7 - ‘Not Because my Heart is Gone; Simply the Other Side’: Francesca Woodman’s Relational and Ephemeral Subjectivity at the Limit of the Image
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2021
Summary
It is that life as lived by me now is a series of exceptions … I was (am?) not unique but special. This is why I was an artist … I was inventing a language for people to see the everyday things that I also see … nothing to do with not being able to ‘take it’ in the big city, or with self-doubt or because my heart is gone … and not to teach people a lesson. Simply the other side.
Francesca Woodman's last diary entrythe opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge. Moments of unknowingness about oneself tend to emerge in the context of relations to others, suggesting that these relations call upon primary forms of relationality that are not always available to explicit and reflective thematization. If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency.
Judith ButlerINTRODUCTION
Francesca Woodman's personal history, more specifically her suicide at the age of only twenty-two years old, is often used as an heuristic framework through which her highly intricate and complex photographic work is read retroactively. Peggy Phelan, for instance, in an essay that despite beautiful elucidation of her work elides Woodman's fascination with photography as the commemorative medium of the twentieth century (a century that paid witness to death and genocide on an astronomic scale) and the tragic facts of her own biography, has asserted that Woodman's work is a kind of ritualised rehearsal for an act of disappearance; Isabella Pedicini has noted further that there is a marked tendency amongst scholars and critics to equate her photographs with a suicidal psyche.
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- Information
- Female Agency and Documentary StrategiesSubjectivities, Identity and Activism, pp. 100 - 113Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018