A PUBLICATION OF THE VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP
VOLUME 7, NUMBER 5 December 1979
Afterimage/December 1979
JANE WENGER:

The dialectics of sexuality
BY CAROLE HARMEL

JANE WENGER has consistently used the human body as the subject of her photographs. The continuing power and fascination of these images consist, for me, in their grounding dialect, their pull toward extremes. They both shock and unnerve us with their primitive sexual energy, and assuage our civilized perceptions with their severe formality. In these intense framings of the human body, Wenger mirrors the polarities of consciousness/unconsciousness: on the one hand, intellectual control, a delight in ordering and forming; and on the other hand, sexual tension at its most primal and frightening, a truly fundamental imagery.

Wenger’s formalism makes this imagery very presentable. Her technique, classical and scrupulously clean, consists of a strict attention to tonality and to proper balance between areas of light and dark; a painstaking, almost obsessive concern with surface detail; a continual stripping away toward simplicity of form. It’s all very Bauhaus. Wenger studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (the successor to Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus) for several years, and admits to a strong design background due to her training there.

Yet somehow the mechanistic orientation of the Bauhaus is completely missing in these images, for all their concern with form. Wenger’s “irrationality” jolts that underlying belief in the machine, a belief that never really accounted for the persistence of imagination (the unconscious that might forsake order).

Wenger’s bodies exist in tension; they do not easily accept the formal constraints with which the photographer holds them so closely in check. I am reminded more of the strict architecture of Puritan New England churches, where everything has been reduced to a pristine, essential simplicity antiseptic, smooth, without the complications of decoration than of Bauhaus refinements.

Inside these churches preachers delivered sermons illustrated with the most graphic iconography; visions of hell in strict disaccord with the virginity of the architecture. Wenger manages to evoke something of the terror of these sermons visions from the (“hellish”) unconscious of bodies writhing through space, contorted, struggling against their own physicality. Her photographs evoke a deep sense of the forbidden, the taboo, of sexuality that is somehow beyond the boundaries of civilized behavior: dark, brooding, verging on the mythical. These extremes stringent formalism challenged by appeals to overt sexuality are the boundaries of Wenger’s world: the one controlling, the other threatening to break loose. Together they present a dialectic of unusual power and almost terrifying tension.

Wenger’s work exists, to date, in four groups. For “Self-Portraits,” the opening show of the short-lived but energetic photography gallery within Chicago’s Artemisia Gallery in 1976, Wenger showed a series of photographs of sculpturesque body forms, severely abstracted, but not at the expense of a singular voluptuousness and grandeur. Shot against the sky, as are most of Wenger’s nudes, and generally from low angles, these female forms were transformed into architecture.
One comparison springs to mind: the ancient Venus of Willendorf whose physicality is potentially threatening as well as nourishing. Yet Wenger’s Venuses do not sag; earth does not claim them. Despite their bulk, they seem possessed of great vitality and capable of violent action. The classical metaphor of female body as nature, passive, is fused with the metaphor of active male to create images which are sexually ambiguous, archetypally evocative.

Her later one-woman show at Artemisia in 1976 consisted of both male and female nudes, photographed outdoors, generally with the sky as background. The nude in nature is a familiar genre, used extensively by Weston, Clergue, Bullock, and Brandt, among others. These “masters” articulate a romantic version of the body as part of nature. In the general mood of relaxation and languor found in much of this work, formalism abstracts the body so that we are aware of the correspondences between nude and landscape. The body, generally of a woman, seems at home in nature. However, Wenger turns this tradition around; her nudes, instead of existing passively in their natural surroundings, are tense and full of motion. Pinned against the sky in a flash of strobe light, they struggle against themselves in an inexplicable conflict.

The bald men series, first shown at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1977 (together with the work of Harold Allen), returns in an odd way to the nude in/as landscape tradition, both using and enlarging its vocabulary. Again formalizing the body through extreme angles, depersonalizing through continual avoidance of the face, Wenger produces metaphorical images that relate the body to its surroundings while at the same time evoking feelings similar to those of the dis-ease and menace of the earlier male nudes. More than ever before we seem to be moving toward a nightmare world with images worthy of Goya: brooding monsters at the edge of the world.

While this work itself is not strictly sexual, its implications or evocations, for me at least, are. On one hand, the sensuality of surface beads of water on a bald man’s head comingling with pores, and the tiny hairs on his shoulders (the absence of hair on the head makes the insistence of body hair strangely disturbing) is beautifully formal, unnervingly real. At the same time, we sense a mystery: untold stories (narratives alluded to but carefully repressed), threats and violence just beyond the edge of the frame.

In the series of bald men (heads without features) the head is a kind of geography, a landscape of features whose connection to a face is constantly denied. Here Wenger shows mostly the back of a head. However, in her current series, “Faces,” the head is turned face-front, but we see only an expression a grimace, a stylization of pain; in short, a mask. Our expectations of seeing a person, an identity, are again denied. And yet the impression is that we are getting closer; the identity of that unknown personality, that face behind the mask, is at least and at last within reach. Again the Wengerian dialectic is at work: the surface is excruciatingly clear, more than we want to see but the meaning is left mysterious.

Wenger uses extremely close cropping. Bodies are rarely shown whole (more so in the earlier work, less and less as time goes on). This cropping is accomplished by posing the model, by arranging the model in the viewfinder, and later in the darkroom. Wenger has no qualms about cropping even after a print has been completed. Indeed, upon viewing piles of images with various lines inked across them indicating possible future cropping, I became aware of an almost surgical glee in amputation, a distinct pleasure in paring the body down to the Wengerian aesthetic of spareness and tension.

What is cut off by the frame implies what lies beyond its limits; and Wenger’s insistence on the edge of the frame seems to be growing with the chronological progression of her work. Thus the single image is insufficient, for we want to see more, we want to see beyond. Viewing a body of Wenger’s work on the wall shows the images pouring out of their individual frames, linking with the rest, making a sequential movement around the room.

Hollis Frampton has remarked that a film or moving picture consists simply of still images on a strip of film with more of the frames filled in. Hence a still might be thought of as a single image cut out of a film. Wenger’s imagery stands somewhere between film and stills an imaginary film with longer areas of black leader (or space) between frames. And, of course, the movement is implied, filled in with our own eye-wanderings from image to image.

This dialectic between movement and stillness is further enhanced by the use of a double light source. Choosing the somewhat unusual solution of strobe plus natural light, Wenger reverses and modifies normal tonalities into a subtle kind of unreality. For instance, because of the way the body catches the flash of the strobe, part may be very light, part very dark, in a way that makes no sense unless we are aware of this second light source. We are used to natural light, to outdoor conventions of one light source. The addition of strobe, artificial light in natural settings, adds a shock value that is at first disorienting.

The second effect of the strobe is that of prolonging and “pinning” an instant that occurred at 1/1,000 sec., suspending it so that we are aware both of its momentary, isolated nature and of its location in a stream of movement. Like the most erotic moments, Wenger’s are both crystallized and crystalline, fluid and enigmatic.

Although Wenger so clearly presents her imagery and so carefully lights her subjects, we still strongly sense that we are observing something forbidden. Because her bodies are faceless, masked, or cropped in such a way as to be unrecognizable, and the personality linked to faces is obscured, these ambiguities emphasize the sense of the taboo. Because her figures seem to exist in a world that is pre-lingual, words are not entirely adequate to describe or explicate these ultimately inexplicable images.

The strength of many photographs lies in the ways in which they remind us of things we have seen. Wenger’s photographs remind us of things seen and forgotten, lodged somewhere in our collective or private unconscious. Thus they become memories of a remote, even primeval past; yet they obviously and stubbornly reside in the present. Like daydreams and remembrances they seem to flash into our consciousness, very corporeal ghosts.

Similarly real and unreal, latent and actual, sexuality exists in Wenger’s work in the reality of surface texture and in the fantasies that link us at some level into an archetypal consciousness, if Jung is correct. Together these opposites form a dialectic of sexuality that allows us to experience pain and pleasure, control and chaos, realism and imagination, delicacy and strength sensitivities and attributes of a skillful lover and of Wenger the photographer, who so successfully incorporates them into her imagery.