At Curator's Office, a Small But Impressive Work of Bodies

By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, December 16, 2004; Page C05

Don't be put off by its size: Last weekend the 14th Street space called Curator's Office opened a tiny group show of contemporary photographs -- just six small-scale pictures in all -- that's got muscle enough to tackle some big issues. Called "The Staged Body," the exhibition collects artists whose primary MO is choreographing and posing bodies -- nude or clothed, depending. Though some are shot with the intention of producing photographs, others document performances and result in two separate artworks: The action itself, which only a lucky few bear witness to, and a two-dimensional photographic document.

Though bodies are this show's ostensible subject, the pictures speak just as eloquently about the state of photo-based artwork. Photographers today are expert directors and choreographers as well as portraitists. It's a long way from Henri Cartier-Bresson's 20th-century notion of the "decisive moment," that split second when artists supposedly stumbled upon compelling compositions. If anything, the pictures assembled in "The Staged Body" confirm that photography no longer bears any resemblance to photography in the past century's sense. If anything, it's a lot closer to the way old-fashioned figurative painting used to be.

Artists Spencer Tunick and Justine Kurland fancy themselves something like film directors, selecting and posing their actors. Tunick stages events where hundreds of naked people assemble in public space; Kurland invites young women to pose in her bucolic tableaux.

These actions come with agendas attached. In her best-known work, Kurland places plump young heroines in verdant settings. "The Family" finds a small troupe of girls frolicking naked in the tall grass. The artist contends that her pictures imagine a blissful, girl-centric world; her rhetoric is mostly anti-male. Yet because a picture like "The Family" is so sugary in spirit -- look at the girls' blissed-out gazes -- it hardly differentiates itself from titillating photos of submissive girls, which are exactly the pictures Kurland purports to undermine.

Tunick's politics are clearer. In inviting a group of naked men and women to lie down in a gritty city alley, he transforms nakedness into something less titillating and more political. The bodies block passage on the road like a group of hippie protesters. The carpet of flesh is about as sexy as a halibut at the fish market.

Gender issues come front and center in this show, too. Mary Coble photographs "drag kings" -- women who dress as men -- yet her picture here isn't a portrait but a body with the head cropped out. The focus on taped-up breasts and stuffed briefs mirrors the emotional tugs and pushes that Coble's subjects experience. In a similar vein, Rineke Dijkstra's beachside portrait of a pudgy baby with her legs spread wide forces us into the decidedly uncomfortable position of voyeurs, despite the fact that the girl's genitals aren't fully developed. At what age, exactly, does sexuality count?

Though Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry's portrait of the street urchin "Richard" was made in the context of a political artwork about San Francisco street kids, here, divorced of that context, the picture recalls historic portraiture. The baroque image takes its chiaroscuro shadows from strategically positioned studio lights. For Noah Angell, who stages events in which he mimics the people he observes -- here in a haunting color picture of the artist playing a young man he once saw on the Metro -- the resulting image also speaks to painterly origins. Angell's photo calls to mind a gorgeous canvas by Gerhard Richter of his daughter Betty turning her head from the viewer. That canvas, in turn, brings to mind Vermeer's virtuosity with light. Like "The Staged Body" itself, Angell's picture is richer than it first appears.