Janice and Her Double

Art exists in the world because an artist has made it. And yet so many others are involved in its creation: framers and fabricators, handlers and shippers, curators and dealers, teachers, students, collectors, critics, publishers and, of course, the viewer—all make vital contributions toward our understanding of this thing we call art. The more hifalutin the institution, the more rigorously it divides the specialization of labor, as though being good at one thing precludes being good at another. Perhaps, in part, this is why Janice Guy’s own art has remained hidden so long behind her well-established position as an art dealer. By the mid-eighties Janice had fully committed to running a gallery and stopped making photographs altogether. She cofounded Murray Guy in 1998, and for the next two decades established a reputation for championing under-recognized and sometimes difficult work, primarily by women. Her own photographs have almost been lost, like so much of the early history of feminist art, because they were never accorded their due value in the first place. But in 2007 Matthew Higgs included some of Janice’s prints in an exhibition at White Columns entitled Early Work, which featured the work of dealers who had started out as artists.

I was a frequent visitor to Murray Guy. Its outlook did much to broaden the narrow definition of photography I had received in my MFA program in the late nineties. Here I encountered Moyra Davey’s self-portrait video essays and Barbara Probst’s photographs made from multiple perspectives; I read Sharon Hayes’s political protest love letters, and sat on the gallery floor inside Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura. These artists undermined the supposed universality of photographs, calling attention to context rather than form. They stood outside the canon as dictated by John Szarkowski during his tenure as chief photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski had been a visiting lecturer while I was a student and I remember him advising us to never make a self-portrait. He said that a self-portrait was a double negative because every photograph already reflected its maker. Of course, not all reflections are created equally, when you consider the power imbalance that obtains between particular makers. In some cases a self-portrait might serve as a remedy rather than a redundancy.

Considering the pedagogy of Yale in the nineties, it’s hard to imagine what Janice was up against in the seventies, when she studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work looks nothing like the formal landscapes produced by other well-known Becher students such as Thomas Struth or Andreas Gursky. She didn’t use a large-format camera to make allover compositions under uniform lighting conditions. Instead, Janice staged acrobatic contortions on modernist furniture and fixed them as large gelatin silver prints, many of which were hand tinted. Turning the camera on herself was a radical, if not defiant, gesture at the time, one that only a few artists had begun to explore seriously. But unlike Cindy Sherman or Francesca Woodman, Janice didn’t dress up in costumes or reenact hyperbolic psychological scenes. Her pictures were stripped of narrative; the variation in her poses seems more to do with modern dance than personal experience. Most often the photographs are straight on and centered, taxonomically documenting a typology of sequential movements. As such, they share more with the Düsseldorf School than it would first appear. Janice approaches her body with a formal rigor and an emotional distance, as if reimagining the classic Becher water tower as a woman sprawled on a rattan chair.

The genre of nude self-portraiture stands apart as a self-consciously chosen yet perennial rite of passage for young women holding the camera for the first time. I see it again and again, each time I teach Photo I. We, who are constantly told how to look in an endless barrage of glossy smiles and perfect skin, push back by taking ownership of the very tool that’s used to sell our own bodies to ourselves. It’s a little like the karaoke you do alone in your room—if you’re my age, it might be Sade’s “Smooth Operator”—where you take off your shirt and sing to yourself in the mirror, becoming both the singer and the sung to, the lover and the object of desire. Except this isn’t exactly how Janice’s pictures work. She uses photography to map something much more cerebral onto her body, measuring herself through and against herself.

By producing a double of the world, a mirror so closely aligns to the function of a camera that the first photographs were sometimes called mirrors of nature. Early ocular scientists discovered that the eye works on the same principal as the camera obscura: light enters through an aperture and projects an inverted image onto a surface. The understanding that the eye is simply mechanistic, that perception is indiscriminate and blind, deeply troubled René Descartes, who believed that knowing and being were inseparable. As part of his attempt to reconcile the blind eye with self-knowledge, he drew a tiny man behind a diagram of an eye, to make sense of what the eye sees. But in doing so, Descartes multiplied the problem infinitely, because each tiny man would need an even smaller man to stand behind his eyes, and so on like a hall of mirrors. And you have to wonder about the delay: How long would it take for the last tiny man to recognize what he sees? It would be like the thunder you hear some time after lightning strikes.

Janice’s work doubles the double, placing her simultaneously behind and in front of the camera. The distance between the camera and her body, her body and the background, bounces against the mirror like a rubber protractor. In one sequence, two mirrors at a slight angle fragment and triple her body. In another, she includes a print taped to the wall, quadrupling her face. Or else emphasis is placed on the space in between, as in the sequence photographed through the blurred circle of her own fingers, a frame within the frame, and where her hand forms a vertical or horizontal axis, revealing the focal plane by interrupting it. Yet, the real charge remains between the camera and the mirror.

And then again, it’s hard to ignore Janice’s body. Her seductive curves and (hand-tinted) pink nipples, curled around an almost prosthetic camera, don’t easily submit to systems of looking formulated into cold photomechanical calculation. She is no water tower, or rather, she reveals the climatic potential in every water tower. Her body seems to simulate masturbation as it rocks back and forth, recalling Vito Acconci’s architectural intervention, Seedbed. In 1972, Acconci famously hid under a ramp built into the Sonnabend Gallery’s floor and masturbated to the footfalls of visitors above. An excerpt from the transcript he narrated during the performance reads, “I’m turned to myself: turned onto myself: constant contact with my body (rub my body in order to rub it away, rub something away from it, leave that and move on): masturbating: I have to continue all day—cover the floor with sperm, seed the floor.” Acconci’s rubbing away, wearing down, his chafing, and the spilled excess connote institutional critique as much as the pleasure he takes in his body. Similarly, Janice’s work contains a sexual ambivalence. On the one hand her pictures promote an orgasmic female body, but on the other they mitigate desire by revealing the underlying structure, both anatomically and optically.

Janice’s photographs are seldom singular, but advance wavelike, in twos, threes, or longer sequences. Each restless pose replaces the one before it, marking time the way tossing and turning in bed chips away at a sleepless night. The position of Janice’s body moves from twelve o’clock to three o’clock, and upside down, her hair cascading toward six o’clock. Her only prop is a watch banding her wrist, denoting another measure of time. Now, across an abyss of lost time, her work seems to ask us, What took you so long?