Venus Looks Back
Awol Erizku, Teen Venus, 2012, Digital chromogenic print in custom maple, 22 Karat gold leaf frame, Collection Glenn and Amanda Fuhrmann, NY, Courtesy of the FLAG Art Foundation
It’s the look - the look in her eyes. It’s not a stare but it is direct. It is perceptive, even penetrating. It shows her to be a conscious being capable of scrutinizing the world as the world scrutinizes her. She does not smile. She demonstrates no need to mollify us. She knows she is looking and she knows that she is being looked at. She knows that the camera is the gateway to a subsequent anonymous audience of countless lookers whom she cannot see but knows will be there, looking at her in the future. She knew you would look. She knows that the looking will never stop. It’s part and parcel of the work that day, on those rocks, in that bathing costume, under that sky, in front of those waves.
This photograph was taken nine years ago. Her life has moved on. The look declares that there is a difference between looking and knowing. They are not the same thing. The image and the person are never identical. Yet, that is the Barthesian magic of photography. It freezes a moment, and often an individual, for eternity and allows an unconnected person - you, dear viewer - to make up a story and feel a personal connection with this image, this subject, this scene.
So what draws you in? The composition is balanced even though she stands not in the exact center of it. The harmonious palette of cool blues, greens and grey of the rocks, sea and sky foregrounds her and complements the warmth of her skin, the red in her hair, the gold of her bathing suit, the coral of her nail polish. She is beautiful. She is young. The title, Teen Venus, links her to a tradition of European art going back to the Renaissance that idealized female body as something divine, especially in conjunction with nature. In 1863, Édouard Manet turned the tables on that long and condescending trope with his painting Olympia. That work hinges on the calculating look of a worldly woman, lying naked on a bed. She knows her worth, her place in society and, most importantly, she knows that you are looking at her. There is no place for your voyeurism here. She sees you and stares back, holding your gaze. She is clothed by her knowledge of the rules of the game.
Born in Ethiopia and raised in the South Bronx, Awol Erizku is used to contrasts and hyphenated experiences. His work explores the liminal spaces between cultures, lives and aesthetics. Teen Venus was created as part of a series of work shown in his first solo exhibition, Black and Gold, which was held at the Hasted-Kraeutler Gallery in 2012. It featured staged portraits of African American subjects that updated poses and scenes drawn from iconic images from Western art history and re-contextualized them using everyday environments and contemporary objects. This fusion of European art, vernacular accessories and fetishized artifacts of African culture has become a staple of Erizku’s photography, sculpture, and video installation that counter the absence of people of color in the canon of art history. His work is about agency. Reframing the past in the contemporary world, he creates nuanced spaces and shows how mutable the notions of authenticity and historical norms really are.
In Teen Venus, he depicts his subject in a moment of transition between childhood and adulthood and in a hybrid space suspended between sea, beach and sky. His portrayal of her is not quite of this world. He knows that the sinuous curves of her contrapposto stance links her back to an older artistic tradition, that of ancient Greek sculpture and its illusion of movement through the apparent shifting of weight between a bent and straight leg. He also knows that this pose, the gentle tilt of her head and her luxurious flowing hair recalls Sandro Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus from the mid-1480s. In Botticelli’s work, the new-born goddess stands nude on a giant scallop shell as she emerges, fully grown, from the sea. In it, Botticelli was playing a game of artistic appropriation. By the end of the 15th century, European audiences would not have seen a large standing female nude as the central element in a work of art since the times of the Romans, some ten centuries previous. Botticelli’s pictorial composition was quite simply unprecedented in its time. And his debt to classical art goes further than that. His figure’s stance with her hands covering her breast and pubis is based on a famous type of sculpture from Antiquity: the Venus Pudica, the Venus of Modesty. By these references, Botticelli demonstrated his understanding and engagement with the cutting edge of cultural of his time. The rediscovery of artworks from the ancient world was the excitement of his age. By updating these classical forms, he remade and reactivated an older tradition for an audience of his peers. His work affirms both his public’s erudition and their progress as they looked to the future.
So Erizku’s photography stands firmly within this centuries-long dialogue about the ability of older forms to take on new meaning and speak to new audiences. However, Erizku’s work, by raising the question of who gets to be seen and celebrated in art, heightens that conversation. This is more than a game of reference and counter-reference. This is a challenge to centuries of iconography and interpretation that has ignored and marginalized generations of people of color. His work asks us to look again, see the absences and ask ourselves why we did not look for them before. All of this may be a lot to place on the lovely shoulders of our Teen Venus, but her look is undaunted. She knows what she represents. She understands her place in this discussion about history, beauty, and belonging. This is her stretch of beach and the power of the waves behind her seem at her beck and call. She is asking about our trespass into her realm and her look defines us as the outsider. Too often we forget that the goddess Venus was more than a pretty face and sensuous figure. Time and time again, she proved herself to be more than willing to seek violent and bloody retribution against mortals of both sexes who angered her. You ignored or disparaged her at your peril.
Like her namesake, and despite her young age, Erizku’s Teen Venus is not one to be trifled with. She is looking. She is watching. She is seeing.
– Sara Cochran
