The title, The Men From Uncle, signals the question posed by Margaret Dawson's series: does identity originate from a person - in this case Dawson's Uncle Hugh - and/or is it constructed, transient, playable like thcharacters and tape of a television programme?
At the same time, Dawson's appropriations, her impersonations of other artists' photographs of actual people complicate notions of authorship, veracity and objectivity. Understandings of the subject and "self" are further unsettled by the photographer's familiarity with her model, their biological relationship and the dynamics of her caring for an elderly uncle after he lost his independence due to a fall.Some of these complexities are discussed in detail in Louise Garrett's essay, 'Making Up The Men From Uncle.'
Garrett situates Dawson with regard to humanism, describing her as challenging "the paradigm of the autonomous, singular (western, patriarchal) notion of identity which has its foundation in the Renaissance's self-conscious redefinition of the individual." This conception of identity informs the view of Nadar (French, 19th century) that the art of the portrait photographer lies in the ability to sense and communicate the essential character of the subject, as Garrett notes.
It is this history and conception of art which Dawson seeks to reproduce (and negate) in her picture gallery of "portraits". By appropriating the rhetoric of modern photography, she inscribes a problematic complicity with the thing she seeks to undermine. This condition is prescribed by the allegorical mode she adopts, and marks out her project as a deconstructive one.
Such use of allegory links Dawson's work to that of Julia Margaret Cameron (British, late 19th century). However, while Cameron's art historical allusions are a bid to elevate photography to the so-called status of art, Dawson's serve to "question the efficacy of art's - and photography's - claims to truth and value."Overtly theatrical props and costumes challenge the concept of "truth" in much of Dawson's earlier work, pointing as they do to the cultural construction of stereotypes, myths and (apparently) documentary photography.
The Men From Uncle, however, is more subtle. Garrett describes its "patchwork of quotations and references" as requiring speculation about the "work's motivation. Meaning is never, finally, fixed, as possible meanings are contingent on whatever (personal or collective) knowledge the viewer brings to the work."Of course, the viewer is also guided to an extent by the artist's process of selection and omission, itself somewhat influenced by her uncle, his conversations, books and sister, Dawson's mother.
In impersonating the writers, musicians and artists he admired, Uncle Hugh is less passive a subject than he might appear from his niece's various doctorings of his appearance in the photoworks. On the other hand, though, at the time the works were created Dawson was caring for her model. While his clothes needed to be chosen and "put out in the order they [we]re to go on," Dawson's choices were directed by her desire to respect his own strong sense of personal style. Such demise of individuality (to use an unfashionable term) through slight dementia is just one aspect of the tension conjured by hints of biological determinism in The Men From Uncle.On a superficial level, the unavoidable physical effects of old age pervade this series. For Andrew Paul Wood, the "uncle photographs talk the elderly male body rather than talk about it." Wood goes on to argue that by "concealing his identity behind assumed disguises ... , Uncle Hugh is distanced by Dawson from his own body - or distances himself, giving it over to the possession of another identity."
Perhaps, however, as a whole, The Men From Uncle effectively stakes out some consistency in identity. Hugh Simpson's re-appearance in every photowork reminds us of his own physicality within the different guises. This dynamic is reversed in Dawson's new series, All the King's Men (2003), undermining any conclusions we may have drawn. These later photoworks involve a plurality of models in recreating the same portrait of either David Livingstone or Bertrand Russell. By the title's reference to Humpty Dumpty, the series doubts the possibility re-construction, of restoration. It might appear that the artist is the central figure, the King, around whom the action of this project pivots, but it is the King's loss for what is gone which gives rise to a vain attempt to resurrect a loved one. In approaching strangers with a physiognomical likeness to her late uncle to appear in All the King's Men, Dawson asks hard questions about the power of photography to deal with the melancholy of loss and longing. She also examines the bounds of the artist's desire, of the mauteur.
Dr Livingstone, I pretend
How did Margaret Dawson persuade 40 pensioners to pose in wigs as famous dead men? By talking to their wives of course.
By Adrienne RewiSunday Star TimesNovember 9th, 2003p 26
As "a mistress of photography", Margaret Dawson is happy to state she is always "up for a little subversion". She is no stranger to appropriating historical photographic imagery, blurring the distinctions between authentic and fake; and she is no stranger to soliciting complete strangers to take part in her photographic projects.
Well known for her major touring exhibitions Amusements, The Men from Uncle, and Out of Sight, Christchurch based Dawson has just completed another busy year - hunting for men and dogs and posing them to suit her conceptual needs for her two separate forthcoming Christchurch exhibitions: All the King's Men and Shot over Summer. It is willing members of the public, she says, who has made her inspirations reality.Dawson, 53, appears quiet at first glance and is not the sort of woman you'd expect to find "advertising for a man" but, as her photographic works suggest, appearances can be deceiving. She's no vamp, she says, but when she has a project in mind, she's not above putting the word out in her hunt for suitable models "Would you answer an ad like this?" she asks, pushing it my way: "Wanted: Mature men to model for photographic artist. I need several 'actors' to pose individually in a provided costume in a studio on the 3rd floor (no lift) in the Christchurch Arts Centre. This is uinpaid but entertaining."
It seems models were not as immediately forthcoming, "I think people are quite shy", says Dawson.But she did get a handful of replies, often from wives suggesting their husbands might be suitable. That was the tack she took in the end, after finding that "following certain men with the right look" didn't always go down well. She found wives much more persuasive, and ended up with 40 male models _ one in his late 40s, the rest in their 70's and 80's - for All the King's Men, which portrays them all as either explorer David Livingstone, or writer/philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Dawson has been working and exhibiting widely since 1978 (limited edition prints have sold for up to $3000) and has always had a keen interest in appropriating and altering images from the past. Rather than presenting perfect, original images, she goes the other way, presenting reconstructed images with intentional processing errors. It's not really pushing the boundaries, she says, but challenges what is acceptable in photography.
Her last major project, The Men from Uncle, featured her Uncle Hugh posed as 40 famous people from the past. Uncle Hugh has lived with me and had been the focus of that two - year project. When he died three years ago, I started seeing people who looked just like him, many who even dressed the same way. I thought it would be fun to do another project, selecting men who looked like my uncle. The irony was that when I made that decision I no longer saw anyone who looked like him. That's why I decided to advertise."
In addition to the ads, placed in city libraries, she also passed out more than 70 letters to people she met. After several months she had acquired two former photographers, several engineers, a former sailor, a bus driver and other assorted elderly gentlemen, many of whom displayed a keen interest in Livingstone and Russell, including a Jordanian, who had played Livingstone as a child in a Sunday School play.
Dawson dressed her models, splitting jackets down the back so they fitted all sizes and attaching false moustaches and wigs, and mimicked the poses of original portraits of Livingstone and Russell. Her collection of portraits are eerily similar, highlighting the concepts of identity, similarity and senitmentality.
The notion of sentimentality is also behind Shot Over Summer, a two - pronged exhibition that shows 250 portraits of well loved dogs (shot over the last three years), alongside more confrontational portraits of dogs that have been shot at the city pound. Dawson visited the dog pound every month for a year and visited dog owners in their own homes, photographing adored pets on comfortable beds, sofas and rugs.
"the sad thing about the lives of so many dogs is they start out lying on the bed as someone's cute puppy then get thrown out and end up at the pound. They often end up being shot. It's a tragic ending, an insidious form of cruelty and it's that aspect of sentimentality that is so distressing."
M J Dawson gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Creative NZ with both the Men from Uncle and All the King's Men.
Christine Webster
Born 1958, Pukekohe, Auckland. Studied at Massey and Victoria Universities and Wellington Polytechnic. She has lived and exhibited in Hong Kong, Cologne and Paris and her works have been shown in major venues throughout New Zealand since 1979. Numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently Black Carnival, a touring show (1994 - 95), Can Can, Vavasour/Godkin Gallery, Auckland (1995) and the group show Out of the Void: Mad and Bad Women, Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia (1995). Widely published nationally and internationally including Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art, catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1992, Imposing Narratives, Wellington City Art Gallery, 1989 and Pleasures and Dangers: Artists of the 90s, Moêt et Chandon Art Foundation and Longman Paul, Auckland, 1992. Works held in major public collections in New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the United States. Awarded three QE II Arts Council grants, the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, 1991 and is currently in receipt of an Arts Council Toi Aotearoa Fellowship. Lives in Auckland and travels frequently.
http://photoforum.hybridweb.co.nz/currency/biogs/chrisbio.htm
Christine Webster
Born 1958, Pukekohe, Auckland. Studied at Massey and Victoria Universities and Wellington Polytechnic. She has lived and exhibited in Hong Kong, Cologne and Paris and her works have been shown in major venues throughout New Zealand since 1979. Numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently Black Carnival, a touring show (1994 - 95), Can Can, Vavasour/Godkin Gallery, Auckland (1995) and the group show Out of the Void: Mad and Bad Women, Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia (1995). Widely published nationally and internationally including Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art, catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1992, Imposing Narratives, Wellington City Art Gallery, 1989 and Pleasures and Dangers: Artists of the 90s, Moêt et Chandon Art Foundation and Longman Paul, Auckland, 1992. Works held in major public collections in New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the United States. Awarded three QE II Arts Council grants, the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, 1991 and is currently in receipt of an Arts Council Toi Aotearoa Fellowship. Lives in Auckland and travels frequently.
http://photoforum.hybridweb.co.nz/currency/biogs/chrisbio.htm=
Robert Mapplethorpe
(November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and naked men. The frank, homosexual eroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.
//
[edit] Biography
Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, New York, a neighborhood of Long Island. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts.[1]
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.
Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital from complications arising from AIDS; he was 42 years old. His ashes were buried in Queens, New York, in his mother's grave, marked 'Maxey'.
Nearly a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. His vision for the Foundation was that it would be "the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about"[2]. Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official Estate and helped promote his work through out the world, but it has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection[2].
[edit] Art
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in the studio, particularly towards the end of his career. Common subjects include flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies; celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith (a Patti Smith portrait [3] from 1986 recalls Albrecht Durer's 1500 self-portrait[4]); homoerotic and BDSM acts (including Coprophagia), and classical nudes. Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio series sparked national attention in the early 1990's when it was included in The Perfect Moment, a traveling exhibition funded by National Endowment for the Arts. The portfolio includes some of Mapplethorpe's most explicit imagery, including a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus.[5] Though his work had been regularly displayed in publicly funded exhibitions, conservative and religious organizations, such as the American Family Association seized on this exhibition to vocally oppose government support for what they called "nothing more than the sensational presentation of potentially obscene material."[6] As a result, Mapplethorpe became something of a cause celebre for both sides of the American Culture war. The installation of The Perfect Moment in Cincinnati resulted in the unsuccessful prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, on charges of "pandering obscenity".
His sexually-charged photographs of black men have been criticized as exploitative.[7] Such criticism was the subject of a work by American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991-1993). Ligon juxtaposes several of Mapplethorpe's most iconic images of black men appropriated from the 1988 publication, Black Book, with various critical texts to complicate the racial undertones of the imagery.
[edit] Corcoran Scandal
[6] In June 1989 Pop Artist Lowell Blair Nesbitt became involved with the scandal involving fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The Corcoran Gallery of Art(Museum) in Washington D.C. had agreed to host a solo exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's works without making a stipulation as to what type of subject matter would be used. Mapplethorpe decided to make his famed debut of "sexually suggestive" photographs in Washington D.C., which was a new series that he had explored shortly before his death. The hierarchy of the Corcoran and even certain members of congress were horrified when the works were revealed to them, thus the museum refused to go forth with the exhibit. It was at this time that Lowell Blair Nesbitt stepped forward; he was a long time friend of Mapplethorpe and he revealed that he had a 1,500,000.00 USD bequest to the museum in his will, although, in public statements that caused tremendous press regarding the issue Nesbitt promised that if the museum refused to host the exhibition of the controversial images created by Mapplethorpe he would revoke his bequest. The Corcoran refused and Lowell Blair Nesbitt bequeathed the 1,500,000.00 USD to the Phillips Collection which he cited as an early inspiration to his career when he had worked there as a young man in the position of a night watchman.
After the Corcoran Gallery of Art refused the Mapplethorpe exhibition, a small, non-profit arts organization, the Washington Project for the Arts picked it up and showed the controversial images in their own space on 7th and E Street, NW from July 21 - August 13, 1989.
[edit] UCE Controversy
In 1998, the University of Central England was involved in a controversy when a book by Mapplethorpe was confiscated. A final year undergraduate student was writing a paper on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and intended to illustrate the paper with a few photographs. She took the photographs to the local chemist to be developed and the chemist informed West Midlands Police because of the unusual nature of the images. The police confiscated the library book from the student and informed the university that the book would have to be destroyed. If the university agreed to the destruction, no further action would be taken.
The book in question was Mapplethorpe, published by Jonathan Cape 1992. The university Vice-Chancellor, Dr Peter Knight, supported by the Senate took the view that the book was a legitimate book for the university library to hold and that the action of the police was a serious infringement of academic freedom. The Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the police, under caution, with a view to prosecution under the terms of the Obscene Publications Act. This Act defines obscenity as material that is likely to deprave and corrupt. It was used unsuccessfully in the famous Lady Chatterley's Lover trial. Curiously the police were not particularly interested in some of the more notorious images which could have been covered by other legislation. They focused on one particular image, 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito 1977,' which depicts one man urinating into the mouth of another.
After the interview with the Vice-Chancellor a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service as the Director of Public Prosecutions has to take the decision as to whether or not to proceed with a trial. After a delay of about six months the affair came to an end when Dr Knight was informed by the DPP that no action would be taken as 'there was insufficient evidence to support a successful prosecution on this occasion'. The original book was returned, in a slightly tattered state, and restored to the university library. [8]
[edit] Posthumously
In 1996, Patti Smith wrote a book The Coral Sea dedicated to Mapplethorpe.
In 2003, Arena Editions published Autoportrait, a collection of black and white Polaroid self-portraits that Mapplethorpe took between 1971 and 1973. This was the first time these early works became available for widespread viewing since the 1970s.
In 2006, a Mapplethorpe print of Andy Warhol was auctioned for $643,200, making it the 6th most expensive photograph ever sold.
In 2007, American Writer, Director and Producer James Crump Directed the documentary film Black White + Gray, which premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.[1] It explores the influence Curator Sam Wagstaff, Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Musician/Poet Patti Smith had on the 1970's art scene in New York City.
In 2007, Prestel published Mapplethorpe:Polaroids, a collection of 183 of approximately 1,500 existing Mapplethorpe polaroids. This book accompanies an exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art in May 2008.
