Malerie Marder — Controlled Exposure
By Matthew Bourbon
Malerie Marder is an exhibitionist who photographs her naked self, her naked family and her naked friends. Making her first big splash in the groundbreaking exhibition, Another Girl, Another Planet, Marder’s art continues to hold its own on the New York scene. Meanwhile, in her recent exhibition at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Marder displays a sampling of both the photographs that originally garnered her attention, and a more recent video entitled, At Rest. Her continuing conflation of nudity, drama and self-exposure remains a vital and volatile combination.
Upon entering the gallery space, one is immediately confronted by a color-saturated photograph of the naked Marder sisters, who call like sirens from across the room. Standing erect with hands at their sides, the sisters are quickly distinguished by their gaze. Malerie looks mechanically out at the viewer, while her sister examines her with a sideward glance. The exposed state of the sisters standing side by side, posed almost as specimens of early womanhood, suggests the complications of love within a family relationship. Crisp-clear photographs, such as this, are tantalizing, and not only because one is left to examine the unclothed. The undercurrents of psychology within the images keeps one interested beyond the obvious lure of the nudity.
Yet, despite the work’s accomplishments, I can’t help thinking about the domineering control that seems to be displayed in the image. Not only do the photographs take a detailed look at family and friends, but they also showcase Marder’s ability to convince her relatives and lovers to become her subjects. This seems no small feat. Think of the awkwardness of asking your mother or father to pose stark naked for a photo that will be enlarged and exhibited for the world to see. I imagine Marder as some sly and deft Svengali, convincing the people she knows to accept the grandeur of taking their clothes off for her camera. What is interesting, aside from her skills of persuasion, is that Marder appears to orchestrate the people in her photos in much the same manner as she manipulates the formal elements in each frame. Every pose and position feels meticulously considered. There is a kind of hypersensitivity to the nuance of body position. Marder seems to use body arrangement as a means to reveal something of her subjects’ psychology. In fact the numb, almost mannequin, poses make the photos feel slightly creepy. The stasis found in the bodies and the affectless facial expressions are stifling. Further, the sterile rooms in which most of her images are staged reek of emotional distance and anonymity. I would not want to exist in these rooms, especially with these excessively morose-looking people.
Marder’s use of serious facial expressions, statuesque posing and tasteful color, all suggest the influence of traditional painting upon her photographic scenarios. When examining her images one can’t help but notice where the angle of a head is delicately tilted, like some stoic Madonna, or how the throw of a hip is shifted just enough to suggest a kind of burdened sensuality. What fascinates me about the photographs is how contrived and false the images can appear, even as they openly display the reality of peoples’ bodies. This pictorial friction is oddly satisfying and disconcerting. In one image, we see Marder just as she hesitates before kissing her former boyfriend. Both are naked from the waist up and are set off by a wall of glistening red bathroom tile. The image is like a sexed-up version of an early 1980’s album cover by The Cars. The image seems manufactured out of cultural signposts, yet the nudity grounds it in the corporeal. Marder clearly understands the value of exposing the vulnerability of nakedness against the sheer dominance of her aesthetic will. While the photographs deal in subjects that are clearly personal to the artist, the result remains forcefully distant.
Despite the obvious appeal of the photos, the real strength of the show is the video At Rest. In the slightly drawn-out video, Marder explores sleep as the state of being where people are at their most unguarded. Unlike the photographs where everyone poses in ways that reveal a kind of self-consciousness or self-possession, the video takes an opposite approach recording unconscious traits. One still sees the same delicate framing of the bodies, as portrayed in Marder’s earlier photos, but the positions of the figures expose a socially unconstrained relaxation. The sleep she depicts is a deep sleep and thus the implied sleep of death. Essentially, the video tracks various people as they rest. The snapshot-like images appear to randomly move from one person to the next, incorporating a wide range of body types and ages. This cross-section of humanity allows our reading of the work to bounce between the general and the particular. One quickly begins to scan the bodies for all their idiosyncrasies. The pallor of skin, texture of hair, accumulation of freckles, rounded sensuality and ravages of time all become hallmarks within the video, enabling the viewer to transpose one’s own form onto the various somnambulists. Watching people sleep and shuffle about their bed sheets is almost meditative. One’s attention tends to oscillate between observation and identification.
The people are outside of us and serve as actors in a stylized play, yet they are bodies that breath and age as we do. The slowness of Marder’s meditation, however, is slightly counteracted as one realizes that there are temporal shifts within the video. Marder has sped up the normal unfolding of time to create a frantic breathing in a belly, an expanding and shrinking penis or a wobbling and heaving of breasts. There is an almost possessed movement among some of the people portrayed that fluctuates from the stillness of a death mask to the fitful movements approximating some epileptic seizure. It seems rest is fraught with its own set of dramas. Marder uses this adjustment of time to brilliantly and simply highlight the physical quirks of the body.
In our slumber, Marder seems to be saying that we are fully alive, but powerfully inward looking–and perhaps equally separated and connected to everyone else who breathes and sleeps. In the end, what is abundantly clear is that Malerie Marder’s art wrestles with the triumphs and burdens of the body. Her work strives to articulate the body’s ability to imbed within itself the individuality of each person’s psychological will. This willfulness is most readily seen in the youthful protest of one child who will simply not succumb to Marder’s desire to capture her unaware. Lying on her side this young child refuses to sleep, instead staring back at the camera with a mixture of obduracy and curiosity. With a healthy dose of irony, this little girl becomes the symbolic encapsulation of Marder’s own demanding and interested eye.
