A pretty damsel, all curls and frills, reaches a climatic moment in the swing's flight. Her dress and petticoats billow up, and she kicks off her slipper, forming a delightful and privileged gaze for the recumbent lover. Fragonard's image of ancien-régime pleasure, The Swing, painted in 1767, has been the subject of some interesting parodies by two contemporary artists this year. Yinke Shonibare's Swing: After Fragonard (2001) and Karen Knorr's In the Green Room (2001) are appropriations of Fragonard's image, which speculate with renewed curiosity on issues of identity, authenticity and culture. Such mimickry of a petrified high-culture canon is not unusual amongst contemporary artists. In the Going for Baroque exhibition, Cindy Sherman reproduced herself as Madame de Pompadour on porcelain plates. Reasons for curiosity in this particular piece of high rococo art are complex. On a surface level, it is easy to be drawn to the painting's flamboyant gestures and sumptuous colour as well as its subversive and titillating subject. However, it is the work's own dubious undertones that may have made it susceptible to parody.

First, a little should be said about the painting's provenance. It was the painter Gabriel-François Doyen who was originally commissioned by an unknown gentleman of the court to paint this expression of ancien-régime indulgence, and records relating to its inception show how the slipper motif was chosen to 'enliven' the picture yet more. The writer, Charles Collé wrote down his conversation with Doyen on October 2nd 1767:

"Would you believe," the painter said to me, "that just a few days after the exhibition of my picture (the Miracle of Saint Geneviève des Ardents) in the Salon, a gentleman of the Court sent for me in order to commission a painting of the kind that I'll describe? This gentleman was at his "pleasure-house" [petite maison] with his mistress when I presented myself to find out what he wanted. He started by flattering me with courtesies and finished by avowing that he was dying with a desire to have me make a picture, the idea of which he was going to outline. "I should like,' he continued, "to have you paint Madame (pointing to his mistress) on a swing that a bishop would set going. You will place me in such a way that I would be able to see the legs of this lovely girl, and better still, if you want to enliven your picture a little more S¹' "I confess," M. Doyen said to me, "that this proposition, which I wouldn't have expected, considering the character of the picture that led to it, perplexed me and left me speechless for a moment. I collected myself, however, enough to be able to say to him almost at once: "Ah! Monsieur, it is necessary to add to the essential idea of your picture by making Madame's shoes fly into the air and having some cupids catch them.' But since I was far from wanting to treat such a subject, which is so different from the genre in which I work, I referred this gentleman to M. Fragonat [sic], who has undertaken it and is at present making this singular work."1

In Fragonard's painting the shadowy male figure in the right-hand corner of the painting provides support for the swinging action and is placed in a vertical sitting posture on a rigid stone seat, where the woman and her lover are respectively cushioned on upholstery and lolling in the grass. The pleasure attained by the lady and her lover is illicit. The lover is lying low in the vegetation, hidden from view with further suspense created by the inclusion of the vertical male figure who signifies the moral propriety and dignified decorum the lovers are resisting.2 The bishop or husband's position is made quite poignant by the fact that unbeknown to him, his mechanical labours support the lovers' pleasure.

Weight is discharged in the meaning of the pastime depicted; an activity of useless inactivity. The weight of living and its contingent responsibilities fall away in the pleasurable act of swinging. Here Fragonard's swing has reached a vertiginous angle, the woman swaying energetically, and the image captures the climatic "high" of the swinging experience. The physical excitement from swinging is in eloquent sympathy with the emotional excitement of the encounter with her lover, and comes perilously close to signifying coitus, or that proximal moment of abandon, signified also by the slipper floating in mid-air. As Donald Posner confirms:

A straightforward description of what one sees proves to be almost embarrasingly frank: the woman is in motion, her legs are parted, her pink dress opens. The man is in the rose bush, hat off, arm erect and well-aimed. And suddenly, to he own delight, as she reaches the peak of her ride, the woman's shoe flies off her foot.3

Swings, seesaws, childhood games of blind man's buff are the reiterated iconography of the rococo period, and this appropriation of childhood playthings by the adult world is unsettling and provocative with the child's natural engagement with movement and play transformed by artifice and desire. The tenor of the swing motif shifts through a number of associations. In the early 17th century, the image of a girl on a swing functions as an emblem of air. Gradually, the motif becomes euphemistically skewed to a more physical and less metaphorical reading of this activity. A woman enjoys a pleasurable movement with the pressure and momentum provided by a male companion which prolongs her joy. (Posner)

This dislocation of meaning is underlined in Fragonard's 1767 version of The Swing, in the detail of the floating slipper, a fetish substance that obscures genital difference. (Bryson) The visual displacement of the desired object onto the shoe prolongs pleasure by leaving the lover's gaze unsatiated. In this economy of visual pleasure, libidinal tension is discharged in the frisson of the brushstroke. (Bryson, p100) The aimlessness of swinging offers up the body as spectacle, with all signs that the body has other functions, suppressed. By severing the body from its own history and functions, Fragonard creates an alternative space of existence. Fragonard's swinger is placed in a terrestrial transcription of the aerial world, a green cloudscape. Cloud, vapour, milk, and water are substances used by painters such as Fragonard and Boucher to translocate the body from the hard world of objects and activities to realms of fantasy. Paintings based on mythological themes by Boucher, such as the utilise vertical space and frontal plane. This spatial alterity is emphasised by cloud-like substances which dissolve hard ground and deep space.

Perspectival space is defused in Fragonard's invertebral fantasy by the pyramidal shape of the swing; its ropes and trajectory suggest a vanishing point located high up in the trees to which the swing is tied. This subversion of point-d'appui becomes more radically changed in the works by Shonibare and Knorr with the introduction of three dimensionality, and particularly the interplay between two and three dimensions in Knorr's piece. Shonibare's installation, The Swing (after Fragonard) juts the swinger forward from the corner of the room in a more frontal and confrontational alignment. In Knorr's work, In the Green Room, some three-dimensional stuffed birds are photographed in front of Fragonard's painting, creating a layering of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects. The birds are set in the indexical register by the shadows they cast in the photograph.

What has attracted Shonibare to the Fragonard is perhaps the availability of the idle body. Shonibare is a master at seeking out historical corners of aristocratic habitat and leisure, insinuating himself into these spaces with discursive effect; Shonibare plays a game of billiards with a group of white upper-class gentlemen or enjoys the drawing-room respectability of a musical soiree. (Diary of a Victorian Dandy 17.00 hrs, 1998) The hallmarks of Shonibare's style and wit are captured in this particular parody of ancien-régime manners. As in his piece entitled, Mr and Mrs Andrews without their heads, based on the painting by Gainsborough, Shonibare's swinging mistress is decapitated, possibly in a retroactive anticipation of revolutionary revenge. All the details of Fragonard's swinging woman have been retained down to the choker, stockings and garters and slippers, however, the soft flesh-tones of the swinger's dress have been resuscitated in colourful batik. The story of this fabric is complex. This textile became popular in West Africa after independence for being constructed as an "African" cloth. The fabric is in fact Indonesian-influenced, manufactured in Holland and marketed in Manchester. It is this hybridity of origin that Shonibare uses in order to furnish his post-colonial perspective. The dubious nature of origin and identity is replayed in the flawed histories of "pure culture", of which the Fragonard is a part. Use of this ready-made allows Shonibare to navigate the privileged spaces of colonial power. If anger is there, it is sublimated in the energy and sheer enjoyment of his engagement with Western culture. Playing with subjects such as Fragonard's swinger, Shonibare gains entry into this "primitive state of perpetual indulgence".(p39, frieze, Nov-Dec 1995, pp38.41)

Karen Knorr's In the Green Room is one of a series of photographs entitled Sanctuary, displayed at the Wallace Collection where the Fragonard is actually hung. In these photographs, wild animals, including sheep, wolves and birds, have ventured into the museum space. Within each photograph, Knorr sets up an allusory juxtaposition between a wild animal and an Old Master painting in a process of deconstruction and reconception. Fragonard's Swing is one of the works chosen for such treatment, using stuffed brightly-coloured birds, redolent of birds of paradise, that, apparently startled, fly through and out of the painting. In the Green Room releases certain metaphorical tensions between the swinging woman and the bird of paradise. The woman's location in a cultivated wilderniss brings to the fore the relationship in Fragonard's work between the tamed and the wild, artifice and nature. This provides Knorr with the material necessary to examine the confrontation between nature and culture in Sanctuary, exploring our affiliations to the untamed within a high-art,Western canon. It is part of Knorr's project to reinvigorate those mythologies and allegories that link human beings with animals.

The bird of paradise is itself associated with the boundary between wildness and domestication, and this resonance of association between bird and swinging woman is amplified in the prelude installation of an empty birdcage. Read in conjunction with the empty birdcage, Knorr's work is mindful of how the domestication of wild birds includes the miniaturised apparatus of the child's playground such as swings. Moreover, the bright plummage of these birds of paradise does not suggest an indigenousness of European context, and so throws into question the notion of origin and identity where wildness does not adhere to national boundaries. The autogenic pleasure of swinging is emphasised in Knorr's work by the way one of the birds occludes our vision of the furtive lover. With the lover removed, voyeuristic gaze resides more firmly with the audience, rather than displaced onto the lover's privileged viewpoint. By removing the courting male from our view, the painting's narrative is destabilised, and this removal of speech is significant.The switch away from narrativity silences the human propensity to speech, re-emphasising Bryson's analysis of rococo painting as a shift from logos to eros. In revoking the functions of narrative in Fragonard's work, the domestic and cultivated sense of the image starts to flounder. Knorr reinvigorates our understanding of this painting by stressing its affiliations to the wild and the untamed, reflecting Sanctuary's general theme of the invasion of culture by nature.

Though the point is not explicitly made, the actual historical context of the work gives another slant on the idea of sanctuary, since the image is based on those idle pleasures of the few that were preserved from common view. I would suggest that both Knorr and Shonibare's parodic reinventions are drawn from the idea of refuge both real and represented; those unavailable refuges of wealth and culture represented here in the images of ancien regime life, frozen for perpetuity within the rigid picture frame. The indexical register of the birds' shadows sets up new friction in the audience's relationship to the Fragonard fantasy, and the three-dimensional element in both works disrupts rococo's dissolution of real space. It is Fragonard's playful expression of uncorseted freedom that has caught the imagination here. The instability and freedom of rococo space resides in those arenas, that the aristocracy have vacated their normative places of power and culture, for. It is where recreation takes place that Knorr and Shonibare can insert their post-modern variations on an idealised past.

Catherine Green

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