I’ve been using Simone de Beauvoir’s TheEthics 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.
I recently read Girl Online by Joanna Walsh. It was published in 2022. I don’t have the energy to write much about it, I’m just going to include this photo of a part that I really liked and related to and felt moved by:
I made some new self-portraits last night and this morning, experimenting with the bridal/wedding aesthetic. Here are some examples:
Things that worked well:
I finally bought a handheld bluetooth remote thing to use with my phone to take photos, I don’t know why I put this off for so long. I think because I like to use the bare minimum when it comes to equipment/tech so I was just being stubborn about it, idk. But using this made things a lot easier and quicker.
Using a wedding veil as a prop gave good results aesthetically.
It was refreshing doing something different to usual, new theme, new clothes, new props.
Usually I listen to music when I’m taking photos. This time I didn’t and I preferred it. I think I was able to focus more and things seemed to flow better and it felt more productive.
Challenges:
The wedding veil was hard to work with, though I like the way it looks. It’s long, it kept sliding around and I was often half tripping over it. Also being covered in it made me hot really quickly from the synthetic which I didn’t expect because it’s so light but it felt very bad on my skin.
Realised a simple thing which is that I need to make sure I drink more water while I’m working, the tiring-ness of making photos/videos tends to kind of creep up on me and then I’ll suddenly feel faint and dehydrated.
Making self-portraits is a lot harder when I have my period, there’s just more to think about, plus the intense pain and fatigue and increased anxiety. I don’t feel as much like moving my body around and doing things that rely on physical action, so I usually try to plan my longer shoots around this. I wasn’t able to do that on this occasion and it felt particularly precarious doing a shoot that involved all white clothes and underwear. Really need to try and avoid this next time. It’s frustrating to have to think about this.
In class we had a group critique. I showed these self-portraits (one is a screenshot of a video posted on OnlyFans):
The conversation was supportive and valuable. I feel reassured that the work is doing something towards what I’m wanting it to do – elicit questions about commodifying the self, commodifying art, different “gazes”, what constitutes work, the problems of work, the blurred lines between performance/reality, selling art and selling the body/self/sex/sexuality.
I talked about the three thematic/conceptual/aesthetic phases that my self-portraits will have throughout my project. The first phase which is pretty much at an end is the corporate/office aesthetic and kind of sexy secretary/office siren persona. The second phase is a wedding/bridal inspired aesthetic using a bride persona. I have just started taking images for this phase, there are a couple of examples above of photos that incorporate the bridal veil. The third phase is the persona of the maid/cleaner/housewife. Certain visual elements will run throughout the whole project for example, the setting of a hotel can easily be applied to each phase, so there will be a bit of overlap, but overall each phase will be visually distinct. It was useful to articulate these ideas to the group and to identify their significance. I have a personal connection to/interest in all three personas/aesthetics. They each represent or allow an opportunity to explore different ideas of work/performance. They each also represent three commonly fetishised images/ideas/”categories” of women.
We discussed the interactions I have with people (men) online on Instagram and OF and how sometimes reactions to the content can be unexpected. Something that has come up for me quite recently, which I talked a little bit about with Dee after the class had ended, is an increasing awareness of the potential for parasocial or semi-parasocial relationships forming through this work and the problems that can come with this. I think I’ll try to write about that in a separate post as I don’t have the energy for it right now and it’s a big tangent.
I think it was Dee who asked whether I plan to use the comments and messages I get on Instagram/OF to make some kind of art work. This is something I’ve thought about, because there are some quite compelling messages, questions etc. that I receive. For example, I shared the following message with the group. I posted the below self-portrait to my Instagram story and someone responded: “Very interesting photo, I understand that it’s you, I understand that it’s something very beautiful, but I can’t understand what exactly”.
I thought this message was really poignant and insightful. Of course, there are sometimes responses that are more sexualised and vulgar and more in line with what you might expect. Another recent message I received said, “Your profile just made me c*m so much”. They seem like quite different reactions but they are both quite intense.
I feel okay about occasionally sharing messages like this on the blog because while this is technically public I don’t share or promote this blog anywhere and the purpose of it is to learn and reflect on learning. However, using other people’s words to make an art work that I call my own, especially words from private messages, isn’t something I feel completely okay with. I think I would feel guilty about this. I also want my work (at least for this project) to be very much my own voice and representative of my experiences and actions and my subjective point of view. Something I’ve considered is keeping a document where I copy text from messages I receive and then edit, cut, rearrange them into a poetic text similar to my own style of writing, so that they are transformed into something that ends up being quite removed from the sharing of an exact copy of other people’s words. Given that I am already making text based images using my OF captions in this style, it might be interesting to also make versions of these images using the message text, so this is something I will think about more. It’s probably worth experimenting with, even if I don’t end up showing it anywhere publicly.
Holly Brindley 