Selective Affinities -Victor Margolin
Human beings are complicated creatures. We have bodies that are discreet,
bounded, and relatively fixed in their identity; yet yoked inextricably to them
are inner selves that are amorphous, fluid, and frequently uncertain of their
limits. Negotiating between the two is a difficult task. Masks,
costumes, fashion, and even surgery are means by which we attempt to transform
the truculent materiality of the body. But the more fluid our inner beings
and the more intense our quest to see ourself in multiple guises, the more frustrating
it is to drag our bodies along behind.
Children explore the boundary between the inner self and the body by dressing
up. Putting on her mother’s dresses, jewelry, and makeup allows
a girl to imagine herself as an adult. The belief that she can take on
the attributes of an older person, perhaps one recognized for her allure or
charm, is a form of empowerment for a young girl who assumes that the fluidity
of her inner desires can actually after her identity. Generally, children
dress up within conventional norms. They emulate movie stars, soldiers,
policemen, or rock musicians. But dressing up can be transgressive when
children put on the clothing of the other sex or garb themselves as antisocial
beings.
Through the work of Cindy Sherman, Joel Peter Witkin, and other photographers
for whom dressing up is central to their practice, we have come to recognize
theatricality as a distinct genre of contemporary photography. However,
this form of representation is still little understood. What is particularly
unresolved is whether to read theatrical photographs as representations of artifice
in which the identity of the performer disappears behind the façade of
a theatrical tableaux or whether to see the photograph as a self-representation
that reveals to us the photographer’s negotiation between a fluid inner
self and the limitations of the body. In the first instance, the performer
is clearly separated from the tableaux, concealed, as it were, behind it; in
the second, he or she is part of the tableaux, which becomes a mirror to disclose
and unforeseen aspect of the artist’s identity.
For Susan Sensemann, photography is an act of disclosure rather than concealment.
Her pictures summon references to disguise, dressing up, and masking, but she
does not try to pass as a garden gnome or a marble bust. Instead, she
wants to engage with those images, to explore them as signs of self. What
she brings to this project is her own countenance. We see her face in
different moods and positions; eyes open and eyes closed, full face and profile.
Each example reveals a distinct aspect of her being and as Alexander Rodchenko
argued in his essay against the photographic portrait and in favor of the snap-shot,
we know someone better through multiple representations than through a single
composite image.
The photographs which Sensemann superimposes on her face wre all taken by her
during twenty five years of travels. She is captivated by the most diverse
subjects – prickly cacti and seaweed, sculpted Thai vegetables, marble
busts of historic figures, Roman wall murals, a statue of the Buddha, delicate
lace, and a fiercely male countenance of Bacchus on an Italian serving plate.
In some of these pictures, we see the shape of her face particularly clearly;
in others, the overlay of the joined image is so seamless that it appears to
be a new skin with its own contours.
The mood of these photographs is rich and sensuous. Color, texture, and
shape reach into the chasms of our psyches to evoke primal responses.
There is much at stake in these pictures. They are intended to be deeply
felt rather than surveyed in a shallow manner. For they are less about
seeing than being. They probe into that realm of the imagination where
each of us investigates the limits of our own identity. What would it
be like to be a plant? Or a garden gnome, or someone of the other sex?
This can be transgressive territory if we attempt to act it out in social situations.
But art allows the freedom to ignore conventions.
These photographs of Susan Sensemann’s are liberating both for her and
us. She courageously exposes the trajectory of her own psyche as it seeks
out its counterparts in the material world. Some of these pictures strike
us with special force because of the uncanny alignments of one image with another.
Consider, in particular, the plate with the head of Bacchus on it. Instead
of donning the head as a mask, Sensemann actually unites her face with it so
that the two affect each other reciprocally. We not only see the artist
as an intensely masculine Bacchus but we also encounter Bacchus with a feminine
side. The same might be said of the photograph of a serene Buddha, which
the artist maps onto her face. Whereas a mask by itself is a weak object
until animated by a living being, the images of Bacchus and Buddha are powerful
in their own right and Sensemann’s relation to them becomes anexchange
of qualities rather than the inhabiting of an otherwise inanimate object.
Sensemann creates her pictures through photomontage. She aligns one image
with another, working with micro measurements of contiguity. Her eye is
as sure as that of John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch, an artist she greatly admires,
and her pictures are no less memorable than Hoch’s, particularly those
of the German artist’s later ethnography series. Hoch, however,
relied on photographs extracted from the mass media to compose her private visions
while Sensemann works exclusively with pictures she has taken herself.
Her expansive imagination far outstrips the possibility of using her own body
as the locus of its relavation. She needs the more ethereal realm of photography
to convey the fervent and ongoing impulse of her inner self to seek aspects
of its identity in the world around her. As viewers, we are invited to
share that adventure and to contemplate how we ourselves might look as a Roman
wall, a tangle of seaweed, or a garden gnome.