Suzanne Bocanegra has filled the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia with tongue-in-cheek meditations on the nature of womanhood in an exhibition titled Poorly Watched Girls. The title derives from 18th c. French ballet La Fille mal gardée about a young girl who manages to evade her mother’s gaze to pursue an unsanctioned love affair. Bocanegra’s girls are often invoked presences rather than actual people, for example in the costumed mannequins of La Fille (pictured above), which conceptually restages the inspirational ballet, or in photographs of Catholic nuns (pictured below) in Dialogue of the Carmelites. The highlight of the exhibition for me is Valley, featuring simultaneous facing projections of women mimicking an off-kilter Judy Garland. Posing women in many guises, and many situations: romantic, spiritual, or otherwise, Bocanegra suggests the unstable and circumstantial nature of the female condition, something that can be created or discarded, not unlike a costume.
Suzanne Bocanegra, detail,
Dialogue of the Carmelites, 2018
Dialogue of the Carmelites, 2018
If La Fille is deliberately and campily theatrical in its plays on costumes and stage sets, the installation Dialogue of the Carmelites creates a more contemplative, intimate atmosphere. Dialogue of the Carmelites is a 20th c. opera, which in Bocanegra’s hands transforms into an installation of book pages from the 1955 edition of Guide to the Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States. Bocanegra has embroidered the pages, causing the nuns in their orders’ habits to look even more alien. A sound installation haunts the room with the phrase “when I am alone.”
Valley recalls two different kinds of valleys: the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, for which Judy Garland did the awkward screen test that is recreated here by different actors, and the uncanny valley. Garland’s screen test is notable because of the deeply uncomfortable way she inhabits the space, twitching and laughing awkwardly as she models four outfits. She was later fired from the film. By this point in her life, the child star had become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and the screen test happened only a couple years before Garland overdosed and died at the age of 47. Valley sets eight projections facing each other down a long room, with benches in the middle for the viewer to engage with the different clips.
Bocanegra brings together creative woman from across the arts to mimic the unfortunate screen test: visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and Joan Jonas, choreographer Deborah Hay, actor Kate Valk, poet Anne Carson, dancer Wendy Whelan, singer Alicia Hall Moran, and writer Tanya Selvaratnam. Chosen by Bocanegra as “strong women artists,” they act out Garland’s wardrobe test convincingly to the last second and detail, each modeling the outfits that Garland wore (and which were recreated by Bocanegra in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop). It places these strong women artists in the vulnerable position that Garland had found herself. The uncanny valley is often cited as the unsettling feeling one gets when AI veers too close to the human. Here eight shining simulacra of Judy Garland are similarly unsettling in the close way that their gestures echo each other as well as Garland. Bocanegra has created a hall-of-mirrors effect as we consider the slippery, insubstantial projections and their tenuous relation to the original subject, who for most people exists, then as now, mainly on the silver screen. Garland, like her impersonators, was also putting on a guise for the camera, albeit with hints as to the strain it caused her.
Each of these installations, as well as a fourth work on view (Lemonade, Roses, Satchel) stems from a specific touchstone full of rich associations and with its own storyline. Moving easily through medium and with beautiful attention to textural details, Bocanegra provides a provocative, heart-felt, yet light consideration of what it means to be a girl, in culture. The exhibition Poorly Watched Girls is on view through February 17 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
