REVIEW
comprehensively. But did it really need to be? Sensitively performed,
Less than twenty years ago, Paris's Jeu de Paume was home to
one of to the world's most impressive collections of Impressionist
painting. Now Monet, Degas and the rest have moved across the
Seine to the nearby Mus6e d'Orsay and the Jeu de Paume has
opened its doors to a new crowd. Since lost June, its beautifully
refurbished series of gallery spaces, which successfully tread the
difficult line between white-walled minimalism and something
warmer and more intimate, have been the residence of an exciting
programme of temporary photography exhibitions; 'an innovative
global project... implemented in a resolutely contemporary spirit.'
The second of its inaugural shows, L'Ombre du Temps, ran from
September until November last year. Aself-conscious re-thinking of
the photographic lineage proposed by Tate Modern's 2003 offering,
Cruel and Tender: The Real in Twentieth Century Photography,
L'Ombre du Temps set out to highlight the perceived MOMA-centric
bias of the Tate's historical assembly, shifting its focus from the
broadly-defined schools of Dusseldorf and New York to position
the camera in a more ambiguous relation to the real, through the
work of Atget, Sekula, Sherman, Cahun and Rodchenko. The show
felt refreshing, even controversial, in its healthy disdain for the
hegemony historically exercised by the evolutionary narrative
which underscored Cruel and Tender. By comparison, its follow
up, a mid-career retrospective of the Dutch photographer Rineke
Dijkstra, seems frustratingly uncritical in its stand-point.
Whilst lacking the sort of inescapable public profile we might
associate with, say, Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, Dijkstra is
by no means a peripheral player on the contemporary photographic
stage. Over the past ten years her work has been exhibited
internationally in some of the world's most prestigious venues,
including both the Guggenheims, and Tate Modern, as part of Cruel
and Tender. It is true that her portfolio has never been viewed in its
entirety, and there is a certain pleasure to be had here in revisiting
her delicate studies of adolescent self-consciousness, their mute
admiration for the uncertain stumble towards adulthood. If this is
a vision well known, it has never been represented so
such mid-career surveys might serve to extract fresh meaning, to
ask new questions, unsettling the sense of a 'story-so-far' curation.
Yet, after two floors and ten rooms of Dijkstra's by-now familiar
pictures of teenage self-construction, the unquestioning nature
of the show become frustrating. We know this work, we like this
work, need we say anything more?
The exhibition begins impressively, with sixteen of Dijkstra's
early beach portraits installed here as an initiating moment, the
first indication of the photographer's quiet awe and respect for
the fragile self-images of her adolescent subjects. They stare
down from the walls as though secular icons, hovering in twilight
on symbolic shorelines, the masks of their adult identity only half-
formed. In their haunting stasis the trauma of experience remains
eternally and powerfully implicit, ushering us through to the second
room where it is realised in the blood-stained, shirt-torn matadors
and the assertive, delicate maternalism of Dijkstra's young mothers.
Their natural juxtaposition of an anti-heroic bravado and a forceful
femininity is played out across opposing walls, conjoined by the
harrowing and melancholic presence of an Ukrainian orphan, who,
battered but dignified and painfully beautiful, appears experienced
before his time.
These early rooms feel fresh, succeed in assembling an
exhibitory narrative that moves and evolves, recognising a shifting
perspective and the subtle dialogue which exists between these
pictures. It is as the show progresses upstairs that a sense of
conceptual and aesthetic inertia creeps in and it slowly dawns that
a lot of this work is in fact very similar. This might not be a problem;
numerous photographers have made their careers out of a similarly
repetitious practice. Yet, it is the individuality of Dijkstra's subjects
which are the staple of these photographs, rooted in an Arbusian
sensibility for a natural visual rebelliousness that refuses to be
stifled by any attempt at physical conformity. We see it in the ill-
fitting uniforms of the young Israeli conscripts, in the bulging boob-
tubes and greasy hair of the teenage Liverpudlian clubbers, and in
the bitter-faced twins which age and metomorphosise before us
across a series of six photographs. But after four or five rooms a
saturation point is reached and a crucial, nebulous aspect of this
individuality is lost, distorted into the photographic motif through
which we are invited to identify, not the particularity of the subject,
but the artistic vision of Rineke Dijkstra. This may have something
to do with marketability and the role of collectors and institutions
in dictating the terms of progress. It certainly makes for a coherent
show. It also raises the question of where this work can go from here?
It will be interesting to witness the lasting consequences of the
exhibition, which tours to Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Winterthur,
upon the development of an artist only recently turned forty-six. As
a consecrating exercise it will no doubt be successful, consolidating
Dijkstra's already established status as part of a contemporary
photographic canon. It is yet to be seen whether it will also draw
a line under a body of work which is beginning to feel stagnant or,
conversely, to permanently seal the photographer in the mould of
her early years. Either way, something has ended. - BEN BURBRIDGE
Above: Jolta, Ukraine, 30 July 1993
Opposite: Tiergarten, Berlin, 27 June 1999
Ben Burbridge works at Photoworks. He is currently studying for an MA in Art History at Sussex University.
Rineke Dijkstra: Photographs and Videos, 1991 - 2004, Jeu de Paume, 14 December 2004 - 20 February 2005
The exhibition tours to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Fotomuseum, Winterthur, and the La Caixa
Foundation, Barcelona.
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TITLE: Rineke Dijkstra: Photographs and Videos, 1991-2004

SOURCE: Photoworks Spr/Summ 2005

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