Sugar & Spice
Hinke Schreuders
Tai Shani
Karin Bos
Natalie Dowse
Juno Doran
Sarah Baker
Suzanne Sixx
Kelly Jenkins
Sugar & Spice… a show about little girl’s dreams and lost innocence…
The London-based American artist Sarah Baker is strongly associated with work that takes popular media forms – advertising, television and pop videos – and subverts them to create her own quirky dialogue with the viewer. Whilst Baker grips these forms firmly by the balls and twists, hers is not a discourse of emphatic feminist critique so much as one that is concerned with ambivalence and the lack of conclusion. Sarah Baker appears to eschew a singular political stance, perhaps even celebrating the freedom from needing to have one, in favour of exploring the gaps; in favour of exploring her –and our- seduction by and complicity in glamour, consumption and the world of promised fame and fortune. Baker’s works engage directly with the role models and promises made to little girls as they grow up in western societies. In many cases she makes a deeply honest statement about the tension between wanting to embrace them directly and firmly taking a critical distance. Often the route by which she achieves the distance is unexpected: her body of work dealing with her friendship with Bill May, a male synchronized swimming champion, is as much about her experiences as a young woman entering seriously into the rather bizarre world of synchronized swimming as it is about him. Through this mechanism, the unexpected and other –the less familiar male gender of a synchronized swimmer- acts as a kind of refractory mirror for her self. In this work, like other works where she turns her lens on others, there is, in fact a deeply personal and confessional quality to the work. This is not the apparently objective position of the documentary, but the intimate gaze of one connected to her subjects, arguably a riposte to the traditional male artistic gaze in which there are no subjects, only objects. This inversion of the object into subject is perhaps most startlingly evident in some of her life-size (or larger) photographic cut out works in which she styles herself into a facsimile of a fashion model, television celebrity or generally glamourous being. Walking a deft line between parody and Cindy Sherman-esque performative portraiture, she creates something genuinely new. Always working with fore grounded elements of pattern- which she uses in a more abstracted way in her collage and poster work- these are beings that draw not only on a myriad of media sources, but always involve the kind of heraldic use of textiles and trademarks that is something of a feature of her oeuvre. Her collage works deconstruct the patterns and trademarks of high-end luxury goods into a language that sits somewhere between calligraphy and abstract painting. But, her cutout works insert them in a way that, although evident, somehow integrates them into the unity of the impact: that garish Versace pink and gold pattern covering the painstakingly chosen outfit seems to meld perfectly with the tones of the skin and accessories in a way that is beyond any fashion styling. It becomes an intrinsic part of the complex female images that confront us simultaneously as an image of media-constructed desire and yet, in total defiance of becoming the mere object of the viewer’s gaze.
Juno Doran
The Portuguese painter Juno Doran has produced a prolific body of work over the last decade. Much of the work produced during the period she lived in Manchester can be viewed as belonging to the recent tradition of “High Pop Realism” arising from the city; her subjects and content largely drawn from Manchester’s various youth subcultures. In these tightly finished portraits and figurative vignettes, Doran depicts young women –and men- presenting with the sub-cultural identities they have found by foraging through the city’s substrata. The defiant gaze of heavily made up Goth girls in their teens speak of the unsteadiness with which their apparently menacing and interesting social identity is assumed. The viewer –and perhaps Doran herself- can’t help thinking that all the black make-up in the world will not help to cover the true lack of confidence in some of these individuals negotiating an adult socio-sexual identity. Thus, contemplating just how girls –and boys- who refuse the dominant images of fashion and beauty instead engage with an equally codified image of resistance, has long been a part of her practice. More recent works have, however, seen her focus on far more personal subjects with a concomitant soberness to the style. In the “Memory Paintings”, Doran turns her attention to her personal memories; her experiences of growing up as a little girl in a Portuguese family living in Angola during the last days of the colonial period and beyond. The sombre gray and sepia tones of the works –not quite photorealist yet staunchly representational- allude at once to sentiment and memory, the world of the faded photograph. And yet, though highly staged, their sentimentality is immediately stopped in its tracks by a kind of directness of content that is reminiscent of Italian Neo-realist cinema. Yes, these are stories framed to maximum impact, but their human reality is something we feel nonetheless.
The little girls and adolescents – Doran herself- are shockingly uneasy; babies seem doomed by foreboding shadows and little girls posed for official portraits present a disturbing world-weariness. Finally referencing the cultural and personal information that almost all of her earlier works denied, perhaps there is a circular process. It is almost as if the latest body of works are offered as a mute explanation to the viewer as to why one little Portuguese girl growing up in the colonies and rural Portugal would run away to a big foreign city and fall in with the naughty kids. At a new stage of maturity, Doran offers us a portrait with all the layers of slap removed.
Suzanne Sixx
Suzanne Sixx graduated from the prestigious Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands and her work seems to straddle a strange chasm between being apparently very different from the dominant forms coming out of that institution and yet actually very much illustrating the conceptual processes encouraged by it. On the surface of it, her garish colours and bubblegum –literal and otherwise- materials are very much at odds with the sleek, restrained conceptual aesthetic often associated with Rietveld artists. Hers are most certainly materials that would stain and leave sticky patches on the famously scrubbed Dutch doorsteps. Her starting point is unabashedly Pop Art that she takes and connects with a mass consumption culture in which teenage girls readily get hopped-up on additives and artificial colours. Consumption, particularly the consumption of teenage girls and young women, is very much at the heart of her work. There is consumption in its literal form: a portrait of Britney Spears in chewed bubblegum; a portrait of Anne Frank in caramelized sugar; a reworked Warhol self-portrait in lipstick. Most of her works seem to use something that end up willingly or ambivalently in young women’s mouths. But these consumed materials also speak of another facet. Desired as they are by girly teenage gaggles, they speak of a kind of subcultural date rape, their additives and nutrition-free content pumped en masse at their target audiences through a diet of media images. In turning these images around and remaking them, she manages too, to bring a kind of temporal distortion. On one level here, the other kind of consumption, 19th century tuberculosis with its characteristic fevered demenour and unleashed sexuality is affected not by a bacillus, but a form of chemical battery farming. And yet, this consumption of dreams, this desire to be an object of attention and worship is not a recent as we might assume, as she points out in her portrait of Anne Frank. Made in caramelised sugar and depicting Anne Frank with jarringly blonde hair reminiscent of a Warhol screen print, Suzanne Sixx has based the work on a photograph found in Anne’s diary. Anne wrote that it was the image that she planned to use as her publicity shot when she too arrived in Hollywood to be discovered as a screen star. Beneath all the other narratives about her unfortunate life, Anne Frank too longed to consume the dream.
Hinke Schreuders
Arjette Hinke Schreuders, artist, designer and commentator, hails from Groningen but lives in Amsterdam. Her practice in these areas varies, perhaps in reflection of the demands of the practices themselves; conceptual, applied and reflective. The rare opportunity to have access to an artist’s range of ”identities” so easily –made possible through her longstanding presence on the web in the form of her “suds and soda” website- itself raises interesting questions about the nature of creative practice, identity and authorship. As a visual artist, Hinke’s practice walks a path beaten in the 1970’s in its use of craft skills traditionally associated with women –embroidery, sewing, needlework- to construct a subversive, clear feminist comment. In Schreuder’s work, this lineage is reasserted to construct things that are at once beautifully made objects and make the political dimension clearly visible: embroidered “cum shots” splash the faces that appear to be lifted from porn films; a parody of a chic shopping bag holds a collection of comedy felt dildo’s; and a fabric representation of a woman’s head invites us with her obscene blow-up dolly lips….. Similarly, like early feminist theorists –and their occasionally grudging debt to Freud- Schreuders often turns her attention to the earliest stories and imagery that little girls receive to guide them in the world. The Little Red Riding Hood (Roodkapje in Dutch) motif occurs in a body of work besides quotes of platitudes and fairy tales. Shcreuders often takes these narratives as starting points for a careful critical view and yet, they remain personal. She does not attempt to hide the power that these stories -first offered to her as an eager little girl- retain in adulthood, albeit with new meanings.The political dimension of the work (whether feminist or post-feminist is subject to discussion) does not conceal a certain sense of humour; a certain warm quality that invites us to share, to touch, and not to recoil in shame or shared anger. Perhaps this is because of the complex identities being addressed within the work. Yes, we are presented with images that we at once recognise as the traditionally repressed female role or her officially liberated and sexually open counterpart. And yet neither escapes a certain wry ambivalence, neither seems to promise a template for Utopia nor complete despair.
Kelly Jenkins
The British artist Kelly Jenkins also makes works in the materials that draw from traditional female activity and its subsequent assimilation into the feminist canon of artistic practice. Trained to a high technical level in textile crafts, Jenkins focuses on producing pieces that use innovative knitting and textile techniques. At times these take on the form of wall hanging or two dimensional pieces in which the imagery is literally knitted into the fabric of the object. Other works have a three dimensional sculptural format. She first gained attention with her large-scale wall hanging pieces. Drawing on the barrage of particularly British imagery that women face in the gutter press, Jenkins’ subverted the visual languages of the likes of The Sun and men’s’ magazines offering up tarty images of fantasy women. These coexist beside the banal advertising imagery of household products supposedly appealing to women, all the more depressing for their shiny jolly presentation. In her reworking of these images, knitted directly into the fabric of the work, a juxtaposition between the demure nature of the craft and the content – big tits flogging telephone masturbation- immediately indicate the polar ends of the spectrum of social conditioning for girls in British society. Her work seems to acknowledge that for many girls growing up in the UK the main visual messages emanating from the lowest-common-denominator press still advocate that they should grow up to be whores in the bedroom but to make sure that the house is nice and clean. In a sense, it is only the punky up-yours attitude of the styling that separates the works from good old school feminism; any accusation of colluding with male representations does could not diminish the clear critical stance. In other works, however, we are confronted with what appears to be a more personal or layered reflection on the remaining reality of blatant sexism in the way British popular culture trains girls to behave. In the work “Stich Bitch”, for example, the juxtaposition of an image of a highly sexualised model’s face and a pair of respectable spectacles seem to talk of a more personal response. Is the “Stich Bitch” of the piece the owner of the spectacles? Certainly she appears to be the one whose enraged, slashing stitches have edged their way onto the models sultry face. Evocative of Dorothy Parker’s quip about girls who wear glasses, are we to understand this anger as a dissatisfaction with the dominant role models or are we to understand that the very act of knitting, with which they may be associated, is, in fact, the act of defiance? In other bodies of work such as the “She Space” three-dimensional works, Jenkins abandons the illustrative and figurative, instead focussing her innovative techniques on producing pieces that are far less transparent and more abstracted. As the name suggests, these might well refer to the female body. A number of them have a distinctly biological feel, reminiscent of scientific microphotography. Fallopian tubes and hormones could be associated with some of the forms: there is an undeniable sense of the physical. But, in contrast to the effect of producing the immediately recognisable, the confrontational is circumvented. These seem to deal instead with an almost secret female body left out of the daily gaze and representations, one that is oddly restful and surprising. And, unlike the demands of depilatory requirements of the popular press, pretty hairy.
Karin Bos
The Dutch painter Karin Bos fixes her artistic gaze on girlhood and adolescence. In her paintings, she taps into a kind of reality that is often written out of the official versions whether they be the critical feminist view of young girls as victims of social conditioning or the protests of compliant women that they are, indeed, feminine and ladylike. In her vision, we are confronted with aggressive tomboyish moments in girls who appear to be conforming to the dress codes of sexy teenagers or the ugly troll-like temper of infants that have been made up for a traditional portrait. In Bos’ work, the political relates far more to the Netherlandish painting tradition of trying to capture a moment of observed “truthfulness” than it does to received feminist doctrine or critique. The feminism here is largely about giving visibility to what, although we all know about it from listening in on girl’s conversations is airbrushed out of the magazine representations or historically painted out of the depictions of women. This is not the confrontational imagery of the “real” female body in opposition to the idealized media representations. It is instead, the presentation of “real” female behaviour that is removed from representations. These are teenage girls that spit in the street and fart in public; little girls that might readily bite your hand rather than say cute things in wispy little voices. Or, they may simply be girls -unselfconsciously and secretly observed- getting on with pretty traditional “female” activities such as in a painting of girls practicing ballet on a roof top. In effect, taken as a whole, Bos appears to appealing for a holistic view of female behaviour, neither editing out the things that challenge nor reinforce the stereotype, perhaps with a fascination about how, exactly, girls make the transition through girlhood to young womanhood negotiating the full gamut of social and biological factors. She does not, however, do so in a way that seems documentary. On the contrary, the painting is not naturalistic and makes use of a number of intuitive and humourous devices that bring a surrealist sensibility at times but also act to focus the viewer’s attention on what she has observed as a kind of “truthful” moment. In “Happy Hunting”, for example, her two trendy chicks, armed with guns and wearing antlers –almost in a parody of the traditional Playboy “bunnygirl”- are at once nubile prey for hunters but, most certainly, simultaneously far more dangerous than Bambi. The work stands as a good example of the discussion that seems to be at the heart of Bos’ practice: this is not the angry cry of protest at the bad treatment of young women at the hands of patriarchal structures but a humourous recognition that young women, even if they have moments of uncertainty, actually have robust strategies for dealing with the contemporary world.
Tai Shani
The British Israeli artist Tai Shani has made work across a broad range of media including installation and photography, performance and video. Whist performance art has been one her main practices in recent years, she has also engaged in making increasingly complicated and ambitious video projects.In these more recent works, she has evolved her practice into working with complex video material such as in the work, “Take Me Back”. Using music and a visual language strongly reminiscent of British cinema dealing with the magical – one thinks of Jonathan Miller’s “Alice in Wonderland”- and a Hitchcockian suspense, complete with all its Freudian visual cues, she creates visually striking, highly-personal and somewhat opaque viewing experiences. As in her other non-video works, reappraising and playing with images of women and womanhood seems to be a strong preoccupation. Make-up, hosiery, cloth, seduction, repulsion, violence, theatre and mascara might easily be keywords attributed to her work in a databasing exercise. Hers is not a straightforward post-feminist critique: her preoccupation with the illogical, eerie world of magic, the occult and the unexplained does not square easily with a received position; does not direct the viewer towards perceiving her as of a particular political position. In much the same way that works of filmmakers like David Lynch present problems for assimilation by any number of traditional critical standpoints, Tai Shani’s works remain too individual in their preoccupations to be pegged. And, like Lynch, this effect often seems to be as a result of the heady mélange of cinematic languages brought to serve the works. There is, however, always a strong sense in her work of the cultural narratives that inform the development of female sexual identity; the warning fairy tales told to little girls turned on their head without losing the magical or mystical elements used as a hook to seduce and draw in the fertile imaginations of female children finding their way in the world. At times, we see the magical in her work almost in the de facto way that children accept it; the world of secret gardens and magical talismans, of talking animals and possessed body parts. But there is something developmental in the way that she picks up these themes and restructures them in her work, almost mapping how they fit into a developmental model for female identity narratives. The innocuous magical stories of childhood morph into the attraction of darker forms of magic to teenage subcultures or into the tainted sexual myths of a world after Freud. In this sense then, Shani’s work is very much about finding the continuity that connects the adult woman’s identity with whom she was as a little girl, the personal and bigger cultural stories acting as a kind of bridge for the continuity between childhood and adulthood.
Natalie Dowse
The paintings of British painter Natalie Dowse tap into a world that is now almost gone. The melancholic imagery of little girls on forlorn seaside fun fairs, of gymkhana girls on ponies and petite gymnasts contorting their androgynous bodies before the glare of international television cameras speak of a world that is already purely nostalgic. Dowse’s work taps directly into the narratives of aspiration and desire pushed at a few generations of British girls through popular media at a certain time, a strangely English response to dealing with the onslaught of the Swinging Sixties. For a period from the 1960s until its eventual death at the hands of MTV and the invention of a teen pop press in the 1980’s, British girls no longer content to exist on stories of plum-mouthed lacrosse champions fiercely loyal to their boarding school named after some suitably Anglican saint were offered a compromise set of aspirations. Arguably a containment strategy for worried adults intuiting the end of 1950’s style patriarchy yet fearing the impact of the sexual revolution on their daughters, a range of comics, magazines, annuals and television programming offered little girls a range of supposedly suitable role models. Gymnasts such as Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci seemed to be the perfect solution: undeniably active and mini career women of a sort, they nonetheless presented an apparently innocent and upstanding (non) sexual identity. Ditto for powerful little girls who could control much larger horses and make them jump over fences in competitive environments. And of course, it is over. Tammy is a single mother living on benefits. Bunty has been beaten by Britney and Lady Sovereign and her gang of streetwise inner city rude girls would tell any pony to talk to the hand. Dowse’ work is acutely aware of the strange contradiction of the world presented to the particular generation of girls in which their sexuality would be apparently contained by sublimating it into a range of suitably sporting, ideally exhausting activities, upon which they could be encouraged to fix their dreams and aspirations. Dowse frames this in terms of examining the use of sport as a form of propaganda used to control and ultimately abuse little girls, an interesting position given the similarities between this construct from the 1960’s and 1970’s and vision of right-wing European thinking in the early 20th century that encouraged girls to hang around in groups doing callisthenics, simultaneously containing them and strengthening them for marriage and childbirth. The work relies on a fatalistic hindsight: there are those who remember Comaneci’s descent into anorexia, drug and alcohol dependency as clearly as her historic perfect ten Olympic score. This sense of a disappointed hindsight about girlhood dreams, even if they were dreams encouraged by a social machinery way beyond the control of the little girls who dreamt them, is heightened in the blotchy, soft style of the works that make their source as screen images evident. In this sense, Dowse’s practice is not only concerned with the content, but also with the formal aspects; the historical context of image production, the relationship between painting and photography and television.
Ken Pratt © 2008