Fantastic Trauma. - Review - book review

Afterimage, Sept, 2000 by Martha Langford

Diana Thorneycroft: The body, its lesson and camouflage

edited by Meeka Walsh with contributions by Mary Ann Caws, Robert Enright and Vicki Goldberg

Winnipeg: Bain & Cox, 2000

Since its emergence in the late 1980s, Diana Thorneycroft's imagery has been called many things: autobiography, self-portraiture, performance, photo-therapy, surrealism and grotesque. Interestingly though, it has rarely been discussed in terms of raw eroticism, though sexual allusions abound and Thorneycroft generally appears naked before the camera. The title of her first major publication, Diana Thorneycroft: The body, its lesson and camouflage, effectively captures the reasons for this since Thorneycroft's self-presentation is camouflaged, literally screened by masks, props and photographic techniques that encourage speculation about her motives and allow her work to be ascribed to different genres.

126 pp./$42.00 (hb)

Like Pierre Molinier, Cindy Sherman and Joel-Peter Witkin, Thorneycroft works within a space of productive disturbance. The question that comes up again and again is, why? Is she simply the channeler of modern anxiety about the body, or is she exploring her own dark history? And then a second question arises, does it matter? Can we not do as the artist purports to do, enter this arena blind? The book has been shaped by these questions and endeavors to answer them, although it has other equally important functions, namely to disseminate the work and honor it. This has been done admirably well in an elegant publication designed by Susan Chafe and edited by Meeka Walsh. Over 40 works conquer the difficulties of reproducing prints that are large, dark and detailed.

Thorneycroft, who studied and now lives in Winnipeg, is well known in Canada--the list of venues for the exhibition of "Diana Thorneycroft: The body..." attests to the interest that museums and galleries have taken in her photographic work. She also does sculptural installations, performances and video that are complementary to her photographs, but far more tempestuous within the teapot of Canadian cultural controversy, grist for the mill of milktoast malcontents and idle journalists. The book does not deal directly with these issues but there are references, especially in Robert Enright's interview, to a kind of notoriety.

Outside Canada, Thorneycroft has had solo exhibitions in Boston, Moscow and Edinburgh. A series of photographs from the early '90s, "a slow remembering," was featured at the 1995 Fotofeis. British critics, notably Marsha Meskimmon and Chris Townsend, have since borne down on the work within the framework of the body (Meskimmons object-body "monstrous and grotesque," Townsend simply "vile"). Some American readers will remember Thorneycroft's Untitled (Cloven Hoof Mask) (1997) which graced the cover of exposure (Vol. 31, no. 3/4), "Essays on the Photographic Grotesque," which I edited with M. A. Greenstein.

This first book therefore represents a decade of production and reception. Thorneycroft is a woman in her mid-forties who hit her stride later in life than artists such as Sherman or Francesca Woodman, to whom she is sometimes compared. Thorneycroft started with a fire in her belly, though her early ambition was not art-world fame, but a rather desperate desire to get her demons into pictures. She is still in touch with that need, though the experience of showing these versions of herself to others has complicated her program considerably.

Thorneycroft's photographs are all tableaux, the majority created in her studio with backdrops, furniture and props. Rich blacks, billowing highlights, soft passages and spatial disorientation result from the lighting, which consists of a hand-held flashlight. Through trial and error, she has learned to paint herself and her surroundings with light while posing in the dark. She now involves an assistant who understands what she wants, though she still ascribes the results to chance.

The compositions are dense with recurrent motifs--dolls (some mutilated), masks (photographic, medical or military, or combinations thereof, with added animal parts), obsolete restraining devices, prostheses (breasts, penises or snakes), decomposing organic material (animals, leaves) and stuffed animals. Thorneycroft is a great collector of specimens and hardware; her fabricated masks are all about mutation, creatures from the borderlands between the barracks and the forest. The masks cover her face, blindfold her or force their way into her mouth. The photographic masks of the early '90s carry the features of her parents and siblings; the relationship is patently uneasy, though the androgyny opens up a space for dialogue--indeed, the mouth of the protagonist is not covered. The later sculptural masks are more sinister, suggesting violence, specifically violation of the female body through the mouth. Taking these performances and attributes as evidence has fermented speculation that Thorneycroft was abused a s a child and that she is working through recovered memories.