Julia Fenton at Mark Woolley - Portland, Ore - Brief Article

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Sue Taylor

In Purity and Danger (1966), anthropologist Mary Douglas analyzed pollution sociologically, showing how taboos express anxieties in the body politic. Preserving social hierarchies, concepts of filth function symbolically; in the caste system, Brahmans represent the thinking head of society and untouchables the lower parts that carry away waste. In her elegant exhibition "Trench," Julia Fenton conducted a Douglas-like inquiry, creating a seductive and confrontational art to ask "whence comes disgust?"

Near the gallery entrance, Fenton hung four framed drawings, each about 5 by 8 inches. These handmade paper rectangles, warping and wafer thin, ranged in color from white to warm brown and were edged in shiny gold. Their delicate beauty was belied by the wall labels' revelation: the lacy sheets were made with breast milk, menstrual blood, urine and feces. With material issuing from the body's secret orifices, Fenton conjured Douglas's descriptions of excremental magic and Georges Bataille's notion of the informe. Theoretical meditations aside, whose excretions were these, one wondered, and how were they collected?

At stake for Fenton is not just the body but the female body as a site of taboo. This emphasis emerged in the installation that provided her exhibition's title. Fenton built three 6-foot cubic frames, each housing a large shallow bowl set in a bed of rice with a black heat lamp suspended above. Each bowl, coated with copper, silver, or gold leaf, contained beeswax to a depth of several inches, with a small trough incised at the center. This vaginal slit held a coagulated purplish residue of human milk and menstrual blood. In the dimly lit gallery, the ensemble gave the impression of a mysterious temple offering, collapsing categories of the reviled and the sacred.

For Fenton the medium doubles as message, from the alchemical charge of precious metals to the ritual significance of rice, used to shower brides with hopes for fecundity and prosperity. If the bloody trench reminds women of Barbara Kruger's admonition that "Your body is a battleground," it also invokes a furrow in the soil that receives the seed, while beeswax implies a honeypot, a common euphemism for female genitals in erotic literature. The menacing lamps suggest the phallic gaze that constructs the female body as abominable, dangerous, and/or desirable. While acknowledging the contradictory nature of this construction, Fenton's installation, with its haunting beauty, seemed to offer a redemptive reading of the body and the base substances that breach its boundaries.