Hellen van Meene

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.

CATERINA BARJAU / JORDI GUAL

RETRATOS DE FAMILIA

Retratar a la familia significa inevitablemente abrir la puerta al “yo” más íntimo y someter la privacidad de uno a la mirada de los demás. Retratar a la familia es trasladar frente a la cámara nuestras alegrías y penumbras cotidianas, así como trazar de un modo gráfico la cartografía de la cadena de DNA que nos ha traído a esta vida. Desde los primeros álbumes genealógicos del siglo xix y la popularización de la instantánea algunas décadas más tarde, hasta la actual era digital y la recurrente banalización de lo privado en la red y las revistas del corazón, el uso de la fotografía ha estado inextricablemente vinculado a la faceta “doméstica” de nuestra existencia. Si la familia representa supuestamente la “célula madre” de la sociedad, el acto de fotografiarla se convierte, según esta lógica, en una especie de diagnóstico factual acerca de la psicopatología de la época que nos envuelve. Más aún: por lo general, la familia suele ser tan fotosensible como la película, y el hecho de retratarla, de retratar al propio “corpus” familiar, por así decirlo, encarna infinitas posibilidades y complicaciones tanto para el fotógrafo como para los retratados.

Caterina Barjau y Jordi Gual, los dos artistas de la exposición “Retratos de familia” que presenta la galería Tagomago del 4 de febrero al 13 de marzo, han llevado a cabo la delicada tarea de articular alrededor de sus propias familias una propuesta fotográfica auténtica y apta, tanto en términos de realización como en su conceptualización. Aunque abarcan espectros opuestos —Barjau se ocupa de las relaciones, mientras que Gual se centra en una serie de metonimias temporales y materiales—, en conjunto los dos trabajos permiten reconocer la tensión inherente a la hora de facilitar un registro visual de familia, sin dejar de apuntar, no obstante, cierta susceptibilidad frente al impacto persuasivo de toda representación.

Caterina Barjau (Barcelona, 1980) ha dedicado los últimos seis años a retratar personas exitosas del mundo de la cultura y la política para revistas y medios de comunicación de nuestro país. Caracterizadas por un uso sistemático del retoque digital, un amplio abanico de referencias pictóricas y el gran formato, sus obras representan la vertiente más contemporánea en el campo de la fotografía. En “Familia”, un proyecto artístico elaborado expresamente para esta muestra, Barjau ha pretendido trasladar su práctica comercial al terreno del autorretrato familiar, abordando la gran cuestión que tal reto conlleva: ¿Podría llegar a fotografiar a sus parientes, en este caso la familia de su abuela por parte de madre, con el distanciamiento que requeriría el encargo de retratar a una celebridad? El resultado final es una serie de fotografías en gran formato que, vistas en retrospectiva, ofrecen un espécimen visual de la típica familia tradicional catalana poco convencional.

Dotados de una extraordinaria calidad plástica y de un voluptuoso tratamiento a la hora de manejar la iluminación y las texturas, los retratos de Barjau contienen constantes alusiones iconográficas al Renacimiento y al Barroco, junto con una elaborada escenificación de las poses que raya muchas veces en una monumentalidad excéntrica. Las superficies de estas composiciones se plasman como un campo visual minimalista y sus protagonistas aparecen aislados de su entorno habitual (casas y pisos familiares). Barjau ha empleado deliberadamente como marco para sus fotografías el fondo negro de su estudio, tanto para enfatizar la individualidad de sus sujetos como para producir mediante su descontextualización una serie de cautivadoras alteraciones en la imagen final.

Proponerse realizar intensivas sesiones de retratos durante las fiestas de Navidad, la época por excelencia de los sagrados protocolos familiares, ha supuesto para Caterina Barjau una pequeña aventura y, a la vez, una experiencia reveladora que le ha inducido a confrontarse con sus seres queridos fuera del nido familiar. Pero también a experimentar con lo privado, a llevarlo al terreno de lo público y a enmascararlo con el glamour propio de una celebridad, lo que durante las sesiones engendró un interesante diálogo entre la fotógrafa y sus numerosos parientes. La mayoría de ellos, contenidos al principio por estar poco acostumbrados a posar, pronto recobraron su solemnidad y su sentido del humor para desempeñar ante la cámara el papel que se esperaba de ellos, tal como les correspondía por jerarquía, edad o afición.

Todos los retratos de la selección perturban nuestra mirada. Son y no son, muestran y no muestran. En ellos, el personaje es todo pose y artificio, como si Barjau quisiera exponer las arrugas hasta los más mínimos detalles, como si la piel lo fuera todo. En el fondo, los brillantes y opacos ojos de estos individuos no suponen puertas a sus almas, y su identidad real se disuelve en la postura, el gesto y la mímica. Por supuesto, aquí el rostro fotografiado no es más que un caparazón en blanco sobre el que fluctúan perpetuamente modos de ser ya edificados en nuestra cultura visual, mientras que la familia, la más “perdurable y sagrada” de las instituciones, no hace sino diluirse en un río de ficciones bajo los focos de la celebridad.

Jordi Gual (Terrassa, 1964) plantea su serie “Equilibrios inestables” centrando la atención en la dimensión espacial y temporal del espectro familiar. Gual es un solitario artesano en todos los sentidos de la palabra, que vive en medio del bosque. Fabrica sus cámaras y papeles, realiza revelados y positivos en soportes también manuales, y ha desarrollado un método de fotografiar propio, instintivo, que culmina en narrativas “abiertas”, sin principio ni final semántico. En contraste con Caterina Barjau, Gual lleva años fotografiando a su numerosa familia, siempre con su casa y lugares próximos de la naturaleza como escenario. Por tanto, no es de extrañar que en su caso los retratos formen parte de la interacción cotidiana y la cámara sea uno más de la familia.

En su mayor parte, las composiciones de Jordi Gual desafían a la totalidad en favor de la fragmentación de los rostros y los cuerpos. Asimismo, en ellas lo que parece adquirir más importancia es el entorno y los objetos relacionados con los seres retratados. Fotografiar el objeto en lugar del personaje es, según afirma Gual, fotografiar la “palabra perdida”, pero también supone en cierta manera posicionarse con la cámara desde el futuro, como si el presente mismo fuera ya un recuerdo lejano. El hecho de que Gual opte por el sosiego —no llega a realizar ningún encuadre sin haber sentido previamente que ha asimilado su esencia más profunda— engendra en su trabajo una sensación de fugacidad que distorsiona nuestra percepción del tiempo. Impregnados de un calidad poética y de una emotividad extremadamente modestas, sus retratos poseen el aura de un objet perdu y los rostros de sus protagonistas —sus cinco hijjos, sus hermanos, y mujer— llegan a alcanzar a menudo una presencia que parece condensar las vidas de todos sus antepasados.

Como en un relato poético, que permite libertad a la hora de la interpretación, los personajes de Gual, con la ayuda de la luz, dejan sus huellas en la placa o película no por lo que son sino por el sentimiento que representan. En cierto modo, sus cuerpos son constelaciones fantasmales, igual que lo eran las fotografías mismas para Barthes, y su paso ante la cámara cobija silencios introspectivos pero a la vez melódicos, como la emoción en sus altibajos. Sustentados en horizontes plenos que se diluyen en afecto e intimidad, sus retratos transmiten un hálito más universal sobre la familia y la lucha cotidiana para sostener el sentimiento que la une, por y a pesar de todo.

“Ejercicio emocional. Inseguridad. Estado anímico que existe pero que no sabes qué dirección tomará. Quizás solitarios relatos del absurdo.” Así describe Gual este sentimiento. Y continúa: “Asfixiante tensión de algo que nos rodea pero no logramos entender. La inseguridad que nos produce lo desconocido. Quizás todo se resuma en una palabra...: ¡miedo! La confusión nos libera del caos para volver a un mismo inicio. Entonces, todo vuelve a empezar”. Para Gual, llevar una familia y fotografiarla resume el cúmulo de todo lo indecible e inexpresable. Es por ello que a la hora de exponer decide construir sus palimpsestos fotográficos. Aparentemente clásicos y repletos de una expresividad depurada, estos últimos explotan en un lirismo crudo y pletórico que nos da mucho a entender acerca de la fascinante complejidad de la familia, una complejidad fuera del lenguaje y de sus entramados retóricos.

Texto: Natasha Christia

All Rights Reserved.

KELLI CONNELL

Double Life

Since 2001, the American photographer Kelli Connell has been working on “Double Life”, a series that has brought her under the spotlight of international attention. In “Double Life”, Connell explores the way her private experience and observation of relationships can be reconstructed and enacted before the camera, assuming thereby the value of an external codified photographic object. Connell’s images portray the same character enacting two roles in a single scenario. To create this juxtaposition in the final photograph, the artist scans, stitches and then digitally manipulates various medium format negatives in Adobe Photoshop. This allows her to build a chronicle that appears to be documenting the relationship of a fictitious couple of young women consisting essentially of Connell and her alter ego.

Seemingly bred on a documentary-like naturalism, “Double Life” dwells between fiction and veracious enactment. By means of this incessant sliding towards two opposite poles, the “constructed realities” Connell fosters do not solely seek to unveil her own dilemmas as subject matter and artist before the camera, but also address the overall baggage of responses and preconceptions we carry as viewers and as avid consumers of fictions. By taking as its starting point a strong autobiographic hint – the presumable sexual identity of Connell and her own experiences – the series goes further to give way to broader assumptions of identity, projected beliefs and other social clichés, reinforced in today’s visual culture by a vast network of media agents, such as television, film, advertising, not to mention art photography itself.

Kelli Connell’s conceptual core practice bears a marked affinity with Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills”. Her images lack the dramatic glamour and over-stylization encountered in Sherman’s case. They are, instead, impregnated with a lighter, more natural mood, appropriate to the mundane ethos of our times. Still, as the “Film Stills”, Connell’s staged scenes seem to be similarly derivative of no specific source, of no original. They contain all and nothing at the same time. They constitute texts open to interpretation and envisioning, easy to fit in the delights and burdens of the individual eye. What they ultimately ask from us, the viewers, is to misrecognize them. They ask us to acknowledge them for their misleading nature, namely for what they are not: an autobiography without fiction and a fiction without autobiographical elements. In this sense, Connell’s pictures jettison the key role photographs have traditionally occupied as material testimonies of life in the construction of emotive intimate diaries and in the preservation of the artist’s myth. The statement here is clear: there seems to be no concrete self behind these pictures, but instead various hallucinatory states of a constantly shifting mood. In fact, Connell’s pictures seem to reconfirm the very contribution of photography to this chimera. Rather than documenting, photographs are here rendered mere performative acts, potentially healing, self-revealing and tormenting at the same time, as if a cult was taking place before our eyes for the exorcising of personal ghosts, fears and other private demons. Above all, photography – understood as the act of taking pictures – becomes here a projection not of a “factual” past, but instead, of a so-to-speak believable set of imagined relationships that are not meant to be lived but rather to be contemplated, while coming from the confinement of the mind out to the world – as if, during this ongoing moment, it were not the world itself that matters to both the photographer and the viewers, but instead the experience of its dreamful reflection through the mirrors of the mind.

But let us go back to the physical economy of representation and narration as established in “Double Life”. The photographs of the series claim to describe various moments in the life of a couple. Yet, by watching these pictures closely, by going through their arranged serial sequence that supposedly illustrates the way these two alter egos interact over the years, we are confronted with a paradox. We constantly feel compelled to wonder what exactly these two characters are: twofold derivatives of the same person, or just two completely autonomous beings?

Time, the changing haircuts, styles and expression, the infantile masculine element in certain pictures contrasted with the womanly soap-opera-like emotive touch of others, uncover two doubles, complete and incomplete at the same time, who resist becoming exposed as two solidified beings in reality. As the narrative flows, against our strong temptation, we fail to identify who is the male and who is the female, who is active and who is passive. In each picture, roles and identities switch and the politics of power are reinvented. Connell’s diegesis undergoes various slips, obstructing any identification process, as if the artist’s sole wish were to exclude us from viewing her as an integral whole. The mirror is irremediably broken; or, perhaps, it has never worked in the first place. Human lives and stories have never been static and, insofar fixed identities are chimeras, photographs become nothing but ghostly objects, that is to say, nebulous apparitions of encounters that had never meant to take place anywhere but in the corners of the mind.

Critics have described this schizoid element imbuing “Double Life” as a duality in representation – the duality of the masculine and the feminine, the rational and the irrational, the exterior and the interior, the motivated and the resigned self. But, as it has been shown, this duality in question seems to dissolve into a million pieces. For we carry many facets and faces. Over the years our cellules are renovated and this results to us being materially distinct bodies. If Sherman’s “Film Stills” exposed this multiplicity of the self without any concrete analogue, their very simulacral condition derives from the performance of the artist’s recognisable opaque presence in the picture. We know that beneath Sherman’s disguises, there is a solidified self, besides a solid myth to deconstruct and a historical illusion to twist. By contrast, in Connell’s naturalised tableaux, this very physical self is multiplied, dismembered and finally diffused. Here, the subject matter, namely the body summoning its memory, emerges as an artificial construct, present and absent at the same time. This creates an unstable and unsettling field of representation. All that is seemingly believable and real has never occurred.

For once more, one would logically presume that all is about the woman as this under-exposed ‘Other’ in visual iconography. And yet, to claim this, to place Connell and her work under the scope of a cross-gender discourse or under a reading of human relationships in their universality, would simply be delimitating. In “Double Life”, the act of cancelling the matrix, that is to say the subject-artist in her physicality performing the photographed subject matter, addresses a broader range of questions regarding the processes and the mechanisms of perception in today’s visual culture. Even if there is an original of the self, we, as viewers today, are unable to perceive it. The notions of clones, digital manipulation and the aesthetic of reality-shows condition us irremediably at the moment of perception. Following on this, here the signifier becomes a ghost to our eyes, a replica – an artificial construct in the first place. There is nothing to demystify, neither the story carrier (subject matter - artist) nor its myth (“the questioning of personal dilemmas”). Resembling advertising, the work of Kelli Connell seems to be embedded on an empty message, which exists insofar it becomes the image itself. In the midst of it, photography appears as we know it today –a photography performing its openness as a consternation of bare signifiers…

Text by Natasha Christia

All Rights Reserved

Published in 1000 Words 6/November 2009