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ARTFORUM - September 1994
Chicago
Joe Ziolkowski
Space Gallery
Review by James Yood
For his "Numbered Series," 1988, Joe Ziolkowski suspended more
than 100 people upside down against a blank backdrop in his studio, photographing
their nude torsos from the navel up. With this simple 180 degree reversal,
Ziolkowski managed to blur individuality, emphasizing instead a kind of
psychic abandon. Of the 20 pieces from this series shown here, only one
depicted an individual struggling against his predicament, trying to pull
his body upward to fight against the doped-up state this position usually
induces. The other 19 participants seemed to accept being turned upside
down more or less benignly; in each, the subject closed his or her eyes,
lost on a dizzying inward journey of blissful oblivion. Ziolkowski clearly
allows his subjects to hang batlike for awhile, and, as their upper bodies
become engorged with fluid, he capture the stunned vertigo-the moment when
resistance shifts to surrender, when identity melts away and is replaced
by something very peaceful but exceedingly very vulnerable.
While a few of Ziolkowski's subjects' arms hung limply or were held straight
out in a flying or cruciform gesture, most were wrapped around heads or
torsos, hugging their bodies in subconsciously indolent caresses. These
works seemed to invert Michelangelo's Ignudi or his Dying Slave. Abandoned
to an extreme physical state and a personal and self-induced intoxication,
these figures convey a heady sensuality that makes distinctions of race,
age, or even gender secondary. Ziolkowski celebrates the beauty and the
dictates of the body even when-especially when-its psyche is absent or confused.
In many ways this extraordinary and evocative series has begun to transcend
its original motivations. Ziolkowski began taking these photographs as
a response to one of the more egregious manifestations of the fear surrounding
AIDS in the late '80s. In 1988 the Illinois General Assembly passed a statute
requiring couples planning to marry to be screened for HIV; 80,000 such
tests were performed before the law was overturned, with 17 people testing
positive. Ziolkowski saw metaphoric possibilities in this state-sponsored
intervention. The disconnection experienced by many of Ziolkowski's friends-the
period of emotional drifting between taking the test and receiving the results-originally
informed this series of photographs, but the whirling bodies now suggest
an unexpected path toward a strange, personal freedom.
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