Head over to London Bridge station which seems to be looking a bit smarter these days, now that the major refurbishment work that’s been going for the past few years has finally been completed. I’m not sure it’s had much impact on the underground lines that converge here so I’m assuming that the main benefits must have been linked in with improvements to the structure of the main line terminus. Either way, the end result for me is a short cut introduced in the walk I have to make to get to Bermondsey Street which, I guess, has shaved about three minutes off my overall journey time so I suppose all the years of other commuter disruption and millions spent on the development has probably been worth it after all. Anyway, first stop on my stroll down the Street today is at Eames Fine Art, a neat little commercial gallery which specialises in organising shows of prints ranging from works by old superstars of the medium like Rembrandt, Durer and Goya through to more contemporary practitioners like Miro, Warhol and Bridget Riley, with the current show devoted to a large display of small works by Eric Gill.
And I think it’s fair to say that the selection confirms that Gill was indeed a very skillful craftsman and designer with a flair for creating fresh compositions that combine elements of medieval manuscript primitivism with the sinuous lines of modernistic art deco minimalism to produce his own unique style of stylised Arts & Crafts movement decorations. As for subject matter, well, just about everything on show here today falls within the orbit of the twin themes of sex and religion that seem to have obsessed Gill throughout most of his working life. Indeed, in his own perversely idiosyncratic theological interpretations of scripture, he seems to have seen the two urges for spiritual and sexual engagement as but different sides of the same highly-charged religio-erotic coinage.
Although, having said that, one doesn’t necessarily need to share Gill’s own very personalised views of a faith-based understanding of life’s creative forces to be impressed with the confident cut of his lines as he delineates the series of bold curves and pretty patterning used in his woodcuts to describe a mix of Biblical, pagan and secular narratives. And whether it’s illustrative scenes showing Christ carrying the cross, St Anthony trying to avoid temptation or sketches illustrating the sexy Song of Solomon – or the less directly referenced sequences of dancers dancing, couples coupling and harems hareming, Gill continuously comes up with cleverly contrived combinations of interlocking elements that are as elegant and sharply defined as the carvings and calligraphic compositions that were the other great areas of artistic exploration to which he dedicated his extraordinarily prolific energies.
Of course, as with any exhibition of works by Gill, the show also comes complete with its own very large elephant that sits uncomfortably right in the middle of the room and makes it difficult to look directly at any of the works without suffering a nagging distraction in the back of the mind. And one doesn’t need to have read the whole of Fiona MacCarthy’s famously infamous biography of the artist, in which she details the appalling moral transgressions of her subject, to feel somewhat queasy when looking at items of his artistic output. Suffice to say that the list of index entries under the heading for ‘sexual tendencies’ in MacCarthy’s book includes phallic fixation, voyeurism, attraction to pubescent girls, incest and bestiality, all of which Gill seems to have eagerly indulged in under the aegis of his own peculiar form of theocratic family rule. It doesn’t really seem right that such a truly terrible man should be able to make such truly great art but he was and he did. And while I definitely wouldn’t suggest trying to put a ban on showing his work, I don’t think I’d want to buy any of it and I could certainly understand why some people might choose to boycott viewing it.
There’s another exhibition from an artist whose work some might well consider worth boycotting coming up a couple of paragraphs down the road but before getting there I think it’s time to cross Bermondsey Street and take a calming distractionery diversion by slipping into the Fashion and Textile Museum to take a look at Night and Day, their exploration of Fashion and Photography from the 1930s. And if there’s something perhaps slightly cold and clinical about Gill’s portrayal of the world as he saw it, then here all is frothy, flouncy and fantastical for the curators have decided not to concentrate on the desperate depression downside of the decade they’ve chosen to review but instead focus on the Hollywood fantasy version that offered the masses such a tempting escapist route away from the harsh realities of their own no-frills daily grind. At least, speaking as someone who knows very little about the evolution of sartorial stylings, that’s what the show suggests to me since it seems to be full of the kinds of evening dresses, couture gowns, large impractical hats and other trifling accoutrements that the rich and famous would be swanning about in at their cocktail parties and soirees rather than the frayed fusty frocks that I imagine my dear old granny and most of the rest of the world were wearing as they struggled through the tough trials of their own somewhat less idyllic lives.
I’m sure that for anyone with a proper interest in fashion then the ranks of mannequins decked out in their flashy and frilly concoctions with all the accompanying sequin sparklers and diamante doo-dads will just look absolutely fabulous but for me all the silks and satin, chiffon and chenille starts to blur early on and the relevance of the subtle stylistic differences don’t really register. As for the promised photographic accessorising, well, that seemed a bit thin and unless I managed to miss a great section of the show, it seemed to consist of not much more than a few page spreads taken from a selection of movie fan mags of the day plus a small separate section devoted to some fashion shots taken by Cecil Beaton. So, all in all, a mildly interesting display but I think it’s probably an exhibition aimed more towards the demographic who like to get their history from reading Vogue and their economics from watching Gold Diggers of 1933.
Which brings me back to the real world, or rather the utterly unreal fantasy world of the 1960s as seen through the eyes of one of the Pop practitioners of the day, Mel Ramos, who has been afforded a posthumous showing of his paintings, prints and sculptures courtesy of the Bermondsey Project Space. And while I’m sure they had very little in common in their own personal private lives Ramos, just like Gill, seems also to have had a similar twin set of obsessions when it came to choosing the subject matter that drove all of his creative output. But with him it was sex and consumerism, the latter commerialistic part having replaced religion as the preferred source of comfort and meaning for the artist and, very likely, the great majority of the rest of the baby-boomer generation that was starting to enjoy the freedoms ushered in by the new age of Aquarian permissiveness. And so, while Gill had all the books of the Old and New Testament to source the stories for his illustrative designs, so Ramos had the whole of Playboy – pinups and adverts alike – to inspire his own particular creative juices to flow.
The results are a series of images in which glossy young women have shed their clothes in order to snuggle up and embrace various XXL-super-sized items of oral gratification, from hamburgers to martinis and Snickers bars to Cuban cigars. It’s a bit hard for me to remember now but I kind of think that when I first saw these images in my teenage years I thought they were sexy, exciting and radical and offered a rather clever updated version of a stack of other old master art historical images celebrating the curvaceous charms of female pulchritude that had previously been licensed by way of reference to classical texts or allegorical themes. So that whereas in an earlier time the male gaze might have been directed towards Leda and the Swan, Andromeda and the Sea-Monster or any number of other paintings with more general titles like The Spirit of Purity and Innocent, yesterday’s coyness was to be replaced by a more open and honest, less furtive and guilty, approach to representations of the potential joys of sex and sexuality.
But then times change and we change with them so that by the late ‘70s or early ‘80s I’m sure I would have revised my naïve youthful analysis and interpretation of this kind of imagery and been lining up in support of my feminist friends’ view of Ramosian cheesecake art as the most appallingly offensive examples of sexist commodification…and so on. Although, of course, then along comes post-feminism and Madonna, ladettes and girl power and I guess that things start to get a bit muddled with the renewed possibility of being able to view Ramos’ work as maybe ironic or comic or just plain silly and terribly dated which, I suppose, is probably roughly where my current opinion remains, although I accept that I may now be well out of touch with correct contemporary thought. Indeed, to try to bring things right up-to-date I suppose one should perhaps try to consider what today’s post-post-feminist advocates of identity-based political thinking would say. And here I get the impression that there’s a sort of nervous, puritanistic default position that would probably think Ramos’ pictures should all be shredded, not just because of the tawdry objectification of the women involved, but also because the props he used – the hamburgers, martinis, Snickers bars and Cuban cigars – are all now considered to be so dangerously deleterious to the health of the general public.
Go see Amie Seigel at Thomas Dane – one of the best shows currently on…
Interesting – but yes lots of yucky attitudes and imagery! Interesting you should mention Madonna and ‘girl power’. To me these, female singers who profess to be feminists then go around looking like the worst type of male fantasy about how women should look and call it personal choice, and therefore feminist, don’t understand the tradition on which their look is based. Personally I can’t put feminism happily alongside dressing in this way and I think we need a movement which asks why would you want to look like this? Probably because many of the men who seem to dominate pop culture, films, fashion and computer games and tech in general are of this ilk! Funny that so many women choose to follow in their footsteps!!! How they have been taken in without realising it! But then our history and culture is so deeply embedded that we find it hard to extricate ourselves from it. Sad really!