Like a lot of little girls, I loved watching women’s gymnastics on television—those figures who looked so familiar until they sprang into action like superheroes, transforming seamlessly into objects of sleek beauty, propelled into the air by the force of their own bodies. I marveled at their determined expressions and the innocent elegance that characterized their attempts, failures, and breathtaking instants of success.
Jo Longhurst’s recent series Other Spaces meditates on the visual culture of competitive gymnastics, in part, as the title suggests, as a way of extending her obsession with perfection beyond the confines of the purely physical.
It’s hard not to think about Other Spaces in relation to her previous series on the British Whippet, The Refusal, which explored the culture of the dogshow and our obsession with grooming the perfect physical specimen. Both derive from personal passions and experiences—Longhurst trained as a gymnast and has two Whippets, one of which was nursing a bandaged wounded leg when I visited her studio, an ironic and poignant show of frailty in relation to the perfectly formed bodies in both series. More significantly, each project speaks to her interest in how specific qualities of perfection are constructed within the narrow confines of particular subcultures. She explores the ways that communities generate social space with altered values and alternative measures for what is ideal as well as for the notion of what constitutes progress and breaks through as exceptional.
Though the first extended exhibition of Other Spaces coincides with the 2012 Olympic games in London, the timing is purely coincidental. Longhurst has been working on the series since 2008, and her long immersion into the visual and historical contexts of this world, and her own evolving ideas about it, have yielded images that are arresting not only for the stunning physicality they expose, but for the layers of psychological, political, and visual structures they imply.
The first work Longhurst made in the series acts not only as a starting point, but as a kind of archeological foundation for both artist and viewer. Titled A-Z, it collects and re-orders a superabundance of professional sports photography of iconic gymnastic moves over ninety years. On one level, it’s epic and monumental, a sweeping thrust of meticulously gathered archival imagery. But there’s a quiet lull to it as well: it requires a sustained attention to detail and unfolds slowly, like an intricate musical arrangement. Splayed out across a wall, it re-casts once-newsworthy images as records of visual and political regimes, of the shifting fads for costume and photographic technique as much as the rolling over of the global centres of power.
The strict course of training for the gymnast is, this work suggests, verging on militant. It calls to mind Michel Foucault’s definition of discipline, which he sees as a political tool for controlling the trajectory and homologous qualities of energy, as ‘the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.’[1] Foucault is of course not talking about gymnasts, but the comparison offers a useful way of intertwining the respective disciplines of the athlete and the photographer in the roles of—even if unconsciously or by proxy—propagandists. ‘Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the “physics” of power, the hold over the body operates according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to the whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees […]. It is a power that seems all the less “corporeal” in that it is more subtly “physical.”’[2] The power of looking in a particular way, the control of the line of vision, can be more commanding—and consequential—than corporeal.
Indeed, Longhurst describes her own recent engagements with gymnastic clubs in language that rings of photojournalist in a military imbed: ‘I was allowed to coexist with them, but I didn’t interfere. My role was primarily that of an observer.’[3] Her observations, her surveillance, though, yielded a conscious attempt at subverting these standardized views by generating images that dislodge the unwavering control of the visual and physical benchmark—the pose, the shot, the precision of gesture usually associated with gymnastic movement.
Take Suspension 1—a form floating, almost weightless, above her peers on the ground behind and below her. She is mid-twisting in a somersault but fully horizontal, her eyes and brow tense in concentration. One manicured hand strays out of the posture, a lone sign of the momentum that brought her here. The circle it seems to form, with thumb and index finger, signals the gestural analogue of perfection. But it’s a moment that would not usually be valued as worthy of documentation—not a significant demonstration of the complexity of the movement. In fact, as Longhurst relates, a glaring imperfection in the eyes of a professional coach.
Unlike The Refusal, in which the immaculate surfaces and repetitive compositions of the photographs reflect the perfect forms and learned behaviours of the animals, here Longhurst confronts us with the garish digital make-up of the photograph, the figure’s bright red nails and the green mat below reflecting the colourful pixels that shade her muscled body. The tilt-a-world perspective is similarly disorienting both for its association with amateur or snapshot aesthetics, and for the sense of immediacy it brings to the scene. Much like the abrupt shift from movement to stillness as a gymnast plants feet to ground after leaping off a beam or tumbling across an expanse, Longhurst deploys a learned and practiced skill: to stop motion and hold a perfect posture.
The image, though, points up a tension that permeates the series, the disparity between what makes a perfect gymnastic movement and what makes a perfect photograph. The decisive moment, for her, is not one that shows an exemplar of perfection, but one that shows something remarkable for its specificity to the instant.
The late, preeminent curator of photography at MoMA, John Szarkowski wrote about perfection in photography in terms of this expression of idiosyncratic imagination. He described the early work of William Eggleston as ‘a concrete kind of fiction, not to be admitted as hard evidence or as the quantifiable data of social scientists.’ ‘As pictures,’ he goes on to say, ‘these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates for the experience they pretend to record, visual analogues for the quality of one life, collectively a paradigm of a private view, a view one would have thought ineffable, described here with clarity, fullness, and elegance’.[4] Perfection, for Szarkowski, was not found in the pinnacle of modernist formal achievement, but instead in a collection of fragments that relate some small sliver of the beauty of lived experience.
All of the work in this series bears a relationship to this divide: the modernist ideal, the perfect posture, and the fragmented body, the awkward reality. Longhurst’s often jarring perspectives evoke Walter Benjamin’s writings about the utopian potential for photography, a medium capable of so much movement, of so many perspectives. Longhurst draws on this idea in the connections she makes to Alexandr Rodchenko and revolutionary capacity inherent in Constructivist philosophy. But how do these new or different perspectives relate to the traditional, largely unchanged gallery spaces and the respective systems they eventually, inevitably, inhabit? How does the larger viewing frame project or subsume them? In his essay on the photographic strategies of the Russian avant-garde, Benjamin Buchloh relates an anecdote in which the Modern’s first Director Alfred Barr visits Rodchenko’s studio in Russia and laments: ‘he has done no painting since 1922, devoting himself to the photographic arts of which he is a master […]. We left after 11 p.m. – an excellent evening, but I must find some painters if possible.’[5] Buchloh ultimately laments the failure of the potential of this new aesthetic: ‘at the cross-section of politically emancipatory productionist aesthetics and the transformation of modernist montage aesthetics into an instrument of mass education and enlightenment, we find not only its immanent transformation into totalitarian propaganda, but also the needs of the ideological apparatus of the culture industry of Western capitalism.’[6]
Longhurst addresses this problem in her varied installation strategies, which butt against the walls and ceilings of the space and interject into the gallery, equating the confines of the white cube with the edges of the competition mat. For the works in Space-Force Construction she employs constructivist-inspired sculptural elements cast in Rodchenko’s Pure Colour palette of red, yellow and blue (now, with age, black), turning the installation itself into a kind of gymnastic feat: images soaring and gliding at varying heights and angles. She may not succeed in subverting the institutional authority of the space, but she points to its limitations, and her endeavours wonder what a different model could yield.
Inherent in the idea of performance, after all, is not only discipline, training, and adherence to boundaries—but, equally, the exhilarating burst of energy that always exceeds those confines in order to generate that single, unrepeatable, cumulative moment of significant action. Control graced by an ability to let go, to give in to perfection. Longhurst takes risks to show us what has been seen; her perfect tense is a leap of faith.
Published in Jo Longhurst I Other Spaces, Cornerhouse/ Ffotogallery Publishing with Mostyn, 2012
[1] Michel Foucault, ‘The Means of Correct Training’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, London: Penguin, 1984. 188.
[2] Foucault, 193.
[3] See Longhurst’s interview with Charlotte Cotton in this publication.
[4] John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976. 14.
[5] Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘From Factura to Photography’, October 30: 1984, 84.
[6] Buchloh, 112.