SOFT COLONY: A Studio visit with Kandis Williams
Following two presentations of work around the iconography of marginalized subjects earlier this year in Los Angeles – a solo exhibition, ‘Disfiguring Traditions’ at SADE and ‘AFFECT: NETWORK: TERRITORY (A performance of syllogisms in motion)’ in collaboration with Josh Johnson at Human Resources – Kandis Williams goes for the jugular of the white heterosexual male with her new body of work in ‘Soft Colony’ at Night Gallery. I met Williams at her L.A. studio a few weeks before the opening of her exhibition, when the artworks were still in progress and America’s political future was in a naïve state of flux. A large table in the studio was covered with cutouts in an almost forensic fashion. The topographic mass compiled of hundreds of stock images of white women from art history and popular culture. It looked like Williams was trying to break a code.
‘Soft Colony’ is the culmination of a year of research that continues the artist’s interest around the themes of identity and race through found imagery. The white heterosexual male gaze is her subject and their victims throughout history were laid bare, figuratively and literally, on the table to be analysed and reconfigured into her signature large-scale photo collages. Williams, an African-American female and I, a white homosexual male, looked upon these images as minorities respectively, and in turn, possess an inherent blindness of the heterosexual male perspective. As I explored the network of images, I was overwhelmed by the repetition of the female body presented in history. “I’m charting these different affects and how they come out from an institutional systematized idea of identity; how post-colonially, they’re taken up again and reiterated as forms of currency or capital”, she explained as we filtered through piles of matte printouts and vinyl stickers.
We may be blind in heterosexual masculinity but we both share a mutual objective outlook of America after living abroad during our formative years. Williams has lived in Berlin for most of her adult life and recognizes the difference between native and exported idiosyncrasies. She described how American image culture absorbs what’s going on directly around it. Citing the over-sexualization of the black male from fatal police shootings across the country, Williams began looking at concepts of trauma at the beginning of her research for ‘Soft Colony’ as a result of her anxiety after she returned to America from Europe. “We live in an age of glorified trauma. These narratives are the foundations of identity art. In our current climate, I think it’s important to examine the identities that are vying for the power of the white male gaze. I want to reconfigure it, reanalyze it and re-associate with it. I don’t think it’s anything a lot of first-wave feminists haven’t covered already – looking at how these iconic images of white women are constructed: vapid and weak”. Tracing the visual histories of the staging of the female body, she embarks on a wildly complex exploration encompassing Mythology and early photography to internet culture, deity and twenty-first century celebrity, in a sociological exposé of how our visual language is dominated by masculine constructs and its impact on our cultural subconscious.
Early black and white photographs from the 1850s by French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot were the starting point for building William’s visual archive. The photographs depict Charcot’s studies on female hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which include Anna O., Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s first psychoanalytical case study subject. The women were instructed to recreate various states of epilepsy or seizures. It was the age of the invention of Chronophotography and the medium soon turns to medicine, and looks to document the physical and muscular movement of patients. The reposes take on the style of painting convention and composition. There were many different methods to recreate the desired contortions for the photograph. They’d snap gunpowder under a women’s nose until she was dazed or glassy-eyed and stick pins in their muscles to create various degrees of muscular contortions. Williams points to a series of women standing next to giant tuning forks. Another condition from this time period was the glorification of anorexia. The patients-cum-models would black out their eyes or cut them out from the processed image.
Williams time travels on the table making links with images centuries apart. “Now look at Betty Page and the similarity to these early contortions. You can see links with Rock ‘n’ roll and Pin-up culture – the different caricatures they employ”. We flip to an image of Britney Spears from her 2004 music video ‘Toxic’. The image of female frenzy through the exaggerated shape of the body is undeniable. “It’s crazy how this imagery is still being produced after more than 150 years – there’s an image here depicting contortions from the television series ‘American Horror Story’, Shelley Duvall from Stanley Kubrik’s ‘The Shining’; this is Orestes being tormented by the Furies”. Williams continues, “before the age of the touched image there was the allure of photography as the truth or document – it’s hard to understand that history today. Charcot’s female patients may not have had the conditions they depict but the photograph as document at the time invited no objection”. The photograph as document is a notion preyed upon by the male gaze. While Williams has little control over her content material given its repetitive nature, she challenges the aesthetics of the document with her unbiased use of image quality; where low-resolution copies and pixelated screenshots abut high-resolution glossy printouts or photographs. It’s a potent device. The act is neutralising: disarming the hierarchies of image presentation and authenticity.
The beginnings of a series of thematic collages lined the studio walls. Health, plastic surgery, holiness and witches would form photographic allegories where Williams would recast her female characters. “My previous works have been about dissolving into another mandala. With these new collages I don’t want to dissolve the content. I want the forms to be visible. I want the eyes, the bodies; I want the full affect.” As individual as the themes are, there’s fervent dialogue between them, which Williams defines as the “interchangeability of the female persona”. It explores the strategy women need to take within a colonized context by constructing the feminine ego from the stories along a timeline of oppression. She refers to emotional labour and the balancing act between home life and the workplace. “Being feminine is submissive – it’s a dance of submission to the male gaze; the male expectation of your body. It’s a constant negotiation”. Is Scarlet O’Hara relevant today after 77 years? Williams thinks so. The O’Hara archetype is the only way to stay close to power within a patriarchal culture.
As much as there is criticality towards the dominant male construct, there is criticality towards the submissive white woman. “Black porn has a totally different set of affects towards black women”, Williams expresses in comparison to white porn and its submissive casting. “The expectation of a black woman is to be animalistic, powerful and in control of their sexuality. There’s no coquettish behaviour. That’s not part of the economy as a black woman. It’s about the maid, the office worker, the plantation worker. These are all big tropes in racialized porn but these roles are also about a skilled woman – a woman who has a need. In contrast, the white woman is about winking and turning the other cheek. It’s about weakness and futility”.
Images of Lady Justice (blinded) and the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy (who was raped) mark how early these submissive typecasts were established. Forward to the twenty-first century and the phenomena of internet subcultures, ‘The Sad Girl and ‘goth girl’ who promote self-degradation as if it were fashionable in the same way feminism has become fashion, and has been taken on by middle-class girls who want to do cam work and feel empowered by the porn industry, despite adopting the tropes of the familiar subservient character. Pornography has sold in every era and on every technological platfrom. “The camcorder, the video tape, the mobile device - through these lenses, it remains the most direct way the male ego construction is satisfied”, Williams illustrates. “Blondes have more fun!” she declares as an example. “These are trappings so deeply rooted in the language of sexuality in the Western world. In post-second-wave feminism we expect that the rest of the world possesses these same sexual values. It’s imperialist! Not all women want to be used, abused and choke-fucked, but if we look around us we know American women sure do. If you look at our image culture, who else can we identify with?”
I scan the walls. Paris Hilton, Patti Smith, The Fates, Kate Bush, Sissy Spacek’s bloodied ‘Carrie’, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer from The Witches of Eastwick; Glinda the Good Witch of the South from the Wizard of Oz, Jean Grey from the X-Men, Winona Ryder, the cast of ‘Charmed’ and Demi Moore - the list is varied as it is thorough. Rachel Dolezal, former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), jars with the manufactured protagonists. Dolezal, who came to public attention in 2015 for lying about her racial identity as being black, is positioned in a heaven and hell composition with a virtuous and naked Alanis Morissette from her 1998 music video ‘Thank U’. Williams is fascinated by Dolezal’s desire to deny white privilege – she wants no part of it on her body, “she goes through such painstaking lengths to disavow her white privilege. It’s such a rupture in her private, public and civic life”. Williams found a collection of glamour shots of Dolezal online. The artist reveals the suggestive nature locates her proximity to the male gaze. Taking on the costume and contortions in the same way Morissette above her strikes a resemblance to Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ - both women are responsible for performing serious feminist gestures that fail to resist being objectified.
If the actress or minstrel finds herself surrendering to the male gaze, what of the artist? Where does Williams locate herself in these affects? “How women are remembered in our culture is so twisted”, she responded. “If you don’t die in a car crash, or an airplane or by an overdose, there isn’t a plethora of images available – it’s only a very small body type that is heavily documented in our society. These images aren’t a part of how I locate my feminine. Ever.” For Williams, a trio of collages arranged with vinyl stickers on mirrored plexiglass is where she places herself. The mirrors are openings in the literal sense – each panel depicts the inside of the eye, the inside of the throat and the inside of the cervix. They represent the internal construction of the body looking out. The works are confrontational in scale and context - the viewer faces the work and sees their own reflection, consumed by these bodily openings. ‘Cervical Smile’, 2016, is an almost shrine-like panel decorated with vinyl cutouts of would-be female muses, swathed or naked bodies and bright white smiling mouths around the circumference of the organ.
An early image of the golden ratio for the female face joins a selection of characters such as plastic surgery personality Jocelyn Wildenstein and actress Tilda Swinton in several of her transformative on-screen roles. The limited range of documented female imagery is, in part, controlled by the image-conscious entertainment industry based in L.A. A city of extremes where self-portraits of baroque masterpieces by seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi hang on museum walls only several miles away from the epicenter of television, film and porn production. Williams acknowledged the power of the industry when she returned to the city – “L.A. is where to come to export your brand. It’s where transformation happens. It’s where people come to fold into these constructed images”. Within the framework of selfie culture, these reoccurring tropes are more and more being understood as capital – as what we as a society expects to see. Parallels can also be made with the self-image and how the image we expect to see is, in fact, the image of ourselves - the one we are invested in the most. Williams need only survey the interactions with her selfie-friendly works to grasp at the toxicity of our contemporary culture. “My practice has no interest in visibility or gaining followers, which is becoming ever more popular now”, the artist affirms. “There are different ways to rupture other than embodiment. I think this has been a subject around black identity for a long time and equally the subject of gender equality.” Williams continues, “I get asked why am I not an activist? My response to that is: I’m an image-maker. I’m interested in images, I want to make images and I’m interested in how they function in culture.” Williams is dealing with an established set of conditions that both impact and inform our social norms.
The feminine is arguably under threat in America. Not only from pussy grabbing white heterosexual males but also by its very own sex who turned out in majority to support sexism, racism and misogyny at the 2016 United States Presidential Election. With growing movements spreading across Western democracies, our society is looking internally for answers to a lot of questions. History usually assists with this respect, yet Williams confronts historical authenticity on a grand scale, leaving us in doubt. Our culture no longer holds a consensus for what’s fact or fiction and trust in mainstream media is falling dramatically. With this widespread decrease, the currency of an image increases – whether a document, doctored or otherwise - and will only contribute to the already conditioned cycle of popular image-making that Williams reveals in ‘Soft Colony’ to be pandemic. Whatever you think you see in her reflective collages of distilled masculine construct, she’ll make you question it. She’ll make you question the past and present, and she’ll make you question your own reflection; why nothing is at it seems and why our own constructs - heterosexual, homosexual, white, black, feminist or other - are to always be looked at through a mirror. So these constructs can be refracted until they can be refracted no more and where one gaze and ideology is no longer valid as prescribed. A gaze overdue expiration.
‘Soft Colony’ runs to December 22nd 2016 at Night Gallery, 2276 East 16th St, Los Angeles 90021 http://nightgallery.ca/
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