Human Kind (Original title: Jöel-Peter Witkin and his unresolved paradoxes)
Loved, hated, but, above all, famous for pushing photographic representation to its limits through his tableaux vivants of all kinds of sufferers and social outcasts, such as giants, dwarfs, fetishists, hermaphrodites or even dead corpses, Jöel-Peter Witkin has been at the focus of major controversy among critics over the last three decades. Viewed as products of aberrant perversion and nihilism, his “obscene” nude saints, stuffed animals, leather straps and skull pieces have raised waves of fury and revulsion among neoconservatives and the Christian coalition in the States. In the meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic, European intellectuals and critics celebrate Witkin’s oeuvre as a major expression of the vast complexities of the human soul and as unconditional worship of the Other, beyond suffering and death. Unquestionably, one thing is certain: Witkin leaves nobody indifferent...
Jöel- Jöel-Peter Witkin’s resume transgresses distinct eras, styles and tendencies. Back in the sixties, while enlisted in the army, he would draw inspiration for his assignments of military accidents from Weegee and Diane Arbus. The seventies brought a new life full of reflection and introspection. After obtaining his degree in sculpture in 1974, Witkin left New York and went on to pursue his graduate and postgraduate work in the theory of photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The fruit of his studies was “Revolt against the Mystical” (1976); a thesis that encapsulated his personal commitment to the medium. The time had come to put theory into practice. In the early eighties, his earlier series of Christ, the “incarnation of the absolute creator”, and Woman as “source of all human life” had already transformed into a newly elaborate, aesthetically and conceptually, body of work, which literally set out to demonstrate the corruption of flesh by mortality, allowing for mutation to become the binding evidence of an apocalyptic corpse iconography. It was also in the eighties when Witkin found his way to galleries and museums at the same time when Andres Serrano was provoking with his “Piss Christ”. Verberating with the extreme conditions of life and death, his breathtaking work gained him international critical acclaim, notoriety and a handful of grants and awards.
Many years have passed since the roaring eighties, but Witkin’s universe has lost neither its relevance nor its capacity for constant reinvention. Especially today, when provocation, apocalyptic visions, flesh disorders and biogenetic mutations have become such hype in contemporary photography, Witkin might even be considered a classic! Still, though his practice comes to terms with the predominant dislocation of the established photographic representations, Witkin covers an alternative space and, surprisingly, he does so by employing as his point of departure, rather than Photoshop tricks, the long rooted quest for veracity in the photographic medium. Challenging imagination through veracity takes much more work than creating 3D artificial worlds, but Witkin’s effort has paid off. His modus operandi is the crippled flesh of life with his masters and slaves and his sole aim is this: revealing before our eyes a reality we deny to face; awakening consciousness by paying tribute to an unknown and unseen Mankind, so unbelievably real…
Depraved human beings or their mutilated fragments in obscure poses and symbolic gestures… Literally “anyone bearing the wounds of Christ” is transformed into a subject of appraisal in Witkin’s pantheon, providing la raison d´être for his romantic, quasi, mystical conviction about the purifying mission of the artist. In an interview, Witkin once confessed his kinship with his models, emphasizing that his oeuvre derives from the need to love, though through darkness. The way to paradise usually goes through hell. “The art that does not point towards some idea beyond the senses is not art at all!” Everybody deserves to be praised, but this democratic sanctification may only be accomplished through a creation of atrocity, thus an aesthetic against the senses. Since the beginning of his particular journey, Witkin has remained faithful to his particular vision, constantly entering regions feared by the majority of artists. In recent works, such as “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris”, “Bad Student” and “Oedipus and Iocasta” (2007), decapitated bodies, heads, arms or penises become part of new fictional narratives or elegant still-lives. All these are pictures with a tremendous emotional impact, but for Witkin mental or physical anomaly is no less respectable than normality. The formless and the deformed are brought back into light. Disgust, horror and cruelty in their extremity are removed from their negative connotations, becoming parts of a new cognitive experience, where the notions of physical beauty and aestheticism obtain transcendental dimensions.
Witkin´s impulse to make photographs like “Retablo de Mexico” (2007) begins with preliminary sketches with diverse references that encompass the history of art, mythology and photography. The big masters of the past, Giotto, Hieronymous Bosch, Goya, Velázquez or Picasso, provide the formal and spiritual “high-art” framework for an unkindly matched religious-like iconography, in which fetishized nude bodies of an ambiguous sexuality are transformed into eternal beings in the context of a disturbing and ineffable present. What nourishes Witkin’s practice is not God but rather the mystic sublime elevation and pathos, encountered in any religious and artistic experience. “A One and Present Time” (2007) is imbued with this kind of extreme autoerotic ecstasy provoked in the midst of a divine appearance. Sensitive to eroticism, be it female of male, childish or adult, Witkin does not hesitate to express his appreciation of a rather universal form of beauty. Images like this may entail a great dose of lust but also gain a dimension as indirect metaphors of madness, disease, and, above all, loss. It may be the loss of a limb or even the loss of a big passion… Placed in the fringes of human ethics, Witkin’s baroque desire is inevitably anchored in irrationality and absurdity. Yet, this mood per se is not a surreal-like exploration of the sphere of the unconscious and the dreams, but rather culminates from the author’s strife “to create experiences that no one has seen or felt before”. Witkin manages to go where the Surrealists did not have the courage to. In a similar but much more extreme way than 19th century photographers, such as Holland Day or Louis Darget, he uses the camera eye to reveal a Mankind whose existence lies beyond nature and experience, calling into question our limited perception of reality.
Besides mysticism and anguish, Witkin’s world is also tainted with irony, humour and a rather down-to-earth vision. “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris” and “Sailor Jim in the luxury of war” are a very good example of this. Despite the fact that both of these staged tableaux vivants do not depart from the realm of myth, their titles hint towards rather down-to-earth connotations. Witkin lives in 2008 and has the need to place himself within and respond to the events that have marked our lives in the last years. In a hieratic, comical posture, his Querelle-like “Sailor Jim” may be viewed as a Roman warrior coming out of a napoleonian victory with his SM paraphernalia. The whole image definitely works as an ironic commentary and as an explicit parallelism of the contemporary political status quo of fear and aggression today with a sadomasochistic game.
Is Witkin a genius or a pervert? Many scholars have often attempted to label him in these terms. Some have looked for possible answers in his supposedly sinister present (his marriage to a tattoo artist!), while others go back to his childhood of religious duality, as the son of an Ukrainian Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother who did not manage to conciliate their religious differences in Brooklyn of the forties. From his own side, Witkin loves to warm the spirits. He often recalls that as a small child he witnessed a terrible car accident in front of his house, in which the decapitated head of a small girl rolled to his feet, her dead eyes staring upward. Ocassionally, he has also referred to the recurring symbolic retrievals of his lost twin sister in pre-natal or infant cadavers in his work. All this has definitely fuelled a quite intriguing myth for all those who allude to Freud and Lacan for their interpretations.
Regardless all ethical or moral issues inherent in the work of an artist whose common practice includes finding his models through newspaper advertisements, the internet, in medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin’s art deserves our attention for the awareness it arouses. It calls for a sort of aesthetic response to universality in the Kantian sense of the term. It calls for a reading of Life and Death and Art after Art. Coming or not out of his personal experiences, frustration or repressed wishes, or just from Rimbaud’s illusory verse “I did not exist, I was different”, Witkin’s artistic posture is one that embraces game, death and risk alongside eroticism and baroque passion.
The very process of creation entails exposure and risk, not only for the artist himself but also for his prints. Having photographed, Wiktin spends hours in the darkroom scratching and piercing his negatives, in order to achieve the blurry texture and the artificial look his copies are famous for. But mission is more important than vertigo. “My work expresses the reaction of my consciousness”, once stated Witkin, pointing to the possibility of an aesthetic healing through a state of artistic confusion based on revelation. Incompatible with the artificial world of blind conformists, intransigent towards social pressures, beyond the limits of representation, in the fringes of life and death, Witkin’s entire universe of paradoxes borrows something from Georges Baitalle. If in the Bataillian universe eroticism has a lot in common with death, violence and dark instincts as an extreme state of bridging the physical discontinuity of the human beings, Witkin overcomes the boundaries of ugliness and beauty, morality and morbidity. In order to bridge the discontinuity of the field of vision, he brings before his lens in an extreme form of multiculturalism all those who are drastically foreign to us, “the unloved, the damaged and the outcasts”.
It is precisely this exploration of unknown territories, what attributes to Witkin’s haunting silver antique-quality prints their Benjamian “aura” of the first photographs. As signs of a hidden, mystic world, specimens of an unknown humanity emerge out of them. In the same way that in the early daguerrotypes the procedure of long exposure imbued the models with living and growing within the instant, in Witkin’s yellowish fading photographs everything is predisposed to endure, abolishing the ephemeral. His deformed protagonists look at us. Their gaze carries the sharpness of what is seen for the first time. It penetrates our visual camp, resisting the process of any expected spectatorial identification. Unaffected, these accidental actors play their roles in the distance. In their “halo of silence”, they are transformed into a sacred synecdoche of the suffering anchored in the heart of human life.
The unknown enters timelessness and timelessness is compressed in the stillness of a single photograph. Effectively, Jöel-Peter Witkin has conferred on these beings their right to form part of the theatre of life…
All images: Jöel-Peter Witkin
Text: Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved
Representing Gallery: Baudoin Lebon, Paris
Published in Eyemazing 02/2008.
Loved, hated, but, above all, famous for pushing photographic representation to its limits through his tableaux vivants of all kinds of sufferers and social outcasts, such as giants, dwarfs, fetishists, hermaphrodites or even dead corpses, Jöel-Peter Witkin has been at the focus of major controversy among critics over the last three decades. Viewed as products of aberrant perversion and nihilism, his “obscene” nude saints, stuffed animals, leather straps and skull pieces have raised waves of fury and revulsion among neoconservatives and the Christian coalition in the States. In the meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic, European intellectuals and critics celebrate Witkin’s oeuvre as a major expression of the vast complexities of the human soul and as unconditional worship of the Other, beyond suffering and death. Unquestionably, one thing is certain: Witkin leaves nobody indifferent...
Jöel- Jöel-Peter Witkin’s resume transgresses distinct eras, styles and tendencies. Back in the sixties, while enlisted in the army, he would draw inspiration for his assignments of military accidents from Weegee and Diane Arbus. The seventies brought a new life full of reflection and introspection. After obtaining his degree in sculpture in 1974, Witkin left New York and went on to pursue his graduate and postgraduate work in the theory of photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The fruit of his studies was “Revolt against the Mystical” (1976); a thesis that encapsulated his personal commitment to the medium. The time had come to put theory into practice. In the early eighties, his earlier series of Christ, the “incarnation of the absolute creator”, and Woman as “source of all human life” had already transformed into a newly elaborate, aesthetically and conceptually, body of work, which literally set out to demonstrate the corruption of flesh by mortality, allowing for mutation to become the binding evidence of an apocalyptic corpse iconography. It was also in the eighties when Witkin found his way to galleries and museums at the same time when Andres Serrano was provoking with his “Piss Christ”. Verberating with the extreme conditions of life and death, his breathtaking work gained him international critical acclaim, notoriety and a handful of grants and awards.
Many years have passed since the roaring eighties, but Witkin’s universe has lost neither its relevance nor its capacity for constant reinvention. Especially today, when provocation, apocalyptic visions, flesh disorders and biogenetic mutations have become such hype in contemporary photography, Witkin might even be considered a classic! Still, though his practice comes to terms with the predominant dislocation of the established photographic representations, Witkin covers an alternative space and, surprisingly, he does so by employing as his point of departure, rather than Photoshop tricks, the long rooted quest for veracity in the photographic medium. Challenging imagination through veracity takes much more work than creating 3D artificial worlds, but Witkin’s effort has paid off. His modus operandi is the crippled flesh of life with his masters and slaves and his sole aim is this: revealing before our eyes a reality we deny to face; awakening consciousness by paying tribute to an unknown and unseen Mankind, so unbelievably real…
Depraved human beings or their mutilated fragments in obscure poses and symbolic gestures… Literally “anyone bearing the wounds of Christ” is transformed into a subject of appraisal in Witkin’s pantheon, providing la raison d´être for his romantic, quasi, mystical conviction about the purifying mission of the artist. In an interview, Witkin once confessed his kinship with his models, emphasizing that his oeuvre derives from the need to love, though through darkness. The way to paradise usually goes through hell. “The art that does not point towards some idea beyond the senses is not art at all!” Everybody deserves to be praised, but this democratic sanctification may only be accomplished through a creation of atrocity, thus an aesthetic against the senses. Since the beginning of his particular journey, Witkin has remained faithful to his particular vision, constantly entering regions feared by the majority of artists. In recent works, such as “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris”, “Bad Student” and “Oedipus and Iocasta” (2007), decapitated bodies, heads, arms or penises become part of new fictional narratives or elegant still-lives. All these are pictures with a tremendous emotional impact, but for Witkin mental or physical anomaly is no less respectable than normality. The formless and the deformed are brought back into light. Disgust, horror and cruelty in their extremity are removed from their negative connotations, becoming parts of a new cognitive experience, where the notions of physical beauty and aestheticism obtain transcendental dimensions.
Witkin´s impulse to make photographs like “Retablo de Mexico” (2007) begins with preliminary sketches with diverse references that encompass the history of art, mythology and photography. The big masters of the past, Giotto, Hieronymous Bosch, Goya, Velázquez or Picasso, provide the formal and spiritual “high-art” framework for an unkindly matched religious-like iconography, in which fetishized nude bodies of an ambiguous sexuality are transformed into eternal beings in the context of a disturbing and ineffable present. What nourishes Witkin’s practice is not God but rather the mystic sublime elevation and pathos, encountered in any religious and artistic experience. “A One and Present Time” (2007) is imbued with this kind of extreme autoerotic ecstasy provoked in the midst of a divine appearance. Sensitive to eroticism, be it female of male, childish or adult, Witkin does not hesitate to express his appreciation of a rather universal form of beauty. Images like this may entail a great dose of lust but also gain a dimension as indirect metaphors of madness, disease, and, above all, loss. It may be the loss of a limb or even the loss of a big passion… Placed in the fringes of human ethics, Witkin’s baroque desire is inevitably anchored in irrationality and absurdity. Yet, this mood per se is not a surreal-like exploration of the sphere of the unconscious and the dreams, but rather culminates from the author’s strife “to create experiences that no one has seen or felt before”. Witkin manages to go where the Surrealists did not have the courage to. In a similar but much more extreme way than 19th century photographers, such as Holland Day or Louis Darget, he uses the camera eye to reveal a Mankind whose existence lies beyond nature and experience, calling into question our limited perception of reality.
Besides mysticism and anguish, Witkin’s world is also tainted with irony, humour and a rather down-to-earth vision. “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris” and “Sailor Jim in the luxury of war” are a very good example of this. Despite the fact that both of these staged tableaux vivants do not depart from the realm of myth, their titles hint towards rather down-to-earth connotations. Witkin lives in 2008 and has the need to place himself within and respond to the events that have marked our lives in the last years. In a hieratic, comical posture, his Querelle-like “Sailor Jim” may be viewed as a Roman warrior coming out of a napoleonian victory with his SM paraphernalia. The whole image definitely works as an ironic commentary and as an explicit parallelism of the contemporary political status quo of fear and aggression today with a sadomasochistic game.
Is Witkin a genius or a pervert? Many scholars have often attempted to label him in these terms. Some have looked for possible answers in his supposedly sinister present (his marriage to a tattoo artist!), while others go back to his childhood of religious duality, as the son of an Ukrainian Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother who did not manage to conciliate their religious differences in Brooklyn of the forties. From his own side, Witkin loves to warm the spirits. He often recalls that as a small child he witnessed a terrible car accident in front of his house, in which the decapitated head of a small girl rolled to his feet, her dead eyes staring upward. Ocassionally, he has also referred to the recurring symbolic retrievals of his lost twin sister in pre-natal or infant cadavers in his work. All this has definitely fuelled a quite intriguing myth for all those who allude to Freud and Lacan for their interpretations.
Regardless all ethical or moral issues inherent in the work of an artist whose common practice includes finding his models through newspaper advertisements, the internet, in medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin’s art deserves our attention for the awareness it arouses. It calls for a sort of aesthetic response to universality in the Kantian sense of the term. It calls for a reading of Life and Death and Art after Art. Coming or not out of his personal experiences, frustration or repressed wishes, or just from Rimbaud’s illusory verse “I did not exist, I was different”, Witkin’s artistic posture is one that embraces game, death and risk alongside eroticism and baroque passion.
The very process of creation entails exposure and risk, not only for the artist himself but also for his prints. Having photographed, Wiktin spends hours in the darkroom scratching and piercing his negatives, in order to achieve the blurry texture and the artificial look his copies are famous for. But mission is more important than vertigo. “My work expresses the reaction of my consciousness”, once stated Witkin, pointing to the possibility of an aesthetic healing through a state of artistic confusion based on revelation. Incompatible with the artificial world of blind conformists, intransigent towards social pressures, beyond the limits of representation, in the fringes of life and death, Witkin’s entire universe of paradoxes borrows something from Georges Baitalle. If in the Bataillian universe eroticism has a lot in common with death, violence and dark instincts as an extreme state of bridging the physical discontinuity of the human beings, Witkin overcomes the boundaries of ugliness and beauty, morality and morbidity. In order to bridge the discontinuity of the field of vision, he brings before his lens in an extreme form of multiculturalism all those who are drastically foreign to us, “the unloved, the damaged and the outcasts”.
It is precisely this exploration of unknown territories, what attributes to Witkin’s haunting silver antique-quality prints their Benjamian “aura” of the first photographs. As signs of a hidden, mystic world, specimens of an unknown humanity emerge out of them. In the same way that in the early daguerrotypes the procedure of long exposure imbued the models with living and growing within the instant, in Witkin’s yellowish fading photographs everything is predisposed to endure, abolishing the ephemeral. His deformed protagonists look at us. Their gaze carries the sharpness of what is seen for the first time. It penetrates our visual camp, resisting the process of any expected spectatorial identification. Unaffected, these accidental actors play their roles in the distance. In their “halo of silence”, they are transformed into a sacred synecdoche of the suffering anchored in the heart of human life.
The unknown enters timelessness and timelessness is compressed in the stillness of a single photograph. Effectively, Jöel-Peter Witkin has conferred on these beings their right to form part of the theatre of life…
All images: Jöel-Peter Witkin
Text: Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved
Representing Gallery: Baudoin Lebon, Paris
Published in Eyemazing 02/2008.
