror of
the other, or the mirror of the self, the mirror
of the camera, there are many mirrors and
there are many reflections depending on the
day and the mood. One can look at the same
thing over and over and it can be different each
time. That is the projection, its the individual
and its the knowing that you will only see it so
many times, all of these things mixed together
might be what reflects back at you.

For both Woodman and Mendieta, the camera
was a tool which they would use to capture the
marks and traces which they left with their
bodies, essentially just shadows of their presences but very tangible ones in an characteristic sense.
Mendieta working in material manifestations which would soon alter or disappear and Woodman
working directly on the negative, presenting the camera with a movement or a pose . Through
these means they were able in some way to escape the finitude and leave traces that would haunt
us, enchant us and remind us that life is a progression of movements which leave marks and traces
of ourselves for the short time we exist as bodies.