less than twenty years ago, paris's jeu

8/14/2019 Less Than Twenty Years Ago, Paris's Jeu

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REVIEW

Less than twenty years ago, Paris's Jeu de Paume was home to

one of to the world's most impressive collections of Impressionist

painting. Now Monet, Degas and the rest have moved across theSeine to the nearby Mus6e d'Orsay and the Jeu de Paume has

opened its doors to a new crowd. Since lost June, its beautifully

refurbished series of gallery spaces, which successfully tread the

difficult line between white-walled minimalism and somethingwarmer and more intimate, have been the residence of an exciting

programme of temporary photography exhibitions; 'an innovative

global project... implemented in a resolutely contemporary spirit.'

Th e second of its inaugural shows, L'Ombre du Temps, ran from

September until November last year. Aself-conscious re-thinking of

the photographic lineage proposed by Tate Modern's 2003 offering,

Cruel and Tender: The Real in Twentieth Century Photography,

L'Ombre du Temps set out to highlight the perceived MOMA-centric

bias of the Tate's historical assembly, shifting its focus from the

broadly-defined schools of Dusseldorf and New York to positionthe camera in a more ambiguous relation to the real, through the

work of Atget, Sekula, Sherman, Cahun and Rodchenko. The show

felt refreshing, even controversial, in its healthy disdain for the

hegemony historically exercised by the evolutionary narrative

which underscored Cruel and Tender. By comparison, its follow

up, a mid-career retrospective of the Dutch photographer Rineke

Dijkstra, seems frustratingly uncritical in its stand-point.

Whilst lacking the sort of inescapable public profile we might

associate with, say, Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, Dijkstra isby no means a peripheral player on the contemporary photographic

stage. Over the past ten years her work has been exhibitedinternationally insome of the world's most prestigious venues,

including both the Guggenheims, and Tate Modern, as part of Cruel

and Tender. It is true that her portfolio has never been viewed in ts

entirety, and there is a certain pleasure to be had here in revisiting

her delicate studies of adolescent self-consciousness, their muteadmiration for the uncertain stumble towards adulthood. If his is

a vision well known, it has never been represented so

comprehensively. But did it really need to be? Sensitively performed,

such mid-career surveys might serve to extract fresh meaning, to

as k new questions, unsettling the sense of a 'story-so-far' curation.

Yet, after two floors and ten rooms of Dijkstra's by-now familiar

pictures of teenage self-construction, the unquestioning nature

of the show become frustrating. We know this work, we like this

work, need we say anything more?

The exhibition begins impressively, with sixteen of Dijkstra's

early beach portraits installed here as an initiating moment, the

first indication of the photographer's quiet aw e and respect for

the fragile self-images of he r adolescent subjects. They stare

down from the walls as though secular icons, hovering in wilight

on symbolic shorelines, the masks of their adult identity only half-

formed. In their haunting stasis the trauma of experience remains

eternally and powerfully implicit, ushering us through to the second

room where it is realised in the blood-stained, shirt-torn matadors

and the assertive, delicate maternalism of Dijkstra's young mothers.

Their natural juxtaposition of an anti-heroic bravado and a forceful

femininity is played out across opposing walls, conjoined by the

harrowing and melancholic presence of an Ukrainian orphan, who,

battered but dignified and painfully beautiful, appears experienced

before his time.These early rooms feel fresh, succeed inassembling an

exhibitory narrative that moves and evolves, recognising a shifting

perspective and the subtle dialogue which exists between these

pictures. It is as the show progresses upstairs that a sense of

conceptual and aesthetic inertia creeps inand it slowly dawns that

a lot of this work is in fact very similar. This might not be a problem;

numerous photographers have made their careers out of a similarly

repetitious practice. Yet, it is the individuality of Dijkstra's subjects

which are the staple of these photographs, rooted in an Arbusian

sensibility for a natural visual rebelliousness that refuses to be

stifled by any attempt at physical conformity. We see it in the ill-

fitting uniforms of the young Israeli conscripts, in the bulging boob-

tubes and greasy hair of the teenage Liverpudlian clubbers, and in

the bitter-faced twins which age and metomorphosise before us

across a series of six photographs. But after four or five rooms a

saturation point is reached and a crucial, nebulous aspect of thisindividuality is lost, distorted into the photographic motif through

which we are invited to identify, not the particularity of the subject,

but the artistic vision of Rineke Dijkstra. This ma y have something

to do with marketability and the role of collectors and institutions

in dictating the terms of progress. It certainly makes for a coherent

show. It also raises the question of where this work can go from here?

It will be interesting to witness the lasting consequences of the

exhibition, which tours to Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Winterthur,

upon the development of an artist only recently turned forty-six. As

a consecrating exercise it will no doubt be successful, consolidating

Dijkstra's already established status as part of a contemporary

photographic canon. It is yet to be seen whether it will also draw

a line under a body of work which is beginning to feel stagnant or,

conversely, to permanently seal the photographer in the mould of

her early years. Either way, something has ended. - BEN BURBRIDGE

Above: Jolta,Ukraine,30 July 1993

Opposite: Tiergarten, Berlin, 27 June 1999

Ben Burbridge works at Photoworks. He is currently studying for an MA in Art History at Sussex University.

Rineke Dijkstra: Photographs and Videos, 1991 - 2004, Jeu de Paume, 14 December 2004 - 20 February 2

The exhibition tours to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Fotomuseum, Winterthur, and the La Caixa

Foundation, Barcelona.



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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

TITLE: Rineke Dijkstra: Photographs and Videos, 1991-2004

SOURCE: Photoworks Spr/Summ 2005

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it

is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in

violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher:

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less than twenty years ago, paris's jeu

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