Exhibitions
Queasy Glamour
Justin Clemens
You can recognise an Yvonne Todd photograph immediately. She treats everything with a decaying Olympian regard, whether her subjects are animals, young women or sundry products of the global petrochemical industry. Perspective is nothing; the zero-degree gaze is all. Yet, in this reduction to pure surface, the essential duplicity, the sickliness, of appearances surges forth. Take such recent photographs as Barbara Inc, Amanda, Joan Kroc or January (all 2006), inspired by Jacqueline Susann blockbusters and 1970s gowns, in which pallid heiresses, plagued by mildly incestuous thoughts or dying from wasting diseases, clutch cats, flowers, sugar cubes, their own hands, the discarded towels of impossible lovers. Whether anorexic, pregnant, obsessively dishevelled or anxiously calm, our heroines watch themselves being captured by the lens without fear or desire. Or take Todd's early The Menthol Series (1999). In one image, a slim, highly-manicured woman's hand rests gently upon a dully mirrored surface. The mirror morphs, almost imperceptibly, into an indeterminate deeper-grey background; the talons gleam with a nacreous finish; a fine gold chain bearing a dice coils around the elongated index finger. Another image from the series presents the waxy coils of birthday candles with charred wicks; yet another features the head of a short-eared, dyspeptic cat, with baleful, slanting almond eyes.
Above all, Todd's central inspiration is young women. Young women, that is, who have been as carefully selected, made-up, airbrushed and photoshopped as is possible, and who have been done so in a way that smacks of patent artifice. This doesn't make them acceptably glamorous, however. Commentators speak of Todd's 'neo-Gothic' sensibilities, of her 'white trash formalism' and 'sentimental iconography'. In Susan Blunton, from the series Sea Of Tranquility (2002), we are presented with a sad-eyed young woman, her long golden brown hair parted in the middle, tied behind, then the pony-tail parted again, stray ends cascading forward over each prim shoulder. The buttons, lace and creases of the high-necked white blouse are as painstakingly detailed as the stippled gleam of the lower lip. In Fervin (2005), the neo-Victoriana is further intensified: a teenage girl in a cream dress with a preposterously high throat and puffed sleeves and bust clutches what appears to be a black-bound (Alcoholics Anonymous) Bible in her lace-gloved hands. The hair is big, the background indeterminate, the mood unreadably creepy. The same goes for the other residents at the Vagrants' Reception Centre: Mordene, Ethlyn, Werta, Limpet, and the Romanian Orphan. Hair, gloves, ruffles and frills might be set off with dark kohl lashes and bows. Todd recalls her early teen love of Virginia Andrews' novels, of 'beautiful teenage girls involuntarily corrupted by perverse ancestral spectacles'. Todd adds that the accompanying illustrations, 'like Hallmark sympathy cards… possessed a combination of limp serenity and shrill unease'. It is such 'limp serenity' and 'shrill unease' that Todd pushes to new heights.
The Bellevue series (2002) is a case in point. Bearing names like Counter Manager, Estee Lauder or Dior, the nine images take department store fashion counter consultants as their subject. These 'consultants' are young women who must already evince a certain style in order to be eligible for the position. They must wear the products that they promote and sell. They must effectively incarnate their employer's specific image. Like you, they must not be models, for they are to function as educative exemplars: look, you too can be improved by these chemicals we retail! Yet neither can they be too offputting – it's bad for business. As a result, a phthisic blandness reigns.
Gilbert Wong quotes Todd as saying the consultants 'are so immaculate that I find them intimidating. My mother was so practical, she had short hair and didn't bother with makeup, so for me these women had a mystical quality.' The mysticism is not the mysticism of human emotions, but the mysticism of chemicals; these are not portraits of personalities, but, as Anna Sanderson suggests, 'of professional personae'. These women are at once the avatars, advisors, ambassadors and advertising of the globalised fashion industry, the indispensable-yet-disposable organs of hydra-headed corporations whose entire raison d'etre is the management of appearances. They are, in other words, dissimulating presentations of how self-presentation might be dissimulated, part-objects and partial-agents of potentiality gone indefinably awry. The word cosmetics derives from the Greek cosmos, universe, order, which can help us understand that if, for Todd, a woman, like any other product, is a made-up thing not essentially different from a clammy pipe or an inverse funnel, she is not any the less real for that. Being is the sickly shine of seem.
In Todd's universe, eyeballs glisten just like hair glistens, or skin or knuckles glisten, or like plastic asthma inhalers glisten. Dress is always disturbingly, excessively demure. Lips are made-up, glossy, slightly parted, revealing gleaming teeth beneath. Eyelashes are long and heavy with kohl. Facial expressions are neutral, almost ataraxic. Impossibly well-formed roses, stripped of their thorns, are beaded with little water drops like sublimated eczema. Backgrounds tend to placelessness. Grey, beige, deep blue, cosmic – Todd often welds together ground and sky without a joint, so that every object seems to float without support. Above all, there is this obscene glistening. If anything holds Todd's diverse works together, it is this obsession with the pure shine of appearances. Synthetic, synthesised, sickly appearances.
Rather than criticising these processes, Todd seeks to exacerbate their logic. In fact, the subjects of Todd's work are already treated as pure product, and the photographs seek to minimise the gap between presentation and what's presented. The image becomes simultaneously producer, presenter and product, its subject matter image-making itself. At every stage in the conception, selection, production, post-production and reproduction of her photographs, this one-woman industrial company leaves nothing to chance. Even her choice of technology – a 4 x 5 camera, tripod, transparency film, digital manipulation, and so on – is calibrated to sideline accidents, to subordinate events to the power of a purified vision.
Not that purification prohibits putrefaction. On the contrary. In Rashulon (2007), we face a Vaseline-smeared vignette of an aggressively plain young woman in the open air, red-rimmed eyes glassy with a faraway look behind coke-bottle spectacles, thin mousy hair plastered to her mottled scalp, the dark blue dress spangled with little flowers, the grass she is sitting on purulently green. In Molvah (Prayerful One) (2007), a young woman in a full-length denim dress, her puffy face framed by long brown hair parted in the middle, stands clutching the bridle of a sad horse with an obscenely pink-splotched muzzle. In Hazel, The Forbidden (2006), another girl sits in a cheap rocker, a blue-bow-tied teddy in her lap. Her glasses are awful, her mouth is too small, her upper lip too long, the rich curls of her hair desperately at odds with her pale pink-striped nightie.
Which is how Todd manages to discern such unexpected affinities between big-business fashion houses on the one hand, and small-business religious clothing purveyors on the other. Capitalists and fundamentalist Christians may seem opposed – for the one, this world is almost everything, for the other, almost nothing – but they certainly share the virulent beatitude of conviction, which is also a rage to decontextualise, to scatter and impose their appearances everywhere. Hence also the affinities between allegedly living organisms and, say, methylated puddles that reflect, in an anamorphic way, the very environment they are poisoning. The gleam of the synthetic reigns over all. So this rage is also an obsession with control, with controlling and stabilising appearances because the body beneath is so clammy, unpleasant, treacherous. Uptight and pallid repression is the tonic of the day.
Yet Todd is not playing a game of interpretative hide-and-seek, of masked interiorities, but of operations upon appearance in which everything is to be exposed. Eviscerated of desire, her subjects are condemned to an interplanetary competition of semblances. In our world of hyperdifferentiated niche marketing, what purports to be restraint is rather evidence of the proliferation of melting inducements. Under such conditions, even 'modest Christian clothing' becomes as obscenely fetishistic as any g-string and stiletto, without, for all that, being truly sexualised. For fetishism is, strictly speaking, an asexual phenomenon. It is epitomised by obsessive calculation and control, the capture of a peculiar scene in and as a hermetically-sealed image, of a ceaseless oscillation between narcissism and aggression. In Todd's cosmos, young women have no relationships but with other objects, with cheap teddy-bears or with the soiled towels dropped by generic fantasy partners, or with the disembodied inhuman glass-eyes of camera or computer screen.
An often-repeated story concerns the Dior consultant's appearance at the opening for Bellevue at Auckland's Ivan Anthony Gallery. Arriving with a small entourage, she bounded up to the image of herself, scryed it compulsively, screamed in horror, then left at once. To this day, Todd has no solid idea of what 'Dior' found so difficult, though one can speculate that it was the unmistakable inhumanity of the likeness – the blankness of the expression, the patent artificiality of the hair and make-up, the carapace of the uniform – that set her off. She was of interest only as a kind of second-order commodity. If photography does indeed steal the soul, in Todd's work the soul is itself nothing more than just another toxic chemical product.
Note the inversions – or perversions – Todd effects in separating the fetish from desire, that, in identifying, isolating, and returning these images to their subjects, she gives them an alienating force. Which is where, paradoxically, her images border on iconoclasm. They convey an unhappy stillness without the possibility of movement; she turns even the infinite bounds of nature into a close and airless space. All the predicates so often automatically assigned to images – their depthlessness, changelessness, artificiality and inscrutability – become subjects in their own right in Todd's work. Her ability to seal off open landscapes, to invisibly constrain the unlimited, is absolutely remarkable. It is no wonder that critics regularly resort to metaphors of the undead, the vampiric, the living crypt, to try to characterise what's going on.
We're back to bodies neither living nor dead, eternalised in postures that can't quite fit their own generic expectations. Todd notoriously worked in a couple of strip clubs as a waitress, as well as in other, more salubrious occupations before being able to support herself as a photographer. Her sensibility has clearly always been somewhat unusual. Todd: 'I fabricated illnesses as a means to get attention until I was about 13. This included making fake vomit, feigning short-sightedness and using typewriter ribbon to create black eyes and bruises. I also tried to break my leg by repeatedly jumping out of a tree and trying to land awkwardly.' One can discern a nascent but insistent question in this self-deprecating confession: what must be done to compel the gaze of others? Her images swim in an amorphous penumbra of deeply unpleasant sensations, of indestructibly abhorrent feelings that have been so attenuated in consciousness they can now only be expressed through generic exacerbations and the muteness of chemically-enhanced glossiness.
There is a certain amorphous post-colonial scent to Todd's works, which leaks out in her obsession with the pallor of white people, with Victoriana. Her attention to detail, and to the control of detail, exemplifies a kind of late Puritan sensibility. She evinces the suburban petit-bourgeois investment in the disavowals of psychological desolation; also a kind of emblematic teenage girl's morbidity, too small and subtle for most men, that broods upon the sterility of human relationships and the limits upon the projection of self. If it's tempting to sublimate the shine Todd unleashes, to put a happy spin upon it, this is for exactly the same reasons that we have beauty consultants in the first place. What shows itself must be treated, for the untreated – the 'natural' – is unspeakably repulsive. Lip-gloss shines, it is true, but then so do pus, sweat and mucous, not to mention methylated puddles and glassy eyes.
Nor should one forget the humour, most evident in Todd's distinctive deployment of names. For individual images, she seems to prefer single-word titles, like Fractoid, Martha, Advanica, Forment, Prell, Gynecology. These are patently synthetic names, not given for the benefit of the bearer, but for their generic implications: corporate names (real or fake), names of wigs, stock characters, medical disciplines. For her sequences, Todd seems to prefer such constructions as Sea Of Tranquility, Vagrants' Reception Centre, Meat & Liquor and Blood, In Its Various Forms. Each conjures up something pretty weird: Asthma & Eczema suggests that you can't breath and your skin's terrible, as well as being reminiscent of such common couplings as 'Ebony and Ivory' or 'Laurel and Hardy'. There are of course exceptions to these general rules; for instance, the extraordinary syntagms that are Goat Sluice and The Guttural Flower. And who else could get away with the Vaseline-smeared vignettes of Carrot And Egg or the post-modern plumbing of Clammy Pipes?
But when all is said and done, what remains, beyond Todd's conceptual sophistication and technical skill, is her idiosyncratic vision. There is rarely an enormous intricacy to her compositions – on the contrary, she almost always arrays simple figures on a near-featureless ground – but the details are bafflingly fine-grained. The flatness, the chromatic modulations, the very simplicity of the compositions forces you to attend to the details with such care you no longer know what the details mean: those upper lips parted over almost-imperceptibly yellowed teeth; the pale burst of knuckles above a delicate tracery of veins; the complex knit of an industrially-produced sweater; peroxided hair tumbling over dark brows or curling down over upturned extended lashes; tiny pits and wrinkles marking otherwise immaculately youthful skin; the sag and fold of synthetic fabrics; and, above all, the alpha and omega of the entire operation, the unleashing of the sickly shine of appearances.
Why Beige?
Robert Leonard talks to Yvonne Todd
What comes first: the title, the model, the clothes, the wig?
There's no formula. Sometimes I develop the works by doing drawings in my workbook; sometimes I just see something that inspires me – like a special costume. Sometimes I am haunted, persecuted by an idea, for years, but don't turn it into a photo until the time feels right; sometimes ideas just pop into my head.
The clothes are never fashionable. You seem interested in vintage costume, as opposed to fashion. Is it a nostalgia thing?
No. Nostalgia always seemed a bit lightweight to me. But I am interested in the way costumes are tied to history, the way they carry character and narrative connotations. There's a photo I like of the young, maybe 12-year-old, Lady Diana Spencer, taken by her father, a keen amateur photographer. She is reclining, watching some inane rubbish on TV, oblivious, absorbed, with a mousey pageboy haircut and high-necked, fussy 1970s get-up, looking sullen and slightly ruddy-faced. That's what life's about.
How do you source the clothes?
I trawl internet sites that specialise in celebrity memorabilia, vintage couture and antique textiles. Some clothes I find locally, in second-hand shops. Often I don't know what I'm looking for, but I know it when I see it. I never hire costumes, though.
Vagrants' Reception Centre followed hard on the heels of your work for Mixed-Up Childhood. It made me think of American child-beauty pageants, particularly Werta in her sash.
Those pageant children look really strange, like tiny wizened elderly women. But with Vagrants' I wasn't thinking about beauty pageants, and I didn't really want to do another child-related series, but it was as if I didn't have a choice: those Victorian gowns were so tiny, they were child-size.
How did you pick the models? What were you looking for?
I lack the fortitude to go out and recruit 11 and 12 year old girls, and I didn't have much time to produce the work. I was feeling slightly panicked. I contacted a local model agency that had hordes of children on their books. They sent me a batch of comp cards. There was no rigorous selection process. I wasn't looking for anything specific. Certain faces stood out. I chose girls with very little or no 'industry experience'. I didn't want seasoned professionals. Also, I prefer to photograph introverts. They don't overcook things.
Ethlyn, the gloved guitarist, reminds me of Manet's 'studio portraits': his female bullfighter wearing slippers and his Spanish guitar player in a pose where he clearly couldn't play the guitar. Ethlyn's guitar screams 'prop'.
I imagined her to be a Hitler Youth member crossed with a gypsy.
What is Fervin holding?
A slightly soiled copy of Twenty-Four Hours A Day, the Alcoholics Anonymous bible, adding to the somewhat tenuous theme of vagrancy.
Romanian Orphan recalls pathetic photos of beautiful refugee children moaning 'take me, love me'. Are you making fun?
The young model was from Romania, and I liked the idea of an idealised teary-eyed orphan. Maybe I am making fun, but it could also be utterly sincere.
Alongside the five pictures of excessively coiffured girls you placed Wet Sock. You seem to like throwing in the odd image to spoil the mood.
I like to include certain images to thwart the heavy femininity of the others. The wet sock is like a sad Jesus picture. An earlier series, The Bone Of Jupiter, had some studies of pinecones and driftwood. There was another image that had a wheel of processed cheese and a syringe filled with Q-Tol, which is a cheap pink antiseptic lotion. And there's a deadpan image of a repeater station encrusted in satellite dishes in Meat & Liquor called Porn Syntax. I wanted a totally pretentious title, suggestive but tenuous.
Your series Sea Of Tranquility, Bellevue and Vagrants' Reception Centre all feature different examples of the same type of thing; variations on a theme. Other series are more heterodox, and viewers go into overdrive trying to find a common thread.
Bellevue is the only series where I had a really singular idea from the outset. With Sea Of Tranquility
and Vagrants', I wanted some uniformity in the series. But usually each series feels like a runaway train. There's no sense of predictability in the outcome.
Joan Kroc is an imaginary portrait of a real person.
The title didn't arrive until after the shoot. I was originally going to call the photo 'Joan Cork', but later realised 'Cork' was 'Kroc' backwards. Joan Kroc is the late billionaire widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc and a much-loved philanthropist and patron of the arts in San Diego. Of course the money came from a distasteful despicable source, that makes people fat. The dress is 1970s Ungaro couture (formerly owned by Liza Minnelli). It's austere yet glamorous. My dealer Peter McLeavey compares my Joan Kroc to Joan of Arc. Both women, he claims, were surrounded by dark forces.
Joan Kroc is a somebody and a nobody all at once.
I'm always more interested in history's peripheral characters, like Liz Taylor's husband Larry Fortensky, the builder she met at the Betty Ford clinic. I'm more interested in Priscilla Presley than Elvis. These peripheral figures never had much talent but somehow managed to have their moment of fame before being consigned to history's rubbish bin. But I remember.
You did a Self-Portrait As Christina Onassis.
Another historical bit part. Christina Onassis is the forgotten daughter of Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate who married Jackie Kennedy. I was interested in her because she was extraordinarily wealthy, the sole heir to his billions. She was a deeply unhappy woman, addicted to amphetamines, and battled obesity most of her life. She had a string of failed marriages and died of a heart attack in a bathtub at 37.
Why do it as a self-portrait?
Sometimes I don't have the strength to find models, and for convenience's sake I use myself. I knew I could alter my appearance easily enough by dyeing my hair black, using fake tan and wearing brown contact lenses. I studied photographs of Christina Onassis – the small poor-quality black-and-whites in her biography. It became an obsession. There was often a pained expression on her face. I wanted to replicate that look. I'm interested in the way method actors become absorbed in their roles, like Val Kilmer while filming The Doors. He was so 'in character', people had to call him Jim.
Springtime is your third anorexic picture. It seems more idyllic somehow – almost pretty.
It's a take on the idea of springtime – new life, flowers, lambs. I needed to plant something ghoulish and skeletal in the picture, in a frolicsome green polka-dotted frock.
Do you ever not use wigs?
Wigs are an integral part of my repertoire. It harks back to my time working sole charge at Wig World in an Auckland shopping mall. I have fond memories of that shop. I used to try on the wigs, especially the grey permed granny ones, and fall asleep on the floor of the changing room. No-one ever came in. Sales were a rare thing.
I love Gynecology. It's so New Agey. It reminds me of ads for 1-900 psychics. You said that dress belonged to Carol Channing.
Yes, Carol Channing, that Love Boat guest stalwart. The gown is a Bob Mackie. I was imagining she was a member of a sci-fi Christian cult whose members celebrate conventional Western beauty. The model was pregnant, which wasn't part of the original idea, but it worked out, especially since the gown has a vulval slit on the belly. I like the idea of a chilly unfeeling non-nurturing mother spewing forth infants in a remote pocket of the universe.
Eye-Vein Rose harks back to another rose picture, Chlora from Asthma & Eczema. What's your position on kitsch these days?
I've never enjoyed having my work described as kitsch, because I don't believe it is. I like to think I peddle in cliches; that I can move from one to the next with no sense of shame or embarrassment. Of course, there needs to be a twist, otherwise it would be boring.
Speaking of cliches, The Guttural Flower has a forlorn girl brandishing a browned sunflower. How can a flower be guttural?
I saw some large, freshly-cut, orange sunflowers for sale at the supermarket, wrapped in cheap cheerful foil paper. They seemed huge and oppressive, looming Triffid-like. Too big and monstrous to be flowers. I bought some and took them home, but they disturbed me. They had an air of surveillance about them. As for 'guttural', I don't know. Maybe the centre of the flowers reminded me of the Sarlacc pit in Return Of The Jedi. That was rather guttural.
The model is wearing beige, as are the models in Joan Kroc and Goat Sluice.
I like austerity, but grey and black can be too severe. White has too many connotations that I'd rather avoid. Beige is the answer. I would describe it as a numb colour. It's muffled and bland.
Why is January carrying a sugar cube?
January is the female protagonist in Jacqueline Sussan's bestseller Once Is Not Enough. She's a morose young Park Avenue heiress, obsessed and in love with her father (killed when his millionaire lesbian second-wife's private jet explodes). She takes acid and has group sex at a party then disappears forever from a sand dune in the Hamptons leaving only an LSD-laced sugar cube behind. The sugar cube is the key to all this degeneracy, in an otherwise frugal, but maudlin portrait.
Do you want us to see your women as pathetic or heroic?
I'm angling more for the pathetic. I respond to stoicism and piety, deflation and disappointment. I avoid hideous words like 'empowerment' or anything else in keeping with the heroic.
You can lurch from a picture like January, which is quite moody and affecting, to Hazel, The Forbidden, which is not. Some pictures call forth a sympathetic response, others, like Hazel, have a touch of schadenfreude.
I photographed Hazel when I had infected shingles. I think some of the viral toxins had taken hold that day. Hazel was inspired by an American website where a seamstress markets 'modest Christian clothing' and uses her flock of plain homely daughters as models. The photographs look like specialised pornography.
So you see a connection between your work and pornography.
Not with the obvious X-rated kind, but perhaps the more obscure, specialised and, to the non-afficionado, quite boring, obsessively repetitive stuff: the pornography focusing on mundane tan-coloured pantyhose or matronly brassieres and flesh-tone petticoats.
Your images seem at once pervy and prim. I'm reminded of Vertigo. Scottie is obsessed with Madeleine in her grey business suits. Primness became erotic for him.
I love primness. Vertigo is one of my favourite movies. Scottie gets really animated when he makes-over a sexy twenty-something Judy into a stern 'forty-something' Madeline. His excitement is palpable.
Christianity keeps popping up. You styled the women in Sea Of Tranquility after Mormon pastors' daughters; Fervin seems to be holding a Bible.
I have Christian Envy. I want to belong. I want to be special. And I like the trappings of zealotry. The more fervent end of the scale, of course. People like Gramma Cherbear, whose fanatical religious instruction for children is accompanied by poorly-executed line drawings of animals that look really scabby and squalid and fucked-up. I'm intrigued by her disinterest in aesthetic finesse, along with the plainness of those girls modelling their mother's dowdy home-made garments. I want to recreate some of that.
Goat Sluice, on the other hand, is demonic.
I was aiming for the Evangelical meets the Satanist. A wholesome toothy blonde clutching a tabby kitten. To hammer home the feel of animal sacrifice, I originally wanted to have her holding a baby goat, but my newly-adopted SPCA kitten kindly agreed to be a stand-in.
There's usually a match between the location or background and the subject, but in Frenzy they are at odds. The girl reclines in a concrete block basement.
I wanted to do something ludicrous. I saw the dress for sale on ebay. It's plaid taffeta, in an elaborate ruffled faux Victorian parlour style. When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was the basement under my house. It was like the most rudimentary mathematical equation: 1 + 1 = 2. It just made total sense to me. I knew the dress had to be photographed in the basement.
What is it with the big teeth?
I like large and prominent teeth. Again, it's part of the repulsion / thwarting system. There has to be something wrong every time. Frenzy's teeth, in particular, remind me of the eyes of a spider.