The “male gaze” is something that is not like obscenity, in that you know it when you suddenly don’t see it. And that’s what’s striking about walking into the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Avery Court, with “Girl Pictures” by Justine Kurland covering all four walls.
Wall text refers to this as a “fantasy of a world,” but I’d argue that much of it is closer to reality. That’s not to say that teenage girls are living every single image in exactly these ways — now or from 1997-2002 when the series was created — but that more of us can see ourselves in these photographs than most anywhere else in art.
It’s the first time I’ve been able to see something of my own experience reflected back to me on the walls of an art museum. I see nothing of myself – not childhood or coming of age or adulthood – in the way women have been portrayed in Art: not as the saints, the mothers, the whores. Not as the person whose entire world is the indoor, domestic sphere. Not as the person who could have had personality, but is instead flattened as mere object of desire. There are exceptions to those archetypes, those stereotypes, those lazy ways to create women for viewing, but not quite like this.
A thank you to the artist and to museum staff for this treat, this new standard, for what I expect to see when I walk into Avery Court. This is what the space could be.
Those who do not recognize profanity as feminine or as a legitimate form of expression will struggle with this exhibit.
Good.
Let them.
This is also not for those who practice toxic positivity, nor for those who have moldy ideas about how certain activities are gendered.
Although, those folks would have the most to learn from this.
The girls in the pictures are doing what girls actually do, and it feels downright transgressive in the best possible way.
They are pictured climbing over gates and scaling rock ledges alongside a highway. They are smoking, playing cards, giving the finger. One aims a gun. They’re shown lugging, carrying, and holding various animal remains: deer, large bird, an armadillo. They are hiking. Lounging on the beach. They are taking up space. Trespassing. Walking two abreast in the roadway where there are no sidewalks. Camping. Sleeping out under highways.
None of them appear to be striking a pose, though the photographer did engineer these scenes that were shot in several locations from Connecticut to California.
Whether in an urban landscape, desert, or forest, the girls seem to exist only for themselves. It’s their own world, and as such, it feels extra dangerous. It hits back hard against lingering beliefs about how females ought to behave. What is this place, where girls are camping without male hunters or defenders? Where girls exist without chaperones?
It looks a lot like freedom.
Justine Kurland’s “Girl Pictures” will be on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through August 2023. Hartford residents receive free admission to the museum.