“Men act and women appear” — viewing White Columns’ fascinating, chilling exhibition “Margret: Chronicle of an Affair – May 1969 to December 1970,” I’m reminded of critic John Berger’s indictment of the gendered asymmetry of vision in 1972’s “Ways of Seeing”: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”“Margret” documents an affair between German businessman Günter K., 39, and his secretary Margret S., 24, through a dense archive of photographs, journal entries, and ephemera discovered three decades later in a discarded briefcase in a Cologne apartment. Although this vitrine-heavy display of primary source materials recalls the archival aesthetics of Sophie Calle, Michael Blum, Tris Vonna Mitchell, Walid Raad, and countless other contemporary artists working with real and fictional documents, “Margret” isn’t a work of art in any conventional sense. Though it’s unlikely that he thought of himself as such, the artist of the artwork is in fact Mr. K., who obsessively recorded his extramarital tryst from May 1969 to December 1970 through photographs, explicit written documentation of their sexual activities, hotel bills, cocktail napkins, empty sheets of birth control pills, and locks of Margret’s hair from her head and pubic area.The story of Günter and Margret may sound like a randy period romp, but the scattershot narrative that emerges through the text and photographs, and the vintage misogyny, suggests something darker and more troubling. Margret, the exhibition’s object of photographic obsession, is admittedly seductive, with legs for kilometers and a mushroom cloud of coiffed pylon-orange hair. The sunny, sepia-toned snapshots emanate a nostalgic Kodachrome aura. Nevertheless, the sheer glut of images — there are hundreds — soon becomes oppressive. The voyeuristic excess of the photographs is exacerbated by Günter’s frigid writings, mostly comprising itemized lists of the speed and duration of sexual intercourse and the various positions attempted. There is no evidence of affection towards his mistress or emotion of any kind.Günter photographed Margret compulsively in various guises and situations: sitting coquettishly on a desk in a modish sweater set, drunkenly slouched over in a wrinkled satin cocktail dress and patent leather go-go boots, smiling in front of a timber-frame resort hotel, spread eagle in the back of a powder-blue Opel Kapitän, naked in bed. This inventory of poses and positions — the luxuriating sex kitten, the doe-eyed ingénue — ironically resembles Cindy Sherman’s famous “Film Stills” series parodying the tropes and clichés of Hollywood cinema. For Sherman, these were conventions to be critically deconstructed; for Margret, they seem aspirational. “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female,” as Berger wrote. “Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”We apprehend Margret as a body, but encounter Günter as a disembodied, pervasive presence on the other side of the camera. He is never pictured, save for two photographs taken from behind of his mistress applying makeup. We glimpse his torso reflected in the bathroom mirror, his testicles and flaccid penis dangling beneath his shirttails. If “the determining male gaze,” as feminist critic and filmmaker Laura Mulvey famously postulated, “projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly,” then photography reifies this gaze, forcing our identification with the male spectator. We see Margret through Gunter’s eyes; looking at her is a squeamish libidinal pleasure.Reading a selection of Günter’s diaries translated into English, it becomes apparent that their affair took place through photography as much as through sexual intercourse; that, through both, he asserted his mastery over her body. “Went to eat at Schallenberg, Holweide,” reads one of Günter’s typical sociopathically cold journal entries, this one dated Oct 11, 1970, “thereafter [a] couple of pictures, yellow sweater, green little suede skirt with green suede jacket. Afterwards drove to Hardefuß St. parked car and took a photograph at the doorway in Hardefuß St. Then to our place…Position on back and special position, very fast climax again, however she went on until I couldn’t anymore. Then fingered clit until ejaculation. Thereupon several pictures in the room, after the intercourse. (Before, several pictures were taken at the bar table too) After photographs in the room, photographs at the bar table, putting on nail polish etc…”Although Günter is undoubtedly exceptional in his apparent callousness and in his fetishistic impulse to catalog his affair, “Margret” presents a real-life melodrama of pre-feminist sexual relations, with each party chewing the scenery in their prescribed role. He is icy and unfeeling; she is jealous, hysterical, ping-ponging between her lover and husband. Despite her precautions, she becomes pregnant, and has an illegal abortion, her third so far. “I don’t even know myself who the child is from,” Günter records her saying, “because you and Lothar both took turns making love to me,” “let it run as I relied on the pill.” In December 1970, right before Christmas, the voluminous diary entries and photographs come to an abrupt stop, when Günter leaves Margret for a Miss Ursula S. “Margret,” he writes, “was furious, because this girl outclassed her in terms of youthfulness, physique, and looks, was tastefully dressed and educated-looking.”Since Mulvey famously formalized the theory of the “male gaze” in 1975, it has migrated from the margins of Lacanian psychoanalysis into mainstream pop culture analysis. Stuck between the confusing, sometimes seemingly contradictory imperatives to be “sex positive” and anti-objectification, between the twin sins of prurience and prudery, cultural critics of all stripes have danced around the male gaze in discursive circles, trying to parse “empowered” from “regressive” expressions of sexuality. After Mulvey and Berger, how do we acknowledge the reality of the gaze without hypostatizing it as a truism that entrenches the power dynamics it attempts to expose? For Günter K., it seems photography was an instrument of phallic control. But what did it mean for Margret? Can these images amount to any more than a textbook example of the male gaze, than an instantiation of a kind of symbolic violence that reduces women to bodily imminence? What artistry or agency did Margret have in the act of being photographed? It’s impossible to know, as she remains over-exposed yet resoundingly silent.
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