Laing Art Gallery ‘The Enchanted Interior’ Exhibition First visit 30th October 2019 https://laingartgallery.org.uk/whats-on/the-enchanted-interior
See beautiful catalogue too Madeleine Kennedy [ED.] (2019) The Enchanted Interior Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Laing Art Gallery.
A first visit is a chance to face the fact that an exhibition of this size and nuance will always overwhelm this viewer at the least. I haven’t decided yet whether the overall rationale of the exhibition as stated in Kennedy’s catalogue is what interests me most in this clearly very urgent collection. Kennedy says that the exhibitions aims to speak out against the perpetrator of abuse of power:
In this case the perpetrator – the one who enchants – is not a person, not an individual artist or even a movement, but an unquestioned assumption: a deep-rooted idealisation of women as subordinates that is imbued in the objects, images and spaces of our world.[1]
The nuance is in the meaning of the sentence. At no point are we told that that the assumption that causes abuse is an assumption in the minds of men alone but one in which all persons engage, by supporting and/or resisting it, in their agency in co-creating the world of lived experience. For me, this made the exhibition very nuanced. I am still foxed by Ursula Mayer’s The Crystal Gaze (2007), in which 3 women and their images – in mirrors, frames and in and out of the gaze of each other comment on women in art, art by women and art on women – such as collars, chains, jewelled and gilded decoration that surrounds endlessly reflect on and in each other. The model may be the old motif of the 3 Graces. I still need to read the requisite essay in the catalogue but nuanced this piece of video art surely is.
Other works of art put nuance into female spaces in much the same way Bobby Baker often does. Soares’ Fainting Couch (2002) genuinely intoxicates – a work of vision, imagined sensation, conception and of the boundaries, necessarily liminal, of scent. It’s intriguing. The nuance is greater in effect than any obvious visual memes. Hatoum’s Home (1999) is so much more than an attack on the domestication of women through the objects they are encouraged to manipulate – these objects take on a threatening life in which the destructive nature of their purpose might may be turned on the assumption of female domesticity itself – knifing, cutting, grating, sieving and mincing it, as if it were meat.
The Oriental art, whether by men and women, is nuanced because it queers the position of Eastern women precisely by making them a projection of Western artists. That the harem was not like this is clear from the voice of actual Eastern women. And Interiors, although clearly enabling the imprisonment of women by men also become full of flashes of an otherness that can threaten as well reflect patriarchy. Good art leaves you still guessing. I desperately need to see Ethel Sands’ Interior with Mirror and Fireplace [undated] again. This interior feels full of secrets yet to be uncovered. It is beautifully indefinite – much more so in that the gaze upon it meets no return inside its spaces – only voids, like that of the central menacing fireplace. The only occupant is an ornamental female Olympia-like figure on the mantelpiece, doubled in a shadow.
Classics of modern art find place with innovative newness through their questioning of the assumptions about interiors. How great to see a Martha Roslyn for instance and one I hadn’t seen of the First Lady Nixon (First Lady (Pat Nixon) [c1967-72]), sporting decorations that frame atrocities of the Vietnam War. So individual women here are not just victims but neither are they themselves co-perpetrators. They get trapped in spaces that they sometimes co-create. After seeing the Tate Modern Dorothea Tanning show in London earlier in the year, in this context of spaces for women, I saw the closed(and one open) doors in her liminal house spaces as even more intriguing – where beauty is toxic (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik 1943). Seeing Fiona Tan’s Nele/Nellie (2013) from the Laing’s own collection again was welcome. This recalls Rembrandt’s life and Vermeer’s painting in ways that enriches each and brings nuance out of each in the comparative reading that goes on in your inner mind.
I’m going again to a Gallery Tour in January with a good friend and maybe several times other (I got a Multi-Visit ticket) and I’m going to look at how female desire is presented in many variants in male and female Pre-Raphaelite art. Not least because I can’t get Evelyn De Morgan’s The Gilded Cage (1900-19) out of my mind. This may because it speaks to the motif of the Bacchanalia, such as might be seen in Poussin’s Triumph of Pan (currently showing in Bishop Auckland). Iconography can bore me but I genuinely want to know why the scholar husband, wears such durable boots as he sits at his desk. The whole recalls Browning’s Andrea del Sarto and I want to know it better. Nuance then is not only present in the fine modern art here – it is everywhere. Easy models of interpretation will not pass in this richness and that is to the benefit of feminist art criticism.
But let’s admit, I still don’t know how to read Holman Hunt’s 1867 Isabella and the pot of Basil despite my love of the Keats’ poem and the fact that I’ve seen this Laing possession so many times. Seeing it in this context will help when I go again and feel a little less overwhelmed. What I sense is that we need to read the concept of framing more carefully. This is not just because of the intriguing melting frames (literally oozing into a puddle on the floor at least in the mind’s eye) of Maisie Broadhead (Hero, from Reframe series (2018)) but also because they are omnipresent – picture frames framing doorframes, window-frames, picture frames, mirror-frames and so on. Without them we’ll miss the relevance Mayer’s Crystal Gaze too.
Of course you’ll miss things. In an exhibition so full of
haunting patterns between works and in works – note the wonderful lacework and
its shadow in Room 1 – even in wallpapers for use or as settings for other figures,
being overwhelmed is a necessary part of the experience. There was only one
work I positively didn’t like – but perhaps a 2nd visit will help me
here, so the less said the better.
[1] Kennedy (2019:15)
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