Guy Bourdin’s ‘70s works are described, more often than not, as surreal. The best surrealists are those with the firmest grasp of what is real. Hans Bellmer’s disassembled dolls, for example, will hold psychic power as long as our own bodies are inundated by webbed shadows of sex and fear. Know the rules, disseminated over dream studies and inkblots and conversations on horizontal couches, so you can break them later. (Here’s one I broke earlier, says Bourdin, holding a recent concoction up to the light on Saturday-morning breakfast TV).
Here, Bourdin’s object of disassembly is an almost-doll, a person-turned-idea: John Travolta, marauding star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever, awaits us stage left. His movie-star blankness plays picture-in-picture, a prescient flash-forward to the modern reaction video, in which the focal square of mass culture is beamed into one corner of our screen. The set dressing is more sophisticated, like a hotel in a cartoon.
This is a sort-of-shrine to Travolta, and Bourdin’s model, in Christmas red-and-green, bows backwards onto the sofa, blinded by the actor’s light - an acrobatic ecstasy to rival Saint Teresa’s. Her upper body has inverted itself into another sub-shape leathery blackness, like Holbein’s Dead Christ. But her stocking-clad legs are spread on either side of the altarpiece, invading the site of her own reverence.
As in the greater realm of celebrity worship, the sexual and the sublime are fused into one. Fantasy does not discriminate. Look again at Bernini’s Teresa and the picture is quite different. Travolta’s threshold (limen, hymn, hymen, red barrier of painted wood) has been bulldozed over. His bird has flown.
The afterlife: 24 years later, Madonna makes a Guy Bourdin-themed music video. The model is Madonna. The picture-in-picture monochrome celebrity is also Madonna, recreating a scene from her 1992 Sex book (encased in sheet metal, shot by Steven Meisel: a Vogue regular, just like Bourdin). Madonna balances on a midcentury television set and sings about the enticing promises of Hollywood, inches away from her own shrunken image. She lies back just like Travolta’s devotee in the photo and pretends to get Botox injections. Then she is sued by Bourdin’s estate.
I imagine them facing off. First it’s a desert chase, Bourdin the coyote and Madonna the chameleonic roadrunner,all magenta canyons and Lurex trees and flashes of light like a flat blanket over the horizon. Then it’s a carefully-blocked courtroom drama recessing in its third act into a series of infinity mirrors, each glimpse of golden wood reflected off and onto itself, until we can see nothing else.