Art
Diane Arbus is alive and unwell
by William McAloon
THE BOOK OF MARTHA, by Yvonne Todd, Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington.
JUST AFTER YVONNE TODD WON LAST year’s whopping Walters Prize, she exhibited Sea of Tranquillity, five large-format portraits of women primped and costumed as characters in an imagined romance novel. That series was followed by another, entitled Bellevue, this time featuring women cast in the role of cosmetics-counter professionals – one was Clinique, another Revlon, and so on.
In both bodies of work – each hugely stylish and conceptually ambitious – a sense of roleplay and disguise was apparent, one that belied the unease flickering behind the eyes of the sitters or refracted back at the viewer. With their knowing artifice, the works achieved a stifling kind of perfection.
Todd’s recent exhibition at Wellington’s Peter McLeavey Gallery, The Book of Martha, had a similar kind of artificiality about it, although the show marked something of a return to the type of work with which she won the Walters Prize. Like Asthma and Eczema, The Book of Martha was a series of small and diverse images, combining portraits with other pictorial genres.
A sense of girlish fantasy and romance underlies these works, one that is tinged with sickness and mortality as well as that creepy airlessness which Todd has made her own. Indeed, the illness that underscores these works runs deep. The works are printed on what looks to be a nicely speckled stock, but in fact turns out to be mould cultivated by the artist and digitally mixed into the images themselves.
As well as their digital manipulation, the photographs are mixed in other ways, too, especially with the freewheeling approach to style that Todd employs. The composite image of the anorexic Martha – Todd herself – could be a 1970s Diane Arbus, and a double portrait entitled “Secrets” has the look and feel of suburban studio portraiture. If, with her previous two series, Todd was getting her models to play dress-up, here she is doing it herself, not so much in roleplaying before the camera but by donning the styles that have slipped down the back of photography’s historical wardrobe.
The Book of Martha begins with a wheelchair-bound woman (“Advanica”), moves to a series of blank business signs that look like speech bubbles or thought balloons (“Forment”), and then to the grim “Martha”. So far, so puzzling. Childhood nostalgia then enters the story, with a lone ice-skater’s boot rendered with the flat precision of advertising photography (“Prell”). This work is coupled with a doll-sized model of an iron lung – Barbie’s horrible-disease playset, perhaps – but the sculpture doesn’t have quite the same impact as Todd’s dreamy images.
Completing the sequence are three striking works. A Bauhaus-style image of Waikato Hospital is a good stand-in for any hospital anywhere, while one of its supposed habitants, the nurse Draize, is depicted with the grimness characteristic of 19th-century portraiture. The last image, Mt Cook, seemingly shot by Edward Weston, concludes the sequence with a vision of the sublime, albeit one that has been evacuated of meaning by over-re-presentation. Were this a movie, this is the image over which the credits would roll.
It isn’t. Instead, we’re left in doubt as to whether the picture is over, and indeed, just what it was we were watching. For all the narrative possibilities that it offers, Todd’s Book of Martha withholds any conclusions. Instead, the exhibition leaves a lingering feeling of unease, one that is made that much more memorable by the impressive surety with which Todd wields her medium.
