|
"Joel-Peter
Witkin," In Human Nature, art exhibition catalogue.
Indiana University School of Fine Arts (SoFA) Gallery. 2007. Joel-Peter Witkin is the Master of Ceremonies in a theatre of the macabre, the deformed, and the insane. His photographic
works plunge the dark depths of what he describes as "conditions of being" to toe the line between what disturbs
and intrigues us. He trolls the recesses of medical school cadaver collections, insane asylums, and morgues for raw materials
that he uses to investigate sexuality, mortality and human spirituality. He chases what people usually try to avoid,
finding beauty among corpses, people with physical abnormalities, hermaphrodites, fetishists, and "anyone bearing the
wounds of Christ." Drawing inspiration from the surrealist films of Cocteau, Dali and Buñuel, and works by Weegee
and Diane Arbus, Witkin attempts to "recapture the golden period when artist, anatomist, and alienist were one."
His visual imagery also falls in line with Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection by describing the experience of simultaneously
being attracted to and repulsed by that which exists where the boundaries between the sacred and the profane breakdown.
Face of a Woman, 2004, includes a disembodied head filled
with flowers to resemble a decorative vase accompanied by a taxidermic specimen of a small monkey. The carefully composed
grouping reflects his "allegorical still-life instinct" and situates the image within the history of aesthetic discourse.
Although the photograph emanates a sense of tragedy, torture and morbid horror, his staging loads the grotesque form with
aesthetic beauty.
Raphael and Fornarina,
2003, explores the disorienting space between attraction and repulsion by infusing the vulgar with an erotic charge. Raphael's
supposed affair with the model for his painting La Fornarina c. 1520 is the basis of several canvas executed
by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in the 19thcentury. In Witkin's version, the nubile flesh
of Fornarina is pressed against the decaying flesh of Raphael's fetishized corpse, suggesting an analogous relationship between
human fascination with morbidity and sexual attraction.
For his work Cupid and Centaur in the Museum of Love, Marselles, 1992, he photographed human and
animal bones fused together and suspended in mid-air, giving the construction the qualities of a specimen at a natural history
museum. While the specimen resembles biological reality, it also records a constructed fantasy that exposes the allure of
biological oddity.
By Jennifer Eberbach
Sources:
Joel-Peter Witkin: The
Bone House (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1998).
Joel-Peter Witkin, Joel-Peter Witkin:
Photographs (Pasadena, CA : Twelvetrees Press, 1985).
Eugnia Parry, "Convalescent...Incorruptible"
in Joel-Peter Witkin: The Bone House (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1998), 177 & 183
|
