Approach to fear: Voyeurism

black and white photography

1976

The Object Series 1974-5

black and white photography

Approach to Fear I: Violence- Identify with Aggressor 1976

Approach to Fear: Contamination- Contaminate 1976

colour photography

Approach to Fear: Pain-destruction of Cause 1977

colour photography

2 panels of 4 images

Dialogue with a Rapist 1978

Detail of ten panels with text

A Young Polynesian Considers Cultural Imperialism (before she goes to the disco.)

1981 Detail

Colour Xerox, 2 panel of 10 images

Out takes from Essays on the Alexis Hunter's Approaches to Fear Photographic Narrative sequences series 1974 - 1981

"Hunter wanted to reach an audience used to watching TV programmes and decoding advertising images. She also manipulated the photographs' focus and depth of field in order to invite an involvement on the viewer's part in terms of changes of emotion, awareness and closeness of identification.

Alexis Hunter makes icons of fearlessness for women, metaphors for feminism, for touch, defiance, freely expressed emotion, political consciousness of others. These icons may be art (which is essentially passive) but they depict action of unexpected kinds. In most of her photo-serials Hunter aims for two levels of communication - the overt political message and psychological identification. On both levels, the viewers bring their own lives and feelings to continue the image sequences."

Elizabeth Eastmond: Looking at the photographic narrative sequences now, a good ten years on, their politics are less controversial of course, but their formal strengths and their humour strike me more forcibly. To Lucy Lippard 'fetishism and a hint of S and M (seduction and mystification) lurk just beneath the surface.' She doesn't specify 'punk' but was punk culture significant for some of these works?

Alexis Hunter: I had an immediate sympathy with the punk movement - it was a very grass-roots thing to begin with, a burst of energy from the young people dispossessed and unwanted from the recession, and bands formed out of art school students who felt the fine arts couldn't do enough to change society. There was a mixture of anarchy and vulnerability - the reversal of accepted notions of beauty - that someone with no job, no future, could be gloriously ugly. 'Fashion' was self-deprecatory: wearing of black plastic municipal rubbish bags, safety pins,torn clothing,razor blades. The punk movement and artists came together in the studios at Shad Thames in the London dockyards. Annie Bean's 1973 performance-band The Moodies had a cult following with artists, especially feminists. She would sing in a black rubber diving suit, the other women in the band in pink silk French knickers and vests. The lyrics of punk songs then were very political. By 1976, Annie was holding Warehouse parties at Shad Thames where I heard Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Alexis Hunter in conversation with the writer John Roberts

JR
"By the mid-seventies as analytic conceptualism implodes and many artists return to some form of picture-making, the debate on photography, semiotics and mass culture takes on a vanguard role. Cinema, advertising and TV provide the dominant cultural framework; analysis of the image is attached to a post-Situationist critique of commodification and reification. Along with Victor Burgin, John Hilliard and John Stezaker, your work situates the photographic images in this space. What distinguishes your work, beyond saying the obvious, that it marks out a politics of sexual difference, is that you actually produce a photography which is pleasurable and emotive in popular cultural terms. In your cinematic-type Approaches to Fear series, the burning shoe sequence for example, the effect is dreadful and threatening in a way that was considered deeply suspect at the time. This is because in its symbolic de-positioning of the feminine it mobilised the embodied pleasures of popular culture. As such did you feel that you were including another kind of spectator in the work, not just a female spectator, but a non-specialist one?

AH
One aspect of my popularism was to make images that appealed to the part of the brain that snaps to attention on seeing a fetish - the mother's shoe and fur for instance - and danger - fire, sharp objects, cracks, blood. This part of the brain is not gender-defined, as it processes survival instincts rather than reproductive instincts. The important thing was to get people to look at the work in the first place, those who would be bored by black and white photographs with dense text. It was important to hook them in with violent high-coloured images, as artists did in religious pictures and B-movies. The female viewer could then identify with the hand in the narrative and reach the resolution in the title. I did not believe in preaching to the converted and used all the devices to capture the viewer's attention, even ambiguity and humour.

The sugary sweet colours and soft focus of many of the photographs is a wry acknowledgement of the power of advertising, responsible for perpetuating many of the most harmful and ridiculous myths about who and what we are, or might become. The sweetness of the initial impression is counterbalanced, however, by the harshness of the narrative content that fiercely contradicts the messages of advertising. The aggression in many of the images is often directed inwards to become self-destructive, as an indication of the internal struggle many women experience when they attempt to overcome the female archetypes by which they feel trapped into passive or sedentary roles."

©Gen Doy,Drapery,Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture, 2000, Published by IB Tauris, ISBN 1-86064-538-0

The impressive mixture of aggressiveness and sensuality is typical of Hunter's works of this period. Some of this comes from references to advertisements, which often use women's hands to make us desire commodities, to experience them through touch and possession.

The artist's own comments on Approach to Fear: XIX, refer to the abrupt blocking of the fetishistic process on the viewer's part, by the emergence of the camera's returning gaze, instead of a penis. This caressing of desired objects, or their empty packaging, occurs often in advertisements and especially in TV game shows such as The Price is Right, where the hands of the game-show host's conventionally beautiful male and female assistants touch the prizes in a parody of loving manipulation. The hands in Approach to Fear: XIX also play out a masquerade of femininity, which is then `unmasked' as the decorated/decorative woman with hand make-up and jewels becomes liberated in the final frames by her use of the camera and her emergence as an active subject.

Notes on Alexis Hunter's Photo-Narratives ©Wystan Curnow 1990

Of all Hunter's photo-narratives, Gender Confusion: Incubus/Succubus (1978) seems the most disconcerting. Mice are vermin. Carriers of filth and disease. To find one in the bed! For it to crawl across her naked thighs, its whiskers tickling the skin, for it to nose around her nooks and crannies, looking for its hole. What nightmarish thoughts! How the sallow, jaundiced cast of colour xerox and those ambiguous body closeups induce hallucination! The mouse is an Incubus, a male demon who tries to have sexual intercourse with women while they are asleep. He's a figure of a nightmare.

Hunter has a certain fondness for him, however, for he appears in Landscape Incubus (1986) and more notably in Conflicts of the Psyche - The Struggle Between Ambition and Desire (1984) where the sleeping woman resists him. In actual fact, the figure in Gender Confusion seems neither afraid nor threatened by the demon-mouse; to the contrary, she plays with him, tweaks his tail, as though he were a pet, a sexual toy, another fetish.

Enter the Succubus, its female counterpart, the cat. Looking for an unsuspecting male to violate. The narrative concludes with the woman considering whether or not to let it kill and eat the Incubus. Since she's in control there is no real confusion. Hunter's photo-narratives seem to be about, among other things, how to maintain an erotic sexual identity that is more than a construction of male desire and fear, that must be able to deflect both to be sure of itself.

Alexis Hunter's Photo-Narratives by Sarah Kent© 1978 Hayward Annual Catalogue

In Change: Decisive Action ll for example, a razor blade hacks off long, varnished nails transforming a decorative hand into a functional one. In Solace ll a high heel shoe that restricts the movement of the wearer and cramps her feet is removed, toyed with in a series of fetishistic images and subsequently burned as a symbol of female bondage. This double set of photographs characterizes the ambiguous relationship many women have with the feminine accoutrements, such as high heels, that they wear to conform to a traditional image of female glamour and sexual attraction, and which give them added confidence, yet restrict third freedom of movement and destroy their comfort. These narratives, then, are not simplistic descriptions of a ‘release from bondage’.

Alexis Hunter knows that repressions are not simply external forces acting to inhibit otherwise free personalities, but are absorbed and internalized to build the self-images with which we restrict our own actions to conform to agreed norms of behavior, and which we, in turn, accept as ‘normal’. It is not until one travels abroad that one can fail to see the cultural peculiarity of ones own conditioning.

Infiltration Margaret Richards© 1980

"Occasionally she comes near being a Dadaist, turning the ordinary into nonsense by twists in presentation, switching the picturesque into the banal and then using the overlap to make a point about convention. But as creator of photographic pictures she is nearer to Andre Kertesz, using soft focus or camera angle to achieve strangely haunting images.

Unlike Kertesz, however, her end result is not only evocative beauty, but thought-provoking association. For instance, the second plate in a 16-frame sequence called 'Responsive/Oppressive' is an unforgettable image, nostalgic and tender, as the shadow of a hand touches the shadows of a spray of flowers. We catch its glamour and its flattened pattern on the white tablecloth, much as we catch the glamour of a framed advertisement on the wall of an underground station escalator.

But unlike that commercial bait, this single image gains significance when seen as part of a ritualistic sequence. Initial visual delight changes in mood and meaning as softness turns to solidity and shadow returns to physicality. The title takes on depth from what we see, not the other way around.