Normally, the acquisition of a new photograph by the Cincinnati Art Museum wouldn’t be that impactful. By and large, prints are small and subtle, and often black-and-white until recent decades.
But Ryan McGinley’s “Petra (Pieces)” is different.
There is its size — almost six feet by nine feet. There is the strong color, with a background of burnished, brownish gold that seems like our earth after a long, consuming fire. There is the fact it’s figural — a portrait of a woman — in a gallery mostly featuring work that is abstract, minimalist or at least not clearly representational.
And then there is the nature of the portrait. A young woman with auburn hair, attractive in a conventional sense, reclines nude against that background, much of her body caked with full-frontal mud. Her face is mostly free of such degradation. Her hair is beyond unkempt; it’s unraveling. Red rings around her open but uncaring eyes make you wonder if she’s a corpse.
Strangest of all, dismemberment seems to have occurred. Her right arm looks excised just below the shoulder; her left seems like a handless piece of arm is loose below the elbow. To say the least, this 2013 work — which Brian Sholis, the museum’s associate photography curator, purchased from New York’s Team Gallery and is displaying through Aug. 2 — is startling.
I found it moving and profound, artfully conceived and composed and beautiful in its unconventional way. But I may have a completely different take on its meaning than what Sholis — in his written notes that I am using for reference — has in mind. Powerful work holds up to multiple interpretations.
McGinley has become one of the most popular and edgy of contemporary photographers; his reputation has only grown since a 2003 solo show at the Whitney Museum. And his projects have begun to echo photographer Gregory Crewdson’s in their elaborate planning, if not quite their cinematic scope. With models and assistants, he does road trips looking for proper backdrops for his young subjects.
One of those is Petra Collins, who traveled with McGinley from Toronto through West Virginia and Georgia and has been featured in five photographs so far, with several hundred other shots unprinted.
This one was taken in the South. McGinley’s disorienting perspective is from above or away, looking at her as she reclines in muddy, rusty backwater. Parts of her arms are below the surface; the legs taper inward as if forming a mermaid’s fin. Behind her head is a shadowy silhouette, like a helmet or crown, which appears to be a tree’s outline. Because the water is so still and its color so thick, and the tree’s outline so isolated from anything else, I wondered if there had been any digital image or color manipulation. Not that I’d think less of the work if there were, but how did he get such a perfect shot?
In his notes, Sholis sees “Petra (Pieces)” through the lens of art history: the reclining odalisques of 19th-century French painting, the broken arms of the Venus de Milo statue at the Louvre, Caravaggio’s “Medusa” in the wildness of her curly hair. I could add to that list the ancient Jordanian rock-cut city of Petra, so hidden — like this namesake here — from easy observation.
But I didn’t respond to it the same way, though I understand that rational take; I saw today’s world in this photograph. Since this is a 2013 work, it’s possible it came after the Boston Marathon and those horrific stories of runners and bystanders killed or maimed, losing limbs, at a moment of great athletic triumph. That serves as a jolt of the randomness of the universe (and cruelty of humankind) interfering with the “beauty” of their accomplishment.
Even if there is no direct link between that event and McGinley’s intentions with “Petra (Pieces),” there is a link in our subconscious. And, too, there is a link with all the other lingering images of recent atrocities.
There have always been artists who confront abjectness by showing it, believing there is more beauty — and nobility — in trying to be truthful than making conventionally attractive images. The latter is what advertising is for.
But this new and daringly confrontational photo makes you think about art’s purpose, especially in these times, as well as its history. That makes the addition all the more valuable to the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection.
CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2015.