WITKIN’S FREAKS ON FILM TO GET MORE EXPOSURE

Joel-Peter Witkin is accustomed to dealing with “the monster issue.” You can’t make repulsive images of sexual freaks, kissing corpses and sadomasochistic torture without developing an image problem. But he insists that he hasn’t encountered much public response--negative or otherwise.

That may change, now that an exhibition of his work is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 9) and “Joel-Peter Witkin,” a new book of his black-and-white images, has been published by Twelvetrees Press in Altadena.

If the book doesn’t create a stir, it won’t be Witkin’s fault. Following a parade of artfully shocking images, he has issued a printed call for models: “physical prodigies of all kinds, pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, active or retired sideshow performers, contortionists (erotic), women with one breast (center), people who live as comic book heroes, satyrs, twins joined at the foreheads, anyone with a parasitic twin, twins sharing the same arm or leg, living Cyclopes, people with tails, horns, wings, fins, claws, reversed feet or hands, elephantine limbs, etc.

“Anyone with additional arms, legs, eyes, breasts, genitals, ears, nose, lips. Anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breasts, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. Sex masters and slaves. Women whose faces are covered with hair or large skin lesions and who are willing to pose in evening gowns. Five androgynies willing to pose together as ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.’ Hairless anorexics. Human skeletons and human pincushions. People with complete rubber wardrobes.”

What kind of artist gets off on this stuff?

A 46-year-old family man who lives with his wife and son in New Mexico. An engaging storyteller with weird memories of his Brooklyn childhood. An effusive talker who wears severe black leather clothes but smiles a lot and jokes about his capped teeth (paid for by his mother who wanted to help him look good for the pictures she knew would be taken of him). And most of all, a hot item on the photography scene whose work is avidly collected by people who matter.

Asked what contemporary photographers interested him after he sold his collection of historical photographs last year to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Sam Wagstaff answered: “Joel-Peter Witkin.”

Witkin’s photography is already so bizarre that his appeal for freakish models seems superfluous, but in fact most of his horrific fantasies are accomplished by constructing sets, drawing on negatives and manipulating images in the darkroom, with the help of friends and strangers who have responded to his ads for subjects.

“Il Ragazzo con Quatro Bracci,” for example, isn’t really a four-armed boy, “but I wish he were,” says Witkin. “The Bird of Quevada,” depicting a buxom nude woman with white wings, isn’t real either, but Witkin confides that he has a lead on an actual “bird-woman” who has grown feathers.

“I really like to deal with people who are strange. They are exotic and wonderful,” he declares. Furthermore, he confesses a strong urge to photograph in an insane asylum and a plan to do so in England. Witkin insists he doesn’t exploit his subjects but enters into a pact of collaboration and shared discovery.

Many of Witkin’s images are inspired by artworks--Miro’s magical abstract Surrealism; Archimboldo’s fantastic heads, composed of bunches of fruit and vegetables; Grant Wood’s stiff portrait of his sister Nan; painter George Catlin’s sadistic scene of bodies speared and hung from hooks; a placid, Neo-Classical Venus by sculptor Antonio Canova--but the artists probably would flail in their graves if they saw his violent variations.

The people most likely to tune in to Witkin’s art on the wavelength he intends are those who see its connection to the vivid fantasies of such South and Central American writers as Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.

Witkin asserts that his “tough” images are meant not only to shock but to convey the idea of “matter into spirit.” His conversation constantly drifts into the vague territory of mysticism, and his images reverberate with Catholic iconography. He says he’s a seeker of “union between person and symbol,” a portraitist of “conditions of being,” who wants to create “a personal type of association with the mysteries we feel” but generally repress because they aren’t accepted.

Though he probes the darkest areas of human revulsion, he speaks of his work in terms of “positive,” “uplifting,” cathartic action, as if he were a therapist, a social worker or at least a social critic.

“But I’m not sermonizing. I just need to express reality,” he counters. “Basically this is about my own form of redemption.”

A notorious Witkin story has it that a little girl’s head, severed in a automobile accident, rolled across the sidewalk to meet him one Sunday when his Catholic mother was taking him and his 5-year-old twin brother to Mass. Witkin has embellished the tale by claiming that he now equates the girl’s head with his camera.

“Brooklyn wasn’t that pretty,” he recalls. “For years I thought that all cats had only one eye.”

His imagination may have been enhanced by his absentee Jewish father who was given to “mystical experiences.” One of the young photographer’s earliest subjects was a rabbi in the Bronx who claimed to have seen God. The rabbi’s vision didn’t show up in the picture, but that hasn’t prevented Witkin from pursuing other equally elusive images.

“It’s a hunt and a search,” he says, enthusiastically describing his enjoyment of creating his own world and “designing images,” rather than shooting pictures of ready-made situations.

“I don’t send a print out unless it has a sense of mystery.” He knows that has happened when “it feels like every cell in your body is applauding you.”

Though identified with beautifully made art of appalling subjects, Witkin says he is “open to change.” Currently working on a 14-foot bronze crucifix with “photographic information” worked into its surface, he gives himself “a couple more years” with his current mode of photography.

“In the future, I hope I can do work as powerful and meaningful as this without having to go through this crazy figuration. I look forward to the time when I can photograph flowers and feel right and purposeful about it.”