Rineke Dijkstra at Marian Goodman - Brief Article

Art in America, Jan, 2001 by Aruna D'Souza

In Rineke Dijkstra's show of eight C-prints, all taken in parks in Berlin and Lithuania between 1998 and 2000, and a pair of videos shot at teen dance clubs in Holland and England in 1996-97, children seem at odds with their own bodies as they confront puberty. It is not by chance that, along with adolescents, women who have just given birth often are the subjects of Dijkstra's vision: both represent stages at which the body's most material experience shapes identity in an especially profound way.

With a frankness that recalls German photographers like Thomas Struth, plus something of Diane Arbus's almost cruel objectivity, Dijkstra sets up a scene and then allows her subjects to present themselves in poses of their own choosing. A little girl, aged seven or eight, in Tiergarten, Berlin, July 4, 1999 stands against a tree in a lush green forest setting, staring into the camera with an innocent intensity that matches the photographer's sharp-focused documentary style. The youngster's unaffected confidence and direct gaze is in stark contrast to photographs of young teens, such as the stringy-haired blonde girl in Tiergarten, Berlin, June 27, 1999 who poses in a three-quarter view looking blankly into the middle distance. Her discomfort at this moment of self-display is evidenced in her tightly clenched fists and curled-up toes, an unexpected bit of tension in an otherwise bucolic setting.

For the pair of videos in the back gallery--which were, judging by the crowds, a popular success--Dijkstra asked kids at the Buzzclub in Liverpool and at Mysteryworld in Zaandam if they would like to be filmed. She took them into a studio adjacent to the site, placed them against a blank white wall and suggested different scenarios, to which they would respond by dancing or swaying or bobbing to the generic techno music in the background. We see the teens ricochet between an extreme self-consciousness and an almost embarrassing unself-consciousness. It's hard to say which is worse: the discomfort the viewer feels when one of the oversexualized girls notices the camera and checks herself, recomforming her movements to some notion of female allure (except for the one butch girl in army fatigues and a shaved head, they all seem to have a remarkably similar ideal), or the discomfort felt when one of those same subjects is lost in the music, allowing a too-raw pleasure to be revealed.

We may squirm at witnessing this all-too-public playing out of uncertain identities but are obviously meant to acknowledge our own self-performances through them. And, as the smirk that passes from one future soccer hooligan to another in one of the clips attests, these teens are hardly unaware of the part they play in our entertainment.