UC San Diego

Office of the Dean
Division of Arts and Humanities
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive # 0406
La Jolla, CA 92093-0406

tel: (858) 534-6270
fax: (858) 534-0091
dean-ah@ucsd.edu

Raskolnikov

An exhibition of photographs
by Glenna Jennings


On view at the Office of the Dean
410 Literature Building
October 2008 - October 2009

Curated by: Fabián Cereijido

Abandoned desks, dirty socks, construction sites, orange groves, a hotel room in Mexico; old and young, male and female, firm and flabby. The faces are turned away from the camera or outside the frame. The images center instead on the skin of other body parts: an un-tanned back, a seductive butt cheek, a wrinkled arm, a caring hand. In each case we seem to join an ongoing scene at close range. There are no tableaux, no establishing shots.

Glenna Jennings’ Raskolnikov is a series of still photos that loosely presents elements of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment through the figure of the high school cheerleader, who is also the allegorical protagonist of Jennings' novella, Granite. Within her visual series, the narrative hints of the titles and the recurrent uniform intermingle with the candid feel of photojournalism.

A hairy legged young male wearing the outfit in a casual interior jumps up and down with girly indulgence . A pregnant woman, her rotund belly spilling over the waist of the cheerleader skirt, casually studies a catalogue next to an exuberant bunch of ripe bananas which dominate the foreground and allegorize. A young woman, her back to the camera, beholds a sunset or a sunrise as the cheerleader skirt, a bit too tight on her waist, flaps in the wind. An old woman clad in the cheerleader uniform displays the loose wrinkled skin of her arms and legs as she sweetly caresses the soft fur of a dog's snout. The scene takes place under the suggestive presence of two ripe, flawless oranges in the foreground. The associative resonances of the dress vary in character and intensity, but in each case the outfit is on the wrong body and/or in the wrong situation.

Although presented under the sway of a narrative (all the titles are quotes from Crime and Punishment) and dressed in a token of normative femininity (the cheerleader uniform), the people in these images seem to behave and be addressed less as fictional characters or cultural constructions than as folks experimenting, thinking and beholding cultural constructions. Their non cheer-leading selves are conspicuous by contrast.

The uniform suggests a sexual identity highly dependent on the discursive effects of social normativity. But this outfit is one outfit, the same in all the images. It comes to the scene carrying not only its folksy sociological baggage (pointless enthusiasm, heteronormativity, promiscuous availability) but also Glenna’s past and sweat. Outside the frame there is a naked author handing the characters her clothes. The inscription of the artist as the owner of the dress and as an engaged skin-seeking eye, together with the soft enforcement of the narratives conjure a plane of "reality". This is where a gesture of de-investment and investment (I want to see you in my clothes) negotiates a high degree of mutual availability between artist and volunteers. Inside this "community" the senseless glee, objectification and promiscuous accessibility normally associated with cheerleading are not vexing normative constraints but props available for thought and enjoyment.
                                                                                                                                                       -Fabián Cereijido