GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
“The girl brings into play the flexibility of adolescence, often defined as an indeterminate state that reprises many of the conflicts of childhood while attempting to navigate a path to an adult maturity that is primarily represented by social conformity. ”
“When I say “adolescent”, I mean less a developmental stage than an open psychic structure. Just as biologists speak of the ‘open structure of living organisms that renew their identity by interacting with another identity, it could be said that the adolescent structure opens itself to that which has been repressed.’ ”
“I’m trying my hand at fashion photography.”
Art, at its best, subverts.
In 2004, the fourth and last year of my fine art degree, I submitted my thesis Sex, Violence and Desire: Concepts of Carnival in haute couture and the work of John Currin. It was a philosophical mouthful; a juggernaut of ambition over meaning. I wanted to crash fashion into art. If I were to adumbrate through the lie of memory and emotion, its essence was… in one word — subversion! Not only subversion within John Currin’s painting or John Galliano’s, Alexander McQueen’s and Vivienne Westwood’s haute couture, but also subversion in the sense of ‘to subvert’ by placing two cultures distinct from one another on the same playground, art and fashion, albeit tellingly in two separate chapters.
Art and fashion may be commercial bedfellows but they are not on the same playground. Nonetheless their collision (and collusion) can be heard louder than ever in the recent Dior handbags adorned by Genieve Figgis, or at Château La Coste right now, where the paintings of William McKeown are curated by British fashion designer, Jonathan Anderson. I use the word collision because art and fashion can collide, but what survives the collision determines whether art or fashion emerges from the crash. Genieve Figgis’ Dior handbags are not art; Jonathan Anderson’s curation of William McKeown’s paintings is. The line isn’t fine.
In her own words, the curator of girls girls girls at a Lismore Castle Arts, Irish fashion designer Simone Rocha writes: “I wanted to invite a group of artists who inspire, challenge and engage with femininity and its subversive characteristics, reflecting a female viewpoint today.” The two words that gasp for air in this aspirational statement is “femininity” and “subversive”. It is how the two words ironically “inspire, challenge and engage” with one another that creates the oxygen to go beyond such protest and confessional hastags as #girlpower or #metoo, to something more subversive and transformational in respect to the figure of the girl in contemporary culture.
The word “femininity” as opposed to girl, is almost a derogatory term in how we define and don’t define gender today. If we were to re-envision, or refashion femininity in relation to subversion, then we would have to redefine femininity all together, from something stereotypically soft to something subversively hard. And in such a refashioning does femininity just become the antonym that it defines itself in opposition to: masculinity? Does it just become about sexual difference rather than what Julia Kristeva describes in relation to adolescence as an “open structure”, neither this nor that but the potential to be everything and nothing. Does femininity become too self-conscious vis-a-vis its subversion? Contra feminist or feminine, which holster theory, critique, grotesque and so on in academic circles, femininity is defined as the “qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of women”, whatever they are. Girl, however, is less definitive in terms of gender. The girl doesn't exist in Freud’s terminology, and for that matter, general artworld discourse. Female and mother do. Girlhood is just a byway to womanhood. Bad girls are destined to become good mothers, or “good enough” mothers according to Winnicott.
girls girls girls, Lismore Castle Arts, installation shot, courtesy of Lismore Castle Arts.
With a title like girls girls girls (even if led by a regiment of low-hanging g’s) we immediately approach the photographs, paintings, textile, sculptures, film at Lismore Castle Arts — by all female artists in name if not gender — at a political distance. Even if the girl naturally transcends gender, we cognitive misers will generalise this exhibition as by girls and about girls. Others, who may have experienced art exhibitions in the last decade of feminist waves as curated vehicles for girl power and patriarchy signalling, will perhaps say that it is a little late to the revolution. Or perhaps girls girls girls is just a catchy name, a name to catch the conscience and sensitivity of a “female viewpoint”? Or is it all a neon signifier, one that signposts to the subversive red light district or a performative vaudeville? The posturing abounds, provoking questions that wouldn’t have been elicited by a more poetic, abstract or archetypal oxymoronic art exhibition title. Where’s the fun in that, or dialectic rather.
Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island, Gelatin silver estate print, 1977 Image size: 13.2 x 13.1 cm, Paper size: 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery
Sian Costello and Sharna Osborne, girls girls girls, Lismore Castle Arts, installation shot, courtesy of Lismore Castle Arts.
It is with girls girls girls in mind that I made my way to Lismore Castle Arts to experience Rocha’s debut curatorship of contemporary art. I expected taste. I got taste in the curatorial consistency of the female gaze and Harley Weir’s same-sex suckling of a nipple, a large-scale photograph that meets your gaze from across the room on first entering the gallery. Weir’s fertile and appetising photograph — Rocha’s curatorial statement piece — visually partnered with Sharna Osborne’s pelvic thrust, sets the lip-slapping tone for a series of seductive images and objects, that tastefully articulate a sensibility that leans towards fashion magazine gloss, but arches its back towards art in the textural textiles of Eimear Lynch & Domino Whisker, and the paintings that dot the gallery here and there. It’s a fine contortion. A beautiful show. A gestalt that surrenders the singular for the whole.
Eimear Lynch & Domino Whisker (display case), Because it Moved Me, 2022 Linen, embroidery, Dimensions variable
The combos of Lismore and Rocha, art and fashion, heritage and white cube, reminds me of experiencing ‘The Wedding’ at Andrea Rosen Gallery New York in 2012, where and when the Canadian Curator Ydessa Hendeles — known for her grace and taste in stylistically and anachronistically putting things together in a gallery, coined “Ydessa Syndrome” by some Frieze columnist — placed a nineteenth-century birdhouse with church pews at the centre of the gallery surrounded by photographs by Walker Evans and Roni Horn (the latter’s photographs are also at Lismore). Rocha, like “Hendeles makes art works exponential in meaning, yet singular in presence.” You enjoy the works here: their craft and their kinship. You get the sense that Rocha formed a relationship with the works that now dress the walls. But what do they address in meaning beyond their seductive presence as art objects? Is it just an accident of circumstantial cultural contradiction?
LEFT: Petra Collins, Untitled, 2 Framed photographs, Each 87 x 47 cms (framed); Right: Dorothy Cross, Stilettos, 1994, Shoes, cow hide, cow teats
It is difficult to not look through the lens and context of fashion when considering the artworks individually. There’s Dorothy Cross’ 1994 cow hide and teat stilettos that pivot toward fashion and fetish. There’s Sophie Barber’s super-large unstretched canvas The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sang that drapes onto the gallery runway. There’s the body posture to the photographs, not unlike the fashion-art hybridity of Roe Ethridge or Wolfgang Tillmans. Petra Collins’s photographs, conjoined and paired (an update on Cindy Sherman’s 1980s mannequin abjection, which artist Robert Longo said was a two fingered gesture to the male-dominated art market) usurp the whispering modesty in tone and scale in the Wishful Self-Portrait paintings of Sian Costello, and the almost too famous photograph by Francesca Woodman, who once jested on the margins of a similar self-portrait that “I'm trying my hand at fashion photography.” Art and fashion, like art and advertising, were once upon a time worlds apart, as artists like Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol found out the hard way. The way they exist together today is in contradiction.
Roni Horn, Untitled (Weather), 2010 – 2011, Inkjet/pigment prints on paper: 5 black and white prints, mounted on sintra 31.1 x 26 cm each, photo: author
In the raised-floor gallery at the back of the main space, veiled in half light, the inchmeal shifts in perspective of Roni Horn’s sequential portraits and the school girl dress-up of the Cindy Sherman’s, dress down the surface spectacle of the main gallery to one that is more composed and sensitive, revealing a sensitivity towards the inner working of bodies. Not just their seductive surfaces and shapes, but their inner turmoil. The body politic is invoked. Louise Bourgeois, the forever girl caught in the vortex of memory and trauma, is found alone in the circular tower adjacent, sculpted prosthetics that wrestle with the trauma of the body and the mind that contorts it from within. This is an exhibition of bodies that look and lust while being looked at. Femme bodies and minds that stay whole under the voyeur’s and fetishist’s gaze of capitalist consumer culture, that forever desires and devours femme bodies and minds. Capitalism never unloosens its belt.
Josiane M.H. Pozi, 1, 2021, Video, 13.25 min, edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs, photo: author
The film in the adjacent screening room seems detached from the body of the exhibition, but it is a phantom limb that, perhaps, most of all, connects the prosthetic limbs that comprise this exhibition as a whole. A woman (the artist Josiane M.H. Pozi herself) takes a taxi to a hotel. The camera angle is from the position of her breasts, a bobbing upshot that captures the undercarriage of her head and the blond hair that frames it. At the hotel reception she asks about the swimming pool, and then proceeds to her room, preceded or followed by a few out-of-eyeshot and earshot human interactions for directions. It’s a film about nothing and everything. The everything moment (more of a glimpse) comes at the end, when the boob shot gives way to a selfie shot, as she tries to get her best side against the backdrop of the luminous live TV screen in her hotel room. This is followed by a wide angle of the room showing the artist sitting naked, on the floor, in front of the TV, and metaphorically inside her phone. It’s an odd everything moment following the nothing that preceded it. It is a sad portrait of culture, one where people surveil themselves and make big brothers of us all. We are all seized. In that everything moment we are injected into the breast (heart) and the head of the artist who — as artists do at their best moments — distills everything into a shifting glimpse in perspective.
Sian Costello, Wishful Self-Portrait I, (2020), Oil on Canvas Paper, 21 x 29cm. photo: author
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1976/2000, Gelatin silver print, edition 17/20, Each 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
The artworks that monogamously speak the language of art with a capital A feel like private pages pulled from from a diary or snapped in the privacy of a bedroom: Elene Chantladze’s painted scribbles and scrawls on A4 cardboard and stone under lock-and-key display cases; Cindy Sherman’s emotional shifts between coy and brazenness; Francesca Woodman’s and Roni Horn’s through-the-persistent-and-repetitive looking glass snaps; Sian Costello’s Wishfully painted portraits; Josiane M.H. Pozi’s sad self surveillance. Whereas the fashion photographs (including Genieve Figgis’s and Cassi Namoda’s paintings) are a little more exhibitionist. Sometimes art feels shameful in its momentary existence, as if it never wanted to be exhibited at all.
The title girls girls girls has a precedent in the book Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art (2011), which boasts a few of the artists here at Lismore Castle Arts, including the forever girl Francesca Woodman and the never herself girl Cindy Sherman. It is recommended reading on a Psychoanalysis and Art syllabus I put together some eight years ago, and a book I fantasised as an exhibition ever since. girls girls girls is as close as it gets to that fantasy.
My earlier affinity with a fashion of a particular subversion, haute couture, was based around a fascination with a subversion of norms, from something wearable to something performative. Art does not have the luxury of a wearable cousin. Art subverts itself, undresses itself to sustain a vulnerable and shameful state of existence. Aligned with fashion at Lismore Castle Arts, art is injected with the culture of the mainstream, a confident and wearable cousin. It is a good collision, one where art emerges from the crash. That said, art here almost looks like it is shamefully looking out into the world in the face of a fashion that spreads its legs in defiance. Like Warhol, who injected high art with advertising a la supermarket chique, there is something buoyant about inviting high fashion into the local language of contemporary art, a collision that is more acceptable in the private art markets of London, Paris or New York (as they say in the fashion world, and perhaps more casually now in the international artworld elsewhere). Rocha has successfully blurred the lines between fashion and art at Lismore Castle Arts, making art shout a little louder while not sacrificing its enigma.—James Merrigan