In Room 44 of the National Gallery, London, sitting
quietly is Bathers of Asnieres, 1884, I forgot this was in the collection and
it blew my socks off, like bumping into a major celebrity in the aisles of
Tesco or perhaps Marks and Spencer. I was even more delighted to discover a
little dog, sitting obediently by its owner in the bottom left hand side above
Seurat’s signature. It is barely able to contain its excitement as the boy
makes the sound of the factory whistle in his cupped hands.
In our new age we can empathise with the
irrepressible nature of Seurat’s subjects as they find space to
express their humanity at odds with the encroaching industrial and technical
revolutions.
Bathers are a commonly re-visited theme by artists
and through our social evolution over the centuries since the early
renaissance depictions of privilege, this dogma has been a useful foil to
record the human experience juxtaposed to a changing world. Cezanne and
Renoir obviously are key to the movement towards a re-interpretation of
classism and these modernist interpretations
de-construct the privileged aristocrats dipping their toes into their
private lakes. Modernism and post modernism share this socialistic utopia
bringing everyone into the previously elitist experience and with painting the
original compositions can be literally distorted and re-drawn.
Photographically we are left only with realist
interpretations, some romanticised, commercialised and sexualised like Bruce
Webber’s beautiful perfect boys in ‘Bear Pond on a Gold Day’ and Ryan
McGinley’s carefree youth’s but other artists reflect a more overtly political perspective
as in Seurat’s painting. Boris Mikhailov’s great series ‘Salt Lake, 1986’ reflects
the notion of humanity finding a way to express itself under the most extreme
circumstances. This is the starting point in the eventual defeat of any
oppressive state, it is why any limiting dogma is so painful to endure; it
is not natural.
The Bather motif is an opportunity for
photographers to work with nakedness, particularly away from the
commercial stereotype we have an opportunity to explore the bodies of the
ordinary human beings not narcissistically sculpted to glamorise
the status quo (lovely and addictive as it is) but to celebrate the oppressed
and hidden beauty of everyday humanity normally hidden from view, shamed by the
unachievable perfectionism that sells us Mars Bars, now brightly lit
and brought back into the foreground out of the shadows.
My bathers in Ukraine are brave metaphors for the defeat of the societal introjections; they inspire me by their example but my objectivist approach
also exposes a vulnerability and a sense of humanity under attack that I share
with Rineke Dijkstras’s beach teenagers. Both works are inevitably infected by
the power of Botticelli’s original interpretation of Venus but the Venus in my
work is a boy (Image_1664).
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| Image_1664, Venus as a Boy, from series Bathers © Richard Ansett 2011/IZOLYATSIA |
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| Detail from Image_1664, Venus as a Boy, from series Bathers © Richard Ansett 2011/IZOLYATSIA |
