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Walking The Line
Intro by Peter Weiermair, 1992
Bruno Gmunder Verlag
ISBN 3-92444163-82-0
Review by James Yood
Joe Ziolkowski's figures, tautly framed in empty space, obey a choreography that stems not from the formalized codex of ballet or pantomime, nor that of sportive gesture. Instead, they display a need for expression that is more restrained and lyrical than exalted and emotional and that appears as authentic self expression. This nakedness draws us indeed towards the bodies themselves, but the situations are bestowed with something timeless, something elementary. The figures are athletically youthful, like those of a frieze, yet are not exaggerated or exotic sculptures. Almost puritanically the viewers concentration is focused on the present body in it's entirety. This allows the viewer an identification - although one without clues to time and space.
Joe Ziolkowski's work mirrors a richness of feelings. It is speechless, physical art, directed at signal-like gestures and elementary poses. In a contemporary landscape of voyeurism, it enables a clear vision of an eroticism that is determined by feelings, rather than sexual passion.
In involving himself constantly in his works - " I am open - I put myself on the line all the time " - Ziolkowski's intention is to objectify personal experience and emotion, not to articulate fantasies. Though the models move almost as if in a dream state, the photographs can't be categorized in a surreal context. Ziolkowski is aware of the history of art and, most of all, the history of photography as art. He is, however, not interested in the mise-en-scene, the beautiful gesture or the bodily arabesque. His work possesses a fundamental conceptual character and has a purpose of provoking debate. His theme is the psychic condition of people, which he displays allegorically, sometimes emphasized by a title.
Photography has a tool-like character, becoming a place of moral theatre. Ziolkowski's intention is not photographic aestheticism or the celebration of youthful, beautiful bodies; rather, he expresses a visual metaphor of the elementary human conditions. So when the artist makes his figures float, or hang down from the frame, this is not to empty his photographs of content or to make them works of pure form, as Georg Baselitz has undertaken. For Ziolkowski, this suspension expresses a state of psyche.
The pictures suit themselves to the power of objectification; they recall in their exaltation of the ideal, and moreover in their composition, a classical tradition. One is bound to be reminded of Attic vase painting, the classicism of John Flaxman or the neo-classicistic linear drawings of Picasso or Cocteau. The figures' contours, and most of all the black-white spacial contrast, intensified by a light which further delineates the bodily outlines, play a supporting role in their expressive quality. Ziolkowski does not isolate the bodies, but makes them bearers of a sensual self-affirmation, with a subsequent claim to the right of communication. Contrary to George Platt Lynes, whose nudes act upon a stage of desire, these nudes are accessible. They are not an expression of aestheticism, but are articulations of erotic yearning coupled with moral circumstance.
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