It's the first major U.S. Exhibition of the artist's work in two decades; which feels surprising when you register her influence within female self-portraiture, as well as the impact of her body of work within its limited time frame. Woodman had graduated from RISD only one year before her suicide, at the age of 22, in 1981; the photos on display at SFMOMA now, like those in several published monographs of her work, consist of images during her undergraduate MFA (in Rhode Island and study-abroad in Italy), and her one year in New York.
One of the debates in criticism of her work follows whether or not she was a student, still struggling to find a principle or grounding, or if she was a prodigy, who had already found that grounding and almost positively would have expanded it to greater territory. Considering the influence of her work since then, and the fact that whatever mysterious element in her work has since inspired lengthy critical discussion, monographs, and now large-scale exhibits of the type now at SFMOMA, you kind of just imagine she was both.
Woodman's work draws us into dimension that is both intensely personal and obstructed, by the sense of the artist moving in and out of frames, in a universe that she's created and that we're allowed to observe. The sense of capturing while avoiding being witnessed might be the main element that's inspired her followers since then. It's in the way we're brought into her Alice-in-Wonderland universe – the female form lost in cupboards, passing within and without interior landscapes, ever-conscious and ephemeral.
And because space and dimension have such significance in her work, the retrospective now at SFMOMA and soon at Guggenheim are amazing to wander around in. In earlier work, Woodman limited herself to small-prints to allow a sense of intimacy; in her final year at RISD, she created larger works and, in New York, blueprint printing processes on a more expanded scale. You can love her work in print version, but exhibition shows you a better sense of what she was trying to accomplish within scale. There's the small and intimate display of moments in print-books while at RISD, with her blurred presence hidden within architecture, and the larger cyan prints from New York, where the figure fits full-frame.
The photos here are from a series that I particularly love by Woodman, “Some Disordered Interior Geometries.” Of the ones she put together, this was the only artist book published in her lifetime. It's small-capture on printed pages in Italian on geometrics.
Later critical review included “deranged,” “bizarre,” “peculiar,” a “three-way game,” “strange distance,” yet “we are the richer for it." (Which, when you think about it, feels like the necessity/fault of criticism. It brings out concepts that might have been discreet for the viewer, but generalizes awareness instinctive to the artist.)
Woodman never had the chance to respond to that critical view, and maybe that is what makes her work so significant. It was her own interior world, uninterrupted by contextual influence, and years later, remains important as a universe unto its own. It still registers in terms of the impact of space, and her work may have the most impact in how little you can tell (about what that space means to her).
