Life, Art, and What Lives On: Pt. 1) Feminine Values

Francesca Woodman was an entrancingly talented photographer who, at 22, made the decision to jump out the window of her New York studio.

Her death has always been a mystery to me–most have attributed it to inconsolable depression over a break up, but this always seemed like such a wayward excuse–a way for adults to rationalize the unwieldy and incomprehensible despair of the young.

This afternoon, I was reading Open City’s Issue #3 when I came across an essay written by her friend and painter Betsy Berne. She writes:

Francesca was always sure she was not working hard enough or long enough hours and I was always sure my latest painting was a failure. But even in our bleakest despair—again, our youth—she was able to turn the tide and lead us astray. We spent a fair amount of time mulling over skin cream, which, according to signs plastered on the buses, made freckles and other unsightly blemishes disappear overnight. It wasn’t her face Francesca was worried about as much as her hands. The subject of our work was a given and we were always looking it over and applauding the latest endeavor. I can’t say that we had scintillating discussions about the meaning of Our Art. If anything we made jokes and obscure allusions and I always thought about Francesca’s work as being sly and witty and elegant as well as haunting.

What struck me immediately was this combination of severity and playfulness, of an old disillusioned artist trapped inside a young female body. The symbolism of these things seemed poignant: the face, the hands, their aging. To not be worried about a face, because one is still young, but to worry about the hands, which create art. And even within the playfulness, a never-ending preoccupation with what disappears.

Many critics have gone back to Woodman’s photographs to try to pick out the “clues” that point to her suicide. That bathtub for a coffin? That crucifixion in the doorway? It’s a horribly crude way to analyze art, but the impulse is always there. Well aware that I will soon be joining the ranks of these critics, I will say this anyway–to me, the primary desire expressed in these photographs is the fantasy of erasure. Of dissolving into walls, of being so blurred as to become invisible, of losing a face, an identity.  And perhaps because she was so young, expression in art and life became the same thing.

It really makes us wonder what kind of environment Woodman found herself in, both as a woman and as a woman struggling to define herself as an artist. Why should she have felt the need to disappear? Maybe as a sensitive person she couldn’t find a way to push through the adrenaline-crazed, fame-mongering, male-dominated world out there.  Why had she tried to promote her photographs as “fashion” not “art” which she clearly felt they were? Today, success demands a never-ending supply of egoism, and women never seem to have enough of that. So many of us can’t bear to be seen, we would rather fade into the background, disappear. Why? I will be addressing this question in the next few posts. Just think: it’s been almost thirty years after Woodman’s death, and her photographs are as powerful as ever.