The Brooklyn Rail

Voyeurism has always been about power. An asymmetrical exchange where one’s agency is unwillingly traded for another’s pleasure, voyeurism is at once dehumanizing and, if you believe Freud, all-too human. But what of the voyeur twice removed—the one watching the one who watches? As Ricco/Maresca’s tightly curated group exhibition Fetish lays bare, voyeurism is never just a party of two. Bringing together a selection of photographic works by Jorge Alberto Cadi, Le Fétichiste, and Miroslav Tichý, Fetish foregrounds the complex issues of agency, objectification, and furtive eroticism that have long been the subject of debate in art history, while also giving rise to consideration of the status and culpability of those who exhibit and view such works.

Sourced from found black-and white-photographs, Jorge Alberto Cadi’s photo collages transform the photograph itself into an object of physical fetish. Whether in the meticulous excising of his unknown subjects’ appendages and the sewing of them elsewhere in a photograph’s composition, or the drawing over of a subject’s face with black ink, the Cuban-born artist imbues his found images with a sensibility that is ritualistic, if not graphically violent. In Untitled, 2015, an appropriated Paramount Studio of Rear Window actress Georgine Darcy, Cadi symbolically sews the actress’ mouth shut with black thread while cutting out one of her eyes and pasting it onto the menacing form of a cyclopean specter rendered in black ink and lurking over her shoulder. For Cadi, the very material manipulations—the cumulative cutting up, sewing, writing, and drawing—would seem to occupy a dual position, both as the fetishistic act itself and the creation of an object of fetish.

Like Cadi, the color photographs of Le Fétichiste evince certain rituals and repetitions of subject matter, which marks their fetishistic quality. Starting in 2006 and continuing for a decade, Le Fétichiste, the unknown artist who created the pictures, surreptitiously captured images of women’s stocking-clad legs in public settings—standing on a sidewalk, crossed and seated at a café table. In other images, Le Fétichiste photographs images of women in stockings as they appear on broadcast television. Meanwhile, in an untitled image from 2001 (all works are untitled), the hairy legs of a man appear wearing women’s stockings and lingerie. One can imagine Le Fétichiste enacting the very fantasy of their own fixation, a doubling-back of desire that would tickle Jacques Lacan. Captured from the waist down, Le Fétichiste’s furtive photographs are both declarative and unambiguous in their fixation upon women’s stockings. While the snaps taken from TV and the alleged stocking-adorned self-portrait gesture toward an object-focused, self-reflexive fetishism, Le Fétichiste’s series of clandestine street photographs are the result of a more intrusive act of voyeurism that does not exist in the works of Cadi. In these images, a fundamental element of consent is absent, which in turn makes Le Fétichiste’s photographs problematic.

This absence of consent also defines the images of the late Czech artist Miroslav Tichý, arguably the thorniest figure to be included in the show. Described in equal measure as a recluse and hermit, a man who had multiple stays at a mental hospital, Tichý created images that are unsettling in their subject matter and pose uncomfortable truths for the viewers of them. Constructing a camera of his own design and incorporating found materials—cardboard tubes, tin cans, optical glass polished with toothpaste—Tichý set about surreptitiously photographing the women in his hometown of Kyjov. In blurry, scratched images (all works are untitled and undated), we see Tichý capturing unsuspecting women apparently sunbathing in a park. In another, far more menacing photograph, we observe a woman from behind as she walks down a street. One can imagine Tichý trailing her as he took the image. In the press notes accompanying Fetish, there is an emphasis placed on Tichý’s status as an outsider artist and an attempt to rehabilitate his images in the context of what is described as their naiveté and rebelliousness. It is a rhetorical conceit that cunningly elides the moral implications of an artwork, turning instead to its formal and aesthetic qualities. Indeed, there is little in the way of clear discussion about the violations these women experienced at the hand of Tichý and how they continue to be perpetrated by their ongoing exhibition. Could there be, somewhere in the Czech Republic, a woman who has no idea we are looking at an image of her, caught by the town’s then resident scopophile?

In other words, Fetish is a complicated, boundary pushing show, at its best, forcing viewers to acknowledge their role—and accountability—as active participants in the circulation of imagery that test the limits of selfhood and privacy. At its most base, Fetish reminds us that unrequited desire and constrained passions can readily go from inspiring to insidious.