Exhibition review for the Journal of Photography & Culture
Jo Longhurst's Other Spaces at Mostyn coincided with the televisual intensity of the London Olympic Games. It would make sense that her photographs of gymnasts, shot several years earlier at the World Artistic Gymnastic Championships and during her time spent as visiting artist at Heathrow Gymnastic Club, were exhibited to capture something of the Olympic fever. Yet, in all works presented in the clean, fresh spaces of Mostyn, the bodies of gymnasts seem to be under a state of siege rather than triumph. Whether photographed in a state of suspension, caught in the mid-flow of a manoeuvre (Suspension (1) (2009/2012)), or disembodied through the fractured presentation of multiple frames (Pinnacle (2009/2012)), Longhurst's subjects seem to push and struggle against the camera, its rectangular limits, and its historical codifications. Throughout Other Spaces, gymnastic performance comes across as more like a semi-punitive ideological exercise, with photographic representation as its assistant judge and wielding stick.
Competitive gymnastics forms only one of the referential touchstones of Longhurst's work. Plato's Perfect Solids and early twentieth-century design aesthetics are other declared references that underpin Longhurst's approach. The accompanying Other Spaces catalogue contains images as diverse as NASA starscapes, Francis Bacon's Crouching Nude, and Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. Each of these references map various historical attempts to resolve, contain or cope with issues of human contingency and social order. As such, we might consider the gymnastic focus of Other Spaces as a direct continuation of the artist's interests in concepts of perfection. Like Longhurst's previous series The Refusal (2001-2008) that explored the breeding of the English Whippet, the terms of 'perfection' develop not only as a trial of the body that undergoes the rigours of routine practice, specialist diet and genealogical determination. Perfection is also developed as a concept that the camera helps to establish and distil. Whereas a work such as Twelve Dogs, Twelve Bitches from the Refusal series used the camera to present an even- paced typology of pedigree dogs in the tradition of photographic objectivity, the camera in Other Spaces is more angular, motional and fragmentary, making equal reference to traditions of embedded sports photography and modernist figurative abstraction from the early 20th century.
In Suspension (I) (2009/2012), a large-scale vinyl print presented flush and snugly into the smaller of Mostyn's cubic spaces, we see a young woman occupy the top half of the frame; her body seemingly levitating mid-air against a blurred backdrop of other young, practising gymnasts. For those of us unacquainted with the routines and sequences of gymnastic performance, we're given no further indication of what exactly we're seeing, though we might surely assume it's a set manoeuvre. There seems to be no equipment that supports her or anything to suggest the directional dynamic of her movement. Her hands are awkwardly frozen by the camera. Her face, calm and expressionless, betrays nothing of the concentration of her action. How does this end? How did it begin? The suspension of the work's title not only provides the formal image description. The title also carries a sense of the camera's momentary imposition and the demand on viewers to look upon Suspension (I) without necessarily understanding the determining factors of the gymnast's performance.
There are perceptions that linger outside of the frame of this and other of Longhurst's photographs: the eyes of coaches and judges in gym halls that could gaze upon these images and offer marks out of ten. Yet any judgement that follows this specialist knowledge is never imparted or explained in the exhibition. Instead, Longhurst's photographs fall to a more abstract plain of critical evaluation, less concerned about the particulars of one performance or another, and more concerned with the codes and qualifiers of performance in general.
In Pinnacle (2009/2012), we see eleven framed photographs of the legs of gymnasts, all toes pointing skyward, some straighter and seemingly more 'perfect' than others. There is nothing more to identify the gymnast, no context in which to put scale to their movements other than a blurred red dot that we might assume is a lonely auditorium spotlight. Presented together in a tall loosely pyramidal tessellation of abutting frames, Pinnacle approximates something of the physical dynamics contained within each composite photograph: the oblique human form extending itself toward the judgement of perfect order, but also more formally against the measure of the photographic frame and the routine architecture of the gallery space.
Throughout the exhibition, in fact, Longhurst's photographs operate as an address of performance on both sides of the camera's divide: in the subject of gymnastics, but also in the performance of its representation. Each set of work in Other Spaces makes a distinct conceptual proposal and strategy of display. There are works presented at irregular height and attached to sculptural assemblages in Space-Force Construction No.1 (United States of America) (2009/2012), or applied directly to the wall surface as we've already seen in Suspension (I), or more straightforwardly framed behind glass in Peak (2009/2012), a side view portrait of a solitary gymnast performing a move that bends her body double, her hands and feet touching the floor.
In A – Z (2008/2012), with its loose rhythmic grid pattern extending across the gallery wall, there are particulars of presentation that force an awareness of one's own body comportment in the act of spectatorship. Consisting of 215 appropriated photographs back-mounted on thick acrylic, A - Z presents itself as an index of manoeuvres made famous through history by well-known gymnasts. Across its arrangement, we have the development of an entire discipline; a visual vocabulary of 'tucks', 'pikes', and 'straddles'. Sourced from picture library collections such as Hulton Getty Archives, The British Gymnastics Archive, and directly from specialist photographers such as Sing Lo and Volker Minkus, A - Z cuts through the twentieth century and the left and right divides of political history, East and West. We see featured, among others, Alfred Schwarzmann, Nazi solider, and gold-medal gymnast in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. We see the legendary Soviet Olga Korbut, represented here by an image of her performing her signature Korbut Flip. Besides the work's more obvious claims for the alignments between sporting aesthetics and political history, the work comes to emphasise the changing photographic technologies (or perhaps, more accurately, photographic abilities), that demonstrate the development of greater cognition between gymnast and camera in more recent decades.
If the rhythmic grid pattern of the work lends itself appropriately to ideas of historical contingency, then the presentation of photographs behind acrylic is an equally important aspect of the work's address and reflexivity. Causing a perceptual shift in the image when scanning and moving across it, up and down, the act of spectatorship upon these images becomes mobilised, self-aware, and by a small degree continuous with the dynamic of movement represented in each image.
These ideas of contiguity between the dynamic body of practising gymnasts and the dynamic body of spectatorship are perhaps most compounded in Longhurst's Space- Force Construction series of works. These exist as photographs of gymnasts performing mid- air manoeuvres, mounted on frame supports that extend from the gallery wall. Here, both the frame supports and the images seem to conspire in the dynamics of movement. The Space-Force Construction works, presented high and low on the gallery wall, protrude as though to meet the viewer 'half-way', as if intimating and anticipating the viewer's patterns of looking. It is these works more than others that seem to bring us closest to Longhurst's declared interests in early twentieth-century design aesthetics. Although it is Rodchenko and Tatlin that take up the pages of the accompanying catalogue, we could also cite El Lissitsky and a litany of others of the period that sought a 'perceptual dynamic' in their exhibition work. Such an approach was a concession toward the habits of audience behaviour in one sense, but perhaps more importantly predicated on encouraging audiences toward a mode of enlightened self-awareness and political activation. Viewing Longhurst's works causes a more specified jolt of self-awareness than her forebears, however. We can’t help but feel that our behaviours of walking around the gallery space are a little staid and inflexible in front of all these nimble bodies and physical exigencies presented to us.
Longhurst’s referencing of early twentieth-century photo aesthetics does not convincingly carry forward the political momentum of the period. But perhaps it was never meant to. Instead, Other Spaces is best seen as a reflexive study upon the idealised comportments of spectatorship and gymnastic performance, respectively.
Photography and Culture, Volume 6, Number 3. ISSN 1751-4517
Jo Longhurst I Other Spaces exhibition, 16 June – 7 October 2012