FIGURE 32.1 Untitled. © Missy Wolf
CHAPTER 32
Dirty Jobs
THE ALL-AMERICAN backyard barbeque is often portrayed as a quintessentially male pursuit. This may be linked to several factors. First and foremost the indoor kitchen is relatively safe. Whatever is going to catch on fire, set off every last one of the smoke detectors in the house, and turn the floor into a permanent grease pit is safely occurring outside.
Of course the lid to the barbeque may have to be retrieved from a neighbor's yard, lawn turf replaced in large sections, and a home delivery takeout on standby if the meal ends up utterly cremated. All this is more fun than it sounds. The chef is likely to be somewhat hammered by the several beers that traditionally accompany such culinary endeavors and then there are all the toys; heaps of charcoal that can be set aflame with lighter fluid; pressurized propane tanks made to hiss before what is basically liquid napalm takes its toll on the food. In that sense this could be considered to be another American spectator sport.
All of this is performed with great bravado, and the women who are mostly far more experienced and better cooks, bear witness to these debacles with the indulgence one might show a toddler who is teething on the tail of the good-natured family dog. There is always hope. If nobody ends up in the hospital, and we're not talking trivialities like food poisoning, everyone generally considers such cookouts a success, particularly if their gums aren't subsequently bleeding and any previous dental work is still in place.
Wolf's parody admirably lays waste to such institutionalized machismo with devastating effect (Figure 32.1).
By glamourizing a woman who seemingly and, alarmingly, suffers from the same delightful dysfunctionality as many of her traditionally male counterparts when it comes to outdoor cooking, Wolf takes her discourse in an entirely different direction.
What Are We Looking at?
Not only is the charcoal on the ground, the woman is lying on top of it with no distress and it appears to be partially burning. Given that the whole image is staged on crumpled photographic backdrop paper, we are not meant to see this as anything other than a staged setup. It is not meant to be real. So how can we say that Wolf is satirizing a macho activity when in fact she depicts a woman in the context of a barbeque debacle, as opposed to a man?
We haven't yet covered the oversized utensils that are part of the grilling ritual. Forks that might satisfy Poseidon, spatulas the size of small frying pans, and tongs that could be used as forceps to deliver a baby, they are the intermediaries between the hands and the flame.
In Wolf's work the only tools in use are the forceps and they are separating something other than a baby from the womb. The mischievous grin on the model's face in her festive brassiere does not divert us from the fact that she is going to work on the hot dogs. The concentration of them in the vicinity of her own womb and the vice grip on one caught in the serrated tongs suggests frivolous emasculation.
How Can the Image Be Interpreted?
Hot dogs all look the same. Is Wolf implying that men are all the same? Incompetent cooks and self-absorbed lovers? Maybe. Is she asking in this comedy: what if the roles were reversed? Do you really want a sweaty, barbeque-briquette covered, beer-soaked significant other near you? And then a darkness descends that is so terrible and unforgivable that we are reminded that comedy has always been used to speak truth to power, from court jesters to their contemporary equivalents, Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher, among others. All is funny until it is not. This is not the velvet hammer we started off with. This is the sledgehammer that only comedy delivers. The least anticipated force hits us before we know it. It might as well be a bullet, because it will have pierced us before we hear the shot. If we survive, we may not even feel the pain at first. Our systems go into shock to protect us, and shocked we should be indeed.
The reverse of Wolf's parody is not the sexy woman who seems to mirror male ineptitude. She is the woman who asks instead, what if this image were reversed in another way. A woman covered in symbols of female genitalia. According to the World Health Organization, WHO, over two hundred million women worldwide, most of whom were minors at the time, have been violated by the practice of female genital mutilation.
This odious practice that mostly women are forced to perform on other women for reasons that are “cultural,” and the lifelong physical and psychological conditions this causes are well documented by WHO and UNICEF. I will spare you the details, but encourage you to research this scourge yourself when you feel up to it.
Conclusion
Wolf's photography reminds us again, painfully, that substantive work is often not what it first appears to be. Wolf made this image before she decided to become a nurse and, as part of her career as a humanitarian aid worker, now travels to countries where this practice is common. I am not suggesting that she consciously thought of the link between what she photographed then and what she is doing now. I am however humbly reminded that if we let our own work speak back to us, in relation to the intended and that which was not, we don't just become better artists and communicators. We can help bring awareness and subsequent change to the world. Don't underestimate the value of humor or frivolity. Sometimes we need to be our own jesters to get to an unspeakable truth, the subtext of our own and other's work. If we engage this process it will lead us to where we are meant to be, whether as artists, otherwise, or both.
Assignments You May Want to Challenge Yourself With
• Humor as a lure
• Engaging Human Rights via the familiar
• F.G.M.
• Social justice