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Sex. Death. Transcendence. By Linda Troeller.
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Photographs by Linda Troeller
Reviewed by Juliette Melia
TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2024. 96 pp., 48 color / 11 duotone plates, 9x13".
You can’t have missed it. Edgy and eye-catching, Linda Troeller’s frontispiece shows her on all fours, bottom bared, ready to accept a lover doggy-style. Her vulva is facing away from us, and indeed, better leave it to our imagination in our pornified society. Vertical, almond- shaped, glistening in its jungle of dark eyelashes, suggestively resting on the floral bedspread (flowers are the sex organs of plants, Robert Mapplethorpe once famously said), the artist’s eye replaces it, a female gaze in all its subversive reversal.
With its flashlit, snapshot aesthetics, this self-portrait is reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s work about her and her friends’ intimacy, or of Natasha Merritt’s, who uses her own body and sexuality in her very erotic self-portraits. Troeller’s sexual coming-of-age coincided with the sexual revolution, which may explain why she revels in her seductiveness and her sexuality. The fetishism inherent in the kneeling neck brace picture has already been noted by Darcey Steinke. There is also fetishism in the full-bodied bandages picture – who doesn’t want to unwrap this gift – or in the arm’s length photograph of Troeller’s younger self in which she looks at the viewer in a seductively defiant gaze, her neck adorned with a black ribbon tantalizingly contrasting with her white skin.
The high erotic load of Troeller’s self-portrait is heightened by the fact that they are of a woman, by a woman, in a feminist rewriting of the naked-or-nude debate. For celebrity art critic Kenneth Clark in the 1950s, the naked body was huddled and defenseless, associated to embarrassment, and could only become a glorified nude through the mediation of the artist’s talented hand, thanks to which the female body could become balanced, prosperous and confident. The gendered aspect of the process is unmistakable: the embarrassing and embarrassed female body is here to be given a proper artistic form by the male artist. This gendered view is also inherent in Marxist art theorist John Berger’s discussion of the same topic twenty years later: the ideal spectator is still supposed to be male, the image of woman is still aimed at arousing him, although Berger is critical of the power imbalance between the two genders. When Troeller represents herself not only naked but sexualized, she empowers herself and her viewers to take charge of their own representation, even in the vulnerable position that is the desired and desiring body.
Beauty norms, the ageing female body... Death.
The 1746 painting Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty by Pompeo Batoni insists on the horror, the violence, of an old woman (Old Age of course has to be a crone) scratching the face of the allegory of Beauty (a young woman in swathes of pink material in case you pictured a young Adonis). Time, a winged male figure, oldish according to his hair but with a still muscular body, guides the hag’s hand with his imperious finger. The painter’s rendition of old age is probably meant to induce horror: the wrinkled, saggy neck, the sunken eyes, the gnarly fingers standing out against Beauty’s rosy cheek. The latter’s expression, however could be that of Troeller upon discovering her first chin hair. Curious. Unphased. Expectant, even.
Old age and the impending mortality it evokes has often been a taboo in the representation of the female body. But overcoming this taboo is a challenge that Troeller’s nude self-portraits fully take up. In The Naked Nude, Frances Borzello’s analysis of female nudes by female artists, we are reminded that in the 1970s, the second wave of feminism was in its heyday and that female artists consequently wanted to take back control of their representation, mainly by sharing the full subjectivity of their experiences. For Troeller, ageing is part and parcel of this subjective experience, and the representation of her ageing female body is the crux of her work. It brings to mind Clarke’s now outdated reservations about the status of nude photography in art, because of photography’s inability to erase the wrinkles, pouches, and other skin blemishes, that might remind the (male) viewer of the humanity of the (female) model. Those reservation are outdated but, I think, still influential if we consider modern communication, be it only advertisement that still uses a majority of young, white, slim, able- bodied female bodies. I can hear Troeller from here, along with other female photographers representing their or other people’s old age, like Mélanie Blanchot or Elinor Carucci, scoffing at Clarke’s retrograde ideas. Her wrinkles, the stains and folds on her skin, are exactly what make her work interesting, because it shows, through the inexorable advance of the years on her body, her philosophical acceptance of death.
Immanence, the divine, potentiality... Transcendence.
Confidently did I set about explaining the sex and the death present in Linda Troeller’s self- portraits, but transcendence is a whole different ballgame. It is a potent philosophical concept that has been defined and redefined, sometimes contradictorily, by several philosophers, and I worry that my feeble attempts will not do full justice to Heidegger or Jankélévitch’s reasoning. Usually, transcendence is all about (wo)man’s relationship to God, because the divine transcends, that is to say goes beyond, our daily experience. Like sex and ageing, the divine is also part and parcel of Troeller’s work. Often, it seems to me, ironically. The divine magic of the diffracted sunbeam sending a rainbow on her face, also reminiscent of the gay flag. The Madonna on the ring of the hand that is also in a position of chokehold on the neck. The torn holy pictures, with an uncanny similarity in the saint’s and Troeller’s eye colour, making us wonder why there are so few images of older women in religious imagery? Could it be the same logic as in advertising and its perpetual reuse of standardized female bodies and faces? There is also the plaster angel, their forever young face chipped and bruised contrasting with Troeller’s, looking aged but ever so strong and resilient.
The definition of transcendence I cherish is the one I take from Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. For her, you reach transcendence when you are not prevented, by society, others, yourself even, to reach your full potential. You study, love, create, laugh, travel, whatever you fancy, as much as you can or want, and the results are fulfilling for you. I feel that this aspect of transcendence corresponds with Troeller’s self-portraits: not the social norms and taboos, nor personal shame or guilt, could prevent her from offering us this beautiful trajectory of a woman living, loving, and ageing, on her own terms.
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Juliette Melia is a French lecturer and a researcher. She teaches English Communication at la Sorbonne and the history of American art at the ICP in Paris. Her writings mainly focus on the representation of minorities in photography. What matters to her is when an artist pushes the boundaries of what was, so far, accepted as a proper subject for art.