The Power of a Woman’s Face

The small exhibit of contemporary portrait photography now showing at the Johnson Museum, In Your Face, contains a bewildering array of attitudes that strike — and strike out — many views toward sex and gender, reflecting and redefining the different and sometimes overlapping waves of feminism and queer theory that have evolved over the past four decades. The photos demonstrate the ambiguity in “faciality” and the word “facial” itself, which beguiles us with its protean meanings, changing expression whether the word is taken from the mouth of an aesthetician, an ethicist or a pornographer. [5]Let the eagle soar: A shot from Nikki S. Lee’s The Hip Hop Project reveals the artist’s struggle with national identity as a Korean American.

Lauren Greenfield’s group portrait of four blonde 13-year old suburban girls gussied up for their first big party implicitly aids the girls’ own efforts to cast themselves as sophisticated adults. The unobtrusively softened color tones, which mute their make-up and skin blemishes, as well as the clear focus of the dye destruction print can remind one of glamour shots. The tableaux of seductive poses includes a girl in an exaggeratedly feminine profile with an out-thrust hip but lacking discernable breasts, another who leans forward giving a coy, equivocal smirk while directly gazing at the viewer, and the alpha female resembling a manufactured teen idol who turns away in coquettish three-quarter profile, seeming to disregard the attention she knowingly invites. Slightly off to one side, though an integral part of the group, the youngest-looking girl surveys her friends with meditative uncertainty, calling their representation of femininity into doubt while still, perhaps more reluctantly, participating in it. Standing off to the side, yet linked by her friends’ arms, the girl’s stance, like the viewer’s, interrogates the beauty system at the same time as it is complicit with its spectacle. The young girl’s own failure to deploy the signs of the feminine image helps her recognize the construction of the sexual insignia inscribed on the nubile young bodies of her peers through make-up, dress and role-playing. The photograph highlights the contradictions inherent in their role as precocious vixens and vampy ingénues, unsettling the hegemonic ideal foisted on these girls by their whitewashed-picket-fence environment. They appear prepubescently thin yet curvy — rounded with a vestige of baby fat, both debutantes and debauchees.

Sally Mann’s gelatin silver print Holding the Weasel also takes an ambivalent viewpoint toward its subject, a nude 6-year old with Shirley Temple ringlets who clutches a dead weasel over her torso. The animal’s feral snout and spiky fur cover one breast while framing the other as a boyish nipple. The little girl’s sidelong gaze and serious-minded pout, one hand on her hip, render her contemplative, as if she were aware of some menace outside the purview of her miniaturized proportions while an out-of-focus tire swing hangs in the background. The weasel could be merely a toy or a dress-up mink borrowed from her mother. On the other hand, it could symbolize the lycanthropic nature soon to be lurking underneath her creamy, hairless skin. Does the girl hold the weasel at bay, or does it hold her in thrall? The shadows thrown over such innocence remind one that the children’s song “pop goes the weasel” is about pawning one’s coat in order to have enough drinking money. The image itself uncovers our own unease as onlookers, muddled by the photo’s heady mix of pleasure and poison. We must avert our own gaze or have recourse to weasel words in order to avoid the unsavory pederasty implied by this fetishization wherein we threaten to turn into erotic voyeurs, wolfish stalkers or toothless specimens preserved past our prime.

The colossal, high-resolution enlargement of the bust of Pia Fries by Thomas Ruff resembles an expressionless passport photo. The woman, however, seems to lack a specific identity. The scale of the image dissolves her human dimensions into a gaudy, abstract “costume”: Instead of a face, we see a zebra-striped faux-fur coat, dangly conical earrings, sticky iridescent hairspray, and gobs of overdone blue eye shadow. The supersaturated colors give the portrait an artificial feel, and the close-up of her skin texture, while revealing hair follicles and acne, oddly makes her age less determinate. She could be anywhere from a mature teenager to a mellow 30-something under caked-on layers of beauty products. Stylization, which may have been a dandy’s source of individuation, had become by 1984, when the photo was taken, a scourge of a society where individuals have been rendered into faceless consumer assemblages. Ironically, the face itself belongs to a Swiss artist who creates distinctive, hyper-colored, collage-like abstract paintings through techniques such as decalcomania and grattage. It is as if Ruff suggests that Fries’ artistic technique has been imprinted on her very body; perhaps the joke is that artists often grow to look like their art, surrendering to the mirror they hold their nature up to, the way pet care domesticates owners who eventually copycat their Maine coon or look like the lost twin of their Siamese.

A street photograph from Nikki S. Lee’s The Hip Hop Project alternatively captures the way that decorative artifacts and performance styles help to affirm and deconstruct one’s hybridized identities. We see the smug baby-doll face of a Boricua in tight-coiffed platinum braids, sporting a cheap American flag tank-top and crucifix necklace flanked by two African-American men, one in a do-rag with arms crossed, the other slouched in a wife-beater, shades and bling. Lee’s self-portrait as a Latina is disarmingly both natural — a bystander’s click of a disposable instant camera — as well as a social fabrication by a confident woman, as Lee was born and raised for 24 years in Korea. In Lee’s snapshots, much like in Cindy Sherman’s, identity itself is always a form of drag: though the exact pose she strikes may be unstudied since it is taken by an amateur, the imposture of her ethnic and social group demarcations have been carefully cultivated. Lee “becomes” a member of some American subculture by changing her clothes, attitudes, and even skin tone, living among a milieu for several weeks to thoroughly inhabit both their mindset and fashion mode, which she implies are co-implicated if not equivalent. Her successful mimicry transforms her into a self-fashioned bricolage of stereotypes and over-determined signifiers. The ghostly glow of the neon time-stamp in the corner metamorphoses from an imprimatur akin to a banal corporate barcode into a running commentary on the transient temporality of ever-shifting identities and contexts; though is it worth bearing in mind that the underlying Fujiflex print comes from Asia, like the artist herself?