Hysteria Still Exercises Its Primordial Force
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday February 9, 1989
"Now, don't get hysterical," is an admonition usually spoken by a man to a woman, often with a hint of fear in the voice. Female hysteria has been pathologised in psychiatry, eroticised in horror movies like The Exorcist, and made sublime in renaissance painting.
It has been an unspeakable state of being which has both repelled and attracted various "masters", from scientific investigators to voyeuristic spectators.
The image of female hysteria is surely one of the most powerful in our culture. As a mode of pre-linguistic expression, and as an alibi for the historical oppression of women within various controlling disciplines, it has become a central figure in recent feminism.
In Anne Ferran's photographs, states of ecstatic abandon or hysterical supplication are deliberately reenacted. Her work makes reference to the histories of medicine, religion and art, all of which have produced hysteria as an affliction somehow symptomatic of femininity itself.
The images are restagings of photographs originally taken in a Paris hospital by a pioneer psychologist over a century ago. Although they were originally cold, scientific evidence, their age and unscientific softness gave them an unmistakable "aura" for Ferran.
Her recreations acutely transmit this feeling of both immediate presence and muffled distance. The tissued surfaces of the photographs modulate the clarity of the images in damp blotches, giving them an almost pictorialist tactility.
The virginal white smocks and crumpled bed sheets of her "actors" mediate between the coldness of the public clinic and the warmth of the private bedroom. Their poses - of voluptuous abandon or foetal protection, with heads thrown back or hands clasped, while eyes roll or mouths gape - recall religious ecstasy, sexual convulsion and traumatic collapse all at once.
Yet they never indulge in melodrama or easy expressionism. The multiple photographs are presented in clean grids, which become emblematic of scientific scrutiny, while also prompting the cool detachment of the traditional viewer of modern art.
Ferran presents us with these dangerous images "held in suspension". Suspended between the history of medicine and the history of art, between the order of the grid and the mutability of the body, and between the gaze of the viewer and the sightlessness of the hysteric, her photographs become images of perpetual modulation.
They can't be pinned down, they can't be ascribed, they can't be interpreted, yet in their illusiveness they speak of long histories and deep memories.
Martyn Jolly is a photographer and writer.
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald