ARTFULLY DISTURBING
INTERVIEW BY TRYSTAN GARRICK
JANE WENGER
Jane Wenger’s photographs both repel and attract. Her large-format close-up prints draw the viewer in, while simultaneously, their unflattering details can take someone aback. This is, in fact, Wenger’s intended effect. She seeks to manipulate her viewers and what they see, creating an artfully disturbing quality that doesn’t always sit comfortably with them.
“I like my work to be very challenging, to put you on edge,” Wenger said. “Even if you hated it, that would be a fine response to me. It’s been said many times before, but I feel we are very much a fast-food society; we want things fast, quick, and easy. We don’t want to think about things. I intend for my work to be disturbing, and that’s why hating it is OK with me. I don’t want my work to be easy to assimilate, to be easy to hang on the wall. People have bought my work and hung it on their wall, and I’m thrilled when that happens because I feel it’s someone who can deal with it and wants to deal with it. I’ve had other people say that they could never put my work on their wall.”
“I want something to draw you in, yet you can’t get closer because you don’t want to know what it is. As part of our fast-food culture, we don’t like to look at ugliness. And ugliness can be anything.”
Wenger’s work is grouped into four series: The Extended Arm (1974–76), Self-Portrait (1976), Bald Heads (1976), and Faces (1979–80). These aren’t actual titles, but self-explanatory names for the content of each intentionally untitled work. The Faces series has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and in New York’s PS1 Gallery as an environmental installation.
The environmental installation at PS1 was a dark room containing four poster-size prints of faces. “The room was small; you could never really back up far enough away from the pictures. It was a tension-producing atmosphere, done consciously.”
Adding to the claustrophobic setting were lights focused only on the photos, controlled by a four-track soundtrack of the subjects groaning and sighing. Viewers reached various conclusions: A woman giving birth, a couple making love, someone going to the bathroom, a man dying.
“My work is basically untitled. I don’t want my audience to have any clues as to how to look at the work. The environmental installation was called an ‘environmental installation.’ In reality, they were bodybuilders working out. They’re parts of faces taken out of context, so that I could use those faces to call up other things within the viewer, things having nothing to do with the person photographed. There’s no point of reference. I put it in another context and made it work for me, to do what I wanted to do. And that’s what I mean about manipulation.”
“There’s a whole theory about photography—that photography tells the truth. People believe that, even though they may, in discussion, realize photographs never tell the truth. And I think you can use that belief, because people still believe there’s some foothold in reality presented in photographs. I’m interested in playing with that. I’d be crazy not to.”
“The reason I chose bodybuilders for the camera is that I would get this close (barely 12 to 18 inches) to the person. I bought a 100mm macro lens just for this series, and I used a strobe at full strength.”
“These guys didn’t even notice when the strobe went off. It shows that what these guys were doing was so intense that they didn’t even notice me. My photography shows that I was so physically close to them, they were part of my consciousness. But because of what they were doing, I didn’t even exist to them.”
Wenger enjoys finding such paradoxes and contradictions in her art.
“My work is very classic from the point of traditional technique, but it’s not classic in terms of conception at all. And that’s just one thing I play against the other.”
“My background is very classical. I have this idea that a person’s strength is also their weakness. I’m very good technically; actually, I’m a mediocre negative-maker. But I’m a fine printer—and I have to be because I’m a mediocre negative-maker. I have to do everything I can to make that print work.”
“I’m a better editor in selecting my works than I am a photographer. I’m not afraid to discard something that didn’t work.”
Recognizing your failures and discarding them are key to becoming a good artist, Wenger said.
“Art students have this fantasy that it’s easy. That artists are just these talented people who go out and do their work, take their picture, go to the darkroom, and then hang their work on the wall. I want them to know it’s fucking hard work; there are more failures than successful efforts. One of the things that makes you a success is knowing what the failures are and putting them aside, even if you put 2,000 hours into it.”
An artist should keep in mind that they’re working for themselves first, Wenger reminded. For some, that may be a luxury.
“In order to be in control, you have to be willing to go without. You have to be willing to pay the price and make a decision that’s unpopular and be able to live by the result of that,” she said.
Wenger is in such a position because she works as a commercial photographer for her livelihood. Her job allows her to indulge in her art without the pressure of a profit motive.
Sometimes, however, not having that concern can still affect an artist’s work. An exhibit of Wenger’s Self-Portrait series at the John Hancock was censored because it was considered pornographic. The label changed the way others looked at her art.
“Context is everything. This work was censored. And when this work was censored, no one could look at it separately from that knowledge. It hurt the intent of the work. Some people would say, ‘Oh, this is the work that was…’ There is nothing that exists outside of context.”
As it stands, Wenger hasn’t created a new body of work since her Faces series six years ago. That’s because, she said, nothing has struck her as exciting to explore or new ground to break. However, she hopes to soon produce a short film and build an installation from that. As for now, she doesn’t want to be artistically typecast.
“Suppose I sold my work, which I do, and my work became very popular. It’s not that I wouldn’t like that in a certain way, but it would be threatening in another way. When you’re popular, and your work is popular, it’s very hard to change. When you gain recognition, it’s very hard to all of a sudden say, ‘I’m not doing that anymore.’”