The least interesting aspect of these very interesting photographs is the much-commented-upon intimation of sexual deviancy that runs through them. More intriguing is the cloak of uncanniness Rosin throws over his figures, especially his way of making them seem like puppets dangling from strange psychic strings, about to be jerked into action by some odd inner necessity. There are, in fact, several real puppets here, as in Ringmaster, 1989, an image of a toy made sinister by Rosin’s tenebristic treatment of it (in part realized through the application of oil paint to the photograph). In Pact (With Girlfriend), 1989, a disturbingly human-looking doll’s head is given a “Minimalist” black line across its mouth—an abstract gag—so that it appears simultaneously in bondage and in anguish. As with many of the works, there seems to be a story lurking behind the image, but the piece doesn’t need an anecdotal context to make its emotionally macabre point.
Freud took, as his first example of the uncanny, “wax-work figures, artificial dolls, and automatons”—lifeless objects which lead us to believe they may be animate, objects whose “automatic, mechanical processes” might be unconsciously confused with organic ones. He used as a paradigm E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story, “The Sandman,” in which a young man falls in love with and idealizes a woman. She turns out to be the automated (and so, in a sense, already ideal) doll Olympia. Just about all of Rosin’s female figures (and most of his male ones as well) are automated dolls with mechanized moods—they radiate inorganic pathos. Their emotions as well as their bodies seem mechanically programmed; their emotions are like the piss and tears of dolls that urinate and cry. For example, the embracing couple—especially the rapturous female—in Dig, 1986, seems stylized, artificial in its intensity.
Rosin successfully exploits the camera’s ability to fix whatever it touches, whether the appearance of a mood or a body. The nude figure with a floral-patterned watering can in Aquarian, 1989, could be a perverse, post-Modernist statue of abundance. The black stripes across her face—like the stripe in Pact (With Girlfriend) effectively turn her into an object, blotting out her humanity Rosin actually desexualizes figures by foregrounding their status as objects. In Biz, 1989, a nude female is partly covered by a newspaper announcing Andy Warhol’s death. Rosin adds a yellow tint to her hair, suggesting that she is, indeed, a living doll, while Warhol typifies the artist-as-mannequin/automaton.
A number of the works here are historical reprises, in effect photographic examples of appropriation art. What is at stake in Rosin’s appropriation art is the character of the relationship to the appropriated past, not the act of appropriation as such. Pier Paolo, 1987, is particularly instructive; it takes as its point of departure the naked Sicilian boys Baron von Gloeden photographed in the 1880s. Rosin’s photograph shows us what the best appropriation art can achieve: a complex sense of our relationship to the past and the figures who inhabited it—the sense that it is still emotionally alive in the present even though it is physically dead. This creates the illusion that the line between past and present has been obliterated or has never existed, and suggests a constancy and universality of human impulses.
—Donald Kuspit
