A Fine Disregard for Gender

Abstract

Someone and Something: Photographs 1991-2010 By Linn Underhill Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University Hamilton, New York April 13-July 25, 2010 Linn Underhill is an esteemed art professor at Colgate University, and her first retrospective, Of Someone and Something: Photographs 1991-2010, comprised of seven photographic series and several artist's books, was truly well deserved: her work is intelligent, technically precise, and filled with both pathos and humor. Given Underhill's position at the college, the particularly large scale of some of her photographs, and the overall number of images, Underhill's work should have been the only show in the gallery. As it was, sharing space with documentary photographs of Karachi, Pakistan, the retrospective felt cramped. Additionally, the lack of information regarding photographic process, print type, and dimensions was frustrating, even for a non-formalist. But the artworks' strong thematic concerns, as well as Underhill's succinct didactics (which drew attention to her aims without limiting interpretation), more than made up for those weaknesses. Much of Underhill's early work explored her frustration with gender stereotypes brought on by a hyper-heteronormative culture. Claiming the Gaze (1991-93) is Underhill's successful attempt to rescue the female subject from her typically objectified position within artwork. As Underhill states, strategy here is to refuse the devices traditionally used in commercial photographs to infantilize women--the fragmented body, the averted gaze, the coy smile, the pose of sexual display. (1) Accordingly, Underhill's subjects are shown full length and life size, diverse in body type, ethnicity, and age. Their expressions are intentionally defiant or dismissive and all of them are direct. Indeed, these viragos confront the viewer and make no apologies for their presence. The most arresting--a butch, Buffy Sainte-Marie look-alike, wearing denim cut-offs that pointedly emphasize her labia stands with arms akimbo and a jutting jaw, resembling nothing so much as a female Dirty Harry. One would wager that this photograph alone could stand as a litmus test for sexism. In No Man's Land (1999-2000), Underhill stylistically emulates the elegant, vintage gelatin silver plate images of George Platt Lynes but uses her own body, dressed in drag, as a stand-in for her professed artistic heroes. Viewed in tandem, the two series prove that great art reveals its period and politics, but ultimately transcends its historical moment. Claiming the Gaze, despite its theoretically inspired title and admitted strategy, is great art: heroic portraits of normal people--that verify our humanity. Conversely, No Man's Land seems atavistic, a disquieting reminder of a closeted, if ostensibly more romantic time. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The most tender and empathetic images that address our oppressive gender strictures arc found in the series Tomboy Suite (1996). …