Singular visions
Intimations of mortality abound in the work of Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethrope at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
The Artist Rooms project – the former collection of art dealer Anthony D’offay, now jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate – continues to enrich our experience of art, not only in showing the work of individuals, but in exploring artists in relation to one another. Works from the collection form the backbone of the Paolozzi and Warhol show currently in Modern Two, and populate this exhibition at the Portrait Gallery about three seminal American photographers.
Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethorpe are very different artists but converge here around the theme of self-expression. Of the three, only Mapplethorpe’s work is classic selfportraiture. He uses the camera to
try on a series of personae, from debonair sophisticate to leatherjacket-wearing bad boy, and to provoke – with sexualised gay images or a non-binary self portrait in which he pushes at the boundaries of gender.
After the mid 1980s, however, when he was diagnosed with Aids, the portraits become about something else. Gradually, we see tell-tale signs of ill-health on those youthful features. The last one, taken just months before he died in 1989, seems to prefigure death, with its disembodied head and skull or namented walking stick, though he meets our gaze with unflinching eyes.
It’s easy to find intimations of mortality, or of mental instability, in Francesca Woodman’s work, knowing as we do that she took her own life at the age of 22. However, the more I see of her pictures – often selfportraits of a kind, taken in derelict buildings, in which her body blurs and shifts, seeming to merge with the peeling paintwork and blownin leaves – the more I see a young women finding her self, not losing it, playing hide-and-seek with identity and energised by the game. The talent and assurance of her work is to be marvelled at, and it’s easy to see why she resonates so deeply with many young artists today.
Placed between Woodman and Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus is different again. There are no selfportraits here, but rather an intimate and rare portfolio of ten images compiled by the artist in the years before her death from suicide at the age of 48: a summation, perhaps, of what she wanted to leave behind. These portraits are surely among the best of her work, images which draw on the extraordinary in the midst of everyday life: a giant with his (average-sized) parents, a pair of identical twins, a couple of middleaged nudists sitting calmly in their lounge.
Though they are often gently amusing, these subjects are never
Woodman’s work is to be marvelled at, and it’s easy to see why she resonates with many young artists today
freaks; the images are shot through with compassion, the work of a photographer who has won the trust of her subjects, and repays it. They are remarkable images, as are the works of Woodman and Mapplethorpe, each in a very different way. African-america artist Senga
Nengudi, now showing at the Fruitmarket Gallery, was making work which overlaps the careers of all three photographers. Her importance within the American avant-garde is being belatedly recognised, with work included both in the Venice Biennale and in Armory Show in New York in 2017.
Nengudi works with themes of race, gender, identity and ritual, but with the lightest of touches. Early on, she gravitated towards ephemeral materials: water, sand, cardboard, nylon, and eventually to performance, perhaps the hardest of all art forms to preserve and replicate.
The earliest work here, from 1969,
is a kind of gentle rebuttal to hardedged minimalism: brightly coloured water heat-sealed into vinyl tubes which look a little like Carl Andre sculptures, a little like giant ice-poles. A more recent floor work uses sand and coloured pigment to echo the language of abstract expressionism.
In 1975, she hit on the idea of making sculptures from pairs of tights. These are tremendously clever and profound: stretched, knotted, weighted down with sand to make anthropomorphic forms, they are celebrations of the resilience of the body, its variety, its occasional ridiculousness. Nengudi is an artist who rarely loses her sense of humour.
Tights continue to feature in the costumes and props she made for her later performances. While the performances themselves are largely lost to us, some documentation of them remains, and it is encouraging that a range of her works are being remade and re-exhibited to introduce her to a new generation.
The sense of a singular idiosyncratic vision permeates the work of David
Austen at DCA, the largest show he has had in Scotland and the first in which he has created an imaginative world. No guide is provided to the individual works here, and little explanatory material: one must enter the Underworld on its own terms, armed chiefly with one’s own imagination.
Austen works in painting, printmaking, sculpture and filmmaking. In DCA, the adjoining spaces have been configured to open into one another, and are connected by different coloured sculptures suggesting sun and moon. There are allusions to Dante, and classical myth, and Austen’s extensive reading list ranges from Ovid to Stevenson to JG Ballard.
It’s a world of wild imaginings conjured with the utmost care and precision. Series of works are hung with perfect geometry. His abstract paintings are as precise and ordered as colour charts. In Ocean ,his painting of stars, the celestial bodies are the same size and equidistant. This contrast itself has an intriguing power.
His Underworld is also populated. In Gallery One, a crowd of faces regard us in neat rows, while in Gallery Two a room within a room contains his series The Drowned, small watercolour figures, alone or in groups, waving, stretching, dancing or just looking a little bemused. In the room given over to film work, the presence is Austen himself, his prone body dressed as a clown. The camera catches him from different angles as a voice relates a dream a friend had about Austen’s death.
It’s about death, then, but also, in ways hard to articulate, it’s about life. Perhaps, like all new arrivals in the Underworld, we’re entitled to feel a little confused. Self Evidence: Photographs by Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethorpe until 20 October; Senga Nengudi until 26 May; David Austen: Underworld until 9 June