Pretty Baby
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
- M. K. Shields -
Still from Anna Gaskell, That's All I Remember, 2006
16mm film
Duration 0:02:52
Courtesy Yvon Lambert New York/Paris
Pretty Baby presents an international selection of artists investigating the matter of childhood directly, fantastically and critically. One encounters various manifestations of theme, ranging from record to revelry, and culminating in challenging expositions in the guise of fractured fairy tales, nontraditional families, violent acts and physical anomalies. Curator Andrea Karnes states, “Today’s images of children seldom depict innocence without irony. Artists in this exhibition share a willingness to acknowledge the complex nature of the child, and in doing so they overturn well-established constructs of childhood innocence.” The number of contemporary artists exploring manifestations of childhood over the past decade reveals the resonance of this idea, due to both its universality and ineffability.
Every piece in Pretty Baby has elements of reality and fantasy, profoundly accessing childhood identity by assimilating its appearance and means. Vermilion (That’s All I Remember), Anna Gaskell’s video installation premiering here, highlights just such a combination. This diptych features paired shots of fraternal twins seated at the edge of a body of water, each recounting their birth. The brother’s version often seems more self-assured as he describes the warmth of a room, his mother’s lanky feet and blinking to clear his blurry vision. The sister tells more circuitous tales of Irish dancing, a whooshing sound (presumably her mother’s water breaking) and a seemingly non-sequitur reference to a child that “didn’t make it.”
Their tales come together as the sister looks at the adjacent frame, listening as her brother explains off-screen that as he got older, he knew that he had someone “with him”—that someone had been born with him. Fragmented edits contribute to the elusive content and reflect that, when it comes to memory, truth can be subjective and inventive. In addition to acknowledging the impact that outside sources like pictures and stories told by adults have on the formation of childhood “memory,” this piece also accurately reflects the stream-of-consciousness way children tell stories, equally informed by a lack of acculturated filtering mechanisms and a seamless digression from unashamed truth to tall tales.
While the connection to reality varies from piece to piece, four basic relationships toward childhood can be discerned in Pretty Baby: recollecting, recording, inventing and problematizing. These categories are not meant to be exhaustive, and there is a certain degree of overlap between them, but they do suggest a starting point for comprehending this selection of work.
Sanford Biggers and Jennifer Zackin, Charlotta Westergren and Makiko Kudo all recollect their own experiences as children. A collaboration between Biggers and Zackin employs personal narrative in the form of home movies. The juxtaposition of rituals practiced by Biggers’ African-American family with those of Zackin’s Jewish one reveal more similarities (as middle-class Americans living during the 1970s) than differences, highlighting the import of social class and historical moment over both race and religion. Westergren uses her relationship with her sister as the inspiration for her piece, while Kudo’s large-scale paintings convey the youthful boredom and reverie of her days growing up on her grandfather’s farm, with nothing to do all day but “doodle and chase cats.”
Adam Fuss, Rineke Dijkstra, Loretta Lux and Gaskell’s video installation record the appearance and experience of life’s early stages through contact with children. Adam Fuss references infancy indexically through evocative photograms, capturing the trace presence of christening gowns as memorials to the past. Presented in adjacent galleries are Dijkstra’s iconic photos of youths on beaches throughout the world and Lux’s photo-based composites featuring her friends’ children. Lux combines images of her models with painted or photographed backdrops, effectively conveying the lovely as well as the awkward. These images carry an alluring air of dark nostalgia for displays of melodrama (The Bride), manners (The Waiting Girl) and absorption (Three Wishes).
Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Nursing, 2004
C-print, edition 6/8
40 x 32 inches
Private collection, Los Angeles
© Catherine Opie
Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings and sculptures and Gaskell’s photos take a more inventive and suggestive approach to the theme. Gaskell’s Untitled #58 (By Proxy) explores the symbolic connotations of the color white with references to angels and nurses. Her Untitled (Override) series brings fairy-tale characters to life. Nara utilizes the cartoonish whimsy made popular by manga and animé in the form of wide-eyed children and sleeping puppies. These artists are clearly involved with the fabrication of fictive lives, imaginary characters and fantastic—albeit plausible—circumstances.
Nathalie Djurberg, Margaret Meehan and Catherine Opie most directly point out obstacles to a simplistic view of childhood innocence. Djurberg’s Florentin alludes to violence committed by and toward children in a claymation video where the line between play, punishment, impropriety and revenge is not entirely clear. Catherine Opie’s series, like Lux’s, is composed primarily of portraits of her friends’ children. The fact that these children come from nontraditional families informs a sense that something lies behind otherwise conventional portraits in which the sitters don’t smile. They seem to have a wisdom and clarity beyond their age: Beatrice looks contemplatively out of the frame; Oscar confronts the gaze of the viewer. Jesse, made almost a decade before the other pieces, recalls some of the more assertive photographs Sally Mann made of her eldest daughter. This beautiful child displays the innocence and androgyny of the preteen years in which one’s sexuality is generally not questioned. Is this an effeminate young boy or a prepubescent girl who will soon need to wear a shirt in public—or does it matter?
Loretta Lux, Three Wishes, 2001
Ilfochrome print
20 x 20 inches framed
Courtesy the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
© Loretta Lux
The anchor image here is a tender and bold self-portrait of the artist nursing her son. The faint presence of an earlier piece in which Opie investigated societal prejudices against lesbianism marks her chest. A scar of the word “Pervert” echoes the more overt tattoos that adorn her arm, both of which are outweighed by the hands that cradle her son and the adoring look they exchange, reinforcing the idea that the bond of motherhood outshines most other factors in the makeup of one’s identity.
Finally, Margaret Meehan’s ceramic bust and accompanying drawing Annie, among the most effective and jarring examples from the series Innocence and Otherness, depicts a white-faced girl wearing dark red rouge on her cheeks and pointed pigtails with tragicomic oddity. Her two sets of eyes do not coexist peacefully but bob and compete for prominence. As the exhibition catalogue poignantly states, the girls depicted here raise questions such as, “is nature defined by the perfect child, or the biological reality of the anomaly; and how does society deal with such anomalies? Innocence and Otherness suggests that the most painful memories of childhood, including vulnerability, pity, and imperfection, might even be seen as the personification of fear, for both children and adults.”
Rineke Dijkstra, De Panne, Belgium, August 7, 1992
C-print
24 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches
Collection Dijkstra Studio, Amsterdam
Several artists not included in this show have come under attack because of their approach to photographing kids. Sally Mann and Tierney Gearon both became notorious for photographs of their children, often nude or in atypical scenarios. Mann’s work is considered an important precedent for the work on view, and a 2005 documentary about her is included in Pretty Baby’s accompanying film series. Both bodies of work are predicated on the fact that childhood innocence, including running around naked, playing dress up, house, doctor, etc., is often misconstrued—or rather re-construed—in light of personal experience and public exposure of potential wrongdoing. While neither Mann’s nor Gearon’s images show anything blatantly improper, they do incite contemplation and, like much of the work in Pretty Baby, walk a fine line in the name of provocation.