American girls aren't born; they're made. The idea isn't particularly new - Simone de Beauvoir made the same point about women more than 50 years ago, but the work of LA-based artist Charlie White in the series titled The Girl Studies explores the production of teenaged girl sexuality with unerring directness and a mix of affection, curiosity and critical acuity.
The series includes several photographs grouped as the Teen and Transgender Comparative Study; each photo unites a young girl and male-to-female transgender subject, inviting viewers to consider both a moment of transition, as well as the gap between what is considered the real and its copy. Girl Studies also includes a short animation titled OMG BFF LOL and a 35mm film titled American Minor. White's film and photos are on view through May 31 as part of the Hammer Museum's "Nine Lives: Visionary Artists From L.A." show, and American Minor will screen later this week as part of the 2009 Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, a prestigious event, and particularly noteworthy in that this is White's first film; it also screened earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. What makes this eight-minute short, a study of lip gloss and pale soft flesh, and White's work on girlhood in general, so gripping?
The answer rests somewhat in White's scrupulous attention to detail. The photographs - gathered in a book titled American Minor - with the subjects posed against a simple blue-lined grid, invite us to focus solely on the faces, moving back and forth to witness uncanny similarities. Speaking at the Hammer about the project, White says, "In one way I was trying to simply make a portrait of two different modes of transformation and that came out of both looking at transgenders and teenagers very separately back in 2003 and 2004." Eventually, he says, he realized that the two groups overlapped. "They worked to complete each other," he explains, and so he removed all background information and simply paired two subjects next to each other.
The backgrounds erased from the photos reappear in the film, which studies a 14-year-old girl as she lounges lazily around in her pristine suburban home and depicts both a vague sense of ennui and luscious if plasticized sexual becoming, but here, too, the emphasis centers on production - the production of sexuality through hair, make-up and clothing. Indeed, while the wall label outside the gallery where the film screens touts the film's rawness, the film is anything but raw; it's thoroughly cooked, offering up girldom and its attendant identity as an elaborate, culturally enforced production that relies constantly on a certain kind of setting as well as a pose. That pose, though, has been internalized, fully linked to being a girl.
OMG BFF LOL, which initially seems like a spoof of a particular kind of girl talk, uses the same logic. The cartoon follows two girls as they shop, perfectly capturing a vernacular and mode of being that aligns shopping and looking cute with ontological being. White's work so resolutely copies its subjects - the way they sit, chew, talk, slurp, slouch and walk - that viewers marvel not just at the spot-on replication, but at the strange worry about the gap that should arise between an original and its copy. The idea is part of a larger gesture that seems increasingly relevant, that of metonymy where a side-by-side logic seems to erase the gap between them. White's brilliance, though, is in how he manages to render the "original" as nothing, an empty space of projection and we're left with the uncomfortable recognition of a gaping hole where the ground under us - of gender, identity and even being itself - has been kicked away.
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