Jeanne Dunning
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring the work of photographer Jeanne Dunning. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (January 1995).
Exhibit at the Feature Gallery, New York
Jeanne Dunning tends to take two kinds of photographs: at first glance, you might characterize them as pictures that either defamiliarize the familiar or familiarize the unfamiliar. The former present a thing so that it suggests something else, as in Dunning's well-known pictures of anus-like fruits, or a recent photograph called The Hole (all works 1994), a tight close-up of a cupped hand that takes on the appearance of some sort of sexual orifice; the latter present an obviously manufactured bodily "deformity" clearly and unambiguously, as in The Extra Nipple, a photograph of a woman sticking her tongue out to reveal a vestigial nipple on its surface. However, it's important not to infer from this that Dunning is merely some dilettante surrealist. Formally, her photos are never ambiguous or obscure: solidly posed or composed, clearly lit, perfectly focused, the pictures are the very model of photographic correctness. When an object appears to read as something unfamiliar, it's not because Dunning obscures it — as any good coupeur de nattes understands, her early pictures of the backs of women's heads were not pictures of the absences of faces — but rather because she draws out a family of traits in a thing which we are accustomed to recognize by an entirely different set of traits. We think of fruit primarily as something to eat, not to fuck, and yet men do masturbate with cored apples, and women do wank off with cucumbers. When Dunning brings out the orifice in a piece of fruit, she's presenting a sort of botanical sexuality that, unlike vegetarianism, doesn't even have a proper name. Similarly, we still recognize the hand in The Hole, and yet Dunning has depicted it not as a thing that grasps a brush or points in a direction, but rather as an orifice, one suggestively sexual in nature — and of course, the hand is a sexual orifice for some people.
When Dunning's pictures defamiliarize, it's by highlighting "abnormal" potentials, and when they familiarize, it's by adding an anomalous potential to a seemingly "normal" situation — an attractive girl with a nipple on her tongue. In either case, she draws out the perverse in every picture with all the singularity of intent that Poe recommends for a good short story. It's practically monomaniacal, the way each work focuses on some defect. In The Toe-Sucking Video, the idée fixe is no longer a thing but a process, the abnormality no longer something one has but something one does. A woman laboriously and obsessively sucks on the big toe of her right foot, and it's sort of sexy but arduous to watch, like giving head to someone who can't come. Obviously the work has multiple connotations: it calls to mind oral sex, foot fetishism, thumb-sucking, masturbation, and all manner of pseudo-Freudian exegesis. Nevertheless, it is not reducible to any one of these meanings. It is first and foremost self-directed toe-sucking — a specialty which, like that sexuality that directs itself toward fruits and vegetables, doesn't even have a name. In the end, perhaps it's symptomatic of Dunning's work as a whole: she's as much a photographer of the nameless as of the anomalous.
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