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| Mommy's Boy. Julie Clarke (2011) Vintage postcard with text; black satin armband with cross, stitched in black upholstery cotton. |
I was immediately attracted to this Vintage 1950s B & W postcard (actual photograph) of a man sitting by a fjord in Lysefjorden, Norge (published by Enerett: Normanns Kunstforlag A.S., Oslo - photographer Arne Normann) because his back is towards the viewer and we cannot see his face. As such, he represents in my mind the loner, or any man who has turned his back on society. He gazes outwards to the distant mountains and is but another object in a landscape dominated by impenetrable and pervasive granite. The braces, which hold up his lederhosen (leather breeches, basically worn by workers for work or leisure wear) forms the letter X, the particular shape of a chromosome. I find the soft, exposed flesh on his back and shoulders fascinating since they form a contrast to the hard, jagged, mountain edge; his partial nakedness a ‘natural’ state of being within the raw environment. His voyeuristic admiration of the scenery together with our voyeuristic objectification of his figure, feminizes him, for his body in this postcard, like that of the female in society has become a commodity, something to be consumed. I discovered this postcard in an opportunity shop not long after I’d heard of the bombing of government buildings and mass shootings of young people on 22 July 2011 in Oslo, Norway by Anders Behring Breivik. Since Breivik was a loner who had withdrawn from society, the postcard, which depicted a solitary man amidst such beauty appeared incongruous to Breivik's display of terror and violence. I could not comprehend why a young man who lived in such a peaceful country could kill seventy-seven of his own people. Part of the reason was given by Breivik in his Manifesto '2083: A European Declaration of Independence'. I've placed a quote from it as text over the postcard. It reads: I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminise me to a certain degree (Anders Behring Breivik). In his manifesto Breivik spoke of his absent father and in one newspaper article he was referred to as a mommy's body. This is my response to Mark McDean’s recent artwork in the Collisions project and his accompanying description that raises issues around the notion of the 'real man' and the 'sissy boy'.
I wonder whether Arne Naess and Anders Breivik might somehow bracket a continuum of contemporary mother worship? Mother Earth and mother me seem somehow relics of fertility misticisms? Or maybe that's a long bow to draw?
ReplyDeleteWell, since Arne Naess was a Norwegian mountaineer and philosopher of deep ecology he was no doubt a worshiper of 'mother earth', but I think Breivik felt that he had become 'soft' by being brought up by his mother (a single parent) - his father almost always absent during his childhood. I was certainly not saying in my artwork that we can draw a correlation between violence and men who have been brought up without their fathers. Mass murders have been brought in in normative and non-normative households. I was interested, as Mark is, in the fact that society makes these divisions and insists on labeling certain behaviors, ie. 'real men' or 'sissy boys'.
ReplyDeleteI thank Clinton Hayden for his observation that the figure in postcard may be aligned with the notion of the Rückenfigur - a person seen from behind, contemplating the view, a devise employed by the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich to encourage the viewer to put themselves in the place of the person viewing the landscape. Particularly noticeable in Friedrich's 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog'
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog
I've done a little more research and I think that the signature on the bottom right hand corner of the postcard 'Normann', is indeed by Arne Normann, the legendary landscape & nature photographer, who shot over 300,000 photos between 1940 & 1990 of fjords and mountains in Norway. He often hiked with 20 kilos of photographic equipment to take his photos. I will probably change photographer unknown to photographer Normann.
ReplyDeleteYet what the photograph is: by authorship, historiography, style, is far less interesting than what it might mean :)
ReplyDeleteAgree! It took on significance because when I was looking through all these old postcards in a box at the op shop this one stood out because of Breivik, but also because I was looking for something that collided in some way with Mark's various artworks that related to disguise & the man in the photo is masked by his lack of face.
ReplyDelete