Articles / Reviews
Women: The Work of Iris Klein
The illusion here unfolds slowly; through Klein’s process, the controlled murkiness of the figure troubles the indexical claim of the photograph and calibrates the narrative to gradually reveal the sham of its constituent elements, vacating the comfortable illusion of familiarity. The viewer may feel slightly uneasy about her/his initial sense of recognition, and unsettled by the dawning knowledge that the illusory form is empty, yet seemed so filled.
In all images of the series, facial features are obscured, and identity emerges only through extrapolation. In some images of the series, even racial identity falls by the wayside, as the reversed prints confuse the positive and negative spaces of the face, body, and environment. One is initially tempted to ask whether the black-and-white Klein-doll is black or white. Is Klein? But as the multi-stable illusion changes state, questions like these are tenderly revealed as projective absurdity: Why did we care?
We might as well ask, like the famous optical illusion, is she a duck or a rabbit?
Her process of printing positive transparencies to produce a harsh (yet ironically gentle) black and white reversal image works as if to underscore the fact that the essentializing idealization of one kind of subject always entails the converse deidealization of another.
Klein's exposure to our/ her desire to be ideal is thus disjoined both from the self (herself) and the ex-posed cultural ideal. This exposure is not purely negative, a simple rejection, but rather it is often lovingly framed in terms of an endearing and somewhat comic failure to approximate an ideal. This is particularly evident in the "Hausschlapfenserie" images. Here the subject sits in an oversized bathrobe, which is suggestively "left" half-open in a way that potentially connotes "erotic photograph" to reveal in spread-eagle position a pair of inconceivably skinny long legs that are attached to a pair of oversized house slippers. The incongruous combination of elements does not elicit out and out laughter, however; rather, the image provokes a knowing, smiling sympathy for the "self"-mis-recognition of the subject.
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