Do I See a Woman Crying?
The Weeping Woman. Nine boys and girls are arrayed, all dressed up, in front of the camera, as though posing for a school photograph. They are all wearing classic British school uniforms. Few details indicate their social backgrounds. They tentatively open up a conversation about an artwork, which they are facing. Cautious descriptions of the subject matter, colours and shapes soon give way to freer speculation. They observe that the woman in the picture is crying, with tears running down her face, which is broken up into different colour fields. Some of the children say nothing at all, but their facial expressions and body language reveal that they are following the conversation. Others are more verbal. They think about and try to provide reasons for why the woman is crying. They use a classic museum-education approach that involves interpreting images by describing what they see in their own words, but I get the feeling that the children are talking about themselves, about broken relationships within their own surrounding worlds, perhaps their parents? It strikes me that they are still very young, but that they are already clearly giving expression to the world of which they are a part of, and which is a matter of expectations and ideas linked to identity, male and female. In the accompanying video, Ruth Drawing Picasso, we get to watch as one of the girls intently makes a drawing of the artwork. Judging by the titles and the children’s interpretations, it is Picasso’s famous portrait of the photographer Dora Maar, Weeping Woman, now in the Tate Liverpool, that is the original model for both of Rineke Dijkstra’s video works.
What is it that Dijkstra has the children show us? A kind of portrait of a portrait. The children cause me to see a woman crying, but I also see much more. With a practised hand Dijkstra guides me through a whole complex of questions about identity. In other words, how we as human beings become independent individuals, and how we can exist in the world. She depicts the unpredictable interplay between the individual and the group, in which we all recognize ourselves. She has been portraying people who find themselves in states of transition, with delicacy and great care, since the 1980s. I play with the idea that the people in Dijkstra’s pictures serve as kinds of elusive trickster figures. Figures that occur in many cultures and religions, and who specifically guide people through life’s important transitions. Figures that are themselves also ambiguous and constantly changing. Dijkstra’s subjects specifically stand on the threshold, and are about to take that decisive step from something known into the unknown. Like the photographer herself, at that critical moment when she is about to immortalize a moment by pressing the shutter release. She has portrayed teenagers newly emerged from the sea posing in swimming costumes, mothers who have just given birth with their babies, young Israeli soldiers, and Portuguese matadors who have just faced the bull, to name a few examples that have become emblematic within photographic art. Dijkstra makes the individuals appear totally disarmed before us, as though standing naked before life. Often, they have been photographed full-length or in close-up. The background is pared down, we get a glimpse of ocean and a strip of sandy beach, a shrubbery or a curtain. Extremely few details tell us about the person’s sociological history, but the drama comes all the more to be played out on an existential level. The greatness lies in the simplicity. The figures in the portraits show us that it is life itself that is always in flux, however trying and bewildering it might be.
I find myself once again in front of the nine boys and girls, and it is not at all children that I see there, unaffected and untainted by life. I see conscious individuals, who have perhaps only dressed in the guise of innocent children.
