Essay
Demystifying A Breeze at Work
Sandy Skoglund’s A Breeze at Work is a photograph of an ordinary office, in which three people are present--a man and two women. They are dressed in a muddy brown color that matches the furniture and walls of the office in which they presumably work. Incongruously, dead branches and twigs grow out from behind trashcans or desks, and fluttering leaves overrun the environment. The leaves are uniformly bright blue but unique in shape and size: they range from as small as bottle cap size to larger than the telephones in the setting and each have clearly defined veins and margins that crease or roll as if the leaf is in motion. The leaves are actually hand-casted bronze sculptures, carefully arranged to avoid any overlapping (Paparoni 2). Yet, however heavy, the bronze leaf sculptures do more than pose as the subject matter – they are all part of a compositional arrangement that draws our attention to the corner of the room where Skoglund locates the seated woman. As Skoglund writes, the leaves appear to “crawl across the surface of the photograph, deliberately trying to be a pattern … breaking up the pictorial space, flattening it and therefore disguising or camouflaging its depth” (Rosenblum 17). This patterning in fact marks the vanishing point of the picture, slightly to the left of center encircling the two women. Artists often put the vanishing point in an artwork near the place they want you to look; Skoglund perhaps wants us to look there and question the relationship between the women and the male. How could the man watch the ladies busy at work with his hands tucked away in his pockets? Perhaps he just gave them an order? Perhaps he came on regular inspection? Did he just “blow in” on the breeze? You’re intended to speculate, as Skoglund once said, “I am happier if an image expresses a multiple meaning, even a contradictory one (Paparoni 2).”
Apart from sculpting the leaves, how did Skoglund create this sinister “horror film shot” (Morton 17)? A Breeze at Work is a photograph of a life size installation– a snapshot of an actual moment when everything in it existed. It takes Skoglund about six months to a year to plan and create each installation (Morton 44). For A Breeze at Work, Skoglund first installed a life-size office, painted it brown and cast the leaf sculptures piece by piece to fit into the setting. She then employed human models for a one day photo shoot before dismantling the installation. Once she has the final image, she limits twelve photographs as the edition, as marked and signed on the bottom right hand corner of the picture. For Skoglund, the presence of a real installation was crucial to the end result because “the installations work negatively to demystify the photograph. In a sense that they unravel how the photograph was made… (which is) good because the installation actually then informs and contributes to the understanding of the photograph” (Squiers 45).
Skoglund’s photographs have broad appeal as she seduces the audience with camera tricks and commercial advertisement techniques. She is deeply interested in commercial photography and is a master at applying relevant techniques to heighten the visual impact of her already shocking installations. Stylistically speaking, Skoglund is known for high clarity and bright synthetic colors (Panaro 1): “We think of a tomato as red. In fact, relatively speaking, real tomatoes aren’t that red when compared to the pure pigment. So we make the tomato redder with dyes so that the photograph of it looks like what we think a tomato looks like, really” (Squiers 37). In this way, Skoglund reminds us that no photograph is neutral, and that bias and prejudices exist in the most unexpected aspects of our culture.
A Breeze at Work inspires multiple interpretations – environmental, social political, poetic and more (Paparoni 2). The title can be read as “a/breeze at work” or “a breeze/ at work”, with the former reading emphasizing the breeze and the latter emphasizing the workplace. In the first reading, A Breeze at Work proposes that animals and plants would triumph on the earth in a post apocalyptic era (Rosenblum 16). The breeze normally recalls feelings of tenderness and melancholy; Skoglund, however, undermines the cultural stereotype and makes breeze into a destructive force that stirs turmoil in an office. In Skoglund’s other works, she depicts a world in which animals – radioactive cats, blood red foxes, orange goldfish or black squirrels overrun human territory. Here in A Breeze at Work, animals are absent, but like the cats in Radioactive Cats, the leaves seem to have adapted to the apocalyptic catastrophe by turning into a synthetic blue (Rosenblum 16). The people in this scene are totally unaware of the action around them, like ghosts dwelling in a different dimension. With the use of real human models, “A sense of poignancy perhaps in terms of life and death, temporality and transience (creeps up).” The figures unintentionally add performative and theatrical qualities to the works (16) and arguably have become the greatest source of uneasiness to the audience.
If we read the title as “a breeze/ at work” to emphasize the workplace, a social political reading entails. Gender and class relations, employment and office hierarchy issues are highlighted by the compositional arrangement of the leaves, as mentioned above. While real-life models heighten the shock effect, Skoglund views them as “symphonic and ballet-like,” perhaps implying a dance between individual characters in the scene, or between the people and the environment. Skoglund’s own interpretation unites the environmental and social political readings into a poetic one, “for me instead the leaves may represent another reality working in the same space in which the people exist” (Paparoni 2). We can see the leaves as the materialization of a lady’s daydream on a working afternoon.
Grinnell College purchased two of Sandy Skoglund’s photographs during her stay in Grinnell in 2001, while she set up the installation/exhibition Raining Popcorn, commissioned by the Faulconer Gallery (Heiferman 1). Like many of her artworks, A Breeze at Work functions on a number of levels simultaneously. The content of the picture is subject to different interpretations: you may see the office ladies as women playing the role of “the other” or as employees suppressed by office hierarchy, the leaf sculptures as fantasy or environmental threat. Skoglund’s artwork also blurs the boundaries between high and low art, or art separated by medium, through simultaneously suggesting a still from a never made film as well as a prophecy about environmental problems (Dreishpoon 2). The multitude of issues that concerns A Breeze at Work well suits Grinnell College’s interest in social criticism, and the photograph has thus become a great addition to our permanent collection.
-T.G.
Sources
Art Through Time: A Global View – Dreams and Visions. Thirteen Specials PBS Video. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
Baron, Judith V. “Introductory Essay,” Shimmering Madness. Bergen Hall Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, (2001). Web. 25 Nov. 2010.
Dreishpoon, Douglas. An Interview with Sandy Skoglund. 2001. Web. 16 Dec. 2010.
Heiferman, Marvin. “Serious Thoughts are Popping Up.” In Sandy Skoglund: Raining Popcorn. Grinnell, IA: Faulconer Gallery, 2001. Print.
Morton, Robert, ed. Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege. New York, NY: Smith College Museum of Art & Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Print.
Panaro, Luca. Interview with Sandy Skoglund. Aug. 2, 2008. Web. 30 Nov. 2010.
Paparoni, Demetrio. Sandy Skoglund in conversation with Demetrio Paparoni. 1998. Web. 16 Dec. 2010.
Rosenblum, Robert. “An Interview with Sandy Skoglund” Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege. Morton, Robert, ed. New York, NY: Smith College Museum of Art & Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Print.
Skoglund, Sandy. Sandy Skoglund. Jan. 29, 2009. Web. 01 Dec. 2010.
Squiers, Carol. “Entertainment and Distress: The photographs of Sandy Skoglund” Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege. Morton, Robert, ed. New York, NY: Smith College Museum of Art & Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Print.
Biography
Sandy Skoglund was born to a middle class family in the manicured suburbs of Weymouth, Massachusetts. Growing up, she earned pocket money by pulling night shifts decorating cakes as well as selling perfume, shoes, and lotions locally, and even hotdogs at Disneyland (Rosenblum 16). She was a rather self-contained girl, like the Bronte Sisters whom she adored; she says in an online interview, “When I think back to why I became an artist, it was all about feeling as though I wasn’t normal. So that feeling of not belonging, of enjoying being by yourself, finding social situations a strain -- those aspects of reality. Even before I went to school and knew what an artist was, I was interested in creating my own world. I draw on everything. The idea of an imaginary life has always been with me. And that is (to me) one of the very healing things about making art. It allows you to transform yourself” (Art Through Time).
Sandy Skoglund was educated at Smith College and the University of Iowa, where she received her M.A in filmmaking, intaglio printmaking and multimedia art and M.F.A in painting (Morton 9). She taught herself photography early in her career for documentation purposes. Initially a conceptual artist, her interest in photography and commercial picture making techniques led her into a new direction – creating the directorial tableau artworks that we see today (Rosenblum 17). Associated with popular culture, her works appeal to a broad audience but also maintain critical rigor and black humor. She achieves this balance by again constantly taking an outsider’s point of view, “I look at the art object partly through the eyes of an art historian, so I’m plagued by questions like who’s going to consume this image, and why? To some extent my role as an artist is not unlike a sociologist of American culture. I try to pretend that I’ve landed from another planet, which was essentially how I felt as a young person growing up in the suburbs. I wondered how I got there, who I was and about everything around me … So looking at our culture from the outside in, as a stranger to itself, is a compelling angle to work from. I find American culture exotic. From this perspective, narrative elements acquire an archetypal inflection” (Rosenblum 17). Her works are collected by over fifty museums, including the Chicago Art Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the J. Paul Getty Museum (Skoglund).
-T.G.
Sources
Art Through Time: A Global View – Dreams and Visions. Thirteen Specials PBS Video. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
Morton, Robert, ed. Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege. New York, NY: Smith College Museum of Art & Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Print.
Rosenblum, Robert. “An Interview with Sandy Skoglund” Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege. Morton, Robert, ed. 1998. Print.
Skoglund, Sandy. Sandy Skoglund. Web. 01 Dec. 2010.
