Rachel Kushner on Nathalie Djurberg

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An offscreen authority figure similarly directs a group of racially mixed supermodel types in New Movements in Fashion, 2006, but here the painted texts--e.g., LOOSEN UPP [sic] A LITTLE and PLEASENT [sic] BEHAVIOUR--seem like fashion-industry norms plus internalized female degradation writ large. The women engage in a series of frantic outfit changes, first donning baby bonnets and sucking pacifiers, then turning from "professional" women to parochial schoolgirls to ballerinas--dolls that Djurberg forces into various stereotyped roles, including not just sex kitten but also punisher and victim, as two are knelt in orange smocks, their heads shaved like the "marked" women of liberated France. Djurberg is clearly sympathetic to the problems of shopper's lust and body-image tyrannies, but unlike, say, Sylvie Fleury or Vanessa Beecroft, she is incisively critical as well.

Djurberg started out as a painter but was never satisfied, she told me, "letting one image stand for itself." On the verge of quitting art altogether, she experimented with animation and realized it solved the problem of singularity ("instead of one image I can have thousands"), foregrounding her interest in action and movement. Yet a relationship to painting seems to linger. The Swing, 2005, Djurberg's most subtle and metaphoric treatment of erotic play, is a reworking of Fragonard's Rococo masterpiece: An enthralled boy pushes a pink-clad, pantalooned girl to and fro. She kicks off her shoe--an obvious fetish object, as Norman Bryson has pointed out, meant to defuse the threat of female nudity. The boy grabs it, clutching it to his face. She leaps off the swing and crawls away--an act that unequivocally breaks the contract on which Fragonard's work hinges, between the boy and his proxy, the viewer, both of whom want a look up the girl's skirt.

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At the end of The Swing, the girl finds herself in a glistening terrain of lumps of bright but putrid colors--chocolaty browns, sickly greens, fuchsia pinks--the basic units or building blocks of Djurberg's trade: plasticine. Is this place the "warehouse" out of which the Rococo tableau took its form? Or is it the logical endpoint to the story, a fantasy space into which the heroine passes because there is no real escape--from the dimensions of a painting, Rococo's tacit significations, or her role as object? Like most fantasies, it's double-edged--candy-colored, but verging on scatological--and its inhabitants won't bend to her will, like the bunnies that blink frostily at her when she summons them. Whether this goopy landscape is some originary material or a make-believe coda to the "real" story of courtship's erotic play and evasions is unclear, but it doesn't matter: By the pragmatic conventions of video display, the piece is shown as a loop, going from beginning to end to beginning--a scenario destined, like people and their compulsions, to keep repeating itself.