Sophie Robinson, a, and Francesca Woodman

By Cristiana | July 16, 2009 at 8:44 am

Sophie Robinson
a, 70 pp.
Les Figues Press, 2009
Los Angeles

In Sophie Robinson’s a, the newest book out from Les Figues Press (a young press based in Los Angeles), she includes a small note taken out of the notebook of the young photographer, Francesca Woodman:

I wish Stein was here to shake me and kiss me.

I note the reference to Woodman because, in the past ten years, there has been an upsurge of interest in Woodman’s work (initiated with the 1986 retrospective at Hunter College, curated by Rosalind Krauss and Ann Gabhart). Woodman, for those unfamiliar with her work, was a prodigy who passed away before she was twenty-three.

She studied photography in high school, went to RISD to continue her work; her photos almost always focus on the body, as she often used her own as the subject of her photos. Her black, white images are luminously surreal, and she was nicknamed the “magician” for her uncanny use of lighting (even more remarkable because she did not have programs like Photoshop to retool images). Almost every one of her images blurs boundaries between body and environment, and there are rarely photos where individuals can clearly be identified (the face is usually distorted, hidden, or masked. In that sense, her intimate photographs emphasize a collective female identity through one body, rather than focusing on a particular person/identity/name).

At the age of twenty-two, Woodman committed suicide by jumping out of the window of her loft in New York. We then have the troubling legacy of her death to deal with when we view her images, this hyperbolic romanticism we attach to someone — and someone with so much talent –  who passes away well before her time.

In Robinson’s a, then, the inclusion of Woodman’s note (appropriately, if the poet is influenced by Woodman, Woodman shows her creative tie to the great American modernist poet, Gertrude Stein) is understandable within the framework of Robinson’s project. The book is dedicated to  “Aerin Davidson, 1985-2007. . . . XXX,” a young woman who, like Woodman, died when she was twenty-two. Robinson’s dedication also instructs one to read the book as a broken elegy, a collection of fragmented sentences and words, collages, expressing how one might try to express grief and pain verbally, without trivializing experiences that are, in the end, perhaps impossible to articulate in language.

None of Woodman’s photographs appear in the book. The photographs and collages in the collection (a is a multimedia book) are by Ken Elrich, the artist and writer based in Los Angeles. The single reference to Woodman is the short epigraph that introduces the third part of the book, “Disorder” (as well as in the introduction by Caroline Bergvall), which is enough for the reader to recall the hyperbolic romance surrounding the tragedy of Woodman’s death, within a book that was written in the/as an aftermath of a friend’s death.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the reference to Woodman, because in some ways, the short reference does so much work, and acts as a problematic parallel.  Even if the epigraph is short, and part of a’s larger collaging efforts, the Woodman reference evokes a public’s/viewer’s voyeuristic romanticism of an artist’s early death, and then associates that public voyeurism with a more private experience of death.

The inclusion of Woodman’s epigraph feels relevant, but it also makes me squirmish. It’s like writing an essay about personal grief – an experience that is so difficult to verbally express – then connecting that grief with a reference to another writer, artist whose death (or more specifically, suicide) has been scrutinized under the public eye. Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath. Despite good intentions, the parallel feels askewed, even, misused.

But is this more telling of what an elegy does, is? That is, why do we poets write elegies?  It’s not for the person who has passed. It’s the writer’s experience with grief that’s being rendered to an audience, and that personal grief – once it becomes expressed through an aesthetic project — becomes separate and distinct from the person to whom the elegy is addressing.

With a, I understand the intentions, the relevance, even the “inspiration” (for lack of a better word) created by Woodman’s legacy and images. At the same time, something that might be urgently important during the process of writing might need to be re-approached differently by the writer when rendering it into the published product.

Filed under: Literature | Tags: Ann Gabhart, Caroline Bergvall, Elegy, Francesca Woodman, Gertrude Stein, Ken Elrich, Les Figues Press, poetry, Rhode Island School of Design, Rosalind Krauss, Sophie Robinson | 3 Comments »

---