Joel-Peter Witkin has been called part Hieronymous Bosch,
part Chainsaw Massacre. His photographic tableaux, carefully
arranged and painstakingly printed, offer us the chance to transcend
subject matter, and enter what Witkin calls a world of love and
redemption."
The
Bone House.
Somewhere
between depraved and divine, Joel-Peter Witkin has created a space
that’s occupied by no other living photographer. His latest book,
The Bone House, documents his progression from child photographer
to where he stands alone today. Heady words, true, but deserved. Joel-Peter
Witkin is a fearless image-maker.
The
book itself is a beautiful piece of work. Green cloth in a gray slipcase,
it’s the perfect vehicle to carry his disturbing, yet compelling
images. Witkin is nothing if not a study in contrasts.
What
distinguishes Joel-Peter Witkin from his contemporaries is a restlessness
and desire that leads him to places others fear –the dark side
where every glimmer of light is authentic. His milieu is nothing short
of the greatest mystery that’s occupied humanity since its very
beginnings, the ultimate question of life and death –questions
that by their very nature are ultimately unanswerable, except in those
personal, brief, and experiential moments when art bridges the gap
between the senses and the intellect. No one occupies this ground
better than Witkin.
Witkin
makes art that can’t be dismissed or ignored. In fact, it achieves
the status all art yearns for: no one, on seeing a Witkin image, can
remain ambivalent. But this isn’t only a product of what Witkin
chooses to photograph. No, it’s in how he takes this material
and transcends its limitations. Using cadavers, hermaphrodites, hunchbacks,
and others commonly known as freaks in general society, Witkin creates
visual paradoxes that challenge our perception. Often criticized for
sensationalism and the exploitation of his subjects, he actually lifts
and redeems them –makes them central to his spiritual quest.
Once photographed, they enter the eternal stream of art.
It’s
impossible to conceptualize a Witkin image in a single glance and
then dismiss it. Each image, after careful darkroom manipulation with
razor blades, pins, and other implements, forces us to question our
ability, viscerally, to understand. A Witkin image can, like the best
poetry, be read again and again and always remain a mystery –one
that feels just outside our grasp. A line from Elizabeth Bishop comes
to mind, “and [we] looked and looked our infant sight away.”
Joel-Peter
Witkin knows that, contrary to popular wisdom, we are not rational
creatures, but subject to our senses. He uses sight, our most privileged
sense, to unnerve and instruct us. Witkin’s images do not merely
shock, they enlighten, if only by forcing us to embrace what we’d
rather leave unexamined.
Woman
Breastfeeding an Eel, New Mexico, 1979 is an image open to multiple
interpretations. What could it mean? The cognitive dissonance one
feels is disconcerting, but certain parts hold: the eel, the woman,
her bared breasts, the conical bird beak she wears as a mask. But
what is their relationship? Personal attempts at unraveling this mystery
are exactly that –personal attempts, as all interpretations of
Witkin must be. The more one tries with the intellect to understand,
the more one realizes that only the senses can be trusted, but even
here, sight, our most honored sense, is unable to grasp the image
wholly. The elements are clear; their context is not. How can an eel
suckle? How can a human being feel warmth for or be drawn to nurse
an eel? How do sight, emotion, and intellect come together in such
improbable objects? What does it all mean?
Much
of discomfort arises because Witkin’s subjects (excluding his
very earliest and very latest images) usually wear masks, eye-coverings,
or false faces. In doing so, he denies us the signal indicator of
personality –the countenance—only to replace it with another.
What’s seen, what’s felt? Irreconcilable duality existing
in a single entity. A constant pull of emotion against the intellect,
and vice versa. One more reason to feel, almost, as if what we see
can be understood. Take Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984. In it we
see a draped woman sitting on a draped chair facing us. Many elements
of the image are interesting: the tiny skeleton off to the right,
the way her hair has been twisted into semi-braids and attached to
the wall behind her, the animal fetus she holds on her lap, but what
jars is the T-shaped mask the photographer has imposed over her features.
Our sight tells us one thing, our emotions another, and there’s
no way they can be reconciled. No matter how often one looks, this
phenomenon never changes, never sets us free. In fact, given our need
for human reconciliation and integration in all that surrounds us,
this delicious discomfort, abstract and concrete simultaneously, can
be savored safely –a testament to one of art’s many functions.
Unlike
many photographic artist, whose vision is concentrated solely in their
photographic or darkroom efforts, Witkin uses titles worthy of literary
aspirations, but this valuation of the literary is never for its own
sake. Each title transcends mere labeling, a charge that might be
laid at the feet of many otherwise fine photographers, and adds a
dimension to images that already bear multiple shades of meaning.
Lesson in the Kabala, New Mexico, 1981, Christ with Horn , New Mexico,
1976. Testicle Stretch With the Possibility of a Crushed Face, New
Mexico, 1982. At the very least, they set a tone through which his
images might be viewed.
If
all creation can be said to be godlike, then the creation of these
images assumes a spiritual quality most readily sensed in Witkin’s
images that use cadavers and body parts. Witkin, in photographing
the dead, brings their quickening essence once again to movement and
expression, takes what we would ordinarily dismiss as the past, and
enlivens it. In this way, what these cadavers achieve is nothing short
of a new life, another chance to commune with the living, and even
more striking, a chance for the living to commune with the dead.
The
Kiss (Le Baiser), New Mexico, 1982, is an image of a single autopsied
head that’s been sliced in half down the middle, and posed as
two separate beings locked in a kiss. There is no mask. Witkin freely
allows the dead what expression their countenance assumes. How strange,
and yet how comforting. A kiss, being inherently pleasant and associated
with joy, disarms the viewer, even as the intellect denies the possibility
that this head can feel anything. That each half of the head is achieving
what it had in life, wholeness, if only metaphorically, doesn’t
diminish the sense that it is so. This fact renders it no less powerful.
Of course, there are many other levels of potential meaning, but the
most significant event of the image is in how the dead, in the face
of reason, can be said to breathe, to communicate.
Considering
how Witkin’s images resist categorization, perhaps the one single
truth that can be said of all of them, is this: in every Witkin image
there’s something that won’t let a viewer go, something
that won’t allow us to dismiss what we see or to completely accept
it. We leave a Witkin image with the feeling that significance has
been glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, although the eye has been
fully engaged in bold frontal sight These images are nothing short
of an attempt at saying the unsayable, a task Thomas De Quincey once
called “the burden of the incommunicable.” In the company
of Goya, Bosch, Blake, and the other great artist of the ineffable,
Witkin, in The Bone House, has created an inexhaustible and essential
book.
