Francesca Woodman

(Pace/MacGill Gallery, December 2–January 15, 1994)

As Robert Frank's The Americans identified a collective national spirit hidden beneath media lies, Francesca Woodman's photographs define a collective personal spirit that has been little delineated before. It's an awareness of sadness and an embrace of those feelings most of us do what we can to avoid and seldom enunciate.
    The way Caravaggio painted the dirty feet of his ecstastants, Woodman poses herself amid the disheveled and crumbling walls of raw loft spaces, accentuating the probe to a place where accoutrements can't protect or disguise. She places her body in an environment that echoes her disenchantment with the lovely facades.
    This artist constructs out of her isolation by indulging in a ballet with squalor. Each shot is a further investigation into remoteness but, ironically, an expression meant to communicate the feelings within that remoteness.
    The shots distort our expectation of the nude in service to our glance. Rather than positioning the body to please a viewer, these shots thwart by asking us to consider a larger context for the naked person on display. There's a danger here. Pleasantries have been de-prioritized. Most shots are dramatic tableaux in which she adorns her perfect body with the surrounding detritus. She immerses herself in the degenerating landscape, a landscape that's been rejected by others. She champions the remnants by grace of her complementing presence. Lithe gestures whisper in the realm of the delicate. A fish skeleton is handled as if it were a flower. Any grander gesture would shake something loose. She's "forgotten" music. Her universe is tactile, contained in the stark rooms she inhabits and in direct attachment to the organic potencies within her landscape slivers.
    These works by an extraordinary singular voice are powerful, haunting, and affecting. They are confrontations with silence that disturb the placid veneer. If they're unsettling for the tricks she plays with conventions, they're also often gorgeous in their incantory weave of vigorous, young bodies and collapsing structures.
    It's impossible to regard these photographs without an awareness that the creative energy pictured would end soon with her suicide in 1981. The re-emergence and recognition of this work — a beautifully produced catalog of a show that traveled in Germany and Scandinavia last year is available in bookstores or from D.A.P. (212-473-5119) — makes it obvious that this bold voice communicates something necessary to our lives.