By Nathaniel Stein, The SIP Grant Winner, Brown University
A version of this essay originally appeared in Katie Koti, asunder (artist’s book: Providence RI, 2010).
Figure in landscape. As a motif, readily encapsulated. As a relationship, quite a bit more complex – aesthetically constructed, inscribed by ideology, old but perpetually shifting. Looking at Katie Koti’s series asunder (2008-present), one might add another term to that list: volatile.
Koti speaks of her images of human figures in the seasonally changing landscapes of rural Western Massachusetts (in the northeast US) as a way of inviting audiences to engage with bodies and ideas that some may find unfamiliar, or even threatening. The invitation is a generous one, difficult to turn down even if one were so inclined. Koti’s models – who are friends of the photographer – share their bodies with her, and therefore the viewer, with an openness that allows the images to read as cooperative acts rather than the exercise of a voyeuristic gaze. That Koti manages to convey a sense of intimacy between photographer and subject is no small feat given the problematic power relations that attend the photographing of people – especially people who are less clothed, or (one may choose to think) less “normal” than the viewers who will eventually consume the imagery. Yet manage it she does. Asunder invites one to look without feeling implicated in a process of exploitation; difference meets the viewer with the quiet confidence of self-revelation, vulnerable yet unguarded.
Katie Koti, tracks, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
All Images are Courtesy of the Artist
Koti underscores the impression of forthrightness with her preferred mode of display. In gallery installations, asunder is presented as a series of large (30 x 40 inch) archival inkjet prints, hung at eye level at regular intervals and mounted full bleed in white frames which tend to disappear into the wall. No mattes, no glass. No preciousness, no hiding. It’s as if the photograph, too, wants to give its full body – and here is a fascinating tension. For while the depicted bodies and the modes of their display comprise a self-possessed confrontation to conventional sensibilities, the photographs themselves offer all the seductions of aesthetic pleasure. Carefully modulated color is at times lyrical, yet avoids the appearance of overt orchestration (Indeed, color correction and tone adjustments are the only digital interventions Koti makes in the images, which are shot on film, in natural light, with a 4×5 camera). Visual rhymes generate a sense of poetic complimentarity between bodies and the found shapes and arrangements of the environment: a rounded back between mounds of earth (tracks); a naked figure planted among knotted posts (garden); bent limbs echoed by the calligraphic line of a wire (tangle); the corresponding articulated shapes of bodies and tree trunks (divide and fall); three exposed objects punctuating the frozen surface of a pond (thaw). Over and again, Koti finds the human figure in a moment of significant resonance with its surroundings, suggesting the elemental convergences of metaphor. Evocations of tactile experience connect the audience to the sensuousness of the prints, and engender a kind of reciprocity between the bodily sensations of viewer and subject. A diaphanous mesh engulfs reclining bodies (cover), a dry stalk traces the naked arc of a back (nest). One feels the ooze of mud, the pungency of earth and grass, the sun’s prickly warmth, and the bite of ice on one’s own skin.
Katie Koti, garden, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
Katie Koti, tangle, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
Aesthetic seduction is a risky gambit for a photographer who is interested in questioning the construction of what is recognized as normal. In fact (and at the risk of invoking a series of critical commonplaces), I would suggest that many critics trained in the academic milieu since the 1980s would find it difficult not to pose certain questions about this work. Does one think about challenging social, political, or cultural matters standing in front of images like this? Or does one slip into the cosseting, velvety embrace of beauty? Certainly, while the aesthetic seductions of asunder are an effective invitation to look, they also soothe, lull, and naturalize.
If aesthetic allure emerges as a potential problem here, then so too does Koti’s mobilization of landscape. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, landscape is not an innocent backdrop. Rather, it is a genre – a medium, even – with a long history as a mode of encoding cultural ideas about the meaning of the environment and human interactions with it. Landscape is itself a form of seduction, a site in which ideologies are passed off as natural, in which conflicts are hidden and hardships elided. Koti’s pictures are set on a working farm, but they do not deal with issues of labor or ownership in the manner of social realism or concerned documentary. Likewise, Koti’s interest in metaphorical resonances between human figures and the natural environment seems, at first, to pull the imagery away from critical engagement. Metaphor asserts a unity so fundamental that it appears to require no explanation; it works on a poetical order that is near magical, and therefore (ostensibly) outside of history. All of these – aesthetic pleasure, landscape, metaphor – are ways in which socially produced ideas about bodies and their relationships with the natural world can be passed off as timeless and eternal truths, beyond challenge or change.
At times in asunder these modes of visual discourse are mobilized in ways that seem to promulgate ideas as problematic as they are old. Take, for example, passage – an image in which a female-bodied model straddles a wet trench cut into the earth. The model is spattered with mud and wearing earth-soaked clothes, shirt clinging to breasts and abdomen. Beneath open legs, the moisture dripping from her body creates a circular hole in the foamy surface of the liquid in the trench. Beside her, fetal seeds have germinated, their first shoots just breaking through the soil. Behind her, the trench leads to a field in full, green fecundity. There could scarcely be a more blatant visualization of the conflation of woman and earth, of a woman’s body as a moist, fecund substrate, governed by natural cycles and inexorably physical. Passage perhaps has its ideological pair in kindle, in which a fire-toting (hot, dry) male figure crosses over the threshold of a wooden bridge, the title alluding to a kind of quickening. Further, in fall one might understand the title as a reference to the season, but it takes on a more loaded meaning when one considers the content of the image. A fully clothed figure is turned away (in shame?) as another manually penetrates a rent in the first’s coat. Is this autumn in the woods, or the Fall in the Garden?
Katie Koti, divide, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
So, just what is the proposition here? In a series of images purportedly interested in deconstructing cultural mythologies about bodies and identity – especially in relation to gender, Koti draws uncomfortably close to a seductive visual language that instates the received notions it claims to question.
My suggestion is that this is precisely where the critical impetus of asunder succeeds. It does not shy away from those seductions. On the contrary, it plunges the audience into all their visceral power and complexity. All of Koti’s models, variously gendered and embodied, grapple with sensations and ideas of what is natural, in a theater of nature. Viewers are left to struggle, like the figures in the images, with a collision between what we feel and what we feel we know.
The images that comprise asunder are raw, unapologetic confrontations with the difficulties of existing in flesh. Their visual plenty is on the one hand beautiful, but it is also a feast – something primal, animal. There is a tension between aesthetic gentleness and restless violence. Koti’s models are not simply set in a woodland Arcadia. They struggle. The nature in which they exist is replete with references to an archetypal order of cyclical change, reproduction, sexual desire – but it is far from hospitable. Netting ensnares, holding bodies to the earth. A stalk that traces the naked arc of a back also threatens; a nest is not a place of womb-like plentitude, but a hard tangle in which gender ambiguity leaves any conventional symbolization of reproduction unclear. A hunched figure between two mounds of earth (symbolic of breasts, perhaps?) seems bent under some great duress, pounding earth which is itself defenseless against an unseen force that has gashed the foreground. Fence posts that echo a standing figure are also a cage, holding their occupant apart and exposed. Ice bites naked skin, and perhaps either (skin or ice) is but a precarious surface to stand upon. Even figures set in fields of wildflowers are vulnerable. They hide; they are defenseless; they exhibit desire that is experienced as natural to the flesh, yet is unnatural to its cultural inscriptions (perhaps most evidently symbolized in bridle, also strongly present in shaft). Koti’s models are in the grips of a struggle with their surroundings that is also a struggle with the materiality of their own flesh. Their bodies – whether mud encrusted, contorted, bitten by the elements, tattooed, or scarred – are marked by struggle’s traces. It is precisely because this symbolism is generated through an encounter with nature that it feels so primal, so fundamental; that it brings us face to face with a most uncomfortable dilemma.
By now, the culturally constructed character of identity is a familiar theme for many audiences. Whether the late twentieth-century intersection of academic and artistic critiques of identity has actually shifted wider cultural practices is debatable, but certainly, within the ambit of contemporary art, the critique is no longer shocking or even, one could argue, radical. I would argue that Koti poses a significantly more disruptive question: What are we to do with the body itself? After the postmodernist evacuation of identity, after the deconstruction of authenticity, after decentering and the hall of mirrors, after we’ve sworn our allegiance to opposing camps of cultural construction and biological determinism… What then? Bodies are, certainly, sites of cultural inscription. But they are also visceral. Whether or not bodies are ever actually constituted outside of culture, one frequently experiences one’s body as natural, as having its own rhythms, responses, needs, and inertias. On one hand, one wants to know that the physical self is malleable, that one’s body is not the sum of one’s self, that biology does not dictate to us what we are or can be. On the other hand, volitional claims for identity are often grounded in the rhetoric of essence, in the invocation of a truth that is natural – incontrovertible, authentic – but which nature somehow mistranslates. Our experience of and desire for an empirical ground in our bodies persists even while we struggle against the tyrannies of embodiment. It is a profound agony, and Koti forces us to engage with it.
Katie Koti, fall, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
Of course, the nature with which Koti’s models interact in asunder is not simply natural. Presently cut by the plow, on the fringes of cultivation, or full of relics of past human presence, the Western Massachusetts country she works in has been marked by human intervention for many generations. It is always, in a sense, the scene of a struggle or its aftermath. The land, too, is marked by the traces and scars of human intervention. Perhaps asunder offers a path out of the agony here. Perhaps there is another metaphor at work, which asks viewers to compare the constructedness of bodies and the land itself. One could choose to take away the following point: nature is never as natural or timeless as we choose to think. The nature we struggle with is actually an idea of our own making, it is within the realm of the cultural, the historical. If this is so, then we are at an impasse of our own design.
But the images resist such settled resolution. They create the sense of a photographer skillfully yet intuitively overturning stones she does not want to, or perhaps know how to, smooth back into place. All of us – models, photographer, viewers – are implicated in this elemental drama. All of us asunder, turned over and exposed. All of us at the scene of a primal encounter, with notions of what wholeness would be, yet divided from it. What asunder stages is not a resolution but an open-ended conflict, a confrontation with two sirens that are as alluring as the prints themselves: nature and culture. And, how much longer this holds one’s attention than a simple visual seduction would. Yes, all bodies and all nature are mutable; they can be made and unmade. But their malleability does not mean we have tamed them. We intervene but we are not in control. We cannot guarantee ourselves as the products of cultural construction alone, because we are always, also subject to the intransigence of a lived experience of embodiment.
So, confront your seduction. Perhaps it’s the idea that the answers to your questions are rooted outside of culture, in the firm ground of nature. Or perhaps it’s the idea that nature has always been the subject of culture, and that it no longer binds us. Asunder does not allow you to ignore your body. The images hail you on a somatic level, with pleasure and pain. You cannot be a sovereign intellect, a pair of eyes, looking. But neither can you fall into the comfortable habit of myth, which is almost but not quite there to catch you. You are called to confront your own flesh as a site of struggle between the theoretical and the empirical, between ideas and a register of experience that feels undomesticated by ideas. You are looking at ones who got there before you, ones who both intervene in and obey their bodies; who construct and feel. They stand in an agony not all of us are ready to embrace. No wonder we appreciate the company of beauty. Koti exposes us, but she isn’t cruel.
Katie Koti, thaw, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
Katie Koti, cover, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
Katie Koti, nest, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
Katie Koti, passage, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print
