Katharina Bosse: New Burlesque
14 September – 20 October 2002
galreck@aol.com, heidireckermann@aol.com
In her current exhibition at Heidi Reckermann Photographie in Cologne, Katharina Bosse presents us with New Burlesque, a series of curiously alluring portraits of burlesque dancers in costumes of kitsch and bourgeois ornamentation. Born in Finland and raised in Germany, Bosse has lived in New York since 1997, where she has worked not only as an artist, but also as a commercial photographer for magazines as diverse as The New Yorker, Spin, Detour, Der Spiegel and The New York Times Magazine.
In May 2001, Bosse travelled to a burlesque festival in
New Orleans, where she made numerous portraits of the uncanny performers.
And although she typically presents this bizarre side of American life, her
sitters are always treated with the utmost respect. We don’t laugh at the
women, but are rather quite intrigued by their strange and enchanting
existence. Bosse is not interested in documentation, but rather in the
psychological backgrounds of her sitters, the way the women re-invent
themselves for the stage and live out their fantasies. Their stage names
alone tell us volumes about who they pretend to be, if only on the stage:
from Babe Bijoux and Stella Starr to Candy Whiplash, Kitten DeVille and even
Venus d’Milo.
Although contemporary, the images all seem to stem from the fifties, both in
content and in coloration. Capturing a new revival of burlesque showmanship
in small bars across the United States, Bosse presents us with a far from
glamorous world of boas and glitter. We see these women, however, not on the
stage, but in their own, very unspectacular domestic settings, posing in the
doorway of their simple homes, on the front porch with their children, as
well as in parking lots and fields. Thrown from the artificial light and
scenery of the stage into the intimidating, banal light of day, a conflict
emerges between the performer and the person, between fiction and reality.
Bosse is obviously interested in the seduction of the stereotypical American
superficiality. We in fact learn very little of the real personalities of
her sitters behind the burlesque surface, although we easily ‘read’ into
them tales of hardship and oppression, and also of pulp fiction adventures
and secret fantasies.
Gérard A. Goodrow