Some of these collage/transfers strain to achieve meaning: a dead child in a coffin (recognizably from Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip) beneath mushroom clouds, and that too-familiar napalmed Vietnamese child, beside paper dolls, ballerinas and ponies, render simple and tired effects. Comparisons of pictographs with c-clamps, paper clips, and hooks and eyes, or of Western self-portraiture, Japanese geisha print, and Matisse nude, are diagrammatic -- more illustrations of the idea than functions of it.
Where this false portrait succeeds, it utilizes effectively the delicate, fragile rice paper, the technological pastels of the copier, and the deceptively simple associations which "allow the bird space in which to fly." The title piece contains eight emptied takeout cartons arranged among scraps of noodles, fried rice and fortune cookies, succinctly summing up the average American experience and knowledge of a traditional cuisine.
Wartime and the Forties brought the extinction of silk stockings and the introduction of nylons to American women. A set of portraits -- three vintage Occidental women separated by a pale silk stocking from their Oriental counterparts -- is sensual, elegant, and culturally accurate. An assemblage of dirt, leaves and an old photograph of a Japanese woman evokes the history of wars and death, and is both political and very private.
Several works using language are more direct and analytic. The opened pages of The Chinese Coat -- a novel of travel, "Japs," and "alien races," -- are sprinkled with luminous small dried fish which stare at us as we read a text that is once nostalgic, unequivocally racist and very familiar. Beneath the photograph of a young Japanese(?) woman we read "Tokyo Rose"; above is the page of a Japanese newspaper, a pressed rose, and fragments of a shattered tea bowl. Here the sources of Gammell's "initial fascination with the Orient" -- trinkets sent by her Uncle Willie from the war in Japan -- can be read.
By far the most significant piece contains two sheer garments -- a child's pink smocked dress and a man's short-sleeved summer shirt -- laid directly on the copier with plastic clothes-pins, a gesture of clothesline, and a clipping which reads "One thing China can offer a Western entrepreneur is cheap and plentiful labor." At a time when socially directed art seems both appropriate and necessary, this one work encapsulates the origins and history of our "false portrait."
Joel-Peter Witkin's violated (and violent) black & white images derive from a surrealism which "can be defined not as a matter of aesthetics but as a way of knowing and a kind of ethics."1 There is considerable photographic history apparent in the images, but they are most genuinely surreal when they are least referential, when we are not aware of antecedents in Victorian allegorical photographs, Bellocq's Storyville Portraits, or Mapplethorpe clones.
The Tests of Christ, a masked man with fetuses bound on his head (a bad pun on the Testes of Christ?); The Expulsion from Paradise, a Victorian set piece complete with winged Adam, Eve with apple, and cherub-fetus; and Hermes, a photographically mutilated "statue" cradling a fetus, all read as exercises in style rather than in vision. The Fetishist, a hooded person overwhelmed by dildos, is campish, as is The Angel of the Carrot, apparently infected by the raging epidemic of photographic B&D, S&M, etc. Arms Broken by Windows, a disturbing portrait of a woman with torn, scarred arms, suffers from the self-consciousness of a teacup "head" placed on the Venus de Milo reproduction beside her.
Witkin's very real power lies less in use of contrivance and assaults on the negative than in frank confrontation with his specters -- sexual confusion, religious yearning, fear, obsession, and death. When his situations succeed (and the danger in studio creation of events is always that the contrivance with overshadow the event) they are beautiful and terrible. Topeka, in which a masked, anti-beauty queen expresses milk from her breast, implies the antithesis of both virgin and earth-mother. Cadaver with Necklace and Cadaver with Bra use a very old, very desiccated woman with a sheer drift of black scarf over her eyes, and draped either with a necklace or a tawdry black brassiere. To whom does this body belong, now that its occupant is gone?
In the realm of specific sexuality, Witkin's obsessive vision probes deepest. Carrotcake #1 portrays a very fat woman, vulnerable in a lacy mask, fondling her breast and masturbating with a carrot. It is a very private scene and enormously lonely. Christ Androgeny pictures a slender, feminine man in a Christ mask, his legs spread to the camera, his hands imprisoned under the taut black straps of his garter belt. Far from being titillating, these images speak to a permanent sexual frustration.
Witkin's Mother and Child and Androgeny Breastfeeds a Fetus address distraught fecundity. Mother's mouth is stretched into a death grimace by a chrome dental restraint; Androgeny stares at the camera in psychotic approximation of a nursing mother. S/he cradles the fetus: protective, defiant, useless. These images articulate "that in our minds which is unspeakable." Witkin writes, "We wait hopelessly to see the shape of their manmade sun, the last thing that will pass our boiling eyes before the advent of a new age . . . Post History." His focus is on the history of the future, projected upon the imagination, dark and terrible.
From cultural detritus, both Gammell and Witkin assemble personal realities. Gammell's is collected from the mythic Far East of yellowed travel pages, and Witkin's wells up from the erotic and spiritual recesses of the mind behind reason. These are committed and problematic images, worth seeing.
