Push Me Pull You
James Westcott
Jemima Stehli once asked London’s top critics and curators to her studio to watch her do a striptease for them. They sat in a chair facing a camera, and held a cable release in their increasingly sweaty palms. Stehli’s back was to the camera. The sitter could choose to take the photo whenever they wanted. Usually it revealed either a terrified or a smarmy expression on their face as Stehli stripped in front of them.
In After Helmut Newton’s ‘Here They Come,’ (1999) Stehli recreated Helmut Newton’s famous photo of Sie Kommen, except she put herself in the picture as the stiletto-ed, naked Amazon striding towards the camera. Stehli’s hair and posture resemble almost exactly that of the original model, but in this case it was Stehli who took the picture with a cable release. She was the one in control.
In a new video and photographic work made with a Larry Bell sculpture at the Cultural Center of Belem in Lisbon, Stehli continues to explore the performance and the power relations involved in the act of photography, and here turns her body into a manipulable object. In conversation with NY Arts, Stehli explains the work…
I’m working with a piece from 1969 by Larry Bell. He did intend it to be an interactive work! I’m interested in being placed in history at the moment you exhibit. All my work is a crossover between the studio and the context of the exhibition.
I wanted to work with Larry Bell’s piece because I’m interested in mirrors. This work grew out of two earlier works with mirrors. In After Helmut Newton’s ‘Here They Come,’ the mirror was part of the process: I had to keep looking at it to get it right, to make very minute lighting adjustments, to know the right moment to lift the foot off the floor, to make sure the breasts were in the right positions, the hair. I was losing myself in a work that had already happened. Then there was almost the opposite: in a work called Mirror (2001), I was using the mirror to make the body shape abstract, more active, more sculptural.
My assistant, Lewis Amar, pulls me into various positions around Bell’s sculpture and I take the picture with the cable release in my mouth at the moment the image seems to be completed. Mostly I comply with his instructions. We did two shoots for this work, and in the first one he ran riot a little bit. But then the work itself started to have its own authority. The framework was my work, but I was handing over the formal decision making to another artist.
The piece is a video work that shows him setting up these photographs. It’s very slow and methodical. The video records the entire process, including the moments that are rejected for the still camera. I’m interested in creating a strong formal sculptural presence but then I’m also interested in the process and in things about to fall apart. It’s all about creating this object: the body has to become a convincing object on its own, in a formal way.
When I first started making the pieces I wondered how Lewis would respond to me in this situation: The positions he was putting me are sometimes sexual, sometimes formal. He knows what I’m about, but at the same time there is this kind of range and uncertainty. That confusion in relation to a formal language of a work of art is what I’m interested in. I’m trying to infect the idea of art being separate from your own emotional and sexual chaos.
