Research Paper – Holly Brindley

I’ve been using Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) as a lens through which to look at Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits.

My initial ideas for the research paper all had something to do with presentation of self and authenticity and multiplicity and contradiction. My starting point was a subversion of a statement from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). He wrote that “In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false”. I was interested in subverting this and considering when/how the inverse might also be illuminated, that the false might be a moment of the true. Because this is how I feel when I look at Woodman’s photographs. In her work I see the images she created that speak to illusion, fantasy, movement, transience, contradiction, myth, magic, shadows, and I think that what she offers is quite a stark “truth” rather than a falseness, despite the theatrical and dreamlike qualities of her images. And I think it’s her offer of illusion itself that that creates the authenticity present in her work, i.e. the falseness is the truth.

The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a more specific framework to hold Woodman’s work up against. I’m currently working through the key ideas that de Beauvoir posits in her writing about ambiguity and exploring to what extent Woodmans’ self-portraits embody the principles. In the book de Beauvoir argues that, “As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. They have striven to reduce mind to matter, or to reabsorb matter into mind, or to merge them within a single substance.” and that, “To attain his truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. He rejoins himself only to the extent that he agrees to remain at a distance from himself.”

I’m interested in why ambiguity is important now in particular. To me, embracing ambiguity (and paying attention to art that does this) is a potential antidote to some of the contemporary problems around presentation/performance of the self (which also relates to much of what was described and anticipated by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle). The problem, in my opinion, is that the presentation of self has moved away from an exploratory gesture often present within art, into the everyday and has become so commonplace and heavily commodified that people seem reluctant to embrace the multifaceted-ness of self in favour of a flattening of self, a creation of a niche personality, a defined set of attributes that are presented to their audience, so that they (their “self”, their “image”) can be neatly categorised and monetised. There appears to be little room to present oneself as a contradictory being because this is too complex, too nerve-wracking, too confusing for an audience with a diminishing attention span, and too difficult for sponsors and advertisers to work with.

I mentioned to Maiko in my tutorial that I don’t want to come across as though I’m condemning the presentation of self online or condemning social media etc. She said that it’s okay to highlight something that I am wanting to be resolved and to focus on what I am advocating for rather than condemning something.

We also talked briefly about how in the case of Francesca Woodman, she is an artist who frequently has a mythical “self” projected onto her from other people. Her life was so short and so there is a not a huge amount of material that gives us insight into her thinking about her work. There are some letters and bits of journals and some back and forth correspondence with an interviewer but a lot of what we know (“know”) about her and how she worked and viewed art comes from the observations and opinions of her family and friends. And because she died by suicide, the circumstances of her death are often projected onto her work. Assumptions are made about her mental and emotional state and her images are often read through that lens. So there is a whole other layer around “self” in relation to her work, beyond just the fact that she made self-portraits. There is the “self” of her that is located outside of her that has been constructed by other people in her absence.

All of this feels like a lot to consider when writing a relatively short paper. But it still feels too early to be too contained. My focus for now is to write about Woodman’s work in relation to ambiguity and The Ethics of Ambiguity and keep going from there.