Visual Arts
October 14, 2004
Girls Caught in Market's Tide
by Robin Laurence
Adolescence has always been a charged time for girls, but never
before, Angela Grossmann's recent art suggests, have the early
teen years been so fraught with anxiety, aggression, competitiveness,
and hypersexualized consumerism. Never before have children
been the targets of so many billions of dollars of relentless
advertising through so many zillions of hours of unsupervised
TV-watching. And never before has the path through puberty been
lit by the likes of Britney Spears...
Alpha Girls, Grossmann's series of expressively executed
mixed-media works (combining painted and photographic elements),
grapples with issues such as the "disappearance of childhood"
(the artist has been influenced by Neil Postman's book of the
same name); the premature sexualizing of children and young
adolescents by advertising, popular culture, and the Internet;
and the social alignments--the cliques, friendships, and exclusions--by
which pubescent girls find validation or misery. Her figures
look out at the viewer singly, in pairs, or in apprehensive,
amiable, or fugitive clusters.
Grossmann has often worked with found images and distressed
materials, finding resonance in the wordless history they bring
to her projects. In the past, she has examined themes of war,
imprisonment, and the Holocaust; of identity, anonymity, and
dislocation; and of what she simply calls the human condition.
As the mother of a 13-year-old, she now finds herself reexamining
the adolescent segment of that condition and wondering whether
or not it's possible to shelter kids from the mass-market and
electronic bombardment of inappropriate images and behaviours.
"You've got to now arm them," she said in a recent
interview with the Straight. "It's like going into war."
Alpha Girls includes 13 midsize works on vellum and
two large-scale paintings on stained and wrinkled canvas, cut
from old surveyors' tents. Most of the faces deployed have been
abstracted from class photos of anonymous Victorian schoolgirls
(although a few of the found photos are more modern). Around
these pale, grainy, black-and-white images, Grossmann has rendered
hair, clothing, accessories, and fictional bodies with elongated
legs. She employs scrubby washes and impasto passages of grey,
white, and black, with muddied interjections of pink, taupe,
and burnt sienna, and wavering lines of Day-Glo red.
The individual construction of these images of adolescence parallels
the broader social construction of gender and sexuality, and
the conjoining of sexuality and consumerism. Innocence plays
against knowingness, confrontation against seduction, individuality
against conformity. Budding young bodies are depicted in vulnerable
states of nudity and cover, in various layers of underwear and
diaphanous outerwear, suggesting the ways in which girls and
women internalize the patriarchal agenda and make objects of
themselves. The ghostliness of the faint, sweet faces from the
past butts up against a jarring sense of the contemporary.
Grossmann says that she is not interested in proselytizing,
nor does she intend her work to propose solutions. Her undertaking
here is to provoke thought and feeling, to bring ideas and emotions
to the surface, to struggle toward some "nubbin",
some "essence", some place where truth is purported
to reside.
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Earrings, 2004
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