Marie-Jo Lafontaine at Von Lintel - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2002 by Nancy Princenthal

From Fragonard's ancien regime frolickers to fin de siecle Paris (as personified, for instance, by Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge) to Gilded Age New York (see showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, over whom millionaire Harry K. Thaw killed architect Stanford White) and beyond, the girl on the swing was once an inescapable symbol of sexuality: loose, free, high-flying, fast, as well as innocent, girlish, vulnerable, unattainable. All such precedents are relevant to Marie-Jo Lafontaine's seven-minute black-and-white video installation The Swing.

Projected on either side of a single, freestanding wall installed in the middle of the gallery (in a 1999 Jeu de Paume installation, the footage was shown on a ring of 15 monitors), the video features a young girl flying back and forth, her swing dipping in and out of the frame, or whirling in a tight circle. Head thrown back, long blonde hair whipping around her face, legs pumping, her dress billowing and riding up her thighs, the child (actually, she is an amalgam of three different girls, none older than six) at times looks unmistakably adult, and erotic. At others times, as when her bare feet dangle limply, or when the soundtrack consists only of amplified, heavy breathing, the mood is plainly ominous. When a waltz briefly plays, it shifts to less complicated romanticism; when her little feet hit the ground, running gleefully, there is a breathless joy that again verges on fear. Like all of Lafontaine's work, The Swing was impelled in part by a news story, in this case an appalling wave of pedophilia committed by public officials in Brussels, where the artist lives.

The topical impetus for a group of photographs that accompanied The Swing was the less sensational but nonetheless deeply disturbing (to some) advent of genetically modified crops. Called Lost Paradise (as was this show), the photographs feature opulently enhanced flowers, their colors souped up to impossible shades of red and purple, their natural profusion exaggerated by super-imposition. Vernal and festive but overripe, and as evocative in their way as The Swing, the photos are set in heavy black frames sometimes augmented by painted panels and/or joined, in twos and fours, into vaguely altarpiecelike arrangements.

Some of this may feel a little familiar. Other artists (for example Fischli and Weiss, and L.C. Armstrong) have lately been using similar flower imagery, and photography that takes not-quite-innocent girls as its subject is currently epidemic. But Lafontaine is no newcomer; she has been working with children and young adolescents for years, and has been making video installations since the late 1970s. The complexity of her work distinguishes it from that of many of her peers (and successors), as does its sense of context, both current and historical. The dance-hall era from which the symbolism of The Swing partly derives is Freud's, too, and the associative significance of the flower photos depends, in large measure, on a Freudian reading of the natural world so deeply internalized we hardly notice it. Lafontaine holds our attention long enough, and perplexingly enough, that these are only a few of the generally tacit connections given voice.