Tout va disparaître
Tout va disparaître: Everything will disappear. Three words about the eclipse of identity, of the self, of the very means of portraiture. The title of Hellen van Meene’s last monograph presents a challenging statement on the way we can approach and potentially interpret the portraits contained in its pages: a statement of a kind we are not used to, shifting the word from the boundaries of classical portraiture to the dissolution of the subject and its identity in space.
Of course, on the face of current discourse, which is still essentially tied to an argument that focuses on body and an identity politics – in search of revealing something of the subject’s ‘character’ – such an attempt may seem irrelevant. But in practice, when it comes to reading a portrait, today more than ever we are in the position of effortlessly acknowledging that the space – defined here as the field of the photographic frame that remains unoccupied by the body and its actions – becomes another key element in the production of meaning. Space carries an array of external semantic references. Charged with a set of tensions passed on from generation to generation, these references become inscribed not only on the subject but also onto our gaze, and as such they irremediably condition our experience of the subjectivity performed before the camera.
Driving interpretation away from the body can sometimes be as much disillusioning and demystifying as turning on the lights during a film screening. But it can be constructive, since it points out what is not to be missed, namely the constructed nature of all representation. It can also be illuminating, since it shows that the actual possibility of representation can exist outside what supposedly constitutes the chore semantic field of the picture: on the corners of the frame, in the background, in the minds of each one of us. Its potential lies on the ‘dialogue of absence’ it engages. Bodies need to be absent in order for spaces to become fully perceived (the oeuvre of Candida Höfer is an apt example of this), and, vice-versa, self-contained spaces denoting absence, neglect and loss can energise the presence of bodies with an unexpected signification. Cue the work of Hellen van Meene.
Tout va disparaître brings together photographs taken between 2007 and 2008 in the United States, Russia and the Netherlands. The book is replete with portraits in the style van Meene has gained recognition for. Their protagonists are adolescents and children, plucked out from the street and turned into the artist’s subjects. Vulnerable, insecure, but at the same time curious towards the camera, these beings retreat into a world of solitary desires and despairs – their eyes downcast and their young bodies in unnatural poses. This translates into delicately orchestrated compositions insinuating a broader fiction of unsettling psychological connotations. Here, the space is an extra new component in an open dialogue with the model and marks a subtle evolution in Hellen van Meene’s practice. On the verge of decay and disappearance, the slovenly natural ambience of these representations literally crash against the portrayed bodies and their unnerving expressions, underscoring a feeling of ‘otherness’ and alienation. Spaces become fields of lost battles, drawing the vain search for an identity that lies in open discontinuity with the world that surrounds it.
Pool of Tears (2008) features young girls within domestic interiors, related with family intimacy. The featured interiors seem to belong to houses that have been abandoned or locked for a long period of time. These empty corridors, bathrooms and bedrooms come forth literally as emotionally blank constellations wherein identity is the only thing left. As if woken up abruptly in the middle of the night or at dawn, van Meene’s girls appear suspended barefoot in their nightdresses. Their gazes and overall expression float off into a state of awkward ecstasy evoke a mutant state between dream and reality. There is no hint of movement, but a quiet stillness. These compositions are impregnated with an intriguing, cinematic-like mystery and a mood of mature unease, hard to match with the yearnings and the spontaneous responses supposedly expected by their young subjects. Emptiness becomes so repressing that it ends up overloading identity with the burden of a suffocating silence.
The same notions are reworked in St. Petersburg, Russia (2008). Narratives unfold within monumental interiors and shabby exteriors of a broader perspective that carry upon them signs of decadence and desolation. For once more, bodies manifest themselves in a context of emptiness, but the cultural and memory-based narratives these sites bear, are of a far greater importance here. The young girls, the majority of whom are adolescent, are seen wearing elaborate romantic dresses appear to enact a part in the play of history. For once more, their youth becomes incompatible with an ambience that is a sort of a ‘past’ place, a mausoleum for the memory. Identity collapses under the heavy weight of a history and a culture experienced materially. At the same time, an iconography and a strong sense of composition inherited by the Low Countries, Van Meene’s place of origin, bestows upon these scenes an extra painterly quality that intensifies the feeling of ‘elsewhereness’. Ghostly, like the transcription of light onto film, these places consistently invoke the fainting of memory, identity and the portrait photography under the nest of an ambiguity, proper of a Tarkovskian world. America, going my own way home (2007), the last series within the book sequence, is in tune with van Meene’s earlier productions. Similarly to the Japan series (2003), the issue of representation here shifts to an Afro-American setting, that is to say a non-European context. In their majority, the portraits take place outdoors with the use of natural light. Vernacular environs with backgrounds, walls, parks and fences provide the setting and compositional devices for this string of images. In some cases, van Meene distances herself from her standard square pictures and experiments with the panoramic format, a format mostly uncommon in portrait photography, as Jörg M. Colberg remarks in the introducing essay of the monograph. Normally portraits direct the eye towards the centre of observation, which is the subject. Here, the intersection of abundant space at the moment of portraiture, besides generating uncertainty and confusion to the gaze, declares the role of the surface of the photographic image as a topos for the encounter of various discourses. Though classic in their essence – in them, the body constitutes the weight of the composition – van Meene’s panoramic photographs address our attention to the overall semantic field of the picture, reminding us that there is always more to see: Identity is derivative not just of the self but of a whole nest of constructed interrelations.
With her work, van Meene addresses not just isolated fields, but the overall problem of representation. In her portraits, the human body becomes another component of a broader composition. The photographic space exists outside of it, in the same way we, the spectators, exist outside of photography for and despite content. Space is put on view downright as an emotional and psychological landscape onto which the overall spatial awareness of the subject becomes sustained within a broader narrative with unsettling slippages. At the same time, space emerges as an alternative two-dimensional tableau of ‘otherness’ that operates in an inevitable discontinuity with our space, the space of the ‘real’. Either orchestrated by the photographer or allowed to invade the interior of the photographic frame, it underscores both the inherent natural and conceptual disjunctions of visual representation. Having said that, Van Meene’s subjects expose themselves passively to the constraints of the natural contexts that envelop them. The fact that they are teenagers should confer them with more adaptability but it results in consternation and exhaustion, as if the struggle to abolish the invisible actions that model the awareness of the self were in vain. The visual rhetoric of disparition, as established in Hellen van Meene’s work, does not just uncover an alternative space of representation for them, but also fuels portrait photography with an interesting novel scheme for its theorization and full sensorial experience.
Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.
Tout va disparaître: Everything will disappear. Three words about the eclipse of identity, of the self, of the very means of portraiture. The title of Hellen van Meene’s last monograph presents a challenging statement on the way we can approach and potentially interpret the portraits contained in its pages: a statement of a kind we are not used to, shifting the word from the boundaries of classical portraiture to the dissolution of the subject and its identity in space.
Of course, on the face of current discourse, which is still essentially tied to an argument that focuses on body and an identity politics – in search of revealing something of the subject’s ‘character’ – such an attempt may seem irrelevant. But in practice, when it comes to reading a portrait, today more than ever we are in the position of effortlessly acknowledging that the space – defined here as the field of the photographic frame that remains unoccupied by the body and its actions – becomes another key element in the production of meaning. Space carries an array of external semantic references. Charged with a set of tensions passed on from generation to generation, these references become inscribed not only on the subject but also onto our gaze, and as such they irremediably condition our experience of the subjectivity performed before the camera.
Driving interpretation away from the body can sometimes be as much disillusioning and demystifying as turning on the lights during a film screening. But it can be constructive, since it points out what is not to be missed, namely the constructed nature of all representation. It can also be illuminating, since it shows that the actual possibility of representation can exist outside what supposedly constitutes the chore semantic field of the picture: on the corners of the frame, in the background, in the minds of each one of us. Its potential lies on the ‘dialogue of absence’ it engages. Bodies need to be absent in order for spaces to become fully perceived (the oeuvre of Candida Höfer is an apt example of this), and, vice-versa, self-contained spaces denoting absence, neglect and loss can energise the presence of bodies with an unexpected signification. Cue the work of Hellen van Meene.
Tout va disparaître brings together photographs taken between 2007 and 2008 in the United States, Russia and the Netherlands. The book is replete with portraits in the style van Meene has gained recognition for. Their protagonists are adolescents and children, plucked out from the street and turned into the artist’s subjects. Vulnerable, insecure, but at the same time curious towards the camera, these beings retreat into a world of solitary desires and despairs – their eyes downcast and their young bodies in unnatural poses. This translates into delicately orchestrated compositions insinuating a broader fiction of unsettling psychological connotations. Here, the space is an extra new component in an open dialogue with the model and marks a subtle evolution in Hellen van Meene’s practice. On the verge of decay and disappearance, the slovenly natural ambience of these representations literally crash against the portrayed bodies and their unnerving expressions, underscoring a feeling of ‘otherness’ and alienation. Spaces become fields of lost battles, drawing the vain search for an identity that lies in open discontinuity with the world that surrounds it.
Pool of Tears (2008) features young girls within domestic interiors, related with family intimacy. The featured interiors seem to belong to houses that have been abandoned or locked for a long period of time. These empty corridors, bathrooms and bedrooms come forth literally as emotionally blank constellations wherein identity is the only thing left. As if woken up abruptly in the middle of the night or at dawn, van Meene’s girls appear suspended barefoot in their nightdresses. Their gazes and overall expression float off into a state of awkward ecstasy evoke a mutant state between dream and reality. There is no hint of movement, but a quiet stillness. These compositions are impregnated with an intriguing, cinematic-like mystery and a mood of mature unease, hard to match with the yearnings and the spontaneous responses supposedly expected by their young subjects. Emptiness becomes so repressing that it ends up overloading identity with the burden of a suffocating silence.
The same notions are reworked in St. Petersburg, Russia (2008). Narratives unfold within monumental interiors and shabby exteriors of a broader perspective that carry upon them signs of decadence and desolation. For once more, bodies manifest themselves in a context of emptiness, but the cultural and memory-based narratives these sites bear, are of a far greater importance here. The young girls, the majority of whom are adolescent, are seen wearing elaborate romantic dresses appear to enact a part in the play of history. For once more, their youth becomes incompatible with an ambience that is a sort of a ‘past’ place, a mausoleum for the memory. Identity collapses under the heavy weight of a history and a culture experienced materially. At the same time, an iconography and a strong sense of composition inherited by the Low Countries, Van Meene’s place of origin, bestows upon these scenes an extra painterly quality that intensifies the feeling of ‘elsewhereness’. Ghostly, like the transcription of light onto film, these places consistently invoke the fainting of memory, identity and the portrait photography under the nest of an ambiguity, proper of a Tarkovskian world. America, going my own way home (2007), the last series within the book sequence, is in tune with van Meene’s earlier productions. Similarly to the Japan series (2003), the issue of representation here shifts to an Afro-American setting, that is to say a non-European context. In their majority, the portraits take place outdoors with the use of natural light. Vernacular environs with backgrounds, walls, parks and fences provide the setting and compositional devices for this string of images. In some cases, van Meene distances herself from her standard square pictures and experiments with the panoramic format, a format mostly uncommon in portrait photography, as Jörg M. Colberg remarks in the introducing essay of the monograph. Normally portraits direct the eye towards the centre of observation, which is the subject. Here, the intersection of abundant space at the moment of portraiture, besides generating uncertainty and confusion to the gaze, declares the role of the surface of the photographic image as a topos for the encounter of various discourses. Though classic in their essence – in them, the body constitutes the weight of the composition – van Meene’s panoramic photographs address our attention to the overall semantic field of the picture, reminding us that there is always more to see: Identity is derivative not just of the self but of a whole nest of constructed interrelations.
With her work, van Meene addresses not just isolated fields, but the overall problem of representation. In her portraits, the human body becomes another component of a broader composition. The photographic space exists outside of it, in the same way we, the spectators, exist outside of photography for and despite content. Space is put on view downright as an emotional and psychological landscape onto which the overall spatial awareness of the subject becomes sustained within a broader narrative with unsettling slippages. At the same time, space emerges as an alternative two-dimensional tableau of ‘otherness’ that operates in an inevitable discontinuity with our space, the space of the ‘real’. Either orchestrated by the photographer or allowed to invade the interior of the photographic frame, it underscores both the inherent natural and conceptual disjunctions of visual representation. Having said that, Van Meene’s subjects expose themselves passively to the constraints of the natural contexts that envelop them. The fact that they are teenagers should confer them with more adaptability but it results in consternation and exhaustion, as if the struggle to abolish the invisible actions that model the awareness of the self were in vain. The visual rhetoric of disparition, as established in Hellen van Meene’s work, does not just uncover an alternative space of representation for them, but also fuels portrait photography with an interesting novel scheme for its theorization and full sensorial experience.
Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.
