About The Girls
REVIEW | Art critic, A.D. Powers, reviews a live performance of ‘Garden Party’
The first image, entitled ‘Garden Party’ was created in Sinclair’s garden on a summer afternoon in 2006. It was turned into a postcard to promote the new club for creative people in Bournemouth, BomoCreatives, which upset a few genteel ladies in Christchurch. Then the image became flesh when The Girls turned it into an installation at the Endorse-it in Dorset Festival on Sunday 12 August in Six Penny Handley.
Nyotaimori is when a Japanese woman lies naked, draped in sushi for the delectation of diners. From what I can gather it is the sort of pastime gangsters might get a kick out of – a kind of Japanese equivalent of lap dancing.
Here the seaweed and raw fish has been replaced by swiss roll and iced buns with cherries on top. Whereas pictures of the Japanese girls show them to have their eyes open, this model is corpse-like. She wears bleach-blonde hair and her body is adorned with strawberries, jam tarts, cucumber slices and iced gems. Meanwhile a hesitant curate is poised with his fork, making the best of something he doesn’t feel comfortable about at all.
What does it all mean? It’s evocative of 1970s children’s tea parties, post-War austerity, church bazaars, the Conservative Party, the village fête, public school and photographs of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 – an England that championed draining life of human feeling and putting formality and duty in its place. What fun we had when we were not allowed to enjoy ourselves.
I get a sense of literary echoes, T.S. Eliot’s, The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock – “like a patient etherised up on a table” or E M Forster. The vicar could be a brave Mr. Beebe indulging a taste for the outrageous. A French journalist once commented that, "Passion in England, except for cricket and betting, is always regarded as a shameful disease." The Girls suggest that we’re also rather fond of mass-produced cake.
The Girls say something also about how a certain type of Englishman views a woman. The model is Galatea ("she who is milk-white"), appropriate for putting on a pedestal. She is Pygmalion’s ivory statue, an idealised Britannia.
Looking at the subject as an installation at the Festival I was drawn to the pale flesh. The subject had no animation and some bystanders thought she might not be real. One even tried to take away an important slice of chocolate swiss roll. The Girls centrepiece has a clinical, tubercular beauty. She would have had a role in the WRVS or Brief Encounter.
For the ‘live’ performance, The Girls added a plastic spider and a ladybird. The work became even more evocative of childhood, perhaps expressing the perpetual adolescent fantasies of English males, mixing up lust, matron and mother.
The addition of a teapot, signified the English relationship with porcelain: low permeability, hardness, high durability, whiteness, translucence, resonance, brittleness, high resistance to the passage of electricity, high resistance to thermal shock – you get the idea.
Two ‘vicars’ were in attendance at the Sixpenny Handley show. One was a Japanese woman, the other an English man. The festival revellers didn’t know quite how to take it. They crowded round, amused and perplexed in equal measure. The security guards were required to stop hands wandering.
‘Garden Party’ is a clever sleight of hand, a quintessentially English image derived from a Japanese ritual. That in itself says something about Englishness - in its pureness it amounts to little more than a watery and tasteless cucumber sandwich, but mix it with something exotic, and something rather special emerges. This image is accessible and fun, and it’s likely to have a lot more mileage in the months and years ahead. And if you don’t like it, you have the chance to wolf down the confectionary after the show, as the festival-goers did with gusto.
© A.D. Powers 2007
See more photographs taken during the performance
Photograph on this page by Sean Gardiner
