FRANCESCA WOODMAN: WATER SPECIFIED

Abstract

Paul de Man makes a distinction between interpretation and reading as that which finds meaning in a text versus an analysis of the relationship between a text’s rhetorical and grammatical dimensions, respectively. Interpretation, as he defines it, assumes that a text’s meaning is largely transparent and that there is no disharmony between how it means and what it means. Reading, on the other hand, makes no such assumptions: it shows how a text’s meaning cannot be reduced to grammar and seeks out moments of indeterminacy between its literal and figurative meanings. I propose a “reading” of Francesca Woodman’s photographs that demonstrates how the critical, largely feminist, literature on the artist engages in interpretation and thus fails to appreciate the artist’s exploration of photography’s conditions of representation. In the process, I argue that her photographs function like hypograms, a concept of de Man by way of Saussure, or infra-texts. In short, Woodman’s photographs are readings of photography and womanhood and her art defies conventional understandings of artistic identity and agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the potential significance of the mirrors in the self-portraits of women photographers, see Carol Armstrong, “Florence Henri,” 223–229.

2. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Edouard Manet,” 63.

3. Benjamin Buchloh is one of the few critics to comment on the materiality of Woodman’s photographs: “Francesca Woodman,” 45.

4. For a historiographic survey on the artist, see Bryan-Wilson, “Blurs,” 187–195. The two most influential accounts of the artist’s work are Krauss, “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” 161–178; and Solomon-Godeau, “Just Like a Woman,” 238–255. Both Krauss and Solomon-Godeau’s essays originally appeared in the catalog to the artist’s first retrospective held at the Wellesley College Museum of Art in 1986.

5. Solomon-Godeau, “The Woman Who Never Was,” 345.

6. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 61.

7. Starobinski, Les Mots sous les mots, 30–33 & passim. In the original notebooks, a hypogram is simply a name that is repeated and hidden in lines of a given text, whereas an anagram is a word or phrase that can be rearranged into a completely new word or phrase.

8. I have adapted the metaphor of transportation from Paul de Man’s essay on Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” which proved formative to my thinking on Woodman. My use of hypogram stems from his adaptation of the concept rather than from Saussure’s original idea. See his “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” 247–248. Also it should be said that the way de Man used the hypogram is considerably less scientistic and “rigorous” than the Tel Quel Group, who believed that a truly systematic approach to literary texts could be extrapolated from Saussure’s theories. Barthes also makes passing reference to Saussure’s work on anagrams in “The Third Meaning”: he writes, “The obtuse meaning is not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree to its objective existence (but then what is an objective reading?); and if to me it is clear (to me), that is still perhaps (for the moment) by the same ‘aberration’ which compelled the lone and unhappy Saussure to hear in ancient poetry the enigmatic voice of anagram, unoriginated and obsessive” (emphasis in original, 60–61). I speculate that what Barthes is referring to here is not the obtuse meaning, but the fact that meaning proper in the anagrams “is not situated structurally”, which is why Saussure’s project failed.

9. Kristeva, “Towards a Semiology of Paragrams,” 25–49. For an account of how the appropriation of Saussure by the Tel Quel Group differed from the linguist’s original ideas, see Wunderli, “Saussure’s Anagrams and the Analysis of Literary Texts,” 174–185. I think the hypogram has a greater applicability to photography more generally. It could be used to explain how Eugène Atget’s photographs, for example, are able to occupy multiple discursive spaces.

10. Solomon-Godeau, “Just Like a Woman,” 255. Emphasis added.

11. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 3–19. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” 3–21.

12. Armstrong, “Francesca Woodman,” 347–66.

13. Armstrong, “Francesca Woodman,” 366.

14. Solomon-Godeau, “Body Double,” 74.

15. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 75–76.

16. Krauss, “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” 162.

17. Of course there was nothing gender normative about their politics or their respective choices to become artists.

18. Berne, “To Tell the Truth,” 5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harrison Adams

Harrison Adams is a postdoctoral fellow in the Tsinghua University-University of Michigan Society of Fellows. He studies modern and contemporary art and the history of photography, with an emphasis in gender and sexuality. Currently, He is completing a book manuscript titled Photography in the First Person on the art of Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann that examines how these seemingly unrelated artists use affect, especially shame and embarrassment, to constitute and interrogate their viewers.