Hannah Villiger, "Skulptural" (1988-89). C-print from Polaroid on aluminum, 49 x 48 in.

February 2009 Reviews

Tetsumi Kudo

Giorgio Morandi

Italics

White Columns Annual

Ari Marcopoulos

Lisa Sanditz

Omer Fast

Sarah Lucas

Jost Münster

Charline Von Heyl

Vik Muniz

Robert Motherwell Yves Klein In Brief: Leslie Hindman Pierre Soulages Guggenheim Goes to Abu Dhabi Celebrity Self-Portrait Collection Goes to Bid The Known Unknowns Show Me the Money

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The invention of the digital camera has led to the ubiquitous style of self-portrait found on Facebook, Flickr, and magazine contributors’ pages the world over. The subject’s face (invariably pouting) appears at close range. A fleshy diagonal line extends to the frame: it’s the subject’s arm, outstretched, trying to make itself invisible. This was also the method employed by the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger for the large Polaroid self-portraits she made for nearly two decades until her death, at 45, in 1997. But her purpose was not ersatz glamour or studious stillness, and her subject was rarely her face. Instead, with scientific zeal, she broke her naked body into antic, aching, intimate bits and captured it in garish close-up. Here, a gash of white forms into a thigh before bleaching out into abstraction; there, myriad hands come into focus, suggesting mirrors and movement. She titled many of the images Sculptural, stating her intent to use the photographic medium for more performative ends. Blown up, mounted on aluminum, and viewed from afar, the contrasty, saturated works take on a painterly cast, evoking so many Kleins or Motherwells. Nevertheless, as one moved through the 22 works in the show, the Lacanian idea of corps morcelé — the body fragmented, reduced to bits — inexorably arose. That Villiger’s body was ravaged by tuberculosis, and that it was female, a site for much ’70s-era performance and photography, seem motive enough for her fantasia of self-dismemberment. But the works themselves — gorgeous, rigorous, wildly mysterious — resist such reasoning. Taken together, Villiger’s aestheticization of the fragmented body builds to a kind of psychic coherence that trumps the limits of the physical form, while simultaneously being born from it. "Hannah Villiger" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.