Inhabiting Illusions, 2009

The passiveness of Jane Burton’s nudes is misleading. Although they hide their faces, their nudity is always visible.  Such seductive anonymity heralds the siren’s song, the spider woman’s web and the dangerous enchantments of the femme fatale. Burton’s alluring nudes are fuelled by bad girl defiance, having emerged onto the art world stage during late1980s’ feminism.  Yet the current survey of her oeuvre, covering works from 1989 to the present, reveals a commitment to female sexual expression, which extends beyond the nude and contemporaneous political debates.

The images in this exhibition can be grouped into traditional fine art categories. They include almost equal numbers of nudes, landscapes, architectural interiors and/or still life studies plus several portraits. Since the early Romantic era in the eighteenth century, the female nude and landscape have been linked with theories of beauty and the sublime.  The sublime was initially included in the category of beauty, but came to be regarded over time as the superior level of aesthetic perception. According to British philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-97) the sublime involves apprehension of the overpowering greatness and limitlessness of landscape, whereas beauty is apprehended as the immediate charm, softness and limitedness of form.[ii] Masculinity was invariably mapped onto the sublime, and femininity onto beauty. A similar gendering principle informed the domestic interiors of paintings in the nineteenth century; women’s bodies and living spaces equated to nature and the inside, whereas the male domain was equated to culture and the outside.  The mixture of gendered visual art genres- female nude, landscape and domestic interior- formed a potent and complex aesthetic, which in the twentieth century became inflected with the insights of psychoanalysis.  Painters, photographers, pornographers and filmmakers drew inspiration from this wellspring of interrelated imagery, concepts and affects. Notable amongst them were the surrealists: Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux, René Magritte, Brassaï, Jean Luc Goddard, Jean Cocteau and, later, the Australian photographer Max Dupain.

Drawn to the ambiguous eroticism of surrealist art, Burton identifies with the recently championed women artists associated with the movement. They include Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Nusch Eluard, Dora Maar, Jacqueline Lamba, Leonora Carrington, Léonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo. Most of these women doubled as models, or muses, for their more prominent male artist lovers and often became famous for their beauty rather than their art.  Burton too is admired for her personal beauty, but she is a liberated and entirely independent artist. Rather than act as muse to a male artist partner, she employs female models as stand-ins for herself, recreating her own version of the earlier artists’ double-edged female power. In this way she maintains artistic and social autonomy and is agent of her own meanings. These meanings are multiple, varied, personal, relational, sometimes political and sometimes nostalgic.

Early black and white works from the late 1980s, which have not previously been exhibited, demonstrate Burton’s experimentation with the settings, poses, moods and effects that were to occupy her for the next twenty years.  The single figure studies include members of her family and friends. There are beautiful dark women in backyard settings, one partly obscured by shadowy patterns, the other meeting the camera’s gaze with kohl-lined eyes; a lovely young man with hands in pockets and a sweet boy with babyish bare chest and jeans partly undone. There are also detailed studies of domestic exteriors, including a vaguely ominous plant and a mysterious cellar window set in a weatherboard wall.  In another study a nude woman has a bag over her head, reminiscent of Magritte, but with the twist of female authorship.

The compositional complexity of one image in the group is particularly instructive on this question of female agency. In it, a smiling nude stands amongst stage-like props as a mirror reflects her body from a different angle. The visual incongruities not only recall the perceptual tricks of Magritte and Picasso, but also admit what Rosalind Krauss identified in the student works of US photographer Francesca Woodman as a feminist intervention. There is a problem-solving format in both artists’ works, which betrays their art school context. Krauss wrote “Always to insert her own body onto the field of the problem to use it, understand it, as the ground of whatever sense the image might make, is a pattern that emerges throughout the problem sets that Woodman undertook.”[iii]

Burton’s image of woman and mirror also uses the female body as the ground for meaning, even though the body of a model substitutes for her own. Burton positions the model between stage like door frames with left arm in front of the frame and left leg behind it so that the woman’s image appears to be flattened against the picture plane. The mirror image is also flat, of course, but the mirror itself is tilted at an angle from the picture plane by two hands emerging from the right hand edge of the stage-like setting. The oscillation between the tilting and flattening of the planes and between the different orders of representation point to the problem that Krauss says Woodman’s images articulate: “Everything that one photographs is in fact “flattened to fit” paper, and thus under, within, permeating every paper support, there is a body.” [iv] By dint of Burton’s identification with this “flattened” body, her nudes enact Hélène Cicoux’s notion of écriture féminine, gendered women’s writing or “visual texts”. Such texts place female experience and sexuality before language, thereby unsettling traditionally masculine signifying systems. Burton’s work, it could be argued, brings photographic representation to account for excluding the reality of female bodily experience.

Burton soon moved beyond this short phase of self-reflexivity to produce visually seamless illusions resembling particular photographs and film stills of Surrealism. The series, two or three things I know about her, 1994, consists of several individual nude studies of women, whose identity and experienceare largely unknown, the title suggests, but for a couple of clues.  In one image, reminiscent of surrealist photographic studies such as those of Man Ray and Brassaï, the contracting frame cuts off the woman’s arms, lower legs, chest and head to focus on the abdominal and pubic region.  Formally, it is a classic figure of the Freudian fetish, or object of the male gaze. As a surrogate for the artist herself, however, Burton’s nude celebrates the erotic pleasure of being looked at rather than looking. This is also true of the rest of the series, in which the tense atmosphere and lighting evoke the genre of film noir, or the psychodramas of David Lynch. In one image the camera has moved in on a cowering nude in a gloomy corner with weatherboard wall and black and white tiled floor; in a couple of others a girl crouches on hands and knees in a dark dungeon-like place. Instead of permeating the space around it or disrupting the framing structure, the body in these three images is contained and trapped. A cold blue light illuminates the models’ alabaster skin, and contrasts sharply with the deep black shadows and ground, enhancing the sense of drama and cinematic performance.

Edward Colless identified in the art of Burton, Jane Eisemann and Pat Brassington, the lugubrious Art School aesthetic of the Photography Department of the University of Hobart.  Gothic themes of furtive female sexual awakening and mysticism find their natural home in this colonial, maritime city, implied Colless; “residents…trust the winter even if it overwhelms them with an unpleasant sentiment, a morbid longing.”[v] Adrian Martin also identified a popular sensibility in Burton’s art, citing the influence of 1940s’ film noir as a source for “the Female Gothic. Women’s Experience as Haunted House: shadowy, imprisoned, sadistic-masochistic.[vi] Both writers described the psychological causes and effects of this melodramatic genre in reductive, persuasive terms.

The obvious appeal to young women artists of these cultural stereotypes lies not only in their glamour, ambiguity and half-truths but, more importantly, in the pleasures of erotic performance. Burton’s satisfaction in creating these works involves sharing the sensual experience of acting out, dressing up or down, role-playing and interacting with others, rather than sexual obsession or psychic disturbance. Dark smudges on the model’s skin hint at bruising and perhaps abuse. But as Burton says, the model already had some bruises when she arrived, and subsequent smears occurred as a result of crawling around the very dusty floor.  Burton’s explanation hints at the negotiation and give- or- take between artist and model, revealing that the process of the work’s unfolding is a social and interactive experience.  Given this and the fact that fantasy and role-playing had become widely practiced in urban sex cultures by the 1990s, when the images were made, it seems more likely that Burton’s fictional narrative involves consenting S & M practitioners rather than victims of a criminal assault. Ambiguity is nevertheless crucial to the sexual pleasure that Burton’s nudes apparently seek, and therefore part of the “mobile complexity” of female sexuality, the form and content of écriture féminine.

Formal and conceptual ironies in Burton’s art have become more subtle and nuanced over the years, contributing to the increased emphasis on mood and feelings.  In many cases the setting itself inspires the affect or mood of the work, often suggesting the presence of a third party besides the already complex photographer/model partnership. In The Sweetest Path, 1999, for instance, a mellow orange light casts a glow over a carpeted bedroom interior, suggesting the warmth of at least one other desiring body close by. Shadows are brown and unthreatening, while filmy, transparent curtains soften the white light from a window to the outside.  More like a bordello than the setting for a murder mystery, the room appears to be divided diagonally by cupboard doors that are made of mirror-glass reflecting a nude who is on the other side of the room. As a reflected image the nude occupies the upper left corner of the composition. By contrast with her earlier art-school nude and mirror composition, this image omits the “actual” body of the nude. At once intimate and distant, the reflected nude in The Sweetest Path rests her head and shoulders against the open window. Obscured by the fabric and hem of the curtain, her head appears to be partially devoured by the strange forces of white light outside. As a representation she could be a reflection of reality, a figment of erotic imagination, a horror movie heroine or a dream. She is certainly an illusion.  The connotations of role-playing are subtle, less obviously set-up by the artist, but inherent in the architectural space, the reflective surfaces and atmospheric lighting.  These formal features convey the ambivalent absence/presence of the nude as well as that of an anonymous, invisible community of desired and/or desiring others.

Always alert to the possibility of beauty and eroticism in her everyday surroundings, and unable to afford a studio and expensive props, Burton chooses settings that have an element of the found and unexpected. The Fall, 2004, for instance, was shot in the elegant bay window of an empty house that Burton happened to come across.  When a man, possibly the owner, arrived with a key to open the house and found Burton and her model there setting up for work, he decided to turn a blind eye. The dappled shadows and filtered daylight entering from the garden through silk curtains provide a sensuous counterfoil to the model’s shapely silhouette, as it emerges from amongst the curtains. The illicit aspect of the work’s manufacture, and the complicity of the trespassing artist and model are echoed by the eroticism, anonymity and mystery of this harmoniously composed black and white piece.

Burton has always taken photographs on film and hates to change reality. She has used a computer in the printing process since her series Cul-de-sac, 2000. This enhances the sophisticated layering effect she achieves, as is evident in the black and white Wormwood series, in which the key image is a wonderful old pine tree. The tree’s trunk runs up the centre of the picture plane with gnarled and twisting branches forking out from it, darkening and thickening with dense foliage at the edges of the page.  The silvery light background is mysterious and strange, brightest at the centre, with a halo of ghostly light grey shapes that suggest distant clouds, trees and perhaps even buildings.  Burton concedes that this soft layering of forms is no longer about reality, but about affect. It recalls the mystical illusionism of Romantic landscape painting, such as that of the German Caspar David Friedrich, whom Burton greatly admires.  The three nudes in Burton’s wintry Wormwood series are semi-consumed by a deep black background or covered with branch like shadows that double as black veins on, under and outside their skin.  Like a grim fairytale, the tree itself appears to be entering each woman’s body and infecting her bloodstream. Burton explains that increasingly she finds landscape alluring, with its promise of freedom, solitude and communion with the natural world.  The brooding atmosphere in the Wormwood series suggests that this promise is double-edged, tainted in this instance by the gothic sensibilities of Romantic painting.

Nostalgia pervades Burton’s Motherland, 2008, series of photo compositions. They were shot when she took a trip to Tasmania, her home during her teenage and young adult years.  Cool pale skies and rounded green hills of sparsely populated countryside are bathed in a mellow evening light. In one image a nine-year-old girl, Burton’s niece in fact, stands in a short-sleeved white dress and white shoes, dwarfed by a hill that rises steeply behind her; in another she sits in exquisite profile against a curtain-framed window that looks out onto a similar landscape. These, like most of Burton’s photocompositions, are reminiscent of several paintings from the history of European art, but also of long summer evenings spent playing and dreaming as a young adolescent in the open countryside of Australia’s temperate regions.

Burton’s series of post-card-size works, When under ether, 2008, conveys a similarly romanticized view of the landscape. Even though they were shot very recently, the images recall sensations of past experience.  The series consists of black and white photos taken from a car or bus window during a road trip around Victoria: a glimpse of cloudy sky, a carefully composed view of an island in the sea and another of a silvery waterfall cutting a valley in a dark ridge. A fourth image is at odds with the rest.  It is a photograph of an old bedroom in a state of serious disrepair, with strips of wallpaper hanging from the ceiling, rendered strange by being turned upside down.  All of the images are coloured sepia or apricot, which infuses them with a sense of almost cloying emotion, induced perhaps by drugs or the heightened eroticism of an out-of-town affair.  At the same time, their superficial charm resonates with a much deeper attachment to places and encounters that live on in memories and dreams, no matter how tawdry or makeshift the circumstances. Beauty and eroticism are central, not only to Jane Burton’s art, but also to her experience of life.

[i]  Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, 1975. For an English translation see Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen, Signs, 1, 1976.

[ii]  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. with introduction and notes by J.T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) 1987.

[iii]  Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, (Cambridge Mass.: October, MIT Press) 1999, 172.

[iv]  Ibid, 166.

[v]  Edward Colless, “Ghosting,” Photofile 44, April 1995: 35.

[vi] Adrian Martin, “Sex Neurosis,” Dark Dreams and Fluorescent Flesh: 17 February- 13 March 2009, catalogue essay (Adelaide: South Australian School of Art) 2009, 6.