Joyce Neimanas
Art Chicago, 5/18/00
Lecture, Chicago Critics on Chicago Art
by Claire Wolf Krantz
Although Joyce Neimanas comes from a background in photography, in recent years, she has superceded any finite classification system and has moved on to even more expansive and interesting ways of thinking about art. Her photo-based images are remarkably dense, the result of compressing many layers of sometimes-contradictory information and images. Creating work that is highly conceptual in nature, and appropriating many strands of 20th century art, she explores ideas related to contemporary culture, issues of identity, and their relationship to art history. Visually, she borrows from painting and drawing, particularly in her development of her digital imagery in the last 10 or so years.
I find most interesting Neimanas’ long-standing use of vernacular images, especially those relating to identity and gender, as well as to relationships between men and women. By combining them with art historical references, she suggests that such issues have been important ones in other cultures and other times. In conversation, Neimanas stated that persistent questions driving her work are: “Who am I?” And then, “Who is the Other?” In recent years, as her thinking has developed, she has reversed the order of her inquiry to be “Who is the Other?” and how does he or she relate to me?” As I see it, Neimanas’ “Other” also stands for cultural norms and expectations, which are, in various degrees, internalized into the conception of the “I”. Within this generalization, she confronts themes of male and female sexuality, sensuality and violence. She often connects such themes to pop culture as well as to the history of art.
Neimanas was immersed in the culture of Los Angeles, having alternated 2-year teaching stints with her husband between the two cities for 20 years, and her work seems visually more connected to a Hollywood and Disney sensibility than to the romantic raunchiness of Chicago’s Imagists. Yet her use of visual information appropriated from other places is particularly interesting in relationship to the emphasis in art history and theory at the SAIC, where she is chair of the photo department.
Most of Neimanas’ work is very subtle, but for the purposes of this talk, I have chosen the pieces that can be understood most quickly in the time allotted to me. The following silver gelatin prints, selected from series’ dating from 1987 to 1991, set up most of the themes that Neimanas will explore with more complexity in her later digital works.
The first two silver gelatin prints are from 1987. Contour drawings filled with images from magazine pages or pieces of fabric are collaged on tissue paper, then placed on photo mural paper and exposed to various light sources.
On the left is Punch , 1987, 72x42” The figure on the left is bisexual, dancing a Flamenco dance with a sexy woman who has a death’s head. Freud’s theories of Eros and thanatos come to mind, particularly in his conception of the seductive aspects of the death instinct.
On the right is Sublime Insecurity, 72x77”, 1988
Two women, supposedly exercising, are also in a relationship with each other that imply lesbian sex. Neimanas created some of the drawing in both images by exposing her photo paper to a moving penlight in the darkroom. Christmas tree lights provide some of the textured exposure.
Most Food Stuffs Are Imported, 81x42”, 1988
Neimanas made outlines of figures derived from movie posters or door posters, which create iconographic images, ones that anyone would recognize and understand immediately because they are part of our culture. She filled these figures with vernacular images from magazines that either enhance or contradict the associations to their shapes. In this piece, Neimanas contrasts 2 different kinds of male identity: John Wayne’s outlined shape is an instant sign for macho masculinity here in the US. The inside mass created with pages from Japanese comics points to a Japanese iconography of masculinity, the assiduously read and often sexist comic book. These and the following works suggest that images are indicative of a society’s ideas about identity and are instrumental in shaping those associations.
Boss, 78x42” 1988
A huge woman overshadows a crowd of little men, yet she is bound up with rope. She is a symbol of power that is nevertheless constrained. Does our society continue to restrain and punish women who are seen as being too powerful?
Beta, From Series History Posturing And Moulting, 1991, 67”h, molded painted fabric, cutout foamcor, marble base
These free-standing figures are photographs cut out and attached to foamcore. The woman in front is an altered movie poster. She has elements attached to her that come from real people: hair, finger nails, eyeglasses. They are signs for things you adorn yourself with, and also for the stuff of our bodies that fall off, a process of molting, implying regeneration and change. The shadowed figure behind the woman comes from an ancient Greek or Roman statue. The clothing on the floor is stiffened into a frozen shape so that it becomes similar to snapshots; objects stopped in time.
This series also deals with the history of iconographic posing in which the photographer and his subject collaborate to make an image. Here, the Greek statue is the forerunner of the object in a snapshot, who, in that act of posing, also declares her or himself a subject.
Inkjet Prints
Dear Diary, 22x14”, 1995, inkjet print
The illuminated manuscript, a medieval comic book, functioned as picture stories. They always presented the world in a positive light and suppressed the negative aspects of medieval society. Neimanas combined aspects of the illuminated manuscript with the comic book to depict what she calls aspects of “me,” and “not me.” “Me” is conveyed in photos of herself at various ages, dogs she loves, intense eyes that see from behind structures, and a vacuum cleaner, symbol of the necessary but often odious domestic chores that women have to contend with. Is the hero with bow & arrow “me” or “not me? Who is the sad, glamorous movie star persona in the corner? Clearly, the perverted hero with the Uzi is an unequivocal “not me.”
Facial Muscles, 1996, 42x30”, 1996, inkjet print
As can be seen in the previous works, Neimanas critiques societal stereotypes, but she does not exclude herself from having internalized such cultural expectations for women. Here, the woman in back, casually dressed, perhaps as an artist, has erased herself in favor of recreating herself as a stereotypical sex object. Medieval drawings of a surgeon/dentist torturing the patient to effect a cure points to what sorts of torture women will inflict on themselves, and to what ends. At least the medieval dentist was pulling out a sore tooth.
Sutures, 1996, 21X26” PAPER, 1996, inkjet print
Dealing with similar themes, Neimanas used images of two items commonly associated with femininity. An embroidered doily represents the domestic. In the 19th century the corset was typically an undergarment, either the symbol of a refined lady or of a whore, but today it is a Hollywood image of a sexy woman. In these images, both objects exude discomfort, or even the violence and torture that underlie many of the demands of both domesticity and desirability. There are gaping wounds in the doily, wounds that look like mouths and vaginas, but the sewing needle that creates the embroidery and that repairs the slashes itself looks dangerous. The violence and intimation of scandalous sexuality contrasts with the ordinary associations we have with women’s bodies and feminine occupations.
Glove, 19X14”, 1996, inkjet print
A funny, silly mask, but the mask is not innocuous. The worked leather and the holes pierced in it evoke an S&M sensibility. Yet the tongue sticking out is both funny and defiant of those structures that control and constrain women.
Neimanas’ “Dog Show” last year at the Wood Street Gallery is perhaps the most subtle and convoluted of all her previous works. Scanning images of toys her dog uses and misuses into her computer, she manipulated the banality of their forms, their fake materials (i.e. fur, printed patterns, plastic skin), and their battered and worn quality as a result of hard use. Used in conjunction with or in contrast to other scanned images from art books and other sources, the resulting images become a metaphor for her day-to-day life as a person in addition to her intellectual and creative life as an artist. The subject matter of each work varies with an emphasis on different aspects of her self and her interests.
Fat Cat, 1999, 24x17”, inkjet print
Fat Cat is about puffing up as we age, and about our society's ambivalence about fat women. The Fat Cat is a metaphor for the fat woman as an inviting, engulfing, sexual object of desire, but also of the fear and disgust fat, or even fecund women arouse in our lean and mean society.
This Iris print is an historical reference to Balthus, but not an appropriated image of his work. The picture is an amalgam of different sources: the girl’s body, looking like something Balthus would have painted, is from a “How to Draw” book; her come-hither face is Indian; and the fur is a scanned-in dog toy. The erotic image of the young girl is further sexualized by the fur, evoking various associations with fur pelts and questions about what is going on under the covering. This unsettling image calls forth questions regarding voyeurism and pedophilia in art. We tend to pay attention to the formal values of a work, or puzzle about how it is made, leaving us free to ignore a content that makes us uncomfortable.
Neimanas’ visual and intellectual sophistication is important to understanding the multidimensional character of her images. Her life experiences as a woman has shaped her art. Going beyond her earlier emphasis on experimentation, she focuses beyond the art world to larger issues in our culture. Of singular intelligence and beauty, her works are particularly relevant to the day-to-day experience of living in 21st century America.