LADY LAZARUS
Walter Cuadagnini
Speaking of photographs of racing horses, Rodin once said 'It is the artist who is struthful and the camera that lies because, in reality; time does not stand still". When Janieta Eyre states that “The media and photography have something in common: they are both more fiction than fact" she is reaffirming Rodin 's reasoning in an up-to-date way. She is also confirming that, despite appearances, she is the heir to a tradition that is far older than is usually realised. In the by now enormous flood of hooks and articles dedicated to the transvestite and misc en scénc practices that have recently swept the world of visual arts, above all photography, their origins have often been forgotten.These are to be found in the practitioners of what might be called artistic photography during its greates period, from Rejlander to Julia Margaret Cameron whose model Mary Hillier was transformed so often into the Virgin Mary as to merit the nickname of Mary Madonna: not bad for faking reality given we are dealing with a modest servant in Cameron's household.
So the roots of a tendency to counterfeit or reinvent reality in a theatrical way are to be found -not just for Pyre but for Sherman, Ontaili and others - within this tradition (and we should not forget that, both at the beginning and at the end of the century, this involved photography's ernulation of painting:
first in order to acquire artistic dignity and later to reaflirni the centrality it had by now gained) Yet if her roots are to be found in this tradition it is also true that Pyre's work is substantially different just as her results are different, above all because in the meantime some very powerful artists have tackled these themes and have provided further areas for exploration: just think of Ralph Fugene Meatyard's fundamental The Family Album af Lucybell Grater or of the early self-portraits of Urs Luthi, even though an abyss separates the two artists (both of whom were, significantly, born at the beginning of the Sixties).
Furthermore Lyre, born in London in the mid-sixties and now working in Canada, has a markedly different sensibility (and perhaps I should also mention here that the apparently realistic images ofjeffwall are also the result of manipulation as well as being staged).
Above all this sensibility of hers has developed froma cool mixture of high and low culture where allusions to the painting of the past are as frequent as those to cartoons, where Alice in Wonderland refers not only to the book by Carroll (one of Cameron's circle of photographers, amongst other things) but to the Walt Disney cartoon film, where Greenaway can mix with Waters' Pink Flamingos with a nod to Fellini's Casanova along the way, and all giving life to a wealtb of images deviated and deviant with respect to the usual pathos of artistic influences. It is not by chance that this also occurs in the most recent series by Tracey Moffatt who crosses Quinta del Sordo with Fantasia.
But having said all that, what can we see in these images by Janieta Lyre, now shown for the first time in Italy? What, basically, makes them different from the flood of images from the nineties which dealt with the theme of the Doppelganger, of cross-dressing, of identity, and of the relationship between fact and fiction, all themes lying at the heart ofjanieta Lyre's poetics? First of all I think we can say that we are dealing with images permeated by a sense of black humour worthy of the best tales of Ambrose Bierce and Jonathan Swift. For the most part her scenes contain a tragic or at least Strongly disturbing element that derives from the figures themselves, obviously involved with physical or psychological problems, from the constant presence of the double (something disturbing in itself), from the repeated topos of a Nindness both searched for and submitted to. But the very excessive presence of these elements transforms the perception of the scene and twists its meaning into a grotesque code, as well as suggesting the presence of an external producer (in the case the artist herself) who, while shooting the scene that she herself has constructed and of which she is the protagonista, also feels its improbability, its lack of sense. It is as though what Janieta Eyre does in these photographs is to side-step tragedy through an excessof awareness, as can be seen in an emblematic work of 1999, Burning Cake: here there is an excess of seriousness in the protagonist's face which conflicts with the banality of the scene and transforms it into a gigantic joke.
On the other hand, and perhaps at the other extreme, these images maintain a mysterious character and suggest something that can never be wholly grasped: and it is not by chance, once again, that the titles refer to ghosts, to Lazarus, to souls. ~. The viewer is placed in a disturbing situation, only partially redeemed by the surreal and macabre humour I have already referred to. This sense of unease is also, if not mainly, created by the setting in which the protagonists enact their play. There are basically two main elements in the scene, one of a highly visible character and the other more subtle but not for this less important. The first is without a doubt the incongruity of the individual components of the interior which are placed together in blatant defiance of any interior designer's ideas of good taste, and perhaps not without an affectionately ironic glance at some of Cecil Beaton's photos from the 50s. So the characters are as over the top as the settings: they are heavily weighted with marks and forms, geometrical layouts are married to improbable Victorian allusions, bad taste cohabits with unexpected refinement, and symbols are superimposed and melt into each other in a complete mirroring between characters and setting.
These are place typified by a horror vacui one more on the limits between uneasiness and joking, these are the showrooms of middle-class kitsch where mirabilia has definitely taken the place of naturalia. The final result - and it could not be otherwise - is one of gigantic non-sense where every interpretation seems to be both legitimate but wrong. And yet if we look with greater attention we can make out less obvious details that might supply us with a means of reading the works which, if not univocal, is at least credible. Just look, for example, at one of the most seemingly banal images of the show, one that is apparently characterised only by the protagonist's unusual makeup, Moking Bobies: at the upper right are three extremely ordinary utensils which, according to thewritten explanation, contain blood, milk, and sperm. The key here perhaps is the panic - so dear to the surrealists - that invades daily reality and transforms in into a dream or nightmare. Wasn't it Breton, after all, who wrote: "La heaut& sera convulsive, on ne sera pas"? In fact close attention shows Lyre's work to be rich in such revealing details which can be read as visual questions or sphinx-like enigmas which only the enlightened (in this case the artist) can decipher.
All this functions, and can only function, by answering to a basic requirement, the single genuine component that these works could not give up without their wh~e edifice crumbling: the equilibrium between invention and verisimilitude.
And once again Janieta Eyre follows two paths in order to arrive at this result: the theatrical character (which, not by chance, David Frankel has stressed as the distinctive trait of Eyre in comparison with Cindy Sherman) is underlined by the presence, either singly or duplicated, of the artist as protagonist in all the scenes. And the realistic, almost documentary character of the works is conveyed by the absolute rigour with which she constructs her scenes, a rigour thata confers on the images their sense of alienated credibility. Or, to use the works of the artist, "My portraits are not self-portraits, they're images from the memories of total strangers. Images in which I hope to see nothing I either recognise or intended. Right now my work involves the accumulation of these impossible memories: an increasingly deliberate and meticulous documenting of an unreality. While discarding my everyday life, I document an invisible one... and so begin to construct an autobiography that depends less on reality than possibility".
The ultimate fascination of these images resides in this record of unreality; of the invisible, realised with all the meticulous care of an alchemist's experiment. They are the latest chapter in those mysteres de la chambre noir that have accompanied photography since its birth. There where ghosts are incarnated without ceasing to be ghosts.