Gender, Nation, and Photography
Milja Laurila, Observatory, 2015. © Milja Laurila. Image sourced from artist’s website: www.miljalaurila.fi.
I remember pretty clearly what photography looked like in the art world around the year 2000. The ’90s had been triumphed by Nan Goldin, Shirin Neshat, and Cindy Sherman. The YBAs were still enjoying their post-Sensation swell. It was all about the impossibly submersive video installations that required the sale of video still photography on the side to cover costs. Photography was still begging for acceptance but making some headway. The answer seemed to be about scale; make it bigger and it’s more like art. Just pump up the volume; it’s the American way, darling. Exiting the elevator onto the fourth-floor galleries at Brooklyn Museum for In The Now: Gender And Nation In Europe, ironically, the first thing that struck me was a gaggle of loud visitors. Scurrying about the triangular-adjacent galleries to Judy Chicago’s canonical critique of male-centric Western history, The Dinner Party, I tried to escape the bombastic tourists and nervous giggles of school children rattled by the exposed female anatomy that punctuates the Center For Feminist Art. Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl recently gifted his collection of 200 contemporary photographs by women artists from seventeen countries in Western and Eastern Europe to the Brooklyn Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In The Now unites forty-seven of these emerging and established artists addressing notions of gender, nationhood, and the practice of photography, highlighting this collection’s feminist underpinnings. Attempting to dial down the external volume of my fellow museum visitors to the more measured tone of a European voice, it’s this demure, yet impactful timbre that embodies In The Now with the tension of the withheld, replete with turned backs, obscured glances, missing heads, shadows, furry disguises, folds, and curtains.
Ulla Jokisallo, Wasteland, 2014. © Ulla Jokisallo. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Persons Project.
I’m sensitive to the noise of masculinity, especially in art. I’m more drawn to artists who happen to be women. The contemporary art world, especially coming out of the ’90s, felt heavily shadowed by the gargantuan works of cis white male art stars with bottomless budgets. Being gender-queer myself, those dudes always felt a bit like boogeymen, but it’s their work that came to mind as a counterpoint when I landed on Milja Laurila’s Observatory, a transfer of medical photographs of female subjects onto transparent acrylic, leaning within a wall-mounted vitrine with the subjects’ backs facing the viewer. Driven by noise, I was compelled to begin there after bumbling through the three galleries, delineated by topics of gender, nation, and photography. I spent a good amount of time on the back wall, hung salon style, which features Ulla Jokisalo’s textured composition, Wasteland, a handcrafted assemblage of pigmented inkjet prints and pins, nodding to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”. Perhaps triggered by the scarlet entrance to The Dinner Party, I zoomed in on the hints of red seasoning in a number of works. Silvia Rosi’s Self Portrait as My Father reenacts an image of her father, creating a “lost” family album of her family’s migration from Togo, marking his status change with tomatoes—the crop he picked as a migrant field worker in Italy. Red Swimmer by artist Boo Ritson captures her painting-sculpture-performance practice with her subject’s face and body covered in brightly colored house paint, eyes closed, and wearing protective goggles and a swim cap—giving a sort of Vienna Actionist take on Alex Katz’s swimmers. Eva Schlegel portrays a nude woman emerging from opened curtains, encased in a red monochromatic effect that evokes sexuality, red-light districts, and fantasy, playing on the gendered gaze of the voyeur.
Installation View, In The Now: Gender and Nation In Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum. Photograph by Danny Perez.
Backtracking to the introductory gender-themed gallery, I restart the exhibition with Vanessa Beecroft’s Vogue Hommes. More than any other work in this exhibit, her photography reflects my memory of the medium around the turn of the millennium. One couldn’t escape it. It seemed to be everywhere, including in fashion magazines for which these particular images were originally created. Despite her Italian origins, her work conveys the decibel range of an American voice, so forceful and insistent that it reads more like graphic design than photography.
Vanessa Beecroft, Vogue Hommes, from the series Double Exposure, 2002. © Vanessa Beecroft. Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Jumping to the largest work in the show, Because Every Hair is Different, Marlene Haring explores hair as a physical marker of European femininity and desirability by covering her entire body in flowing blonde hair extensions. Despite the dude scale, the surface and edges of the offset lithographs, in contrast, are left bare and exposed, mirroring her passive not-bothered pose.
Installation View, In the Now: Gender and Nation In Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum. Photograph by Danny Perez.
Dipping into the nation-themed gallery, I was excited to see the work of twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson, who, along with Shirin Neshat, played a key role in breaking through the wall of maleness surrounding large-scale, big-budget video and photography installations of the time. The Wilsons have spent three decades photographing sites that shaped twentieth-century European history. Sea Eagle depicts Nazi bunkers built along the coastline from Spain to Norway. Abandoned yet solid, these remains exist as haunting historical scars of the Nazi’s genocidal campaign against anyone deemed other. Speaking of scar tissue, French artist Carrolle Bénitah stitches through images rediscovered in family albums from her childhood in Morocco. The scanned and reprinted photographs, embroidered with red thread, dress and puncture the myth of the ideal family, while tracing interpersonal and familial rifts and echoing the religious connections of Morocco’s Jewish communities. The use of embroidery can also be seen in London-based artist Aida Silvestri’s blurry anonymous black and white portraits of Eritrean refugees, with colored thread mapping their journeys to the UK. The last work in the gallery is a compelling flower capture by Sarah Jones, which riffs on the concept of the “English rose” as a beautiful woman or girl. The work subverts the flower’s original meaning by showing growing roses with their backs turned to the viewer, portraying the unseen or less desirable elements, much like Milja Laurila’s Observatory.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Sea Eagle, 2006. © Jane and Louise Wilson. Image Courtesy of the Artist and 303 Gallery.
Leaving In The Now—significantly more quiet than it started, back turned, and eyes lowered—the exhibit felt less about the now and more about the traditional veils of femininity and feminism. It’s a beautiful and alluring show, but I was surprised to not see any engagement with the Trans narrative. Upon inquiry, I learned there is only one non-binary artist, Melanie Bonajo, in the Haukohl Collection, and they were not curated into this exhibit unfortunately. This detail keeps the installation and the collection about 10 years behind the dialogue of the present day, but in all fairness, not every story needs to be told in every exhibit. Less is generally more within an exhibition context, but I’d maybe just remove “In The Now” from the exhibition title, and perhaps for future chapters of this collection, we can try to face a bit more forward.
In the Now: Gender and Nation In Europe is on view at the Brooklyn Museum until July 7, 2024.
Aida Silvestri, Saba—Eritrea to London on foot, by car, lorry, boat and aeroplane, 2013, printed 2021. © Aida Silvestri. Image sourced from website: www.photoworks.org.uk.
