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Jeanne Dunning: Study After Untitled
Untitled Landscapes
A selective survey of the photography and video work of Jeanne Dunning is now on view in Galleries 2 and 3. With its unwavering focus on the terrain of the human body, Dunning’s art has gained notoriety for its provocative and sometimes unsettling implications. In her essay in the exhibition catalog, Dunning writes:
Untitled Landscape I (1987) is the first piece I ever made that pictured the body. When I took this picture of the hairs on my (unshaved) leg, I was just fooling around, trying to use up a roll of film, but when the slides came back from the photo lab I saw that the leg had become a landscape. From the very beginning, things in my work didn’t sit quietly where they were put. Instead, they managed to be multiple things at once, and not necessarily what we expected them to be. Untitled Landscape II (1987) is a photograph of a man’s shaved cheek, and here again what seems most apparent is something I wasn’t thinking about when I took the picture. Although I didn’t consciously plan it, the pairing of a woman’s unshaved leg with a man’s shaved cheek seems positively freighted with the weight of our cultural and gendered expectations regarding our bodies, which is exactly the territory of all my work to follow. The Untitled Landscapes developed out of a play between what I thought I was taking a picture of and how I saw the picture after the fact. . . .
Most of my work uses simple gestures to try to get at complicated relationships and reactions. Like their color precursors, the black-and-white landscapes manipulate your impulse to identify what you’re looking at by giving you a horizon line. As landscapes, these places might be atmospheric and romantic; they are vistas seen from far away, perhaps at a stretch evoking quintessential examples of the Kantian sublime. But once you realize it’s a body, this distance instantly collapses. Suddenly what you’re looking at is only inches away from your face and edging towards being a little too close for comfort, given that you don’t know what part of the body it is, or whose body it is, or even if it’s the body of a man or a woman. We don’t see bodies in this kind of proximity unless they are our own or those of our lovers or children. The movement from landscape to body collapses response as well as distance. It heightens your awareness of the disparity between how you feel about what you’re seeing as a landscape and how you feel about it as a body.
Support for Jeanne Dunning: Study after Untitled has been provided by the Peter Norton Family Foundation, an anonymous donor, and the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley.
The exhibition travels to the Chicago Cultural Center in April.
