Fleshly discomfort  Jane Wenger/Options 7:

An Environmental Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Ill. Jan.31-March 22  BY CAROLE HARMEL  Using ten giant photo-murals mounted along the walls of a small room, dark except for carefully-directed illumina.tion on the giant photomurals and a muted sound track-visceral sounds, various grunts and groans punctuated with silences and bounced around the room-Wenger has moved from two-dimensional render.ings into the three-dimensional space of installation. These were the same faces she exhibited previously at the Landfall Press (see my review of this and former work in Afterimage, December 1979).

There, they remained objects to contemplate from a distance, removed from the viewer by their discreet white mats and the pristine gallery walls. Here, heads were blown up to the size of bodies: their original abstraction and close cropping relaxing their indexical signification so that they stood midway between real heads and metaphorical landscapes of pain. Their size and the disorienting darkness drew us close, tempting us to touch. One was alternately seduced by the curves of flesh, sucked in by orifices, and repelled by the glistening, sometimes reptilian textures of skin.  In contrast to the clean, well-lit galleries in the rest of the museum, this dark chamber both threatened and attracted. Drawing the viewer in, almost unwillingly, it then encouraged introspection, a journey into one’s own shadows, associations of suffering, a confrontation with pre-verbal existence.

The sounds emanating from different parts of the room counterpointed the images to create a feeling of diffused unease, which further intensified the psychological thrust inward. A comparison to film, with its sound track and the black spaces between the frames, is tempting, especially since viewing these images was more like viewing a film than viewing photographs as they are usually shown. Wenger’s installation, like the dark space of a theater, invited closer identification from the viewer. One projected oneself up there, into the prints, rather than looking at photographs on a white wall or a white page. Yet the experience resisted the temporal linearity of film; it didn’t move anywhere, but rather pulled us inward. It remained the instant of a still photograph, directed back through the strata of our memory.  I was reminded of the camera obscura, that “dark room” where photography was discovered. And that dark room which captured images has always had certain psychological overtones for me. The moment of its appearance meant selfreflexivity, holding up ourselves to ourselves for close scrutiny. So with Wenger’s dark room. It becomes a metaphor for imagination, an alchemical space where the stuff of the world is transformed by our minds into our needs, our fears.

The metaphor extends to that alchemical space where photographers give form to their imagery, create the illusion of substance from nothing, concepts from images. It is the creative space of art, or any human ac.tivity-threatening, yet exquisitely seduc.tive, inviting knowledge while resisting definition. In Revisioning Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), James Hillman speaks of how images of suffering can be metaphors for the process of self discovery, self knowledge, individuation.

A Jungian, Hillman sees the growth of self as a painful process, fraught with danger, and at the very least, hard work. I won’t give away the “secret” of these images, i.e., their literal source, which Wenger chooses not to disclose, but let it be said that they emanated strenuous, painful activity. We may fill in the point of the activity for ourselves. Wenger’s installation was shown concurrently with a major exhibition of the giant portraits of Chuck Close. The contrast between these two treatments of faces gives an insight into the present close relationship between painting and photography. Wenger’s giant faces come close to abstract expressionism. Their graininess and size reduces facial features to the status of elements in a much larger )andscape. Close’s paintings, on the other hand, begin with photographs, and show more clearly than any photograph the conventions of the photographic image.