Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

There are those who manage to work in the past’s territories (to use the poet Dmitri Prigov’s expression: “to bide there, and yet to emerge dry”), as if without noticing where they are. In the (very short) history of Francesca Woodman there is nothing that speaks of the past’s vulnerability, or even shows particular interest in the old world. The daughter and the sister of an artist, she began photography at thirteen. When she died at twenty-two she left behind a body of prints, a few videos, and a large number of negatives, all connected by a rare sense of unity, not of method, but of approach. What preoccupies her — that is, the subject of her compulsively perfectionist art — is hard to formulate, not least for her. Her typed letters (written in a rush, so the words are often begun, then left unfinished, then a space, then she starts the word again, very much in the manner of the piping voice we heard on her videos) hardly try to explain the tasks she has set herself. The letters might be described as the bubbling surface of a river, flexing itself over rocks.

There are two types of writing about Francesca Woodman, and they might be characterized as biographical and formal. Interest in her work grows in both camps: the character of her work and her early death combine to give her a special sort of fame, she very quickly became an icon for the unhappy young; another divinity in the post-Romantic pantheon; a highly prized incompatibility with life. In Woodman’s case, because her favored material was the female body, it is easy to read her subject as the impossibility of living in a male world, under the male gaze, or the hopeless attempt to avoid this gaze by hiding or pretending to be someone else. Rosalind E. Krauss interprets Woodman’s message this way in one of the first articles about the photographer, written at the beginning of the 1980s. Krauss’s article lays the foundations for the perception of the work as the chronicle of a disappearance, a commentary on Woodman’s own future death. As this version gained popularity, the most frequently used word in any discussion about Woodman became “haunted,” spoken with the kind of comfortable horror we reserve for ghost stories. If we adhere to this interpretation of Woodman’s output then our role is to witness the fair-haired girl disappearing underwater, or lost in the roots of a tree, or flickering behind tattered wallpaper, extenuated, finally fading out, and yet ceaselessly documenting all this for our entertainment and edification, in the best traditions of confessional lyric.

The photographs certainly allow this interpretation, alongside many others. Their natural environment is the smoky light of metamorphosis, of various kinds of transformation and distortion, which do not permit a perception of the self as a thing of wonder, or even an anomaly: in Woodman’s world this is just the natural order of things. Seen from the outside Woodman’s subjects fit in a tradition of homemade Victorian shadow theaters: fluttering ghosts strolling with lost maidens.

Seventeen-, eighteen- and twenty-year-old Francesca enjoyed dressing up. She loved and wore old clothing, what we’d now call vintage, flowery dresses, woolly tights, Mary Jane shoes. At school she told the girl who shared her room that she hated contemporary music and had never watched television in her life. It seems she was telling the truth. The documentary The Woodmans gives at least some insight into her upbringing, the right art school, the uncompromising exclusion of anything her parents thought unworthy. At some point Francesca’s father notes in passing that if his daughter had been interested in her girlfriends rather than in photographic angles and the specifics of lighting, then he would have had nothing to say to her. This seems to have been the truth, and I can only pity the child. The “fabricated” quality of Woodman’s person and her work resembles an integrated and successful project — the clarity of the handwriting and decision-making, the consistency and the ambition of every move — and this is yet another reason to think of her as a victim: of the times, of circumstances, of parental ambition. The expectation of success, the drive to success (and the inability to adapt to the inevitable delays and obstacles) is familiar to all children of professionals, the young musicians and ballerinas, in whom far too much effort and faith is placed, and it adds something to our understanding of her life and death. What it doesn’t explain is the more than eight hundred photographs taken by Woodman in her hope of creating something of her own.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” This is the opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House , written in 1958, the year of Francesca Woodman’s birth and one of the best books on the relationship between the human and the uncanny, when the uncanny itself takes a sudden interest in the human. The book’s heroine is forced to convince herself of her own materiality by carefully noting each action: drinking a cup of coffee, buying a red sweater against her family’s better judgment, a victory, a beginning to life; but as the book progresses she blends more and more into the cursed house.

A few quotes, taken at random, from writing about how Francesca is disembodied in her own photographs: “her own body becomes transparent, strangely weightless, almost fleshless, blurring the boundaries between the human body and its surroundings,” “her body, caught in movement by the camera like a dark haze, as if she were as unbodied and unhuman as the air surrounding her,” “a ghost in the house of the woman artist.” Francesca Woodman took her own life, the result of a long depression, and as is so often the case, a fatal concurrence of the absurd and the hurtful: her bicycle was stolen; she didn’t get a grant; she had relationship troubles.

Suicide shines on any fate like the most powerful spotlight: it conspires to make the shadows deeper and the failures sharper. But Woodman’s family and friends collectively and convincingly refute the biographical interpretation of her work, drawing attention to another formal side of her work, the planned brilliance of these little shots, their particular humor, the language of coincidence and chance, the visual rhythms, the shadows of André Breton and Man Ray, the lifted hands metamorphosing into birch branches, branches voting with a lifted hand. They are irritated by the critics’ insistence on the theme of disappearance, but when you look at these pictures it is hard not to feel an answering desire to dissolve, to allow oneself to flow into the frame, the interior or the landscape. Or flow together with the author to the point where you become indistinguishable: The cliche of Woodman as a genius at self-portraiture nearly obscures the fact that many of the bodies, and even the faces we interpret as the confessional self belong to other women.

These women were friends, models, people she knew. Sometimes we see their faces, sometimes they resemble each other to a strange degree, sometimes they are shielded from view by mute objects: plates, black lace, even photographs of Francesca herself. Sometimes they are completely faceless, unpossessed to the point of dereliction, severed from us by the edge of a print, or parts of the body: someone’s legs in stockings, breasts and collarbones (in another picture), a hand emerging from a wall, the body of a woman in flight, a leap, blurred. None of this belongs to anyone — it is quite literally nobody’s: like a black umbrella or a crumpled stocking, it is simply part of the location, the interior of whatever abandoned house Woodman had chosen (for she only used such interiors). If we ask ourselves who all these orphaned arms, legs, shoulder blades belong to, what sort of a creature it could be (what species of being), then we might guess that all these constituent parts make up a single entity, something like a collective body — the body of death, or more precisely, the body of the past.