Exposition by Nathalie Léger    {Reviewed by THOMAS} What is the relation between an atemporal — or, rather, idiotemporal — work and the temporality — or evanescence — both of its creation and of its reading? In photography, as in literature, as in any of the so-called arts — and here we turn back before proposing a ‘useful’ definition of ‘art’ — it is the relationship between passing and unpassing time that forms the unterlayer of our understanding of the work, and of what, if anything, we can see beyond it, if it can be said to have a beyond, and, as with all relationships, whether in the arts or in society, the first question must always be one of power. Who or what is affected by who or what at the instigation of who or what? Which forces are here promulgated and which forces are resisted? What is revealed and what is — perhaps by that revelation — concealed? And, more interestingly, what is concealed and what is — perhaps by that concealment — revealed? The ostensible subject, so to call it, in any work of art is of relative insignificance to these considerations, and to the mechanisms of representation to which they give rise. Ostensibly concerning a four-decades-long series of photographs taken of the Countess Virginia Oldoini Castiglione by the Parisian society photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson from the 1850s to the 1890s, Exposition reveals Léger's thinking on exposure, concealment and over-exposure, on representation and self-representation, on the politics of the gaze especially when concerning the power or otherwise of women, on the limited and limiting truths of photography, on time and history, and also, half-reluctantly but therefore crucially, on uncomfortable aspects of her own family history (for instance, on a childhood photograph of Léger that shows her face peering through some bushes was taken by her father’s lover, who was aware that Léger was gazing at their dalliance when thinking herself unseen). “They contemplated her beauty the way people enjoyed freak shows,” says Léger of Castiglione. From her youth, through her time as mistress of Napoleon III in Second Empire France, through to her declining years, Castiglione was obsessed with the way in which she was seen and conscious always of controlling her self-representation, directing Pierson in a stupefying series of lavishly staged and costumed photographs, some recreating — faking — key moments in her life. This project, with its vapid and cloying results, is the work of a woman determined at all costs to keep a gaze upon her but to reveal nothing of herself. She appears “at once defiant and imploring,” both monstrous and needy. Her self-representation is not that of Cindy Sherman for the first gaze in Sherman’s photographs is Sherman’s own, whereas for Castiglione the first gaze is that of the passive, male, invisible photographer. There is a tyranny in her command of the gaze of others but also a desperation, an existential insecurity, a sense that the subject is lost to herself and — impossibly — seeks assurance in the response of others to the fake self she presents (and long before instagram, too). Photography, “her only mask”, is what makes her both visible and impossible to be seen. There is nothing to Castiglione below the surface — or at least not as far as we can tell — she has made herself into an object, her so-called “beauty” is a characterlessness, a blandness; she is an object that demands no sympathies other than admiration, if admiration can be considered a sympathy. Léger is, rightly, not interested in Castiglione beyond her photographic project, but she is interested in the spaces, the absences, in which the ungraspable could exist if it did exist (“Like death, and one or two other little things the subject is simply the name for what cannot be spoken.”). If ellipses are a means of removing content from a sentence without altering its meaning, how much content is the greatest amount that can be removed while preserving enough meaning to at least simulate coherence? At what point does the process of ellipsis itself become the meaning? (>>Read my review of Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden here)