This tiny little display is next door to the current ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ show – not worth making a pilgrimage to the Royal Academy just for itself, but worth popping into if you’re in the building (as is the small Emma Stibbon display which is right next to it). No rush: it’s on till the end of the year.
It’s a display of eight self-portraits by current and recent Royal Academicians from the last 50 years. They are (in alphabetical order) Anthony Green, Chantal Joffe, Hew Locke, Sidney Nolan, Patrick Procktor, Paula Rego, Gillian Wearing and Clare Woods.
Obviously the genre of the self-portrait raises multiple, many-levelled issues of intention, agency and identity: Who am I? How do I depict myself? How much do I compromise what I see with the medium I’m using? How much am I influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the vast tradition pressing down on me? How do I escape the weight of the past and develop my own voice and vision?
Here are the pictures in question, along with selected facts from the curators’ wall labels. Which ones do you like, and why?
Green’s humorous creations, cartoony paintings made in imaginative shapes, used to appear every year in the summer exhibition (he passed away in February of this year). Looking closely you realise there’s a whole narrative going on: for a start the curators tell us the thing is in the shape of a crown, which I didn’t immediately ‘get’. Spotlights shine down from the top right onto a full-length, fully clothed portrait of the artist standing on a sort of stage in front of a yellow stage curtain. And on the left are the stalls of a theatre, full of serried ranks of more self-portraits. The general idea is: Who is the artist performing for, creating for? Himself, copies f himself, clones of himself? I like Green’s works well enough when I see them but, well…
Here’s Joffe and her daughter on the beach at St Leonard’s-on-sea. According to the curators, the image catches a girl on the cusp of adolescence, turning away from her mother. Joffe is quoted as saying, the more intense the emotion, the more she is driven to simplify the image. Personally I find this a disturbing and upsetting painting. The lack of any effort to convey sand, sea or sky repels me, but not as much as the faces. Eyes are what we look at in the people that we meet or look at and both sets of eyes here are distorted and bent and speak very loudly of physical deformity and/or mental illness.
This is one of a series of eleven life-sized photographs from the series ‘How Do You Want Me?’ in which the artist adopts menacing personas. Here he is a sort of surrealist knight in an image saturated with colour and collages of unlikely images, not least the halo of machine guns and daggers which surrounds him. Locke says the series title ‘How Do You Want Me?’ is a satirical reference to the way the art world voraciously consumes the ‘latest thing’, especially the exotic or strange and – by implication – Black artists. So it’s by way of showing two fingers to the art world. Fair enough, but this rational explanation gets nowhere near conveying the over-coloured demented collage with a sword-wielding maniac at the centre.
Nolan’s dates are 1917 to 1992 i.e. he’s one of the older artists here. This may or may not be reflected in the fact that this is pretty much the weirdest and most abstract work here. According to the curators, as a young man Nolan worked with spray paint in a factory and, later in his career, returned to spray paint as a medium. The heavily distorted image and bars of colour down the left, in one mode make me think of raves and acid and hard-edged psychedelic drugs i.e. a positive image. But then, really looking at the head and deep damage that’s been done to it, the radioactive degrading of the image, make me think of Francis Bacon and all his heads turning into meat or screams. Scary.
I like stylised paintings but I don’t warm to this one. According to the curators he’s holding a thick paintbrush loaded with white paint in his right hand. I thought it was a mirror or a mobile phone glinting in the sun. I ought to like the plain orange background but I don’t. The curators think this is a very ‘intellectual’ image because he’s glancing up at the frame of the picture i.e. investigating the limits of art etc. The asymmetry of his face, the unevenness of his eyes, speaks to me of mental illness and unhappiness.
The curators point out how many artist’s self-portraits capture the artist holding a palette and brush and looking at the viewer in a pose which captures the moment of creation, as if we are there, with them, in that moment. They also shrewdly point out how the two most completed parts of this sketchy image are the face/eyes which see and the arm/hand which creates – as if the two most important parts of the act of creation are fuller, wholer, more complete, than the rest of the body, which fades away into irrelevance. So it’s an image about artistic force and power.
Apparently Wearing has ‘explored’ her identity with numerous self portraits playing with format and genre. The smoke is meant to be a reference to her place of birth, industrial Birmingham but made me think of a genii appearing from a lamp. The t short slogan, ‘HEAVY METAL’ is a reference to the disproportionate number of heavy metal rock bands who haled from Birmingham. The artist and curators may think of this as an experimental investigation of issues of identity and mortality, but it also looks very much like the cover of a certain kind of album depicting a rock chick fan of the band.
Apparently this painting is based on a photograph of the artist’s cat climbing over her, something which just about makes sense once it’s pointed out but I didn’t guess beforehand. Maybe I have a morbid imagination but I read it as the image of someone’s fact (blonde hair, eyes and nose) horribly melting into a great white blancmange. As paintings of cats go, it’s not a classic, is it? Neither is the mood exactly typical of most cat lovers: Woods explains that the title is from the Billy Bragg song of the same name, which captures the feeling of being present but detached, ‘a feeling of suffocation by responsibilities and expectations.’ All this puts into words the very negative response I had to this image. The glutinous melting effect is achieved by mixing thick oil paint directly onto the aluminium surface of the base, which maybe accounts for the powerful feeling of being asphyxiated.
Personal tastes
Personally, I like the Wearing and Rego, in that order. Wearing because it’s a photo/image which looks like a rock poster, could be on a billboard or a poster on the tube i.e which is very assimilable, not least because it makes her look very attractive in a rock chick kind of way.
The Rego I like because I like charcoal sketches, particularly if they’re unfinished (hence my veneration of Degas). I also like the strong female vibe, the aura of strength and indomitability about it. The obvious feature is the dark eyes which are about twice the size of an ordinary adult’s eyes. Decades ago I read some pop science which pointed out that the eyes are proportionately larger in babies than in adults and that, therefore, we humans are programmed to feel soft and sentimental and attracted by large eyes i.e. in order to warm to, and protect, babies. Obvious evolutionary advantage.
This apparently explains why we feel warmly towards Disney cartoons, from Mickey through hundreds of cartoon characters to Nemo or Frozen – they all have disproportionately large eyes and trigger a soppy sentimental feeling; certainly disarms our adult cynicism. If anything, the Rego portrait inverts the convention, because she looks not soft but spooky – not threatening exactly, but lowering and damaged. And the stumpy muscular right arm gives the image a dwarfish, freakish atmosphere, too. Don’t Look Now.
Reynolds
There’s a twist in the tail. This miniature display takes up only part of The Collection Gallery, the narrow corridor-shaped space at the start of the gallery. At the end of this corridor you can see the start of a completely separate exhibition, which is a selection of highlights from the Royal Academy’s Old Master collection, grand mythological themes, Biblical paintings and Renaissance statues. But the first work in that, completely separate display, is a portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder and first President of the Royal Academy. So when you look away from the eight self-portraits I’ve just discussed, your eye passes over the lovely image of Reynolds at the end of the corridor.
The point is, the Reynolds portrait is clearly head and shoulders (pun intended) better than the eight works in this little display. It has class and dignity and gravitas. It reminds me of the umpteen histories of art which try and put into words the revolution in visual technology which the development of oil painting during the Renaissance brought about; how artists used the new medium of oil to portray depth and scale of subject, with true perspective etc, but then went on, as the centuries progressed, to focus on the conjuring of light and shade, in particular of dark shadow, to convey psychological and spiritual depths unlike any art which had gone before (Leonardo, Rembrandt).
In this picture Reynolds is clearly channelling Rembrandt and the sophisticated Old Master tradition of strong contrasts of light and shade which came to be referred to as chiaroscuro. It has a human dignity and depth and sensitivity which none of the eight modern images come close to matching.
This is a small but interesting, free display in The Collection Gallery at the Royal Academy (at the back of the building on the first floor). Its point of departure is an enormous woodcut engraving made by Emma Stibbon of a derelict whaling station in Antarctica. It was Stibbon’s Diploma piece, which she submitted along with related drawings and photos, to gain membership of the Academy.
Collapsed Whaling Station, Deception Island, Antarctica, 2006 by Emma Stibbon
It’s a big work – 1.17 meters tall by 2.38 meters wide. If you’re close up to it, you have to turn your head to take it all in, creating a panoramic effect. Up close you can see how the powerful grain of the woodcarving echoes and amplifies the heavy wooden beams of the structure itself.
Contexts
This mini exhibition also features about twenty other artefacts, which includes prints, drawings and photographs, chosen to expand and contextualise the image:
1. About a third of them deal directly with the whaling station including photos of it during its time as a research base in the 1950s; from just after the volcanic eruption and its abandonment in 1979; through to the photos Stibbon took on her visits to Antarctica, alongside related sketches and charcoal drawings.
2. Another set of images relate to Robert Scott’s ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition (1910 to 1913).
3. But the biggest amount, about half the display, consists of works by other Royal Academicians of either a) ruined buildings or b) extreme landscapes, which provide visual and conceptual accompaniment to the Stibbon piece.
Section 1. Stibbon
Stibbon is drawn to environments that have been shaped by both the elemental forces of nature and the impact of human endeavour, what she describes as ‘landscapes that have a tension between the natural forces and the manmade’. (So, if you go to her website, you’ll see folders of projects with titles like ‘Polar regions’, Wild lands’, ‘Volcanoes’.)
a) Collapsed Whaling Station
The main woodcut depicts Biscoe House, a large building erected in the early 20th century for the purposes of commercial whaling. In the 1930s it fell into disuse, before being taken over and renovated by the British military during the Second World War. In the 1960 it was damaged by a lava flow. Lava in the Antarctic? Yes, Deception Island itself is actually formed by the crater of a submerged volcano.
Nobody lives permanently on Deception Island though scientific stations run by different nations are visited periodically by scientists. Stibbon saw the building when she accompanied one of these scientific trips in 2006 as an artist in residence. The display includes photos of the station in its heyday, alongside photographs and sketches made by Stibbon on that first trip in 2006, and a subsequent one in 2013.
She tells us that she chose to depict the station in a woodcut because of the physicality of the medium, but also because of the size you can achieve. It’s a very big print, which creates a kind of cinematic, immersive experience.
Installation view of ‘Collapsed Whaling Station, Deception Island, Antarctica, 2006’ by Emma Stibbon
b) Lead
Beside the central woodcut are other works by Stibbon, notably a very striking piece titled ‘Lead’. She made this after her second visit to Deception Island, in 2013. Unlike the big wood carving, it’s an intaglio print. (‘Intaglio describes any printmaking technique in which the image is produced by incising into the printing plate – the incised line or area holds the ink and creates the image.’)
Obviously the central crack in the ice is the thing that catches the eye. It was created by the ice-breaking ship Stibbon was travelling on, and is, perhaps, a vivid symbol of the fragility and contingency of this, and indeed all, environments.
Lead by Emma Stibbon (2014)
But what I liked is the rough and ready finish given by the medium, e.g. the flotsam of white froth at the bottom of the jagged channel of open sea, the black dots in the sky, the strange lizard eye in the hill above the dwindling crack, and the vertical lines at the top left.
I doubt if any of these would appear in a photograph. It’s what art does; even at its most apparently naturalistic, art transforms and amplifies reality, feeding the eye and the mind with more meaning and possibility than we actually see.
Section 2. Scott
Stibbon travelled to Antarctica as artist-in-residence to the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. This, I presume, is why there’s some photos and information panels about Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. This photo shows five members of the British Antarctic Expedition (1910 to 1913) . After much trial and endurance the group reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 only to discover that the Norwegian expedition under Roald Amundsen had beaten them by 34 days. All five men in this photo perished on the journey back to their base camp.
But the display highlights some unexpected connections. First, it turns out that Dr Edward Wilson, seated on the right, was himself an artist. Among his belongings at base camp were discovered works he’d made before the expedition set out on the ill-fate final part of their journey. These included a watercolour of Mount Erebus, a volcano in Antarctica. After the expedition perished, a fundraiser was organised to raise money for the wives and children of the dead men, and the print on display here, based on the original watercolour, was sold for the cause.
Watercolour of Mount Erebus by Edward Wilson (1911)
And second, it turns out that the expedition itself was organised from an office in 6 Burlington Gardens, which is now itself part of the Royal Academy buildings! Huge empire but a small world, official London was.
Extreme weather and ruins
a) Extreme conditions
Extreme weather has fascinated artists for centuries and this little display includes some choice examples from the RA’s collection.
This is a print based on William Daniell’s painting of the Eddystone Lighthouse off Rame Head during the Great Storm that battered the south of England in 1824. Huge waves almost engulf the lighthouse, sea and sky are mingled in the tumult. From a compositional point of view the interest is in the light emanating from the vulnerable lamp room at the top of the building: if it wasn’t there you’d need the moon to achieve the same effect of luminous light shed on the towering waves and highlighting the turbulent clouds. It is also symbolic. Given the date, 1824, viewers would be invited to identify the fragile but persistent light as not only a navigational aid to ships in distress but of the resilience of Christian faith in even the most troubled times.
Hung next to it is a sort of modern equivalent, not a storm but what looks like a steady downpour onto remote rock stacks near St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides. Norman Ackroyd has been producing prints like this for decades, they’re a familiar sight at the Academy’s summer exhibitions. The wall label tells us these two rock formations, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, the most remote of the thousands of British Isles, became an obsession of Ackroyd’s after his repeated attempts to visit them were defeated by bad weather.
Other extreme conditions images in the show include a study of waves by Anthony Gross, the print of Mount Erebus by Edward Wilson mentioned above, and three photographs of Mount Etna erupting by Ledru Mauro. All the images in this display (and tens of thousands more) can be found via the Royal Academy Search the Collection function.
b) Ruins
But ruins have fascinated artists, too. I remember Tate Britain’s 2014 exhibition devoted to the art of ruins. In that spirit, the most extreme ruin here is a photo of one of the galleries at Burlington House after a direct hit from a bomb during World War One, showing broken glass, plaster and stone scattered everywhere. But that’s, obviously enough, the result of human violence. Other images are more in line with Stibbon’s interest in the powerful forces of the natural world.
This is one of several sketches by George Clausen who did naturalistic and no doubt dated sketches and paintings of English rural life, especially in Essex, from the 1870s right through to the 1930s. This isn’t a ruin caused by enemy action or the violence of nature, but a much quieter image of slow decay and collapse. Natural entropy. It doesn’t reproduce as well as some of the other images, but in the flesh I found it reassuring and homely.
Study of a dilapidated cottage, Finchingfield, Essex, after 1907 by Sir George Clausen
Other ruin images in the exhibition include a ruin in Greece by Hugh Casson, a study of Dolbardern Castle Llanberis by George Clausen, and a collapsed gate by Norman Stevens. All the images in this display (and tens of thousands more) can be found via Royal Academy Search the Collection function.
The video
Thoughts
The whaling station woodcut is obviously a fine work in its own right. But this is a charming display because it is designed to lead the eye and the mind on journeys ravelling outwards from the central image. Its juxtapositions tease and inform and entertain. Some of the ancillary art works are as enchanting as the centrepiece. Sometimes the smallest exhibitions are the most enjoyable.
From left to right: 1) ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. 2) ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 3) ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood. All in room one of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:
advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists
Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works and is worth printing in its entirety:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and most eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern United States. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.
Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.
What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?
Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
The artists live and work in this region, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, all indicated on the map.
2. Outsider art
Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.
So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.
Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.
Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.
The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.
Raw materials
Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!
Anatomy by Archie Byron
Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).
Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal
The exhibition
The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.
Artists
The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.
Room 1. Friendships and family ties
The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.
The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.
Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)
I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.
Room 2. Personal stories, local sources
Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.
This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.
Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.
Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy
By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.
Paintings from room 2.
For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.
Paintings by Purvis Young
By contrast with the paintings, I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen so much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made mashed-up street junk in the early 1920s. Then lots of artists in the 1960s turned to making sculptures from found objects, and then the Arte Povera movement of the early 1970s, which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.
My point is that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well-explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had such a reassuringly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of classic Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.
Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire
Room 3. The yard show
As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.
One of the best known examples has been created over decades by Joe Minter (b. 1943), and is titled ‘African Village in America’, on a half acre site near Birmingham, Alabama. The show includes an impressive video featuring a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.
Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend
Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.
Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts
This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quilt-makers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.
More Gee’s Bend quilts
I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which has bound successive generations of women quilt-makers together. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting in design.
Spending five minutes in the quilt room made me suspect I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts in the same way that I do paintings, sculpture and photographs. Well, my loss.
Marfa Stance and quilts for sale
‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ is a relatively small exhibition, but be warned that there’s an additional room, which is sort of part of the show but situated right at the other end of the Royal Academy building. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. It’s through the members’ cafe, then up some stairs and in the Academicians’ Room on the first floor.
Here are displayed eight or so modern quilts from some of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers. The difference between these ones and the works in the main exhibition is that these ones are for sale. They felt ‘better’, more elaborate and finished than the ones in the main show but, as I explained, I’m not a good judge of these kinds of thing. But be warned about the prices. The cheapest one will set you back a cool £25,000, the most expensive one, £30,000.
There’s a web page about them where you can not only read a bit more but buy one, if the fancy takes you and your bank balance can handle it.
The Architectural Review is a monthly international architectural magazine. It was founded in London in 1896 and does what its title suggests, covering all aspects of the built environment.
Manplan
Just over 50 years ago, in 8 issues from September 1969 to September 1970, the Review ran a series of eight specially commissioned reports on the state of architecture at the end of the 1960s. It was to review not just architecture in the narrow sense but the entire state of town planning, in an age when old Victorian slums were being torn down to make way for gleaming new towns made of high-rise towers, medium-rise blocks characterised by lifts and concrete walkways, subways under sweeping new ring roads, nicely laid-out grassed areas and so on.
The Review’s editors called the series of articles ‘Manplan’ and hired leading photojournalists and street photographers to address a set of eight themes, being:
Frustration
Travel and communication (‘Society is its contacts’)
Town Workshop
Education (‘The continuing community’)
Religion
Health and Welfare
Local government
Housing
The result was a series of brilliant photos shot on a 35mm camera in a spirit of photo-reportage – vivid and dramatic black-and-white works which captured a nation in the midst of great social, cultural and environmental change. To the horror of some of its contributors and readers, the magazine turned its back on large-format, heroic photography of buildings and their details, instead embracing a grainy, 35mm black-and-white reportage aesthetic, where people were as, if not more, important than the places. In the words of The Royal Institute of British Architects, publishers of the Architecture Review:
The aim was to propose an alternative and more holistic approach to urban planning, which would look at all basic human needs as a whole. The photographs illustrating the issues were created in the spirit of photo reportage and often featured people inhabiting the spaces studied by the survey, thereby shifting the focus from the architecture itself to the human element within the built environment.
So it was intended to be polemical stuff. The photographers were:
Ian Berry
Tony Ray-Jones
Tim Street-Porter
Patrick Ward
Altogether the Architectural Review published about 80 photographs. Just 16 are on display here, but every single one of them is a masterpiece; there’s no slack. Each one is a densely packed, highly charged vignette. This exhibition isn’t big but it is packed with social history, with memories and nostalgia for a time within the living memory of many but feeling evermore distant.
Design and layout
On a separate wall is a display of the actual copies of the magazine which the photo-essays appeared in, along with the words and designs of ‘Manplan’ editor Tim Rock and designers Michael Reid and Peter Baistow. This section goes into detail about how the photographs were processed, reproduced and printed (using ‘special matt black ink’) along with analysis of the layout and typography. All a bit over my head but interesting for students of design.
The photographs
Private terraced houses on the Old Kent Road opposite Camelot Street Estate, London by Tony Ray-Jones (1970) part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Housing at New Ash Green, Kent by Tony Ray-Jones (1970), part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Low-rise housing, Tavy Bridge, Thamesmead, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones, part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections
Classroom windows in a school in Wales, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
High-rise flats and multi-storey car park, Birmingham, 1970 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Chatsworth Street school and high-rise housing block overlooking the cleared site, Liverpool, 1969 by Tom Smith, part of ‘Manplan 4: The Continuing Community (education)’ in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Salvation Army officers picnicking on the steps of the figure group Asia by J H Foley, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, London, 1969 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections
Unidentified primary school, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Thamesmead film
To one side of the 16 framed photos on the wall, is a TV monitor showing a film from around the same time (in fact the year before the project, 1968). So far as I can tell it’s not directly connected with RIBA or the Manplan project except for the slender link that one of the 80 Manplan photos happens to cover the same subject as the film, namely the new estate being built at Thamesmead. So it wasn’t directly related to the Manplan project but gives context to the kind of architectural and town planning thinking which was going on at the time of the Manplan project.
Directed by Jack Saward, this 25-minute public education film gives an overview of the history and construction of Thamesmead, a sort of new model suburb built down the River Thames from London on the site of the old Royal Arsenal, a site that extended over Plumstead Marshes and Erith Marshes.
Alas, to quote the introduction to the video on YouTube:
The ambition is commendable but it didn’t quite work in practise, with Thamesmead becoming a notoriously problematic estate and its architects perceived as exhibiting many of the faults of post-war planning, with communities being tinkered with from above like a real-life experiment. This is where utopia meets authoritarianism.
Hard to believe, but the planners that designed the place provided insufficient transport links with London, no way of crossing the Thames for 5 or 6 miles in either direction and – best of all – an almost complete lack of shopping facilities and banks. Lots of pretty little lakes but…nowhere to buy food. According to the label in the exhibition, the estate ‘was soon plagued by social problems caused by lack of facilities and public transport’.
The half-built estate won an unwanted fame when American film director Stanley Kubrick used parts of it as the setting for his notoriously violent 1971 movie, A Clockwork Orange, a vision of an alienated, dystopian society. Here’s the photo of it taken by the brilliant Tony Ray-Jones which provides a sort of coincidental link between the Manplan series and the film.
Thamesmead under construction, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones in ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Which do you prefer? Which do you think is telling the truth, the film or the photo?
The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection
All the materials for the Manplan exhibition, photos and old copies of the AR magazine, come from the Robert Elwall Photographs Collection. This comprises around 1.5 million images from the earliest days of photography to the present day. The collection includes photographic archives of individual architects and practices, travel and topographic images from across the world, press photographs from major architectural journals, and large bodies of work by some of the best known architectural photographers of the 20th century. The collection includes prints, negatives, slides, transparencies, photographically illustrated books and digital files. It is itself part of the larger Royal Institute of British Architects collections.
Conclusion
Flicking through some of the text on the walls is a dispiriting experience. These 1970 writers were raging against the soulless design of modern cities, the daily struggle of commuting to work on overcrowded public transport, against air pollution, excess traffic and the destruction of the environment, against the dominance of the car over human-friendly spaces, against the dehumanising effects of modern technology, against social inequality and the lack of social housing, against the prioritising of profit over people.
It’s as if, 53 years later, nothing has changed except we all have smart phones to share our frustration about how things obstinately carry on being rubbish. The Manplan writers’ rage and frustration is captured by this, the last entry in the exhibition.
Double page spread from Manplan 1. ‘Frustration’
It’s a copy of the original magazine, open to a double page spread showing a traditional Pearly King and Queen standing in front of the typically sterile, barren waste ground surrounding a clutch of looming, threatening tower blocks. Up in the top right is a text reading: ‘The richness of East End life is replaced by monotony and inhumanity.’
Yep. that’s the world I grew up into and which punk rock, with its angry nihilism, was a direct response to. Eternal shame on England’s architects and town planners.
Related links
A Brief Revolution continues at the Photographers Gallery until 11 June 2023
‘The many men, so beautiful…’
(from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
A Hard Man is Good to Find! charts over 60 years of gay photography in London from the 1930s to the 1990s.
You don’t have to be naked to be butch, you don’t even have to be gay to be an object of gay attraction. Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, Spring/Summer 1957 edition, featuring model Sean Connery, photo by Bill Green. Courtesy the Alistair O’Neill Collection
Homosexuality illegal and legal
For the first half of the period homosexuality was a criminal activity which was severely punished, with the threat of exposure hanging over hundreds of thousands of gay men, and making them susceptible to blackmail and intimidation. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised gay sexual activity but left in place many forms of legal and social discrimination and so gave rise to the gay liberation movement which campaigned for full social equality.
Personal note: In 1978 I joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, enjoyed going on marches, signing petitions and spending time at Windsor’s only gay pub. Through all this I discovered that I am not gay but discovered a susceptibility to gorgeous men, hunky men, specially young working class men, the kind that you used to see doing labouring jobs with a wonderfully carefree physical exuberance, the kind of young bloke photographed in the 1960s by Anthony C. Burls (see below).
The Obscene Publication Act remained in force
Anyway, back at the exhibition: it brings together more than 100 photos of men’s bodies, taken with a distinctly gay or queer sensibility. The thing to really understand is that throughout the period, from the 1930s till well into the 1980s, despite the 1967 law about homosexual acts, risqué images of male nudity – taking them, owning them, distributing them, publishing them – remained a criminal offence under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
A lovely boy. John Hamill by John S Barrington (about 1966) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
A secret history
All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.
Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.
Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.
The male nude as fine art. David Dulak by Angus McBean (1946) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
London locations
The exhibition takes an interesting approach which is to divide the photos, and the gay magazines and bookshops which distributed them, by area of London. Thus it’s divided into sections which deal with Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Marylebone, Portobello, the Serpentine and Euston.
Highgate
Apparently Hampstead Heath is London’s most renowned cruising spot for gay men. Young artist Keith Vaughan bought a Leica camera and set up a dark room in his bedroom. Aged just 21 he then made a n album of photos of gorgeous young men at Highgate Men’s Pond in the summer of 1933.
Highgate Men’s Pond Album by Keith Vaughan (1933) Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
John S. Barrington trained as an artist at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1938 he persuaded two men he’d met on the Charing Cross Road, dancer David Dulak and his friend Vik, to accompany him to Highgate Men’s Pond so he could photograph them nude – and thus began a long career as a ‘physique photographer’. Dulak was later photographed by Angus McBean, see two photographs above.
John Mckay made studies of ballet dancers and performers.
Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks
I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.
Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.
In the 1950s Basil Clavering ran a cinema on the Charing Cross Road but he also built a photographic studio in the basement of his house on Denbigh Street, Pimlico. Here they recruited military men to pose in genuine uniforms and also act out various scenarios, some kinky, some humorous. He and his partner John Charles Pankhurst, invented the ‘storyette’, a series of stills, as from a movie, which told a story, often saucy, sometimes featuring corporal punishment.
Just doing the housework. Storyette EX FJSS print, 1950s by Basil Clavering (aka Royale). Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
The Serpentine
In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.
Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.
Spencer Churchill, 1951 by Paul Hawker. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Marylebone
‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.
In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.
Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.
Photo of Gervase Griffiths, titled ‘Narcissus of 1967’ by Cecil Beaton
Earl’s Court
This was the location of BDM publications, set up by Alexander McKenna and partners, which published a range of styles, from the lifestyle magazine ‘Jeffrey’ to more explicit titles such as ‘Hung Heavy’, ‘Taste of Beefcake’ and ‘Leather Studs’.
Notting Hill
Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.
One of the Portobello Boys, hopefully only fiddling with his zip. The Portobello Boys, early 1960s. Courtesy The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives
Euston Road
Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America. David Gwinnutt started taking photos of the post-punk gay scene as an art student. Patrick Prockter introduced him to his generation of artists.
Thomas Mervyn Horder (Baron Horder) was the chairman of Duckworths, the literary publisher in in the 1950s and 60s. He also had a sideline as a physique photographer under the pseudonym Larry Knight, publishing in specialist magazines with titles like ‘Grecian Guild Pictorial’ and ‘Der Kreis’.
History of the posing pouch
In line with the unwritten law that absolutely all exhibitions these days must either be about America or feature Americans, there’s a little annex off to the side of the main gallery which gives an amusing history of the posing pouch. In this version of the story this skimpy little piece of fabric, barely enough to cover a man’s meat and two veg with the thinnest of fabrics going round the waist, was invented in America.
It developed from the aim of American gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as legally possible. In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality.
Original 1955 posing pouch as sewn by Bob Mizener’s mum (or mom)
We are told that the shape and tan colour of the pouch was often lightly drawn on photos over the willy of nude models in order to avoid prosecution if the parcel they were distributed in was stopped and searched by the authorities; but that the happy recipient could then easily, in the safety of their own home, rub the little patch off and glory in the sight of total male nudity!
Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow.
Mixed media
It’s not just photos. Within each part of London the curators identify gay photographers who lived and worked in that area, but also includes catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications to show how the photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. In the 1970s publishers of gay photos send out catalogue sheets like this one to customers, who then ordered full-sized body shorts and prints of the guys they fancied.
Which one would you send off for? 1970s catalogue sheet by John S Barrington. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
White Brixton
Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre.
Back to John S. Barrington. In the later 70s he set up the 252 Gallery on Brixton Hill, which included photographs but also drawings and sculptures. He sent out catalogues listing his many gay models and categorising them by race as well as arranging them by head and masked torso. They’re included here as an interesting example of the taxonomy of desire.
Black Brixton
Rotimi Fani-Kayode lived in Brixton from 1983 to 1989. His work explores the paradoxes of the Black queer experience. He’s represented by a work called the Golden Phallus.
Guy Burch was director of the Brixton Art Gallery from 1985 to 1988. Artist, writer and curator, he’s represented by photo study drawings and collages.
Frank B came to prominence for his performances which involved blood letting, performed in the late 1980s in gay fetish clubs and is represented by photographic invitation cards to a private screening of a 6-minute art movie.
Ajamu X is an artist, curator, archivist and activist whose work explores ‘the nuances of intersectional experience as a Black British queer man’. He is represented by contact sheets which show him playfully wearing a white cotton bra and panties.
Thoughts
To be quite honest this exhibition wasn’t quite as sexsationally fabulous as I was expecting it to be. A lot of the images are quite small, many are only on contact sheets of 20 or 30 tiny, tiny images which I had to lean right up to in order to see properly. Take the contact sheet of 40 or so images of Black artist Ajanu X who is, unexpectedly, wearing a white bra and panties in various states of disarray. Funny and sexy but tiny, each image only an inch square or less.
I enjoyed the staggering physiques of some of the Greek athlete-style photos from the 1930s and 40s. I liked the couple of photos by Cecil Beaton of Gervase Griffiths lazing by a fountain or posing among cow parsley in some field, because they were so redolent of a kind of Pink Floyd 1960s.
I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair.
There were several sequences of young men, obviously soldiers, in full uniform and then various stages of undress, hanging out together. There was a whole set of young blokes around the house, sitting, reading, smoking, half dressed or with their cocks hanging out their trousers, the Portobello Boys. Mildly interesting, but I went to an all-boys school and shared houses with blokes at university; admittedly we didn’t spend social time with our willies hanging out of our trousers – at least not when sober.
Overall, I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.
And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.
Two learnings
I don’t think I’d ever noticed the phrase ‘physique photography’ before, but here it kept recurring and being explained as a style of photography which goes beyond the passive idea of the ‘nude’ to celebrate a kind of effortful, muscular, athletic masculinity. Think body-building.
Stunning example of ‘physique photography’. Indian bodybuilder Monotosh Roy shot by Bill Green (Vince) in the 1950s
Related to it was a comment in a wall label right at the end making a simple but devastating point that, as LGBTQ+ culture gained confidence in the 1990s, photographers, publishers and consumers felt more confident in producing and consuming gay pornography.
The point being that the delicate balancing act, the hints and subtleties of the preceding decades, the self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s – all this tended to be swept away as gay art gained confidence in the 1990s. Now artists could depict explicit photos of erect penises and men doing all kinds of things with them to other men. Obviously delicacy and subtlety continue in a thousand flavours, but the era of constrained delicacy and obligatory subtlety came to an end with the arrival of explicit gay pornography.
Bodybuilder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990)
A note on nomenclature
The introduction explains that ‘queer’ is now the accepted academic term for non-normative sexualities but the curators acknowledge that it used to be a term of abuse (as it was when I was growing up) and so older visitors might be offended by its use. At the same time, they acknowledge that the more factual, legalistic term ‘homosexual’, which older visitors might be comfortable with, is ‘problematic’ for the younger generation.
The need for this note prompts the reflects the ongoing (and, I imagine, eternal) struggle human beings have to make sense of the disruptions, embarrassments and irrational instincts of sex which we find ourselves saddled with.
Willies
Having been to hundreds and hundreds of exhibitions curated by feminist curators and read thousands of wall labels written by feminist curators, I have had the notions of toxic masculinity, of the poisonous affect of the male gaze, of the evils of male sexual attention, of male sexual harassment, and the unspeakable terror of seeing a penis from which some women, apparently, never recover, drummed into me again and again and again. Even the shamefully biased mega-exhibition about so-called ‘Masculinities’ at the Barbican didn’t include one single image of a penis for fear of offending sensitive visitors.
It was, therefore, rather disorientating, gave me a sense of vertigo, to walk into a pair of rooms absolutely flooded with this object of terror and fear – showing a proliferation of penises, peckers and plonkers, willies and winkles and weenies, cocks and tools and todgers.
Like all the other ‘banned’ part of the human anatomy, like women’s breasts and, more so, vulvas, if images of penises are strictly rationed and you only occasionally see one, it can all too easily be overloaded with lust and desire. Whereas if you freely see scores, then hundreds of them, in all their variety and humanity and mundaneness, quite quickly you get used to the sight, and then a bit bored.
From a visual point of view penises obviously come in two states, flaccid and bored or aroused and erect. Presumably this is, or was, in the period under study, the threshold between images which could be justified as art or at least decorative (flaccid) and pornography (erect).
Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think there’s a single erect penis in the show. Maybe this is because the exhibition itself had to tread a fine line and the inclusion of erect penises would have crossed that line (? I don’t know the law on the matter). Maybe because pretty much all the photographers on show here used the flaccid/erect distinction as a simple rule of thumb (were there legal precedents under the Obscene Publications Act regarding the exact angle of arousal of the member? Again, not being a lawyer, I don’t know.)
For whatever reason, no erections at all are on display here and probably over half the images didn’t show penises at all (e.g. all the athletic, posing pouch-style photos; or a lot of the fully dressed soldiers or fairground workers; or just the many portraits which focused on faces) and all the ones that did include a penis showed it only as a slack, slumping, limp willy.
These kinds of images captured what I imagine is most men’s attitude to their penises; on rare and special occasions it may be roused and primed for action, but most of the time it’s just another part of the body which you barely think about unless you have to pee, or you inadvertently squash it while riding a bike or some such activity. Ouch!
In this respect a lot of the photos seemed (to me) to be surprisingly stripped of the urgency of sexual desire (lust) and instead conveyed quite a homely, almost domestic vibe of what it is to be a young man, to be naked and to lark around with other men. I’ve been to scores and scores of exhibitions making polemical points about women’s bodies, depicting them from every angle and analysing in immense detail the way women’s bodies are depicted in all sorts of media and the never-ending iniquity of the male gaze, as a matter of burning social and political importance.
This exhibition is a rare opportunity to look at scantily clad bodies without feeling a soupcon of guilt; and and space where the visitor can just accept and enjoy the sight of the male body, in all its variety, for what it is.
Catalogue sheet 3, 1949, by Bill Green (Vince). Stephen Cartwright collection
Last thought
This exhibition triggers nostalgia for an age before the internet: talk of photography as an activity restricted to a talented few, of hard copy magazines and subscriptions, of mail order catalogues, of the extraordinary lengths you had to go to to get sight of a photo of a naked man – all this consigns the entire exhibition to a past which is rapidly retreating.
For now we have 1) smartphones and 2) the internet. 1) More or less everyone has access not just to cameras, but to extremely high-quality cameras and amazingly sophisticated image manipulation softwares. Everyone’s a photographer these days. 2) And any image of anything, alive or dead or ever conceived, can now be accessed at the touch of a screen, including as many naked bodies, male, female or whatever, as your hard drive can cope with.
This entire exhibition bespeaks not just a world of repression and restraint, but of rarity and difficulty. Now nothing is rare and everything is available. Soon the subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact described in this exhibition will seem as dated and historical as the pictorial conventions of Georgian England.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is not an open competition which anyone can apply to, like the BP Portrait Award or the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. The exact opposite: the curators choose just four finalists from what they consider to have been the best photographic exhibitions staged by individual photographers, in Europe, in the previous 12 months. To be precise, the stated aim of the prize is to ‘reward artists and their projects considered to have made the most significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months.’
Therefore, if you visit the Photographers’ Gallery in the next few weeks you will find four rooms, each devoted to an in-depth display of work by just four international shortlisted artists. In alphabetical order these are Bieke Depoorter, Samuel Fosso, Arthur Jafa and Frida Orupabo. The winner of the prize was announced on 11 May and got a tidy sum of £30,000 (the other three entrants got £5,000 each). Who was the lucky winner? I’ll tell you at the end of this review.
I’m going to address the photographers in the order you actually encounter them in the gallery, rather than alphabetically.
1. Frida Orupabo
Frida Orupabo (born 1986) is a Norwegian of Nigerian heritage i.e. Black. She began posting photo collages on Instagram in the mid-2010s, cutting and pasting together images of Black bodies using historical and archive material; then in 2017 she took her approach into the real world (i.e. not just on a screen), creating the large collages you see here. All this led up to the exhibition which brought her to the curators’ attention, which was titled ‘I’ve seen a million pictures of my face and still have no idea’, which was held at the Photomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, February to May 2022.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
I immediately liked the results – very big, frameless, freestanding works which are more like sculptures hanging on walls than traditional photos. As far as I could tell, none of them had titles. Orupabo’s being Black and being a woman i.e. pressing contemporary art’s two big buttons of race and gender, sends the curators into a tizzy of artspeak:
The sculptural collages and digital works of Frida Orupabo are multi-layered formations, exploring questions of race, sexuality and identity. Orupabo, a Norwegian Nigerian artist and sociologist, grounds her inquiry in her own experience of cultural belonging. Utilising visual material circulating online, spanning colonial-era photographs and ethnographic relics to contemporary imagery, Orupabo’s hand-wrought works re-arrange and re-make the archive. The resulting images take the shape of fragmented Black, mostly female-bodied, figures.
These figures, first dislocated, are reassembled layer by layer in a complex and poetic manoeuvre that simultaneously denounces one-dimensional depictions of Black lives. Her collaged cutouts hold our gaze and invite various readings of the stories and lives of the people depicted, many of whom are entirely absent from the archives. In this way Orupabo invites a consideration of how photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence.
Does photography ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Isn’t that like saying books ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ or laws ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Surely any technology can ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ if that’s how the people wielding it want to use it. Probably guns contributed quite a bit ‘to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’, probably quite a bit more than photography. In fact photographs of the atrocities carried out by the authorities in the Belgian Congo did as much to disgrace and discredit that authority, as the kind of photographs the curators have in mind, the kind used to measure and categorise the Indigenous peoples, did to define and control them. Photography is just a technology. I can be used for good or evil. Writing that ‘photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ is just art school boilerplate, modish rhetoric, smart-sounding swank (definition: ‘behaviour, talk, or display intended to impress others).
Anyway, as so often, the curators’ obsession with the twin shibboleths of race and gender blind them to the specificity of the actual art in front of them. Two things struck me. One was the way the deliberate crudeness of the artefacts is intentional: heads are pasted onto bodies at anatomically impossible angles, a pair of legs are completely separated from a body. She is highlighting the utter dysjunctive effect of her collages, their complete artificiality, and that reminded me of Dada, of the deliberately unsmooth, jagged photocollages of George Grosz or John Heartfield from 100 years ago.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
But something not at all hinted at in the curators’ commentary is the horror tropes. In the top photo you can see that the loosely female figures are, from left to right, 1) attended by two sort of flying rabbit demons; 2) sitting on a monster’s head; 3) is shaped like a mermaid; and 4) in the most striking image, is a human head cut and pasted onto the body of a bat. A whole lot of stuff is going on here, but what strikes me is the invocation of imagery of Gothic tales and horror stories; it’s the stuff of Goya nightmares. What? Why? In this respect she reminds me of the way Kara Walker’s silhouettes of Black people in ante-Bellum Deep South morph into nightmare, monster images.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
Anyway, it was the sheer weirdness of these big collages which grabbed me, not their alleged commentary on colonialist this, that or the other, and so I’ll tell you straightaway that, for the uncanny unexpected weirdness of her images, Orupabo was my favourite of the four artists: I wanted her to win.
2. Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter was born in 1986 in Belgium. She was selected for this prize on the basis of a 2022 exhibition titled ‘A Chance Encounter’, staged at C/O Berlin from April to September 2022. The display here consists of two parts, titled ‘Michael’ and ‘Agata’. Apparently:
In ‘Agata’, a first meeting [with Agata Kay] in a Parisian strip-club in 2017 evolves with complex tension into an intricate, changing narrative. The project explores questions of collaboration, the limits of a creative friendship, performance, boundaries and authorship.
I couldn’t find ‘Agata’. Possibly it amounted to one framed photo of a pink room, and maybe a collage of movie posters on one wall, but these weren’t labelled so I wasn’t sure. Going back to reread the introductory wall label more carefully I realised that the subject of Depoorter’s photos, the stripper Agata, eventually asked Depoorter to suspend their relationship and asked that all record of the photos, conversations and letters involved in it be erased. Maybe the Agata project is the absence of any materials about the Agata project. OK. That has a pleasing 1970s conceptual art feel about it.
But the reason I wasn’t too sad about not finding ‘Agata’ is because it was completely dwarfed by the other project displayed here, ‘Michael’. This is an epic, dense, absorbing and deeply unsettling work.
in 2015 Depoorter met a middle-aged, confused man named Michael on the streets of Portland, Oregon, USA. They got talking and Michael took her to his apartment which turned out to be covered from floor to ceiling with scrapbook-style cut-outs from magazines, books, newspapers, school reports, journals and diaries and all manner of bric-abrac.
As a result of this encounter Michael gave Depoorter three suitcases containing a trove of his personal items, sketchbooks and essays which she, for unexplained reasons, accepted. Then, presumably, she departed Portland, for the wall label explains that, at some point later on, she tried to contact him again and failed. When she flew back to Portland to find him she discovered his flat rented to someone else and that Michael had vanished, leaving no trace.
At which point Depoorter commenced what appears to have been months if not years of effort to track him down, the start of an obsessive quest to find Michael and to understand his life. As far as the labels tell us, to this day she still hasn’t found him, but along the way she has created the two big things which this darkened room is filled with. One is the way all the walls are even more covered in detritus and scraps of every kind than Michael’s apartment was, the records and ephemera of her hunt which Depoorter has acquired over the past 6 or 7 years.
Installation view of Michael by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
Post-its festoon multiple layers of documents and diaries and journals and magazine photos and contact sheets. Arrows connect different pieces of evidence. It’s exactly like the room of the crazed serial killer which the cops eventually break into in all those American psycho movies. She calls it ‘The investigation room’ and what we see here is just a fragment of the materials she’s accumulated in her obsessive, endless search. She has supplemented Michael’s own collection of ephemera with her own. The two sets of detritus are intimately interwoven. But spooky though this is, it isn’t the main thing: the main thing is the film.
Installation view of ‘Michael’ by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
It’s a 31-minute-long film detailing Depoorter’s obsessive quest so far. There are no moving segments. It consists entirely of still photos, so it’s by way of being a slideshow of places she’s been to and people she’s interviewed as she delves deeper into Michael’s life and past, her words and those of the interviewees appearing as captions on the screen.
So, in the sequence I watched, Depoorter spoke to some people who were at high school with Michael, who described his intense upbringing by nice but weird Mormons. We see stills of Michael’s high school yearbook with jagged, uneven hand-written notes scrawled across it. It has lots of overtones of serial killer movie, except Michael is no killer, just an oddball Depoorter bumped into and became slowly obsessed with.
If all this sounds weird (and it definitely is) after just a few minutes I found the pace and determination of Depoorter’s narrative drawing me into the film. Michael may have been just an insignificant nobody and yet, in Depoorter’s powerful telling, the memories of childhood friends and schoolmates become weirdly compelling. I realised I was being drawn into Depoorter’s own obsession. It’s contagious!
The curators comment that this work interrogates:
the complex ethical relationship and boundaries…between the photographer and their subject [and] questions the role and responsibilities of the photographer, the possibility or impossibility of truth in representation and grapples with personal and professional boundaries.
No doubt. But something deeper and weirder was also at work here. I was quite relieved to break away from the film and step back out into the light airy gallery space.
3. Samuel Fosso
Samuel Fosso was born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon. He was selected for the prize on the basis his exhibition ‘Samuel Fosso’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, from November 2021 to March 2022.
Since the mid-1970s Fosso has dedicated his artistic practice to self-portraits and performative photography. In vulgar language, he dresses up and photographs himself. At the tender age of 13 he set up a Studio Photo Nationale in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic. Alongside commercial work, Fosso began a series of self-portraits, and has carried on to the present day, hence a nickname he picked up along the way, ‘the man of a thousand faces’.
More recently Fosso has created a series titled ‘African Spirits’ in which he dressed up as – and recreated famous photographs featuring – Black celebrities such as (the ones on display here) radical activist Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Haile Selassie and Tommie Smith, one of the African Americans who gave the Black Power clenched fist salute from the podium of the 1968 Olympics.
Installation view of ‘African Spirits’ by Samuel Fosso at the Photographers’ Gallery. Can you name all 6 of these famous Black figures?
According to the curators:
Playing the role of key historical figures and social archetypes in front of the camera, Fosso embodies a powerful way of existing in the world, and a vivid demonstration of photography’s role in the construction of myths.
There’s also a pair of huge colour photos of himself dressed as soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, tribute to the many African and Black soldiers who fought in those wars (see my blog post, Congolese soldiers in the world wars).
Compared to the previous two displays, photocollage sculptures and a weirdly compelling documentary film, Fosso’s exhibits – classic framed photographs – seemed, well, kind of obvious, kind of quaint.
4. Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa was born in 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi, USA. He is an artist and filmmaker. What is an American doing in an exhibition supposedly restricted to exhibitions in Europe?
Well, one answer is that art curators can’t stop themselves promoting the Great Yoonited States of America: after all, Depoorter’s ‘Michael’ project is about an American and entirely set in America and half of Fosso’s African Spirits are American. And now we have an actual American photographer. Three out of the four displays are heavily or entirely American.
Why do British curators love American art?
What can you do against the endless tide of American art and artists being promoted by British art curators and adding to the vast sea of American culture which floods all our channels? If Britain’s art curators are so hell-bent on promoting American culture and American values at every opportunity, all I can do is register my feeble protest and point out that there are, in fact, other countries in the world apart from America. Quite a few, actually.
Why do we rarely or never hear about them? Because America is easy, that’s why. American art comes pre-packaged with 1) fluent, articulate artists who are great in interviews 2) innumerable American critics who bubble over with rhetoric about race and gender and 3) political and cultural ‘issues’ which we all already know too much about about because they flood our TV, radio, movies, documentaries, newsfeeds, twitter and all the other American-run social media.
When an American artist gives an interview saying they’re addressing issues of #metoo or Black Lives Matter,everybody immediately knows what they’re talking about and nods in concerned sympathy because we’ve already seen and heard and read hundreds and hundreds of news items and newspaper stories and magazine features and documentaries interviews and tweets about just these ‘issues’.
American art is like McDonalds art. It’s smooth, pre-packaged, ready to consume, processed, pre-masticated, baby food. Just add water and you’re good to go. Compare and contrast the problems you’d encounter with the language barrier and with explaining all the little-known historical and cultural references if you tried to stage an exhibition of contemporary, say, Indonesian or Peruvian art. But another African American artist yakking about slavery or the institutional racism of American society – piece of cake, child’s play, no brainer, no mental effort required, just the appropriate amount of liberal sympathy.
Arthur Jafa
Anyway, Jafa is here despite not being European because his exhibition, ‘Live Evil’, was shown at Arles in the South of France i.e. a European venue, from April to November 2022.
There’s a video of an extended interview with Jafa. He’s very angry about racism, in America, Europe, everywhere. In the bit I watched he quoted Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. In a modern art gallery you’re never far away from the 1960s. My eyes glazed over because I have heard scores of Black artists complaining about racism in America and read hundreds of articles about racism in America. Black Lives Matter posters hang in the windows of concerned students round where I live.
The stories of Uyghurs Muslims locked up and tortured in Xinjiang, of the people dying and displaced in Yemen or Syria, of the 920,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, now as I write and you read? Are these packing the walls of the Barbican, Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the Photographers’ Gallery? No. Silence. Nada. Their stories will never be told. They might as well not exist. But another American artist doing another show about how racist America is? Take your pick.
One last obvious point about the ubiquity of American artists: America is rich. It has the wealth to support a huge class of artists who, if they play their cards right, can become very wealthy, successful, appear in all the right magazines, and generally enjoy a great lifestyle. Makes me feel a bit sick when artists from the richest country in the world complain about their suffering and oppression. Go and live in Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Afghanistan for a month then fly back to your air-conditioned studio in LA and tell me about the suffering of ‘your people’.
Anyway, according to the curators, Jafa’s work is another ‘extended meditation on the issues of race and the Black experience’. Just like Frida Orupabo’s display, then. I’d swear there are other ethnicities in the world apart from Black and White. There are quite a lot of Indians and not a few Chinese, for a start. But not in Curatorworld. Black, Black and more Black, preferably American Black, is the only experience, the only voice, the only art we are going to be shown. I’m not saying ‘the Black experience’ is not a thing to investigate. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not the only story in the entire world to be aware of, to listen to.
Anyway, to quote the curators:
Drawing from a rich collection of images, film footage and music, Arthur Jafa uncompromisingly articulates Black experience, providing us with an exercise in visual literacy, confronting us with a new Black aesthetic which avoids fixed hierarchies and linear storytelling
There are just six works in Jafa’s display, six very large photos. First, maybe a word of explanation about the tile. ‘Live Evil’ is the name of a Miles Davis album, released in 1971, a live recording of a concert performed in December 1970 in Washington DC. After the epoch-making ‘Bitches Brew’ of 1969, Miles was working with a large group of almost entirely electric instruments, producing a strange voodoo swamp sound, mashing up heavy funk grooves with Jimi Hendrix guitar, and his own trumpet heavily electronically distorted. During this period Miles cultivated a dark and brooding image. He revelled in the nickname ‘the Prince of Darkness’, in fact he released an album titled ‘The Prince of Darkness’ in 1971, same years as ‘Live Evil’. Anyway, ‘Live Evil’, which sounds like this:
Miles Davis (1926 to 1991) was without doubt one of the great musical artists, composers and performers of the twentieth century. In the show he is featured in a diptych (‘any object with two flat plates which form a pair’) alongside the godfather of the Delta Blues, acoustic guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911 to 1938), which looks like this:
Johnson died young leaving only 20 or so recordings behind which have, nonetheless, become legendary and inspired all the blues guitarists of the 1940s and since. Dying young, Johnson left a legend or urban myth about himself which is that, in order to play so amazingly, he had sold his soul to the Devil. This legend was fostered by tracks with titles like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ or ‘Hellhound on my trail’:
So what does Jafa’s juxtaposition of these two Black musical icons tell us? Well for a start, they both made smoking look cool. To consider their music, although only about 40 years separate the photos (1930 to 1970) they seem musically and technologically galaxies apart. Then again, maybe they’re linked by the common thread of their devilish reputations, hellhounds and princes of darkness. Finally, maybe it’s simpler than that: Robert and Miles were both outstanding musicians, embodiments of Black excellence.
Across the room is another, bigger and more dramatic juxtaposition:
On the face of it, this is a straight contrast between an image of innocence and one of scary threat. Yet some other visitors I got talking to explained to me that they’re both images of identity masquerade: apparently, the earliest iterations of Mickey were based on white entertainers who’d blacked up as minstrels; while the figure on the right is actually a white actor who has blacked up using scary voodoo imagery (I assume this photo was shot on a film set but I can’t find out which one. Do you know?). They’re both lies, or deceptions, or multi-layered images of Blackness. Is that it?
tackles the complexity of African-American cultural identity, as defined by an existential paradox that places the Black subject ‘in essential intimacy with death’, as Saidiya Hartman explains in Jafa’s documentary ‘Dreams are Colder than Death’ (2013).
The endlessness of American pop culture
I liked the clarity of these dyptychs and also the fact that they were much deeper than they first appeared to be. The trouble, though, with popular culture, especially American popular culture, is that it is endless. Like the Bible, you can find a passage or quotes to prove anything you want to. I can cut and paste Homer Simpson next to Superman and straightaway I’m making important statements about masculinity, or something. Given such a vast sea of pop ephemera it would be hard to splice together two random elements and not find yourself raising interesting cultural or semiotic issues.
American culture combines technological wizardry with super-refined commercial strategising. Look at the Marvel Comic Universe movies, which are spectacular viewing, rank as the highest-grossing film series of all time, having netted over $29.1 billion, and have a mental age of around 9.
And American artists are trapped within this culture, condemned to try and imbue meretricious trash with meaning – and Black American artists are doubly trapped, trapped in a sea of Americana from which they (apparently, if someone like Jafa is to be believed) feel profoundly alienated. So I understand Jafa when he says that Black American artists are they trying to create narratives of Blackness which will help them navigate the bottomless dumpster of American pop culture, and the complex matrix of racist laws, assumptions and culture. I assimilate this kind of message because I’ve heard it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It comes pre-packaged and ready to consume.
Anyway, the puzzling thing about the Arthur Jafa display is that the use of these two sly juxtapositions is not his only trick – only two of the six items use it; the other four items are single images and far more varied, not to say troubling.
One is a treated image of the Black singer of a rock band (HR of Bad Brains) jumping about onstage, which left me cold, having spent too much of my teenage year paying attention to images of rock performers to be impressed by one more.
But in a completely different tone from everything else, one entire wall is taken up with an enormous photo of what appears to be a room somewhere in Rwanda, empty of people, but filled with washing lines (?) from which hang the clothes and rags of people hacked to pieces in the terrible genocide.
Installation view of Arthur Jafa at the Photographers’ Gallery
Is this part of ‘the Black experience’? Or the African experience? Or the human experience? It was certainly part of this generation of Rwandans’ experience. Does it directly impact anyone who wasn’t there? If so, why more so than the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust or – the most disastrous civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion in China in which at least 20 million perished (which I’ve just been reading about at the new exhibition at the British Museum)? Or the Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962, in which anything up to 50 million Chinese starved to death? Or, during my lifetime, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea in which up to 2 million people, a quarter of the population, were murdered or starved to death, 1975 to 1978?
I carry the images and histories of all these atrocities in my head, which not only gives me a very dim view of human nature, but also appears to be where I differ from someone like Jafa, because I don’t categorise these atrocities by the skin colour of the victims. They’re all human to me, each one an individual who suffered more than I can imagine, died in misery and terror, mounting up to a vast weight of guilt on the conscience of mankind. The collected atrocities of mankind don’t respect colour or ethnicity, which is why I find the foregrounding or privileging of some massacres or genocides over others morally repugnant.
Anyway, back to Jafa. The last piece in his display is a partial sculpture, a kind of bas-relief hanging on the wall of the whip-scarred back of a Black slave, a very potent image of man’s grotesque inhumanity to man or the atrocities of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
I get it, the Black slave trade was a very, very bad thing and generations of white exploiters captured, bought, transported and treated their African slaves with unbearable savagery and brutality. But I happen to have just finished reading Robert Hughes’s epic history of transportation to Australia, The Fatal Shore, and it is packed to overflowing with the unspeakably sadistic treatment meted out to the transported white convicts, especially in the penal colonies of Port Moresby and Norfolk Island. For even slight misdemeanours like looking at an overseer the wrong way, a convict could get three hundred lashes till bystanders could see their spine and ribs through the remains of their butchered back and the bystanders had to pick gobbets of raw human flesh off their clothes. Hughes repeats descriptions of British or Irish convicts who were whipped to death. So this, for me, is the image of a whipped human.
Most of human history is an abattoir. To limit notions of suffering and injustice to just one ethnicity or to one group or one class seems to me historically and morally questionable. It’s a form of boasting – my grievance is bigger than your grievance. It’s very much part of the grievance and victim culture which America has perfected and exported to the rest of the developed world.
But billions have suffered abominably, in every continent, at the hands of all races. The génocidaires in Rwanda weren’t white. The killers in Cambodia weren’t white. The people who implemented the Great Leap forward weren’t white. The murderers of 1.5 million Armenians weren’t white. The administrators of the gulags weren’t Western imperialists.
If these seem disproportionately enormous ideas for a photography exhibition that’s because Jafa is aiming to trigger big ideas about history. It’s just that I happen to be, maybe, more knowledgeable about the history of atrocity than the average gallery goer and so my frame of reference is wider, maybe, than he intends. Maybe it’s just me. I’ve read more widely about atrocities throughout history than is good for anyone, and so this powerful object triggers a wider, deeper historical response than he was, maybe, expecting.
I’m reading Emma Sky’s book about Iraq. She mentions General David Petraeus raising Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue in conversation. This was written about the siege of Melos in 416 BC, part of the wider the Peloponnesian War. When the Athenians finally took the city of Melos they executed the entire male population and enslaved all the women and children. My year of reading Roman history and literature drummed into me that slavery was a universal institution throughout the ancient world, that the civilisations of ancient Athens, Rome and Egypt entirely depended on it and that the huge slave population was subjected to terrible, awful lives of unending labour and liable to whipping, cutting, maiming and torture for the slightest infraction.
That’s what I know, that’s what an image like this triggers; not the suffering of one particular group, but the universal horror of human history.
Anyway, back from these vast horizons to a small room in Soho containing half a dozen artworks by Arthur Jafa. The conclusion from this small display seems to be that Jafa has at least two modes of operation, one consisting of the canny juxtaposition of images from popular culture, an astute form of curating and darkling satire; the other mode, flat-out horrific memorials of ‘the Black experience’.
This latter is, as you can imagine, catnip to modern white curators, driven by the bottomless resource of white bourgeois guilt:
By placing one resonant cultural artefact next to another Jafa references and questions the universal and specific articulations of Black experience. Eschewing a linear narrative, Jafa organises his material through formal and affective associations, linking his images through visual resemblance or thematic resonance. In this way Jafa aspires to an art that harnesses ‘the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.’
That’s from the press release. On the introductory wall label the curators say:
Embracing slippage and dissonance Jafa creates art that is as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.
‘…as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.’ What I took from the four exhibits on show here is that ‘Blackness’ as an artistic, critical and curatorial concept is indeed so fluid and multidimensional that artists, critics and curators can say almost anything about it and sound convincing. It lends power and a sense of urgency and relevance to even the most anodyne exhibition. It adds the spice of the ‘radical’ to a medium which all curators are uneasily aware is overwhelmingly white and bourgeois. Along with Gender it is a power word and, more than that, a kind of ideological matrix or discursive machine, which will continue to generate works and words, art and discourse, with ever-proliferating effect, for the foreseeable future.
From one perspective, ‘the Black experience’ as an art category is not so much the product of Black people’s actual experiences (which I imagine are very varied and complex) as it is of the liberal guilt of the White art establishment.
Who won?
Who do you think should have won the prize? It was won by Samuel Fosso, ‘the man of a thousand faces’. Why? Shoair Mavlian, the (White, obvz) Director of The Photographers’ Gallery and Chair of the Jury said that Fosso’s:
‘sustained exploration of self-portraiture uses a traditional, studio-based approach steeped in history, while at the same time his work remains relevant and addresses contemporary political issues of today with humour and authenticity. His work has created an extraordinary platform for Black voices and artists throughout his career.’
It’s a difficult choice but I think I liked Frida Orupabo’s weird, Gothic photomontages more than Fosso’s dressing up; and, although I’ve just given him a hard time, actually the clarity and design of Arthur Jafa’s diptychs have stayed with me days later, but then that’s American art for you, as slick and efficient as a Spielberg movie.
This is an exhibition with a thesis. The layout and design, the structure, the choice of topics addressed and even the selection of individual artefacts, have all been made to support the central argument. What is this thesis? It’s another one of those ‘undermining received opinion’ exhibitions, so common nowadays.
In this case the received opinion goes like this: in the fifth century BC, from roughly 500 to 450 BC, the federation of Greek city states, led by Athens, fought off repeated attempts to invade and conquer them mounted by the huge Persian (proper scholarly name, Achaemenid) Empire, under its kings, Darius the Great (ruled 522 to 486 BC) and Xerxes the Great (ruled 486 to 465 BC).
You can see from this map how the Achaemenid Empire, at its height around 500 BC, covered a large swathe of south-central Asia and how vexing it was for its rulers that it swept through the Middle East, all of Turkey and up into the Balkans only to be blocked by the obstinate city states of Greece (at the far left of the map).
The Achaemenid Empire at its Greatest Extent, about 500 BC. Created by Mossmaps, accessed from Wikipedia
Contemporary Greeks, notably the historian Herodotus, but many other politicians and playwrights whose works have survived, portrayed the conflict as a desperate struggle against the odds of free, democratic states battling oriental tyranny.
In particular – and the focus of this exhibition – is the way that Greek leaders, politicians, writers and historians, but also artists, sculptors and craftsmen, routinely associated the Persians with luxury, with excessive wealth, which they went on to associate with moral failings such as decadence, greed, corruption, effeminacy, and so on.
The legendary King Midas (originally an actual ruler of Phrygia in central Anatolia) and how he was curse to turn everything he touched into gold, became associated with the Persians, a symbol of the punishment incurred by unlimited greed.
Recreation of an Achaemenid court robe, made with expensive dyes, rich embroidery and gold applique, designed to be draped and belted across the middle. Designed by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University (2022)
According to Greek writers all this Oriental extravagance and decadence starkly contrasted with their own pure, restrained and high-minded art and culture, which was summed up in the inscription above the famous oracle at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess‘.
East versus West
This stark dichotomy or binary view of civilisations, of a fundamental opposition the West and the Eastern Mediterranean, was to have a strong influence on the Roman Empire, whose leaders and writers also associated themselves with lofty principle and morality, and their opponents in the East – the successors to the Persians, the Parthian Empire – in identical terms. We are brave, they are warlike. We are high-minded and principled, they are lawless and treacherous. We live lives of dignity and restraint, they wallow on luxury and sensuality. All tropes which would again be revived when, in the late Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then pushed on into Thrace, eventually conquering Greece itself in the 1700s.
These tropes lived on into 18th and 19h century scholarly works, of history, art and anthropology, as what the American critic Edward Said called ‘Orientalism’ i.e. associating the empires, states and peoples of the East with luxury, corruption, decadence, sexual profligacy and so on.
Arguably, this great founding binary between noble democratic West and tyrannical barbarous East underwent another enormous revival in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, in aftermath of which loads of American leaders and opinion-makers revived all these old tropes, painting the Middle East as a land of wild-eyed religious fanatics, with the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington going as far as claiming the terrorist attacks had revived an age-old, unchangeable and inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’.
The only thing problem with this long and hallowed tradition is that, right back where it started, with the polar opposition between Greeks and the Persians… it’s wrong. And this exhibition at the British Museum sets out to show why.
Undoing the stereotype
It does so by presenting two counter-claims:
Persian luxury wasn’t what the Greeks claimed it to be
the Greeks were far from being as spartan and luxury-free as they claimed, but themselves valued luxury goods and incorporated many aspects of Persian craftsmanship and style into their own artefacts
To put it another way, for over two thousand years scholars and writers in the West have tended to take the Greeks’ at their own valuation of themselves, not least because our own power structures (of Christendom versus the Turks, of the European powers when they created their empires, of the modern 21st century American empire) found the Greeks’ binary tropes useful to confirm the superiority of the moral West. But the actual objects from these two supposedly distinct cultures tell a different story. They reveal a far more complex and messy picture of cultural interaction, interpenetration, influence and involvement than the official documents.
Thus, with disarming simplicity, the exhibition reflect this binary worldview, starting with two rooms: the first one displays a range of objects from different parts of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, some to explain the history and structure of the empire, some to demonstrate how luxury objects were used to express and support political and cultural power.
Room two focuses on the other half of the dyad, classical Athens of the 5th century BC, again with some objects used to explain the history and cultural highpoints of the period (of which the construction of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 BC is the most notable item), before going on to display cases which indicate how the Athenians incorporated, remodelled and adapted influences from the East through a variety of handicrafts and objects.
Hellenistic
And then, to prove its point that there was always more complex interplay between cultures right across the region, the third and final room looks in detail at the culture which arose after the conquest of Alexander the Great.
Alexander turned the tables on the Persians for, after conquering all of Greece, he swiftly took Anatolia, conquered Egypt and then pushed on into modern Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan. It was here that his dazzling ten-year career of ceaseless conquests came to an end with his untimely death in Babylon in 323 BC.
On his death Alexander’s short-lived empire quickly collapsed into individual kingdoms ruled by his various generals and there’s a display of coins with heads of those who managed to emerge as new rulers including the Antigonids (who emerged to rule Macedonia), the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Persia. Nonetheless the Greek culture, literacy, models of poetry and writing, models of sculpture and architecture, lived on after him across the whole region.
Because some Greeks called their homeland Hellas and its inhabitants Hellenes, scholars have for hundreds of years referred to the period from 323 until the Romans conquered Egypt in 31 BC, as the Hellenistic period, and art historians refer to the style which developed across it as the Hellenistic style.
The curators include a room on post-Alexander Hellenistic culture in this exhibition because they want us to arrive at it with fresh eyes: instead of the Hellenistic style representing a new synthesis of opposing traditions – which art historians have traditionally seen it as – this exhibition argues that Hellenism was more like the logical continuation of complex cross-cultural contacts and currents which had been swirling across the region for centuries before, despite the insistence to the contrary of Greek propagandists, who scholars for too long have taken too literally.
Room 1. The Achaemenid Empire
So room one attempts to show that the so-called ‘luxury’ of the Persians wasn’t indicative of moral failings, as Greek propagandists liked to claim, but was an intrinsic aspect of their statecraft. In other words, artefacts and objects, ceremonies and rituals which involved or highlighted wealth were important tools in keeping together such a huge and heterogeneous empire. When the Achaemenids conquered a territory, they went out of their way to appease populations. They often left native rulers in place (such as King Arbinas of Lycia for whom the Nereid Monument was built which is viewable elsewhere in the museum) or replaced them with regional administrators called satraps.
The new Persian rulers let their subject peoples continue to practice their religions – but they insisted on the pomp and pageantry which established them firmly as the ultimate rulers, distributing largesse and gifts to confirm the hierarchy of client king or satrap, and emperor. Satraps in turn collected taxes and tributes, and then granted largesse on a local level.
Thus the Persian administrative system court used objects of exquisite luxury not only as markers of authority but as intrinsic means to the administration of the empire. In doing so, a distinctive Persian style developed that was copied by different social classes throughout the empire and spread far beyond, into Greece itself and up into the Balkans. To quote one curator, the ‘Persians wielded “luxury” as a political tool across a vast and complex empire.
The Greek interpretation of Persian ‘luxury’ was a misreading: the Greeks interpreted it through a moralising prism and failed to understand that ostentatious displays of luxury were central to the Persian Empire’s administrative methodology.
Power was demonstrated not just by luxury objects but ceremonies and activities such as holding public audiences, banquets for subject kings and courtiers, and hunting expeditions. The court moved seasonally between the capital Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, to hold court, administer justice, and confirm his power around his huge multicultural empire. The king travelled with a vast camp including a royal tent equivalent to a palace throne.
According to the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian emperor would reward client kings and courtiers with gits such as a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, a gold scimitar, a Persian coat, and so on.
The room starts with historical background to the Greco-Persian wars: with Cyrus the Great (died in 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then Darius I (550 to 486 BC) who launched the first invasion of Greece (492 to 492). This failed, he began preparation for another one, but died before it could start and handed on preparations to his son, Xerxes.
Xerxes (486 to 465 BC) led the second attempted invasion of Greece, invading via a bridge he had constructed across the Hellespont (480 BC), and mounting a military campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although he at one point captured Athens and burned the buildings on the Acropolis (480), Xerxes was defeated at Plataea and, facing revolts in various provinces back in the empire, was forced to retreat from Greece. The defeat of his huge campaign spelled the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenian Empire.
Room 1 displays
Having given a brisk overview of the historical background, the exhibition moves on to cases devoted to various aspects of the central topic, ‘luxury’.
One of the most numerous types of object are so-called rhytons. These are drinking vessels but, the exhibition tells us, were part of a surprisingly ornate ritual. You’re a very senior Persian official and, at a banquet, you hold the rhyton in one hand while a slave fills it with wine. When it reaches a certain level you tip it with one hand and a stream of wine gushes forth from a small hole at the bottom, often concealed amid an elaborate design, and the thing is, you had to direct this stream of wine towards a shallow bowl you’re holding in your other hand. You don’t drink from the rhyton, you drink from the bowl. The rhyton is a luxury object designed to showcase your power and prestige, as is the entire ritual.
Sound unlikely? Well, there’s a carved stone relief showing precisely this action being carried out at a banquet and there’s several cases full of beautifully worked examples of these wine pourers, crafted into all kinds of animal motifs.
Other aspects of Persian ‘luxury’ include bottles created to contain rare and precious spices and oils and objects such as the exquisite gold armlet (above), details of peacocks and parasols, jewellery and make-up. The king wore fur-lined coats, a golden torc around his throat, all markers of supreme power.
Persian rulers used chariots for hunting but also as symbols of power and dominance. The most common animals in Persian imagery are the mightiest animal then known, the lion, and the mythical creature, the griffin, both of which are depicted across all media from the Persian Empire.
Gateway 1. The Persian wars
You pass from room 1 to room 2 through a kind of gateway, angular upright and lintel painted jet black to distinguish it from the dazzling white of the rest of the show. In each of these there is an animated map and a couple of artefacts reflecting war. The first one is a 30-second animation showing the path of the two Persian invasions into mainland Greece: the first one from 492 to 490, ending in defeat at the Battle of Marathon; the second one, from 480 to 479, which featured the battle of Thermopylae, the naval battle of Salamis (480) and the Persians’ definitive defeat at Plataea. To set the tone the animation is accompanied by a classic Greek helmet and a figurine of a warrior.
Room 2. Ancient Athens
Again, the room starts with the basic history, describing the development of the Greek city states, especially Athens, which rose to have an empire of its own, complete with an enormous population of slaves and a flock of smaller cities who paid her handsome tributes, as well as wealth from the silver mines discovered in 483.
There’s a bust of Pericles the great statesman (495 to 429 BC), whose noble speeches are recorded by the historian Thucydides, and who oversaw the development of Athenian democracy and the building of a new, astonishingly beautiful and mathematically precise temple to Athena Parthenos atop the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was not only a temple but a treasury, a storehouse, packed with treasures of all kinds.
The exhibition backs this up with an illustration of the original Parthenon, brightly painted and decorated, and photos of the modern reconstruction of the enormous statue of Athena Parthenos (‘the virgin’) which was the focal point of the Parthenon and which was a gaudy, brightly painted figure, 12 metres tall, made of ivory, wood and gold.
Reconstruction of the statue of Athena Parthenos at the reconstruction of the entire Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Luxury permitted when it enhanced the prestige of the city.
There’s an inventory of some of the treasure the temple once contained, carved in stone (including the throne of King Xerxes, captured at the Battle of Salamis); and part of a relief from the Elgin Marbles showing women processing towards the temple carrying luxury plates and objects, possibly captured from the Persian army, to devote to the goddess.
This section explains how the Athenians struggled to reconcile their self image as noble, egalitarian democrats with their growing wealth. One solution was to decide ‘luxury’ was permissible so long as it wasn’t attached to individuals but was used to honour that state.
It also explains the socio-political reasons for this aversion to luxury. Democracy was a response to civil conflict. Competitive displays of wealth among Athens’s richest families had led to tensions and violence at the end of the 6th century. When the statesman Kleisthenes introduced his reforms in 508 they were designed to defuse these tensions by enforcing greater equality between citizens. The laws he introduced distributed political responsibility among all adult male citizens in a system they came to call the rule of the people, demos-kratos.
Thus the animadversions of so many writers against personal displays of ‘luxury’ wasn’t based on morality alone, but on a very real fear that they would revive the social conflicts of the late 6th century which had threatened to plunge the city into civil war. Banning private displays of wealth was a political necessity.
Room 2 displays
Take peacocks. Peacocks were a very Persian marker of luxury and caste. They arrived in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC. Expensive to keep and with no practical purpose, they were classic markers of wealth and luxury, which meant their owners had to be careful not to raise democratic hackles. One aristocrat publicly displayed his peacocks once a month: luxury was acceptable so long as it was presented as benefiting the community.
As to Athenian views of the Persians, there’s a hilarious display case showing how the Greeks portrayed them on the many, many vases they made, decorated with line drawings of characters and animals. On earlier pots Persian characters are depicted as wearing trousers and jackets, very barbaric from a Greek perspective, but dignified and noble warriors.
After the triumphs of the Persian war, the depiction of Persians became more mocking and derisive, notably in the image of a defeated Persian sitting side-saddle (effeminate) on a donkey (not a warlike horse) facing backwards.
Or take the Persian habit of having slaves carry a parasol to protect you from the fierce Middle Eastern sun. In Greek depictions, this was turned into parasols for delicate ladies, associating the Persians with effeminacy. In part this was because women played no part in Athenian politics and so were, in a sense, free to toy with decadent habits. Another one the exhibition points out, is the use of make-up and eyeliner, something Persian men wore but would be unthinkable in a fine, upstanding male Greek citizen.
Fish were another pressure point. Rich Athenians imported from the Persians a taste for rare and exotic fish, something which was publicly disapproved of, as shown here by a vase illustration and a disapproving quote from the playwright Aristophanes. (Compare and contrast with Roman moralists from Cicero onwards singling out ownership of rare fish ponds as one of the first markers of the Roman Republic’s slide into decadence and decay.)
Remember the rhytons which figured largely in the first room? This room has half a dozen examples showing how the Greeks adapted and undermined their grandiloquent originals. For a start they’re generally made from the Greeks’ favourite material, good democratic clay not ostentatious silver. And , as in this example, the bombastic use of an animal’s head (a lion’s) is undermined by the realistic and very Greek narrative depicted on the main body of the vase, above it.
There’s a case explaining that the Persians used images of bulls, lions and griffins in their power objects, but that these characteristically Persian motifs were also incorporated by Athenian designers. The exhibition features examples including beautifully crafted jewellery such as pendants and bracelets, and even a wonderful pair of earrings with tiny deer-heads in the shape of rhytons. What had been exemplary markers of Achaemenid royal court have been transformed into high-end fashion accessories for wealthy Athenians.
Interestingly, Persian motifs and depictions of characters wearing classic Persian dress became slowly more stylised and generalised, over time. A century after peace had been made with Persia (i.e. by 350) Persian motifs had been generalised into images and symbols of the vague East, including griffins, Amazons and other legendary animals and peoples.
Gateway 2. Alexander’s conquests
As with the passage from room 1 to room 2, so the passage from room 2 to room 3 is through a narrow, relatively low archway painted jet black in which is embedded a screen showing an animation, in this case showing the path of Alexander’s astonishing victories across Anatolia, into Egypt and then across Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan.
Map showing extent of Alexander’s conquests in 323 BC. As you can see, it almost completely replicates the extent of the Achaemenid Empire at its height (source: Encyclopedia Britannica)
Room 3. Hellenistic culture
Born in 356 BC Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia on the death of his father, Philip II, in 336, at the age of 20, and almost immediately set about fighting his rivals in northern and central Greece, wars in which he enjoyed unparalleled success, uniting all of Greece under his rue before pursuing campaigns in Asia Minor, into Egypt and then east into Mesopotamia.
The period from Alexander’s death in 323 down until the overthrow (suicide) of Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 BC, is generally referred to as the Hellenistic period.
Alexander not only swept aside the Persian empire but the range and cosmopolitan nature of his empire ushered in a new age in which eastern and western styles of luxury were fused, hence the need for a distinct adjective, ‘Hellenistic’ style, a style which originated in Greece but freely incorporated eastern and oriental subject matter and styles.
Alexander has, of course, been traditionally viewed as a great Greek hero. The curators ask the teasing question, was he? Or could he more accurately be described as the last Achaemenid king? Because when he conquered the Persian Empire he inherited a highly organised, centralised administration. He maintained the existing system of provinces and retained some Persian governors. And then he remodelled images of his rule on the Persian style. He held court in the tent of his foe, Darius III and ordered suppliants to kneel before him, in a most ungreek manner.
In the era after Alexander’s conquests, cities across Asia developed as trading hubs for precious materials such as gold, silvery and ivory, housing specialist craftsmen. True to the spirit of Hellenism, they mixed motifs from Greece, Persia and Egypt.
Room 3 displays
Again there are a couple of panels summarising the history before we move on to look in detail at a range of objects. One of the most stunning is a gold wreath from Turkey, similar to those found in elite tombs in the kingdom of Macedonia. The gold oak wreath consists of two branches, bound together at the front by a model of a bee and with two gold cicadas concealed among the leaves. From the tomb of a local aristocrat in western Turkey, it epitomises the spread of ‘luxury’ across the region and the evolution of cosmopolitan styles in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.
There’s a display case about ivory, explaining the culture’s attitude to elephants, the trade in tusks and the ‘luxury’ good made from them. There’s a set of clothes, trousers and a jacket, representing Hellenistic cultural synthesis. It’s actually a recreation of a Persian riding costume. Persians wore a costume which included cap, coat, tunic and trousers. Alexander liked to mix Persian and Macedonian costume. He adopted the tunic, cap and sash but not the trousers which, as a good Greek, he considered barbaric.
Persian riding costume as recreated by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2022)
The Panagyurishte Treasure
But pride of place in the third room goes to extraordinary Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria (roughly equivalent to ancient Thrace). Accidentally discovered by three brothers in 1949, these treasures are outstanding examples of ancient metalworking and demonstrate the influence of Persian and Greek luxury across the Balkans.
Remember the Persian rhytons from room one, and how we saw them being echoed and rework by the Athenians in room two? Well, of the nine pieces in the Panagyurishte Treasure, no fewer than eight are rhytons, beautifully crafted gleaming gold. The ninth object, the big circular plate, is one of the shallow bowls which you poured wine into from a rhyton and actually drank from. Still can’t really imagine how you’d do this without spilling loads of wine down your front, unless you were exceptionally dexterous.
The Panagyurishte treasures rarely leave Bulgaria, and were last seen in the UK in 1976, so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see them.
Information cabinets: raw materials and techniques
The exhibition is punctuated by information ‘boxes’, white cubes with text printed on them and a little glass pane showing samples of the material being explained. So there’s a box devoted to frankincense which contains samples of the aromatic gum from frankincense trees which was used in antiquity as medicine and incense. Apparently rulers of Arabia sent to the Achaemenid emperor every year about 26,000 tonnes of frankincense as tribute, which was then distributed to rulers across the empire as a symbol of the emperor’s largesse.
There’s a box about silver and its role in Persian artistry, which contains some actual silver ore, ingots and silver coins.
There’s one about the marble the ancient Greeks used to build the Parthenon and other temples, explaining that the particular type they used (‘Pentelic’ marble from Mount Pentelikon, 10k from Athens) contained traces of oxidised iron which gives the buildings that warm glow around sunset time, with some examples of marble fragments.
There were other similar explanations and samples of alabaster (‘a soft, luminous stone prized for its coloration and distinctive veining’) and ivory (the role of elephants in Persian and Greek culture, and the use of ivory, having a display case to themselves, including a cute ivory carving of a satyr’s head, which once decorated the head-rest of a couch).
Some of these info boxes are complemented by videos, each only about 60 seconds long, which give you insight into methods and techniques. There’s an interesting one about techniques used to manufacture a stunning Persian robe (displayed next to it), another one about how to create black glaze pottery ancient Greek style, one showing how the Greeks used glazes to give ceramic pottery a finish which mimicked Persian metalware. Persian metalware = decadent luxury; Greek pottery = democracy and morality.
But the standout one for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition, was a 60-second video showing how the Tyrian purple dye, famous across the Mediterranean for over for millennia, is actually made. I’ve read about it hundreds of times but never before seen a craftsman take one of the murex sea snails, crack it open with a hammer, dexterously extract its hypobranchial gland from the gloopy body and add this to a load of others kept in a jar, where sunlight and decay make them turn a rich purple colour. Once the coloration process is complete, the jar of glands is laid out in the sun to dry, then ground to a fine powder to create the basis of the purple dye, for over a thousand years associated with royalty and power. Because of its labour-intensive production, pure Tyrian dye was more expensive, pound for pound, than gold.
Conclusions
Does the exhibition succeed in its aim of persuading me that there was less of a binary opposition between Greek abstemiousness and Persian ‘luxury’ than previously thought? To be honest, it’s difficult to say. I imagine that most visitors, like me, are just not qualified enough to judge and are entirely in the hands of the curators. If they say so, I guess it must be so.
What does come over, for me at any rate, was a related but different conclusion, which is to do with the profound disconnect between official discourse (Greek texts) and the evidence of the objects on the ground, of the life of people in the broader culture which, the curators claim, strongly contradicts official Greek propaganda.
It made me wonder if it’s always true, if it’s a rule of human societies, that governments, almost by their nature, have views and official versions which fetishise a nation’s culture and heritage and so on – but that these will always clash with the far more messy and complex realities of life on the ground, of how people actually live, with the language and artefacts and habits and customs of actual populations, which often don’t fit into anybody’s neat categories.
To put it another way: that, throughout history, societies are always more multicultural than their leaders want or imagine them to be.*
Other rooms
The Greeks and Persians are favourite attractions at the museum, and at the end of the exhibition there’s a list of rooms where you can see objects related to the exhibition, being:
This surprisingly extensive and greatly enjoyable exhibition on the ground floor of the Royal Festival Hall is premised on the notion that the cover to David Bowie’s 1973 album, ‘Aladdin Sane’ – the photo of Bowie’s face with the ‘lightning bolt’ drawn across it – was an epoch-making, benchmark-setting, game-changing, epochal work of art. On the wall labels and in the exhibition publicity the curators go so far as to claim that the cover photo is ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Do you agree? This exhibition tries its damnedest to persuade you.
Cover of Aladdin Sane by David Bowie, released 19 April 1973
The album
‘Aladdin Sane’ was Bowie’s sixth studio album, released on 20 April 1973 on RCA Records. The previous albums had been:
David Bowie (1967)
David Bowie/Space Oddity (1969)
The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
Hunky Dory (1971)
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
The concept album ‘Ziggy’, creating an elaborate mythology about an ill-fated, fictional rock musician, was Bowie’s breakthrough LP. It sold over 100,000 copies and catapulted him into the realm of real stardom. Concerts sold out, the music press started to treat him as a player, his fan base exploded. It established him as a leader of the more thoughtful, cerebral, art student end of Glam Rock, far more ambitious in his skilful deployment of a persona and concept than rivals like Marc Bolan, let alone the pure pop end of Glam such as Sweet or Slade.
The follow-up, ‘Aladdin’, is closely linked to ‘Ziggy’. Bowie recorded it with the same backing band (led by guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson) and it was recorded between gigs of his extensive Ziggy Stardust tour. The songs were mostly written on the road in the US between shows. This explains why the subject matter is often directly American (‘Panic in Detroit’) and also has a heavier, harder rock feel than Ziggy. The track listing is:
It contains one solid gold hit, ‘The Jean Genie’, which is a classic of a certain kind of style of repetitive, one-riff rock. It started with Mick Ronson fooling around with a Bo Diddley riff on the tour bus. Back in New York Bowie developed lyrics to entertain Andy Warhol acolyte, Cyrinda Foxe. In fact the way the lyrics describe a certain New York type is strongly reminiscent of Lou Reed, whose album Transformer, full of such portraits, Bowie had just finished producing and playing on. A cursory listen to both shows that Transformer is, quite obviously, much better than Aladdin, more varied, more interesting tunes (‘Perfect Day’, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’), has stood the test of time far better.
The bassist on the Jean Genie session later claimed it was recorded in an hour and a half flat. It went to number 2 in the UK chart (a chart which, one of the many entertaining and nostalgic wall labels tells us, had recently featured Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’ and Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’). But I find most of the other tracks on the album boringly repetitive and too long. And the lyrics?
Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead
It was ‘daring’ and ‘risqué’ at the time to describe blowjobs in a song, 50 years later…not so much. And ‘professing’?
It’s surprising that this contrived performer, this cracked actor, so keen to display a glammed-up, self-consciously theatrical character, should include a Rolling Stones track, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, on the album. He said in interviews it was a tribute to the Stones-inspired feel of many of the songs, but it’s dire, isn’t it? The main difference is Bowie swallowing or snatching the word ‘together’ in contrast to Mick Jagger’s lazy sexy drawl, which is definitely worse, and the spoken ad lib at the end:
They said we were too young
Our kind of love was too young
But our love comes from above
Let’s make love
This sounds like a blatantly commercial play for the adoration (and money) of pimply misunderstood 15-year-olds everywhere.
Who is Aladdin Sane? In interviews Bowie simply described him as ‘Ziggy Stardust goes to America’, where he discovered urban decay, drugs, sex and violence on a scale you couldn’t get in Britain. Critic Kevin Cann is quoted describing him as ‘a kind of shell-shocked remnant of his former self’.
The album had 100,000 advance orders which meant it went ‘gold’ and to number 1 in the UK album charts, staying there for 5 weeks and in the top 10 for 27. It’s estimated to have sold 4.6 million copies in total, the kind of figures record companies, accountants, and rock music geeks adore.
The exhibition includes an area dominated by a fantastic old-style hi fi system comprising record player, amp and big speakers, on which the album was playing. (For techies, the deck is a Michell Transcriptor, with Celestion 66 loudspeakers and a Rotel RX-1203 amplifier.) Someone must have been continually turning it over or putting the needle back to the start of the side. There are bean bags to slump on. Tellingly I came across someone’s daughter, obviously not very interested in the exhibition, slumped on a bean bag with headphones on, and when I asked her what she was listening to, it wasn’t Bowie.
However, the thing about this exhibition is that it isn’t really about the music. The actual content of the album is barely discussed. The focus of the exhibition is the cover art for the album. This, we quickly discover, was shot by fashion photographer Brian Duffy, was the most expensive rock album cover made to date and, according to the curators, is one of the most iconic rock images of all time.
Brian Duffy
Thus an immense amount of time is devoted to the background and build-up to the famous cover image. I counted no fewer than 84 photos devoted to telling the story. First the context and key personnel. So there are photos of each of the band members with wall labels explaining who they are and their contribution, the largest number devoted to the extremely photogenic Mick Ronson in various rock star poses, but also shots of the bassist and drummer. (The curators speculate that some of these shots were meant to be used in the gatefold of the album sleeve, but the power of the final slash image swept them aside.) There’s photos of Bowie’s producer, Ken Scott, manager Tony Defries, two photos of Bowie’s wife, Angie.
So much for the music. More central to the story of the iconic cover is the extensive section devoted to the photographer of the iconic image, Brian Duffy. We learn about his career before the shoot, that he was one of a trio of young London photographers, what older photographer Norman Parkinson called ‘the Black Trinity’ – the others being David Bailey and Terence Donovan – with contemporary newspaper clippings to that effect.
We learn that Duffy, as he was universally known, was a leading fashion photographer, which is backed up by a wall of 27 of his very impressive fashion photos. These powerfully convey not only the style of the day as found in glossy mags such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, Elle and the Sunday Times, but also indicate the fashion, rock and celebrity figures of the era, such as John Lennon, Michael Caine, politicians.
There’s a cornucopia of 1960s gossip: Duffy’s collaboration with Len Deighton on the 1969 movie ‘Oh What A Lovely War!’, technical influences such as the way graphic artist Philip Castle used an airbrushing technique on the poster for A Clockwork Orange, which Duffy was to ask him to repeat on the Aladdin cover, the way the cover of Hunky Dory was printed as black and white and then hand coloured by Terry Pastor, how the cover photo of Transformer was taken by ‘legendary’ rock photographer Mick Rock, was accidentally over-exposed but Reed liked it that way, and so on.
The shoot
But there’s more, lots more, as the exhibition zeroes in on the creation of the iconic image. We learn about Duffy’s studio manager Francis Newman, and designer Celia Philo. We are treated to photos of the interior and exterior of the Duffy’s studios at 151a King Henry’s Road, Swiss Cottage NW3. where the famous shoot took place.
We learn about the canny strategic thinking of Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries. They shared a vision of how the marketing of a pop performer could be transformed into high art – or at least a good impression of what pop music consumers thought of as art. One extremely practical and canny reason is that Defries knew that, the more they spent on the cover art, the more record label RCA would be forced to cough up to boost sales in order to recoup their investment. Hence he and Duffy agreed on using an extremely expensive seven-colour printing technique which was then only available in Switzerland.
In order to justify the process the image had to be simple and striking. It had to make maximum use of bold colour. Hence the development of a bright red (with some blue shading) against artificially pale bare skin.
This explains why nobody on the shoot saw the final version on the day because the negatives had to be sent away for commercial processing to achieve that hyper-real effect.
Then we’re on to the photo session itself. An immense amount of resources go to describing in great detail how the shoot was conducted and where the idea for the famous zigzag across Bowie’s face came from. Bowie was 26, had hit new peaks of fame, was deeply aware of the importance of image and media presentation. He wanted something striking and new but didn’t know what. The shoot was crammed in between dates on an international tour.
Duffy had never done a shoot for an album cover before. Both star and photographer were in new territory. So the most striking thing about the shoot this whole exhibition is making such a song and dance about is it was all over in an hour,
In fact, rather disappointingly, or maybe fittingly, right at the heart of the story is uncertainty/mystery. Turns out nobody really knows where the idea for the iconic red flash came from. There are several possible sources. Bowie shared his birthday with Elvis and the King had developed a motto, ‘Taking Care of Business – In A Flash’, and accompanying logo:
Elvis Presley’s Taking Care of Business logo
Rather more prosaically, Duffy’s studio had a National Rice cooker and their logo was a red flash. In 1970 the company had created the world’s largest neon sign depicting the logo on the side of an office building in Hong Kong. From some source, Duffy conjured up the idea of painting a flash across Bowie’s face. It took make-up artist Pierre Laroche to achieve a first draft, establishing a pale ground for his face and chest, and then the red flash.
Then the background was brightly lit in order to burn it out or render it invisible. Bowie was positioned against it wearing only his underpants and Duffy started snapping (as the curators carefully inform us) using his Hasselblad 500 EL camera, using a David Cecil ring flash unit on Ektachrome ASA 64 120-format film. Turn to the left, turn to the right, look straight ahead, two rolls, 24 images, all knocked off in well under an hour. Clean make-up, free to go.
The exhibition features a wall of contact prints of the ‘outtakes’ or unused images i.e. other almost identical shots of made-up Bowie which were rejected for various reasons. The decisive factor was the eyes. In all the rejected versions Bowie has his eyes open. Seeing the final version among all the rejected ones makes you realise that the one with his eyes shut is head and shoulders more powerful than the rest. Why?
Aladdin Sane contact sheet by Brian Duffy
The curators explain that using the image of Bowie with his eyes closed broke with all the conventions of portrait photography. Usually there’s some kind of eye contact with the viewer, the eyes establishing contact or rapport. Even if they’re looking away, we get a stronger sense of someone’s character if we can see their eyes. Thus choosing the eyes shut image immediately created an aloofness and mystery about Bowie, exactly the kind of androgynous, alien effect he and Defries were cultivating.
The second big artistic decision Duffy took was to add the blob of mercury on Bowie’s collarbone. It was added by graphic artist Philip Castle. The curators, like all modern art curators, obsessed with sex, describe this blob as ‘phalliform’ i.e. shaped like a penis*. Is it, though? If it’s the shape of anything, I’d pick up on Bowie’s obsession with aliens and interpret it as being a a ray gun. At the time, this kind of special graphic effect was relatively new, and so I think I interpreted it as a sort of science fiction detail, the kind of thing you might get on a Hawkwind or Emerson, Lake and Palmer album.
Anyway, it certainly emphasises the other-worldly, disembodied vibe of the whole image. For the curators, constricted by their framework of gender and sexual identity, the image emphasises Bowie’s gender fluidity. Not being so constrained, I see it as far more playing to Bowie’s alien from another world schtick.
Anyway, any interpretation is equally irrelevant to the actual music which I outlined above, grimy, gritty portraits of New York types, the Jean Genie or Lady Grinning Soul. You only have to listen to half the album to realise that the cover image is wildly misleading as to its contents.
Last word about the lettering. This is Rémy Peignot Cristal with a blue-white-red gradient. It was Duffy who changed the dot over the i of Aladdin into a small flame shape.
Why the fuss? Gender, obvz
Personally, I was never that particularly struck by this album cover because it came from an era overflowing with striking album cover art. At the time it seemed just one among many amazing, imaginative and striking images, so I don’t quite get the fuss.
What comes over with increasing insistence as the show progresses is that the arguable over-valuation of this one image is in part because it is also being considered and valued as an emblem of gender, queer and identity politics. Aha. This explains why the actual music – its composition, production and performance, its lyrics and its value – are more or less ignored by the exhibition. Nobody says whether the album is any good, probably because it isn’t really.
Instead, as you progress into the second half of the exhibition you realise the whole thing is being seen through the lens of contemporary concerns about gender and identity. Seen from this perspective you see its value in a completely different light, namely that Bowie’s poses in the early 1970s, as bisexual, asexual, strange and alien (the aspect of his persona which was foregrounded in Ziggy, Aladdin, Diamond Dogs, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and, maybe, ‘Low’) helped a lot of people who were struggling with their sexuality. It’s made pretty plain in the show’s press blurb:
With a focus on the photo session that gave us Bowie’s ‘lightning bolt’ portrait, this exhibition explores the continuous reshaping of Bowie’s image, and his part, along with Duffy’s, in a reimagining of sexual and gender identity.
It explains why in the last part of the show – once we’ve got past the 80 or so large photos of the band members, manager, wife, and all the contact images from the shoot itself, past the wall-sized blow-ups of Bowie in full glam pose, and past the room with the hi-fi system playing the album – we come to a space with sheets hanging from the ceiling bearing quotes from people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, who struggled with their sexuality and identity, and who found solace in Bowie’s confidence and unashamedness and bravura performance of alternative sexualities.
Personal testimony room in the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead
In a world dominated by macho movie stars and football hooligans, Bowie offered an alternative, an imaginative way out, a refuge. He made a lot of troubled, embattled people realise they weren’t alone. Bowie showed that you could not only feel confused and uncertain and not fit into any of society’s categories, but become a star on your own terms, appear on the telly, pack out concert halls, and make a fortune.
As the curators out it, Bowie’s message for generations of outsiders, not just sexual outsiders but alienated, unhappy teenagers, was:
Ignore what society wants you to be. Be what you want to be – including how you look to the outside world.
This part of the show – and the first-person tributes from young people who Bowie, with his many-changing masks and fluid sexual identity, helped and reassured and inspired – was genuinely moving, but also a bit disorientating. It was weird walking from the world of trash glam throwaway pop hits into quite a more serious and troubled realm, a world of gender anxiety and liberation, freedom but worry, which seems to be with us more than ever.
I doubt if Bowie set out to be sex therapist to a generation but, this exhibition suggests, that was the impact he had, for a lot of people.
Nostalgia
For me, though, being neither troubled by my sexuality (no more than average, anyway) and no particular fan of Bowie’s early music, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition because it is an absolute riot of nostalgia. The opening rooms set the scene for the Great Photoshoot by establishing the social and political and music context of 1973.
Probably younger visitors walked swiftly past the background panels describing Britain in the 1970s, the collage of newspaper headlines from the period, the oil crisis, the four day week, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, the endless strikes, but I lingered long and lovingly, reliving the long-ago days of my boyhood.
Next to the politics was a similar size panel with a collage of contemporary music paper articles, giving an impressionistic sense of who was who in rock music, circa 1973, many of them, apparently about Elton John, whatever Paul McCartney and John Lennon were up to, a new young band named Queen, and so on.
Far more visually striking, though, was another collage establishing the context of classic rock album covers from the period. These included actual vintage copies of Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, Slider by T Rex, early Roxy Music, Music from Topographic Oceans by Yes and many more. This is what I meant by the Aladdin Sane cover image being just one among many. Surely the cover of Dark Side of The Moon is as, if not far more, iconic than Aladdin Sane, is far more widespread in the culture, you’re more likely to see it on t-shirts or spoofed in cultural references.
Album cover of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd, released 1 March 1973, 6 weeks before Aladdin Sane (19 April 1973)
And indeed the exhibition confirms that the Music Week Sleeve Design Award 1973 gave first place to Dark Side (with Aladdin coming a very creditable second). Looking more broadly, a quick internet search for rock albums of 1973 turns up:
Gram Parsons – GP (January 1, 1973)
Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (January 25, 1973)
John Martyn – Solid Air (February 1, 1973)
Iggy & The Stooges – Raw Power (February 7, 1973)
John Cale – Paris 1919 (March 1, 1973)
Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973)
King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (March 23, 1973)
Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure (March 23, 1973)
Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy (March 28, 1973)
Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire (March 29, 1973)
The Beatles – 1962-1966 (April 2, 1973)
The Beatles – 1967-1970 (April 2, 1973)
David Bowie – Aladdin Sane (April 13, 1973)
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (May 25, 1973)
Steely Dan – Countdown to Ecstasy (July 1, 1973)
Mott The Hoople – Mott (July 20, 1973)
Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin – Love Devotion Surrender (July 20, 1973)
Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run (December 5, 1973)
Of which you’d have thought the cover art for Dark Side, Raw Power, Houses of the Holy, Tubular Bells, the two Beatles compilation albums and Band on the Run are getting on for being as ‘iconic’ as Aladdin Sane.
Consideration of general album covers from the period then moves onto another section focusing on album covers specifically by or closely related to Bowie i.e. the covers of his previous albums, especially the androgynous or sexually ambivalent ones such as The Man Who Sold The World where he’s lying on a divan wearing a dress, or Hunky Dory; and the equally ambivalent, but in a different, far more butch way, cover art for Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced by Bowie, which he and Mick Ronson both played on, and released a few months before Aladdin, in November 1972.
Front and back cover of Transformer by Lou Reed
All this is great fun, to see the great album art and play in your mind all the great tracks from long ago. There’s also a guilty pleasure: off to one side of the ‘classics of rock’ album covers is a montage of ‘square’ albums from the period, to remind us older guys how dire most music and entertainment of the period was. So there are the covers of albums by The Black Watch, the TV show Opportunity Knocks, the musical Godspell, Break-Through, character-based albums by Alf Garnett, Benny Hill and Tony Hancock, by Ken Dodd and his Diddymen and, a bit more acceptably, by ‘pop sensation’ Gilbert O’Sullivan. Half a century ago.
Montage of retro 1970s album covers at the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre
*Camille Paglia
A little further on into the exhibition I discovered the curators’ use of the word ‘phalliform’ is lifted from one of the lengthy quotes from American feminist academic, social critic and renatagob, Camille Paglia which are printed on the walls.
I remember Paglia’s presence on the scene in 1980s TV and magazines, touring her leather-jacketed, spike-haired form of aggressive New York feminism, and churning out page after page of mashed-up, hot-wired Beat prose poetry. The exhibition relies very heavily on her for its central premise, namely that the Aladdin Sane photo:
with its red-and-blue lighting bolt across Bowie’s face, has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half century, reproduced and parodied in advertising, media and entertainment worldwide.
This is the premise of the entire exhibition. Here’s another slice of Paglia’s all-about-everything, showily eclectic, name-dropping prose:
It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price.
‘…and paid the price’ – this is sentimental tripe, a facile, clichéd, pre-modern view of the artist as specially damned and cursed for his gift, the kind of thing that Byron invented in the 1810s, felt a little ridiculous when Baudelaire did it in the 1850s, lived on into the poets maudits (damned poets) of the late nineteenth century (Rimbaud bunking off to Africa, Verlaine crying into his absinthe); was a thorough-going cliché worthy of mockery a hundred years ago.
It’s superficial magazine writing, rewarded for being exaggerated, over-written, sentimental and stereotyped. But, like wearing a leather jacket and having a spiky haircut, it was enough to persuade many people that Paglia was cool and has something to say, back in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s. If you like this kind of 6th form showing off, then it usefully underpins the exhibition; if you don’t (and you might have noticed that I don’t) then it undermines it.
Afterlife of an image
But back at the exhibition we haven’t finished yet. There’s more. This really is an exhibition for Aladdin Sane completists, because the exhibition goes on to chart further highlights of Bowie’s career after the album was released, and the long afterlife of the Aladdin image. For a start the curators aren’t backward in pointing out that Bowie himself had long links with the South Bank Centre, from his debut in 1969 in the recently opened Purcell Room, to his curation of Meltdown, their annual contemporary music festival, in 2002.
In the same year that the album came out, 1973, Radio 1 broadcast a series called ‘the Story of Pop’ in 26 episodes, and the cover of the first part of the associated part-work featured the Aladdin Sane image.
As to Duffy, he went on to work with Bowie on two further album covers, namely: Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (1980).
In 2002 Absolut Vodka ran an advertising campaign which used classic album covers, and one used the Aladdin Sane image.
In 2003 Kate Moss appeared on the front cover of Vogue sporting her version of the Aladdin Sane lightning to celebrate 30 years of its impact on culture and fashion (fourth photo down on this page).
After the 2008 financial crisis some parts of Britain issued their own local currency (news to me). Apparently a currency was issued local to just Brixton in south west London. Since Bowie was actually born in Brixton (at 40 Stansfield Road) the Aladdin Sane image featured on the Brixton £10 note.
In 2013 the Victoria and Albert Museum staged a huge exhibition about Bowie, titled David Bowie Is. it ‘set a new benchmark for immersive music exhibitions’ and was a sellout, going on tour round the UK and then abroad.
Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016. The following year Royal Mail issued a set of ten commemorative stamps for what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday year. Six stamps featured album covers, including Aladdin Sane. The first day cover was franked with a copy of the lightning bolt logo.
All these occasions are lovingly recorded, with appropriate illustrations and detailed captions. Bowie has been turned into an institution. All images have to be licensed by ‘the David Bowie Archive’. To quote the Clash, ‘turning rebellion into money’.
Chris Duffy
Things fall into a place a bit more when you learn that the exhibition is curated by Duffy’s son, Chris Duffy, and accompanies a book of the same name. Ah. And that it was Chris who described his Dad’s work as ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Ah. And that Chris Duffy has set up the Duffy Archive to preserve his father’s work and legacy. Ah.
I loved this exhibition. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a relaxing, easy-going wallow in 1970s rock and pop and social nostalgia, full of nuggets and gossip and factoids. It’s a broad walk down memory lane. Like everything, it’s capable of multiple meanings and interpretations. The curators go heavy on the gender liberation aspect, which I see and understand. I responded more fully to the nostalgia elements. But once I understood the lead involvement of Duffy’s son, I also came to see it as a rather touching act of filial respect.
This is a very, very political exhibition, bigger than I expected (5 rooms), artistically important, wide-ranging, illuminating and sometimes very upsetting.
It’s a broad selection of art from contemporary Australia all based round the theme of the calamitous impact of white European colonisation on the continent’s indigenous people. (As I understand it, we should nowadays not use ‘Aborigine’ or ‘aboriginal’; it’s best practice to say ‘indigenous Australians’ or ‘indigenous people’.)
This exhibition brings together art works by indigenous people, alongside works by Australian artists of European descent, all revolving round the themes of colonialism, expropriation, racism, and cultural erasure i.e. the systematic denial of the existence of indigenous people, their deprivation of legal and voting rights, crude attempts to turn them into good Christian citizens, and the banning of their culture, language and traditions.
The exhibition displays a wide variety of media including paintings, photos, artistically treated documents, maps, a huge video installation, some very large fabrics accompanied by sculptures. There’s a lot of explanatory text which makes you feel thoroughly ashamed to be white, British and, of course, a man, since some of the women artists in the show consider the appalling violence and injustices meted out to the Indigenous people the result not only of colonialism but of specifically ‘male modes of power’.
Untitled (Alhalkere) by Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Australia 1992 is part of a series Tate has recently devised which aims to look at the artworks which cluster round a key year in a country’s history, the series having the general name ‘A Year In Art’. The first one was ‘A Year in Art: 1973’ which explored how artists responded to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile which brought General Pinochet to power.
This is the second in the series and the title, ‘Australia 1992’, begs the question: what is so important about the year 1992? Well, it was the year of a landmark decision by the Australian High Court which overturned the concept of terra nullius (meaning ‘land belonging to nobody’). This was the doctrine by which the British had justified colonising the land now known as Australia.
The concept was used to, in effect, deny the existence of the native Aboriginal peoples who had inhabited Australia for 30,000 years, had developed a lifestyle in balance with its particular natural characteristics, as well as complex societies built on clan structures, a culture rich in hundreds of distinct languages. The High Court decision was the climax of decades of work by indigenous rights campaigners and provided a new legal basis for ongoing campaigns to expand indigenous rights and extend legal protections to indigenous culture.
Buluwana, Female Ancestor by John Mawurndjul (1989)
The art works in the show aren’t all from the year 1992, far from it, much of it is from the subsequent thirty years and some of it is bang up to date. But it all rotates and revolves around the issues thrown up by that 1992 ruling.
Room one
The first room contains three important elements. Firstly, a set of four videos by key artists featured in the show, namely Helen Johnson, Judy Watson, and Dale Horton. These are all 4 or so minutes long. The fourth video features an extended interview with Aborigine artist John Mawurndjul who explains how, although he lives in the new world, the new dispensation of the white man, he maintains the stories and traditions handed down from his father and his father’s father, hence the title of the film, ‘I am the old and the new’. John takes the camera team to a dry and dusty location out in the country where he explains the design and meaning of ancient Aboriginal rock art. He’s also filmed using traditional tools and paints, in particular a kind of soft bark brush, to create the fine striping visible in a work like Buluwana, Female Ancestor.
Another important display in this room is of drawings made by Edward Koiki Mabo of the land on Torres Island which he claimed was his under ancestral indigenous law, drawings used in the 1992 court case. There are three of these, indicating the location of plants, landmarks, traditional use and ownership, which had been passed down to Mabo through 17 generations of tradition. They’re the subject of a wall label explaining more of the detail of the case, its results and implications.
Lastly, there’s a factual (i.e. non-art) map of Australia, an attempt by scholars to represent the language or nation groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia, by David R. Horton (1996)
Note that the word ‘Country’ is used in a special sense to denote the Aborigines’ ancient connection with the land of their ancestry. So throughout the exhibition the curators refer to Country not ‘the country’ or ‘the landscape’.
Artists and works
There are five rooms in the show and, given that the central one is enormous, space for lots of art works.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye expresses her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder and her intricate relationship to country in Untitled (Alhalkere) (top of this review).
John Mawurndjul is featured with his bark painting Buluwana, Female Ancestor, created with a fine cross-hatching technique used by generations of Kuninjku artists.
Dale Harding was the subject of one of the videos in the first room. There he explained that he often paints directly onto a gallery wall to create a site-specific work and images of these make them look dramatic. Sadly, that hasn’t happened here and he’s represented by a moveable work, The Leap/ Watershed, in which he’s blown ochre onto a large canvas to create an abstract shape. Although this isn’t particularly obvious, apparently it is intended to reference both the life-giving attributes of the land and the 1867 massacre of Aboriginal people in Mackay, Queensland. ‘The Leap’ refers to a rock formation in Yuwi Country where around 200 indigenous people chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the Queensland Native Police Force.
The Leap by Dale Harding
There’s a great series of works by Judy Watson entitled ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’. These 15 framed works take official documents used by the Australian authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries to categorise indigenous peoples and allot them (or not) voting and other rights. Thus, until 1965 you had to be able to prove you had a ‘White’ parent in order to vote, in Queensland. The categorisations include racial ones by which a person was defined as being ‘fullblood’, ‘half-blood’, ‘quadroon’ and so on, terms I’m familiar with from the same system applied in the American South in the slavery era.
What turns them into art is that Watson has spattered them with red pain mimicking blood. These documents obsessed with ‘blood’ have been drenched in the object of their enquiry, blood which also indicates the numbers of indigenous people murdered by the white military and police over the centuries. A stain on Australia’s history and conscience.
From ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’ by Judy Watson (2005)
The complete set, along with a detailed explanation, is available on the Tate website.
In a similar spirit of taking colonial documents or concepts and undermining them, is the work of Helen Johnson. She’s represented by a couple of enormous rectangular fabrics, suspended from the ceiling, on which she creates images complex satirical images. The series is titled ‘Seat of Power’ and is from 2016.
Seat of Power by Judy Watson (2016)
This work needs a bit of explanation (which is available on the Tate web page devoted to it). It consists of a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas which depicts a satirical image of the British parliament in session by the Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle, itself overlaid with partially legible text which refers to a chair that was gifted to the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia by the UK branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1926.
It’s big and it’s striking but, as you can see, it needs a fair bit of explaining unlike, say, all of the indigenous art on display which speaks immediately to the eye and heart. It also demonstrates a small principle about art and literature, which is that satire doesn’t have to be funny. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be and Watson’s works aren’t.
This point is easily made by comparison with a set of works by Gordon Bennett titled ‘How to Cross the Void’. These are a series of gawky cartoons or sketches of scenes, with satirical text written in, but unlike the Watson they are actively funny. The best example is this one depicting a dark-skinned man hanging himself in a cell, with the advice that, if you get into difficulty hanging yourself, you can always ask a policeman. They’ll be happy to help 🙂
‘Ask a policeman’ from ‘How to Cross the Void’ by Gordon Bennett (1993)
But alongside the amusing cartoon element there’s also something quite conceptual or cerebral going on in this series. All the images incorporate a black square. This is a reference to the clack square painted by the Russian Suprematist painter, Kazimir Malevich, made in 1915. In retrospect, art historians take this to be a founding work and moment in modern art for completely rejecting all vestiges of realism or figuratism. Malevich intended it to be the end of that tradition of painting and the start of a new tradition of pure abstraction and sometimes referred to it not as a square but as a void.
So why is there a black square in all these works? Because Bennett is asking whether any cultural artefact can truly inhabit a void, in other words whether any artwork can escape from the time and place of its making, escape from its history and transcend its cultural context. The general idea is that, no, it can’t, and this might be more true of Australian modern art than many other types…
A different work by Bennett is assigned a room of its own. Dominating the room is a characteristic example of the traditional heroic white conception of the discovery, claim and colonising of Australia, ‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage from as late as 1937
‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937)
As you might expect any modern artist to do, Bennett subverts and interrogates this kind of pompous white triumphalism with a version of his own, titled Possession Island (Abstraction) (based on a different painting, ‘Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown (1770)’ by John Alexander Gilfillan).
Possession Island (Abstraction) by Gordon Bennett (1991)
As you can see, a once fluid realistic oil painting has been converted into a stippled black-and white image in the style of a blown-up newspaper illustration. The coloured bands do three things: 1) they mask the only indigenous figure in the original painting, who has thus been erased in the same way the indigenous presence was erased for so many centuries. All that is left is the drinks tray he was holding for the refreshment of his white master. 2) The precise rectangular shapes may or may not be a reference to Malevich, which I’ve just explained. 3) But I was intrigued to learn that the colours of the blocks are those of the Aboriginal flag. In my ignorance, I didn’t know that there was an aboriginal flag.
There’s another aspect to this. Tate have cannily displayed these works in a room with a window looking out across the River Thames towards St Paul’s Cathedral, which is bang opposite Tate Modern. Insofar as St Paul’s is a seat of state, religious and ceremonial power of the Australian colonial power, Britain, the sight of it juxtaposed with these stories of colonial repression and brutality amounts to a form of geographical satire.
View across the River Thames and Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral from a room in Tate Modern
A bit more subtly, the window in question is a tall narrow one whose shape echoes the tall red rectangle in Bennett’s work. Conceptual and visual echoes and ironies are bouncing round this room.
Yhonnie Scarce
Arguably the best items in the exhibition are the set of enormous hanging fabrics by Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce is an Australian glass artist who is a descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia. The idea behind the works is fairly simple but results in extraordinary pieces which, for me, dominated the exhibition.
Each work is a hugely magnified antique photo of members of Scarce’s family, blown up and printed onto bed linen. These are then displayed alongside blown glass artefacts relating to the images. In the photo below, the work on the left is ‘Remember Royalty: Papa Willy’ and is a photograph from 1920 showing Scarce’s great-grandfather, William, at work shearing sheep. The image is printed onto an antique woollen blanket, an obvious reference to, or invocation of, this labour. He worked hard all his life to support his 12 (!) children. The toolbox below the blanket contains actual tools (I noted shiny new spanners) mingled with glass-blown replicas of yams, traditional foodstuff of Will’s Kokatha people.
Two works from the series ‘Remember Royalty’ by Yhonnie Scarce
The work on the right follows the same patter: it is a vintage photo taken in around 1911 at the Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse and showing Scarce’s maternal grandparents and children. The wall label tells us that mission schools like this were dotted all across Australia where indigenous people were exposed to brutal regimes of cultural assimilation i.e. forced to wear European clothes and practice Christianity. In another act of care and tribute to her ancestors, the trunk below the printed sheet contains glass balls, each of which contains a horizon line and constellations: the artist is returning to her ancestors the connection with their land which deprived of during their lives.
There are four of these huge photo-sculptures (in the other two, Scarce’s blown glass artefacts are sewn into the fabric of the photos), and because of the immediacy of the images, and the directness and poignancy of their family stories, these were, for me, the standout works in the exhibition.
Three videos
1. Vernon Ah Kee
At the far end of the exhibition is a big long darkened room containing Vernon Ah Kee’s four-screen video installation ‘tall man 2010’. This splices together news footage of the protests and riots following the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on 26 November 2004, on Palm Island, an island off the coast of Queensland. Doomadgee died in police custody as a result of multiple injuries. In the protests that followed, the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down. Sergeant Chris Hurley, who arrested Doomadgee, was tried and acquitted for causing his death.
One of the central figures leading the protests was Lex Wotton, a member of the Palm Island Aboriginal Council. Ah Kee presents him as the ‘tall man’ – an Aboriginal term for a bogey man or spirit who elicits the truth from wrongdoers. Wotton later won a lawsuit, alongside other Palm Island residents, which found that the police had illegally discriminated against them. The State of Queensland paid them A$30 million compensation.
So, from what the wall labels tell us, it seems to be an equivalent of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. It is typical of the American-centric nature of all our media that the Floyd incident and movement it gave rise to massively entered Britain’s consciousness and cultural sphere (houses round where I live still have ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters in their windows) while the death of Doomadgee didn’t cause a ripple.
Still clip from ‘tall man’ by Vernon Ah Kee (2010)
On a practical level, the footage is continually punctuated by the bars used in the creation and editing of film footage and by the loud sonic whine which indicates to editors that there is no soundtrack. Unfortunately I have mild tinnitus and found this very loud, penetrating high-pitched whine made it impossible for me to be in the room.
2. Bonita Ely
In 1979 eco-feminist Bonita Ely travelled to Jabiluka in the Northern Territory and filmed this performance, titled ‘Jabiluka U02’. Here the Mirrar indigenous community has waged a decades-long campaign against plans to mine uranium in the Kimberley flood plain. To be frank, watching her dig a pile of sand in what looks like a park is a little underwhelming. But the wall label links it with ongoing struggles against Australia’s mining corporations, singling out two current instances: in 2019 the Australian government allowed the Adani company to develop a coal mine that will endanger the Barrier Reef. And in 2020 the mining company Rio Tinto deliberately destroyed rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge, holy to the Puutu Kunti Kurram and Pinikura peoples for thousands of years. I did hear about this in the British media. Why aren’t Rio Tinto boycotted? Why aren’t the people responsible for vandalism like this named and shamed?
3. Peter Kennedy and John Hughes
This is a long video which is shown at a completely different scale from the Vernon Ah Kee; that is shown across a huge screen dominating a very big wall; the Kennedy and Hughes video, by contrast, is shown on an old-fashioned TV. It addresses the history of white management, capitalism and institutionalised denial of indigenous rights, but I found it completely impossible to watch because of the highly repetitive, droning high-pitched soundtrack which eclipsed the contents and gave me a headache. Must be better ways to get your message across, guys.
Tracey Moffat
Filling one side of the big central room is a series of 24 large photos by Tracey Moffatt titled ‘Up in the Sky’, shot in 1997. They depict life in a rough and ready Outback town. The whole series can be viewed on the Tate website.
The curators say the subject of the series is the forced separations of Aboriginal families by government agencies i.e. taking indigenous babies from their families and giving them to white foster parents or, as in some of these photos, Catholic convents. The abducted babies became known as the Stolen Generations.
From ‘Up in the sky’ by Tracey Moffatt (1997)
But if you look at the whole set you’ll see that Moffatt’s photos do much more than that. Most of the photos are of poor whites, what Americans call ‘trailer trash’. They prompted upset and outrage at the gross injustice of all those stolen babies and broken families. But the pictures of the immediate present also triggered feelings about living that kind of life, in that kind of place, not dissimilar from the feelings triggered by the Chris Killip exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Imagine living there, in a one-horse town where the horse died long ago, leaving desolation and wasted lives.
It triggered one big thought which goes slightly against the grain of the show: this is that, whereas all of the works by all of the artists in the exhibition address the injustices done to and the tragedies suffered by the indigenous people, nowhere (I think) is there mention of the injustice done to the white people sent to Australia. Almost all of them were convicts or the soldiers sent to guard them.
According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, some 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to Australia during the 50-year existence of ‘The System’ of transportation, most of them the poorest of the poor who had never been more than ten miles from their places of birth. Suddenly they were transported to a different planet.
Imagine being a nineteen-year-old woman sentenced to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread, wrenched away from your family and place of birth and familiar surroundings and sent half way round the world in the company of criminal and violent strangers to a completely alien, unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape. Imagine being the young soldiers sent to guard them.
My point is that there’s a kind of double injustice at work here. First the injustice and cruelty of the forced transportation of over a hundred thousand Britons. And then the behaviour of these scared, angry, brutalised Brits, to the relatively defenceless native peoples they discovered. Brutality upon brutality. Horror doubled. It’s a terrible historical legacy and this exhibition really drums into your mind multiple threads of injustice, violence and cultural erasure which continue up to the present day.
Video
Most exhibition promotional videos are a zippy 30 seconds long. This one, at 14 minutes, is a more in-depth consideration of the issues and starts by explaining the 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander, featuring the man who brought the case, land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo, before going on to describe the practice of some of the artists in the show.
Born in Prague, Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (1936 to 1996) spent most of her career in the central European Slovak city of Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine. Here she developed and experimented with relatively small-scale abstract sculptures, the overwhelming majority of them using white plaster cast in organic rounded shapes. To enter the four rooms of this retrospective is to enter a world of whiteness, comprising scores of mysterious, self-contained ovoid shapes, some incorporating metal or wood, but the great majority a pure, smooth, round whiteness. At first glance they might almost be bones or fossils in a natural history museum.
Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern
The four rooms of this exhibition bring together works rarely exhibited before in the UK to create an light and airy survey of Bartuszová’s career from the early 1960s, when she began her experimentation with casting, to the late 1980s, when she was making bigger, more varied and more site-specific art.
During her working life Bartuszová created around 500 sculptures, ranging from numerous small organic forms to larger commissions for public spaces, as well as works designed to be integrated into landscapes. They have titles like ‘egg’, ‘drop’, ‘folded figure’ though many are so pure and abstract they can’t even manage a title and are simply labelled ‘untitled’.
‘Folded Figure’ by Maria Bartuszová (1965) Collection of Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy
Filling balloons with plaster
They look like this because in the 1960s Bartuszová began experimenting with taking balloons or even condoms, and pouring plaster into them in order to create smooth, white balloon shapes. Because the plaster obviously weighted down and distorted the balloons, creating a smooth flowing ‘blobby’ effect, she called this playful approach ‘gravistimulated shaping’.
As an experiment she sometimes dunked the setting plaster in water which also had the effect of smoothing the surface. The early sculptures made using this method evoke natural and living forms, such as drops of water and, above all, eggs, although other biological or anatomical shapes may suggest themselves to the viewer.
In the 1980s Bartuszová inverted her practice, so to speak. Instead of blowing wet plaster into balloons, she started doing the (more obvious) approach of blowing up the balloons and casting the plaster around them. She called this ‘pneumatic casting’.
The most obvious change was in the surface texture of the casts which went from being beautifully smooth to becoming relatively rough and textured. But there were other implications, the most striking of which was that, having made the case, because it’s so fragile, you can crack or fragment it, and suddenly create a completely different psychovisual impact. Instead of smooth completeness, you have fragmentation and craggy edges. And she went on to discover that, the bigger the balloon (she took to using meteorological balloons), the more holes you could make, and the more strange and evocative the resulting shape would appear.
‘Egg, but not Columbus’s’ by Maria Bartuszová (1987) Courtesy Slovak National Gallery, SNG
Endless eggs
This turned out to be a highly resourceful strategy, in that:
It can be scaled up: you can make massive cracked shell sculptures this way and the bigger the sculpture, the more elaborate the sense of shells within shells within shells.
She also discovered that you can add together these balloon-shaped fragments to create ‘multicellular’ shapes and, insofar as they are cracked and exposed, allowed her to explore countless types of empty space and ‘negative volumes’. She described each result as ‘a tiny void full of a tiny infinite universe’.
Looking at them now it suddenly occurs to me they look a bit like the clotted balls of frogspawn, but somehow frozen and cracked. Or maybe the models of complex molecules I saw in school chemistry lessons and you see in scientific literature. She referred to them as ‘endless eggs’. Here she is in her studio, in the 1980s.
Maria Bartuszová in her studio with sculptures, Košice, Slovakia 1987 by unknown photographer
The damaged eggs really have a very different vibe from the balloon casts. The latter feel smooth and complete, and very sensuous to look at. Freud says that looking is an evolutionary advanced form of touching, and you can feel the smoothness and calming weight of the earlier shapes in your mind’s eye. But the cracked shells, obviously enough, feel jagged and damaged, empty and lifeless and, somehow, spent.
Add wire
The next step down this route was to introduce metal wire. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that that’s what she’s doing: finalising the arrangement of twines of fine wire in, around and through a complex congeries of cracked egg shapes.
This apparently simple addition adds a whole new layer of complexity to the works. The untitled piece I’ve shown, above, is the work that Tate has used on the poster for this exhibition and it is certainly very characteristic of this phase or branch of her work, but I’m not sure I like it.
I very much like abstract art, and geometric shapes and I know what they mean when the curators point out that many of the balloon ones are small enough to imagine cradling in your hands. But something about the ragged asymmetricality, the unpredictability, and the jagged surfaces of the broken shells made me uneasy. If my mind’s eye warmed to the smooth curves of the full-bodied balloon shapes, it recoiled from the broken, barbed feel of these works.
In the country
In the 1980s Bartuszová moved to a house in Košice with a studio and a large garden on a hillside. There are photos which show a rambling sloping garden with small trees into which she has inserted some of the multiple balloon works.
After the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring of 1968, many artists retreated from political or social statements and found refuge in nature and spirituality. Bartuszová took to spirituality, reading about Zen Buddhism (as so many people did in the early 1970s) and, more to the point, began incorporating natural objects in her work.
Here is a large branch half-drowned in plaster to create the impression of snow. I liked these ‘snow casts’ because they look like branches in snow such as I saw just a few months ago when London had heavy snowfall, and because I love trees. She called the series of works exploring this approach ‘Melting Snow’.
‘Tree’ by Maria Bartuszová (photo by the author)
Metal sculptures
So far I’ve followed Bartuszová’s work along one particular avenue of development but there were, in fact, other strands and threads to her work. For a start there’s a whole different strand made up of works case in metal which obviously have a very different vibe from the cool white plaster works.
Ordinarily, I like small, geometric, metal abstract sculptures very much indeed but somehow these cold metal objects felt so far removed from the warm mental feeling given by the plaster casts – from the central logic of her development – that I recoiled from them, in the same way that I wasn’t sure whether I liked the cracked eggshells or their barbed wire finish meshes.
Bound and tied sculptures
More in line with the soft mood of the plaster casts was a kind of hybrid form she developed, where smooth, gloop plaster casts interacted with metal or wood. Most often this took the form of wire, or sometimes string, twined round eggs shapes to make them bulge, very much into the shape of cells at the earliest stage of cell multiplication when the nascent life form consists of only 2 or 4 or 8 cells. You can see examples on the table in the first photo at the top of this review, or in the photo below.
Again, I didn’t like the use of the thin wire or twine. Inexplicably and irrationally, they made me feel tied up in wire, made me feel breathless and constrained. According to the curators, these many objects tied and bound and wired symbolised for Bartuszová ‘the bonds and constraints of human relationships’. The curators only mention in passing that she experienced ‘challenges in her marriage’ which eventually broke down and ended in 1984. Quite.
The curators make these works out to be sophisticated and complicated meditations on or expressions of the way personal and familial relationships are interconnected with nature, they way they capture the trace of a moment in solid form, in a tactile fragment of time. That her work is a thinking-through of sensual shapes, an extended exploration of feeling through sculptural practice. Fair enough. But the wire-snagged endless eggs made me feel like I was ripping my hand on barbed wire and the wire-bound cells made me feel asphyxiated.
On the other hand, I liked what you could call the ‘belted’ works, where the constraining force isn’t wire but more like a belt. Her work along this line of investigation, in the 1980s, continued with the themes of binding and pressure but incorporated many more materials such as acrylic, string, bronze, rubber and wood. Basically, I found these funny and charming.
Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1972 to 1974) Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Social art
Bartuszová left a legacy of some 500 sculptures which stimulate, please or disturb in their quiet but steadily experimental, abstract way. About 80 are on display in this exhibition. But there are (at least) two other distinct aspects of her practice.
In the mid-1960s Bartuszová had branched out to experiment with small sculptures composed of interlocking shapes, many from her trademark plaster (such as ‘Folded Figure’, 1965) but also series cast from bronze and aluminium. These were conceived as 3-D jigsaw puzzles which could be taken apart and reassembled.
Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern showing some of her interlocking 3-D puzzles (photo by the author)
Early in the show there’s a series of black and white photos recording how some of these works were used in innovative workshops for blind and partially sighted children. Rather than summarise I’ll quote the wall label in its entirety:
In 1976 and 1983 art historian Gabriel Kladek organised and delivered a series of workshops for blind and partially-sighted children. A key element was the use of Bartuszová’s hand-sized and enlarged sculptures. The sculptures could be handled and several of them taken apart and reassembled. Kladek photographed the workshops, capturing the young participants’ joyful exploration of the sculptures. The workshops encouraged the children to experience different shapes and textures through touch, differentiating between geometric and organic forms. Prioritising movement, the body, touch, action and active engagement with sculpture, the use of these sculptures highlights the artist’s forward-thinking, participatory approach.
Sweet, huh? But would only work with the smooth and rounded forms, not so much with the fragile eggs, let alone objects bound with wire and twine.
But Bartuszová got involved in a surprising number of public commissions. She lived in a communist country and all artists and writers were expected to make practical contributions to society. Since these are obviously site-specific and generally very big, none of these big public pieces are included in the exhibition, we have to be content with (generally old black-and-white) photos and explanatory wall labels.
Thus we are told about:
a bronze fountain she created for the Institute for Physically Disabled Children in Košice (1967 to 1971)
monumental reliefs she created for the Southern Slovak Paper Mill (1973 to 1975) and Eastern Slovak Steelworks (1974)
There are photos of her in situ at these locations supervising the creation of the works. In addition there are also photos of the futuristic models she designed for playground climbing frames and slides, and a set of photos recording the creation of a monumental public sculpture titled ‘Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture’ (1982) at the entrance to the Košice crematorium.
These are sort of interesting mainly because they show how brutalist, post-war modernism was very similar either side of the Iron Curtain, suggesting that it had less to do with the creativity of individual artists than a certain design logic emanating from modern building materials, technologies and production methods. If you have lots of steel or pre-stressed concrete available along with large-scale factories and workshops for its production and design, then certain stripped down shapes and designs logically follow, whether you’re in Slovakia or San Francisco.
A photo of her at a large workshop, cleaning snow off one of her slides, and of a partially sighted child paying with one of her forms, can be see at the Tate magazine article, A Futurist of Form.
Books & Boots 