Fragmented Desire 2024 by Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio
Fragmented Desire
Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s series Fragmented Desire is an extended self-portrait, both interior and exterior. Its smallest work, I am the living bread depicts what could be an organism’s cell or brain, but is, in fact, Fontaine-Wolf’s mammogram. The title quotes John 6:51, hence the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby, at consecration, the Eucharistic bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ. But it also relates to the maternal function of the breast as nourishment. The salvific value of motherhood conveyed on the Virgin Mary and faith in her virginity (widespread by the C4th CE) saw the proliferation of Marian imagery, including the popular iconography of the Madonna lactans, the breastfeeding Madonna. By linking these concepts, I am the living bread celebrates woman as life-giving force – the image glows beatifically when light hits the aluminium panel – whilst acknowledging the shift, post-pregnancy, in a woman’s relationship with her own breast, hitherto associated with sexual pleasure.
The mammogram’s presentation in isolation from the rest of the body also recalls the attributes of tortured St. Agatha, her excised breasts on a platter which, in turn, might find a contemporary echo in our fear of mastectomy. However, there is also a disturbing, erotic sadomasochism in depictions of saints’s torture. In Giovanni Lanfranco’s painting, St. Peter Healing Agatha (1614), the bleeding gash on the saint’s breast is simultaneously Christ’s side wound and a vulva. This conflation was already evident in the luxurious Prayer Book of Bonne Luxembourg (pre-1349), where the wound was inspired by medieval imagery of the vulva/ vaginal opening and presented amid objects of Christ’s persecution and death, such as the whip, hammer, pliers, nails, and so on. Fontaine-Wolf alludes to it in her own Instruments of Passion. Blue, colour of the divine and of erotic movies, dominates. There’s a cool sensuality at play in the glimpses of bluish nipples and the blue silky fabric in vulvic folds that also points to perceptions of female sexuality as a weapon, capable of inflicting both pain and pleasure.
The pietà (“pity” or “compassion”), was a subject developed in early C14th northern Europe to convey the emotional pain of the Virgin for her dead son. By the Renaissance, Bellini, Perugino, and Michelangelo had created powerful variations of affective piety, laying Christ’s body across his mother’s lap, invoking his birth and death simultaneously. Fontaine-Wolf’s interpretation emphasises this through the inclusion of an ultrasound of her womb. However, in reversing the genders, her Pietà draws attention to the ‘feminine’ aspects of Christ: his vulnerability, softness, meekness, self-sacrifice, suffering, and so forth, qualities historically associated with women. The textures and complex, reflective surfaces of Fontaine-Wolf’s series evoke the high Baroque. Her bodies are sited in an ornate church setting of marble floors and gold candlesticks, yet flesh is stone-pale. These could be sculptures, timeless archetypes. Even her ultrasound looks like marble. The tripartite structure implies an altarpiece, except the wings are not of equal size or of the same format. Again, the bodies are not visible as complete entities, but are overlapping, interrupted, split, by vertical or horizontal velvet strips. Juxtaposed in places by a fleshier pink, these velvet ruptures mimic wounds, or, again, the vulva.
The contrast between the cold, clinical aluminium versus the soft velvet in Fontaine-Wolf’s Pietà, as well as between her sculptural bodies and the non-figurative passages of free-form swirls, speaks to patriarchal archetypes of woman as vessel in both religious and medical discourse versus the lived experiences of women. Rather than presenting religion and medicine as separate belief systems, Fontaine-Wolf underlines their collusion. A fresco from the Cycle of Saint Francis in the Upper Church of the Basilica of Assisi, 1288–1297, for instance, depicts the physician Girolamo verifying St. Francis’s stigmata, thus instructing the believer that there was objective scientific ‘proof’ of the saint’s wounds. Classified and controlled by patriarchal structures, Fontaine-Wolf’s women respond by dissolving into illegible marks that refuse to be contained.
Dolorosa invokes another pictorial representation of the suffering Mary: the mater dolorosa (“Mother of Sorrows”). Traditionally depicted with seven arrows through her heart to symbolise each stab of emotional pain beginning with Simeon’s Prophecy and culminating in the burial of her son, Mary enables the believer to link womb and tomb in a linear narrative. In Fontaine-Wolf’s version, the imagery is much more ambiguous, though the colour blue functions to suggest sorrowful and divine. Tripartite in structure and edged in aluminium, Dolorosa, when read from left to right, becomes increasingly abstract. First, we see Fontaine-Wolf’s textured profile, only legible through the presence of eyelashes in what doubles as the curve of a mirror and/or halo. The central image derives from an X-ray of the artist’s skull, a familiar memento mori motif from earlier series, as well as a reminder that hormonal changes can cause the potential loss of teeth in pregnancy. Meanwhile, at right, there appears to be the continuation of a blue velvet curtain – a nod to David Lynch’s iconic film Blue Velvet (1986) which Michael Atkinson interprets through Freud’s theory of psychic impotence (that is, the condition of the heterosexual male with unresolved sensual and forbidden feelings for his mother that manifest in an inability to desire the woman he loves and to love the woman he desires. This leads to a compartmentalising of women into either the ‘mother’ to be loved, or the ‘whore’ to be debased). Fontaine-Wolf seems to suggest then, that the ideal of the Madonna always exists in a dichotomous relationship with the whore.
Her Pandora’s Box is a case in point. It could be a portable altarolo, a precious object used for private devotion, however, its wings don’t conceal the whole of the central panel which seems to show an abstracted nude. The outer wings, faced with dusty pink velvet, imply something demure. Except, like a striptease, they open to reveal more of that central image: at left, a clearer, headless, crouching woman, and a greenish, fossilised serpent shape. Beside it, a meat carcass. The visible ribs of the meat, combined with serpent and woman, inevitably summon the figure of Eve. Eve as we perceive her now – the seductress responsible for the Fall, punished with the pain of childbirth – dates to a C4th CE re-interpretation of Genesis by St. Augustine and others, if not earlier C2nd BCE Jewish literature. Pandora (“a gift to all,” “all gifted”) is her closest pagan predecessor. According to the myth recounted by Greek poet, Hesiod circa 700 BCE, when Prometheus offends the King of the Gods, Zeus avenges himself by ordering the creation of Pandora, a “beautiful evil,” the first woman in Prometheus’s idyllic world. He also gives her a jar (which becomes reimagined as a box by the Renaissance) that must not be opened. When Pandora succumbs to her curiosity and opens the sealed vessel – another reference to the womb, but also to the vulva (‘box’ in Tudor English slang) – she unwittingly releases vice, sorrow, and disease into the world. As in so many religious and mythological stories, then, it is the mortal woman’s desire for carnal knowledge or procreation that leads to the downfall of humankind and, consequently, to death. In fact, a section of Fontaine-Wolf’s skull x-ray is reflected in the part-mirrored section at the inner right of Pandora’s Box.
This trope of the unruly, ‘fallen’ woman is also implied in Fontaine-Wolf’s What Lies Beneath I which shares a title with a supernatural horror film (2000, director: Robert Zemeckis) about duality and possession. In it, the ‘hysterical’ female protagonist is inhabited by the ghost of her husband’s murdered mistress, whose face appears reflected in place of her own in the bathwater. Both water and mirror imagery recur in the film. Equally, in Fontaine-Wolf’s unique physi-digital process, there is always a complex layering; often, images are doubled, reflected, or reversed. (Pieces of Her is a wittily self-referential, more explicit section of the Pietà). Mirrors feature in many previous works. In What Lies Beneath I, the tripartite structure acts like a dressing table tri-fold mirror, a theatrical, film noir device to express duality or a split persona. Fontaine-Wolf’s head and bare pink shoulders are seen from behind, part of the head obscured by a fold in a blue velvet curtain. She contemplates herself in the mirror: the reflection, split across the central and far right panel, is silhouetted, faceless. Perhaps it isn’t even a reflection but another back view, as in Magritte’s Not To Be Reproduced (1937). Or, again, an ominous film noir shadow. At left, her flesh is blue-toned, her half-head almost reduced to thick, blue brushstrokes; she wears a pearl necklace, bearer of multiple meanings: a symbol of Venus in Antiquity, of extravagance for Pliny, of the Immaculate Conception (that is, the birth of the Virgin Mary) and Christ’s birth for Christians. The woman remains fragmentary, unknowable, elusive. Even more so in the companion piece, What Lies Beneath II where only her interior is portrayed. Both innocent and femme fatale.
Indeed, Fontaine-Wolf’s body is fragmented and dispersed throughout the series, only partially reassembled through the juxtaposition of works in curation: faceless head and torso in Echoes of a Woman, legs in Fragmented Desire, for instance. The diptych format of Echoes of a Woman emphasises the motif of duality. At left, the backward thrust of a woman’s head references Man Ray’s photograph Anatomies, 1929 of his artist lover Lee Miller’s throat, which, isolated in this way, appears phallic. Fontaine-Wolf’s pose also refers to Bernini’s infamous sculptural group, the Ecstasy of St Teresa (1647-52) which depicts the saint at the moment golden arrows pierce her entrails. Though St. Teresa’s account describes this as a spiritual experience (albeit with sadomasochistic undertones), Bernini gives his sculpture an orgasmic facial expression. (As Charles de Brosses, President of Dijon, remarked in the late C18th, “If that is divine love, I too have known it.”) In both these cases, female sexuality is viewed through the same lens of heterosexual male desire; the man literally seeing himself within her as phallus (Man Ray) and imagining her open mouth (Bernini).
At right, the reverse image has literally been defaced, the face and most of the hand erased by a thick snake of blue paint. It recalls, perhaps, Man Ray’s Lee Miller (c. 1930), another image of Miller’s throat, this time seen in profile, which he discarded, but she then printed and claimed authorship of. Furious, Ray retaliated by razor-slashing it and splattering it with blood-red ink. This uncomfortable entwining of sexual desire and violence, of Ray’s attempt to slaughter his muse at the point at which she declared herself artist and owner of her image, all find echo in the undercurrent of foreboding in Fontaine-Wolf’s series. And in the biography of Bernini who ordered the slashing of his inconstant lover and model Costanza’s actual face. Instead of being castigated by Pope Urban VIII, the sculptor was ordered to marry. His wife bore him 11 children.
Fragmented Desire is a free-standing sculpture which takes the form of a two-panel folding screen. Such screens were popular in bedrooms in the C18th and C19th, acting as sexual metaphors in painting, encouraging the viewer to imagine women undressing. The screen has also been viewed as a vulvar object, as evidenced in its use by designer and architect Eileen Gray, for example. Its format – the act of opening to reveal, closing to conceal – also mimics that of the altarpiece where outer panels were typically less magnificent than the interiors. Here, the outer panels are covered in blue velvet – again, doubling as both a reference to a psychosexual Lynchian world and to the spiritual. When approaching the open screen from one angle, the viewer sees herself reflected in a mirrored inner panel – the sole whole image of a body in the series. Yet this totality also breaks down, because seen from a different angle, the mirror reflects the imagery on the other inner panel which is of already-mirrored bare thighs emerging from a cocoon of white silk. The resulting image has the appearance of a surreal, many-legged creature. The action of opening and closing a bi-fold screen, like a parting of all these legs, is itself suggestive. As well as signifying sex, a woman’s open legs might also recall the position for giving birth. Here, she could be giving birth to herself.
The inclusion of fabric within the image in Fragmented Desire is reminiscent of a tradition in Japanese C17th folding screens tagasode byōbu (“whose sleeves?”) in which opulent, discarded clothes were depicted draped over bamboo clothing racks mimicking the real-life custom of displaying silk clothes on lacquered stands as signifiers of wealth. There’s actual cloth in Fontaine-Wolf’s The Serpent’s Mantle: two lengths of black velvet, co-joined in the middle by a rectangular metal section complete with womb ultrasound and mammogram images, hanging over suspended aluminium poles, like Eden’s infamous snake in the tree. At once suggesting the snake’s shed skin (a symbol of renewal) and a priest’s cassock, the mantle is bookended by two metal triangles – a shape recalling the Trinity, the vulva – one showing an eye, the other a mouth. The eye references the observer (Adam and Eve’s are opened through their interaction with the snake; Man Ray excised the photograph of Lee Miller’s for his sculpture Object to Be Destroyed, 1932); the mouth – that which bites the forbidden fruit, that which screams in pain or ecstasy - doubles as orifice and wound. Ultimately this phallic serpent mantle, with all its allusions to interiors and exteriors, to revealing and concealing, to pure and impure, to medicine and religion, functions as a portrait of the slippery nature of desire itself.
Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio, art historian, lecturer, and writer, 2024
