Angela Grossmann gives the title Swagger to her latest body of work not, it seems, to display through such a posture an attitude of arrogance, but to push the viewer to interrogate the very term.
All 18 of her male images — indeed, we wonder if some are, in fact, male — stop us in our tracks. Instead of the arrogance and bluster we come to expect when the word “swagger” is used, we encounter expressions of vulnerability, fragility and uncertainty, and become aware that the making of masculinity may not be what it seems.
Grossmann reveals the construction of maleness to be far less sturdy and far more incorporating of the feminine than we may first envision. The Modernist project of social order and sexual differentiation, we find, is also more incomplete than expected.
Fifty years ago French feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed in The Second Sex (1952): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” With these electrifying words de Beauvoir asserted that women were defined not through biology or psychology, but through the social and cultural experience of having to constantly be the “other” in relationship to men. Grossmann tells us through her images that while men may be dominant in this gendered system they, too, are not born, but made, and, as individuals coming into adulthood, they, too, are subject to significant pressures, not of their own making.
We learn from these male images — many of which betray feminine features — that boys entering manhood can be gripped by much the same anxieties as adolescent girls (anxieties which Grossmann has considered in earlier work) and experience fears similar to those of their female other of not measuring up to the gender ideal modern society has set up for them.
Grossmann recognises, and then we with her, that males, too, are subject to scrutiny, but she also reminds us — be it through showing boys boxing, male figures with “man’s best friend” the dog, or young men in uniform — just how different are the experiences of gender, and that the traces of violence and aggression remain ever present in the male world.
Grossmann’s visual critique locates itself in early modernity, a period in which men and women were expected both to look different, and to act differently, from one another. They were to look their parts and were encouraged to engage in activities that would help them in this endeavour. It was the time of the physical culture movement, a movement aimed at revitalising modern manhood for the century ahead, when males took up sports such as boxing and bodybuilding, activities which the newly developing visual practice of photography was there to capture.
This attitude to manhood was especially true in France. Following the defeat of the French Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870s, French journals began trumpeting the call for men to make themselves anew. This disposition was fostered through the visual representation of the time. As Tamar Garb points out in Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (1998), the modelled, muscled, masculine body of the physical culture movement was found in both the gymnasium and art museum, and she notes that a number of famous body-builders earned their living as artists’ models.
Grossmann evokes the period from the late 1800s to the early 20th century through the faces she has selected from photographs taken in this period. These photographs appear selected to search out the hidden points of instability in the artifice of maleness and then, through enlargement and the technique of collage, to expose the viewer to the underbelly of the Modernist endeavour which, while it promised to bring clarity to all in its domain, leaves us instead with indeterminacy.
Grossmann’s place in this work is France (she lived in Paris for a year in 1986 after being awarded the Canada Council Studio).
Florian is the piece selected for the invitation to the exhibition. Here the image is of a young man (or is it a young woman?) with the Eiffel Tower in the background, an image automatically read as a symbol of France, Modernism, Exhibitionism and, perhaps, if less obviously so, for some, the phallus. By giving the name “Florian” to the figure selected to personify the work, Grossmann reinforces the idea that things may not be what they seem. The historical figure Florian lived in the violent times in which Roman emperors reigned and, while he was commander of the imperial army in Bavaria, he was no Mars. Rather than offering sacrifice to the pagan Roman gods, history has it that he cheerfully accepted the beating meted out to him by soldiers for his refusal to engage in this violent act.
So, too, is it with Grossmann’s Florian. A wisp of a man, looking like a slightly unkempt dandy, he seems to stand as if doubtful of his male role, passively waiting for someone else to take the initiative.
Grossmann’s boxers, of which there are four in the show, reveal the same hesitation, including the boxer given the same title as the exhibition, Swagger
We sense no pugnacity from these playful figures, all of whom, while men in the making, are still boys.
The frames surrounding the gently rendered romantic male images reinforce the central mood of disruption of boundaries evident in the work. The ornate, dark silver, art nouveau frames, marked as they are with wisp-like flourishes, appear to take the brush strokes in the painting beyond the artworks’ boundaries.
Grossmann’s technique is collage. She aligns herself with a method that has shown itself to be an appropriate artistic vehicle to convey the uncertain and the unstable. Given the types of disruptions of meaning that occur with collage, this technique has been called the art form of the 20th century, yet it is a technique that visual critics believe has not been fully realised. Grossmann takes up that task. By moving collage’s strategy from one that has tended to limit itself to a juxtaposition of images and materials that shock the viewer, she takes it to one of disparate integration, thereby disavowing the dualism of this one and its other — a position that forces choice and has plagued much of post-enlightenment thinking. Instead, Grossmann shows us how fitting difference can be.
The works in Swagger speak of a suspicion of the kind of thinking that seeks the essence. All 18 pieces, while raising the issue of manhood, refuse to speak male essence, leaving the viewer happily disassociated from this essentialising impulse, a condition Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and figure most closely identified with deconstruction, sees as necessary for any meaningful relationship to the other.
Vivre la différance.
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©S Fuller 2007