The Witkin Carnival

The carnival came to town this past season, setting down stakes at the Guggenheim Museum. While the main attraction was supposed to be Claes Oldenburg’s retrospective of oversized toys, for some the real pull was toward the sideshow (some would say freak show), Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographic retrospective by Germano Celant (December 1995–January 1996). It seems, however, that the freak show as a perennial favorite is losing some of its allure. The passion for “transgressive” images seems to have momentarily passed. Witkin’s exhibition received little attention, and the attention it was given only asserted how tired Witkin’s work was. A curator who had previously organized shows for one of the most relentlessly button-pushing, shock-inspired museums in New York said that she knew what she was in store for with the Witkin exhibition and chose simply to stay home, avoiding the ordeal. She didn’t bother to qualify what the ordeal was—whether she felt this way toward the quality of Witkin’s work, his subject matter, or both—either way, her avoidance was casual and not anxiety-ridden. At a dinner party, I quizzed a photography collector and classics professor on his thoughts about Witkin’s work. He expressed disgust with Witkin’s photograph of a woman breastfeeding an eel. When I protested that this was to me but a classically inspired image—Cleopatra and the asp in an ironic exchange of bodily fluids—he gave me an unamused look and announced that he would, regrettably, not be able to stay for dessert.

We are a nation tired of death, blithely unconcerned with the bartering of nuclear arms that so obsessed us a decade or two ago, and grown accustomed to seeing AIDS exploited in the media, even in advertising campaigns. Enough, we have said, of the terrors of flesh and blood. Enough, Arlene Croce wrote in a much discussed New Yorker article, of Bill T. Jones and his annoying obsession with his illness and impending death. At the moment, we appear to be far more concerned with gyms, implants of every sort, and generally reinstating the myth of the perfectibility of the human body.

In the face of all this, Joel-Peter Witkin has not cleaned up his act. How annoying, then, in light of his persistent obsession with the mortal and the macabre, that he is not even one of the elect, with a disease as a calling card and platform from which, with full p.c. backing, to justify his obsession. How dreadful that Witkin uses mere mortality—a catch-all accessible to one and all—to fuel his emotions and artistic work. These are the grousings of those whose taste has turned away from graphic works like Witkin’s.

Although Witkin’s photographic grotesqueries are those of mortal flesh, they resonate beyond the initial shock they so often inspire. His photographs are most often compared with those of Weegee, Diane Arbus, and Cindy Sherman. But Weegee, unlike Witkin, chronicled events and spectacles staged not by himself. And in contrast to Witkin’s dramatic staging techniques, Arbus found her “freaks” in everyday life and played with a documentary style, pointing the camera, somewhat reassuringly for the viewer, straightforwardly at a very specific Other. Witkin’s work is best compared to Sherman’s, whose transformations of herself through prosthetics, makeup, and costumes, and (later) her bizarre compositions reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s tortured doll parts share the same interest in art historical representations of the body. And both indulge their at times grotesque imaginations.

Witkin’s tableaux engage the many conventions for depicting the nude that have evolved over the history of art. The enormous, fleshy model hooked up to a bizarre, fantastical breathing device in Sanitarium (1983), whose aspirations and exhalations may be fueling the movements of a world, brings to mind ancient figures of bulging fertility goddesses. Witkin also recalls Gothic art’s emphasis on rootlike shapes for male bodies and bulblike shapes for female bodies and playfully twists this convention into an hermaphroditic depiction with his Angel of...