Where to start? Perhaps, like Alonso y Marful, with August Sander’s photo of his friend the artist Anton Raderscheidt standing determinedly alone in a street, probably Cologne, in 1926? Why choose this photo as a starting point? What held Su Alonso & Ines Marful’s attention in this image and the choice of this and not other photos by Sander of Marta and Anton Raderscheidt, both were painters? Or even the many photos of this artist couple’s participation in balls, masques as young fashionable artists in Cologne in the late 1920s? Was it his determined gaze? Was it the singularity of his pose alone on the street which echoes his paintings of the time, as a new kind of objectivity, but nevertheless one in which the sexual politics within these works all too frequently position the clothed male artist against a naked female figure, model and muse. The latter trope emerges in Maurice Guibert’s much earlier photograph, they also use, another starting point.
My eyes drift to Alonso y Marful’s first work based on Sander’s photo, this is no simple reproduction, no copy. A dance has begun. The singular figure may have changed gender but this is also a determined shift in the sexual politics of the scene. Ines Marful may be standing in similar clothes, adopting his pose, acting out his gaze (somewhat ironically) and his posture but she is surrounded by echoes of herself, and there is blood, a stain, a paintmark on the image. A cut? A wound? Perhaps, even a reminder that this counter-canon cannot be innocent, the attempt to reproduce was never attempted? The original scene shifts from one man isolated against the modern metropolis to three women holding their own seemingly within that same city space (although it is a visual reproduction of the original scene). The gendered substitution does not reproduce the same sexual politics of the era, of the moment, or even of time “now”. It offers different points of identification, of movement, of change.
Alonso and Marful’s cropped hair and smart suits in this image and another photo of Sanders of gentlemen walking in the countryside as well as in their replacement of mannekins in Eugene Atget’s photos echo and resonate with the many images of Romaine Brooks and of Claude Cahun, and other smart metropolitan lesbian circles of the era. However, this playful cross-dressing of woman to man places women back into a male-defined history not to “mimick” or to “reproduce” but to disturb its “naturalness”, its own presumptions. It seems Alonso y Marful are not engaged as some feminist art historians have been in a recovery of the women artists in these circles or of the atmosphere of the 1920s which have been subject to increasing amounts of historical research and the writing of “new” histories (even the introduction of Rosa Bonheur does not do this), instead they are pursuing the displacement of the “first” story iconographically, with attention to exposing its myths and its sexual politics in its own terms… And next. As other women artists in this project consider Alonso y Marful’s image, they move further away from the “original”, from the first permutation, into their own. Chantal Maillard’s Cual, Díptico de lo oculto (after Alonso y Marful, 2012) displaces for a second time, the initial displacement between Alonso y Marful and Sander. She eliminates the image, recognising history as that blank canvas or scene for other dilemmas to be played out, even created, a tabula rasa, and on which another deadly confrontation arises in the wasp’s sting of the poetry and an acorn or footprint. This crack in the dust of history is even more apparent in Eva Lootz’s Ríos que hablan…
And then someone takes another tack and presents a modern imperative: Carmela García, Pintora. Blanca Gracia. Madrid 2014. (after Eva Lootz). This re-enactment is also a response of and from the contemporary moment placing a woman artist today in her own time, in her own situation in the modern metropolis, as the embodiment of contemporary metropolitan existence. In time, over time, and with the accretion of history, the very signifiers of García’s work may also become fetishised and subject to reproduction or ironic play. More than a drift perhaps a circle is enacted in this cycle. A circle might wrongly suggest a kind of perfection or a closure has been performed, may be it would be more accurate to say this is more of an elipse or even a kind of boomerang effect.
Looking between Alonso y Marful’s works and their sources, and then across to the works by the many other artists who have taken one image and developed their own ideas in the works, a chain of connections starts to suggest itself between the appropriated documentary photographs and their de/reconstructions of them. In this chain, there are no copies or reproductions of an “original”: nor is credit given to the original as an “origin”. The first “historical” photo is a starting point but that is all it is, a place for Alonso y Marful to begin. Each production changes how we might see the original source. Each reproduction provokes us to pause, rewind and replay the historical moment it represents from the perspective of the contemporary moment in which we view it. The works which develop from these re-visualise, transform and play with meanings and ideas contained within the original about self-representation but they add to it, alter it and move it onto a different register of meaning. Unlike other appropriation artists, both feminist and women, Sherrie Levine or Sturtevant, Alonso and Marful do not make a copy of the original, nor is it any kind of parodic tribute. They do not wish like Cindy Sherman or Yasumasa Morimura, or even Vlad Mamyshev Monroe, to “be” the image of their dreams, as a mimickry, parody or effective simulation of twentieth century cultural icons, their adoption is more than capturing a moment or a reconstruction of history. The emulation using the image in the source is always the starting point for a dissimulation: for breaking any verisimilitude with the copy. Their tactic is to transform the content of the original by de/reconstructing it. Their repetition, and indeed the doubling or repetition of images taken up by many of the artists who followed their work with their own (Andi Arnovitz, Cabello y Carceller, Teresa Matas, Veru Iché) and underlines this point, could be seen as a homage but it is a re-appropriation to specific ends, to inserting themselves, their own self-image, into a history of disturbance.
A chain of associations, like dominoes, fall on top of one another as one’s eye moves from one work to the next by other artists in the series. It is the movement between these images which is striking, not the fixity of the image in itself. The first act – the selected photo has its own regime of representation and its own artificial sense of itself as “striking a pose” in terms of what it reveals about its subjects. We are always in danger of forgetting the artificiality and carefully constructed composition of the original photos, reading them somewhat literally as a self-evident past, caught by the camera. The second act performed by Alonso y Marful’s work upon the first and the subtle shifts in meaning picks out certain qualities within it; we are not simply looking at a substitution of women for men. We see more acutely the first through the second and how it has been transformed but we also see within the second a new statement about how Alonso y Marful play with their own image as a form of self-representation through this re-enactment. Changing gender, adding signifiers of red, revealing differences in images repeated or displaced within the composition. Then a third act begins…as other women artists take Alonso y Marful’s work and reinterpret or shift it once more and the meanings multiply by using Alonso y Marful as their own starting point for something else. Each displacement is significant in drawing attention to what is contained or depicted in one work, what is mimicked in another, what is appropriated or added in a third.
Dependent on how you conceive these links, you can argue that this offers a new kind of associative visual history between and within works of art. However, this strategy of copying and emulating the traits and tropes of earlier works in one’s own is far from new. The self-portraits of many artists since the 16th century has done this, looking back in order to look forward. These appropriations and connections are simultaneously didactic, pointed, disclosing and revealing. They are often exercises within a discipline about representation of a self as a kind of fiction and the artist’s presentation is always a representation, not a “truth”. Feminism has worked hard to dis-assemble the rhetoric of the male as genius artist which naturalises Art History as a baton race of exclusively male achievements. By attending to the small additions and shifts that are added within each work in the chain, what seems further highlighted is the processes at work in each images’ reproduction and displacement: an attention to visual language and to looking.
If Alonso y Marful attempt to occupy the past by standing in the shoes of another person, typically that of the male artist, they also generate a movement between the past and the present in an assertion of their own place in a new narrative of history. While it may seem they insert woman-as-artist into history, this displacement remains remarkably uncomfortable, because women do not really want to occupy men’s shoes, it is their temporary occupation of being there that will change how we as audience see things irrevocably. This discomfort can only transform and disrupt our understanding of the original and the contemporary and divert or redeploy reproduction and repetition in history to great effect. The reinterpretation by other women artists in the chain intensifies this effect, this displacement of features and qualities within their re/appropriation.
There is a kind of melancholy in this mise en abyme but it nevertheless explores a “Ms. En Abyme” (as suggested by Diane Elam in Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme1 If the “mise en abyme”, as Elam suggests, is a ‘structure of infinite deferral’, it opens ‘a spiral of infinite regression in representation’2, often figuring a complete reversal between subject and object. As Elam goes on to argue, a feminist questioning of representation and “truth”, by contrast, as a Ms. en abyme, makes us ever more aware of the infinite possibilities of women. This situation, at the intersection of feminism and deconstruction, is only possible because of a critical attitude towards social conventions and tropes which are frequently naturalised as the status quo and have so readily silenced the visibility of women’s creative activities. This effect is even more pronounced in the 3rd or 4th iterations by Alonso y Marful’s many feminist participants and colleagues as their different interpretations point frequently to a different enforcement of multiplicity of actions within women’s creativity today, and the replacements, repetitions and displacements they enact shift again our thinking back and forwards along these chain of image-making. Alonso y Marful’s project established the possibility for this feminist subject to emerge and their aspiration in this project could be summarised by Giovanna Zapperi’s words, commenting on Carla Lonzi’s text Let’s Spit on Hegel (1970)3 when she suggests that the feminist subject represented there is ‘the sudden emergence of an ‘Unexpected Subject’ (soggetto imprevisto), a subject that requires neither the past nor the future: ‘a new subject [that] pronounces a new word and in that pronouncement is confident of its diffusion’.”4
NOTES
1 London, Routledge, 1994
2 Ídem, p. 27
3 Spanish translation on line by fem-e-libros / creatividadfeminista.org, México, 2004http://www.nodo50.org/herstory/textos/Escupamos sobre Hegel.pdf
4 Giovanna Zapperi, Travelling Féministe, 10 juillet 2014,“Introductory remarks to the conference Carla Lonzi: Art Critic and Feminist” [on line].http://www.travellingfeministe.org/site/spip.php?article32