About The Girls
REVIEW | ‘Garden Party’ by The Girls reviewed by Beverley Knowles
The difference of course is that at this garden party, in reference to the Japanese tradition of Nyotaimori, the cucumber sandwiches are served off the naked body of Zoe Sinclair, who along with Andrea Blood, make up the artistic collaboration that is The Girls.
The vicar reads his book as he helps himself to the Great British delicacies, oblivious seemingly to the perversity he plays a central role in. Oblivious to the part he and his digestive system are playing in the process of disrobing the woman’s passive body and presenting it as an object of lust and desire for the gratification of the male audience. Oblivious to the part he plays in the exploitation of women. Oblivious to this ironic objectification of the artist by the artist.
Does he turn a blind eye to the perversion or does he genuinely not see what is right in front of him? Does he not see his own behaviour and how it affects both himself and those around him?
And if he can’t see that what other anomalies might he be overlooking in his day-to-day existence?
The vicar is symbolic of our human tendency to avert our attention away from the things in ourselves that make us uncomfortable. As we look away the perversion is allowed to perpetuate itself. This is what makes The Garden Party so powerful. It brings the viewer face to face with our tendency to ignore our own harmful behaviours. We behave destructively whilst allowing ourselves to believe that we act out of compassion for those around us.
The Garden Party reminds us that what is immediately apparent from the outside is not always visible from within. We live in a fantastical state of denial.
The Girls use their considerable wit to communicate a home truth that might otherwise be too close to the bone to engage with. Satire is a powerful strategy for critique but tricky to handle and easy to massacre. In The Garden Party The Girls show themselves masters at wielding this potent tool to great effect, tricking the viewer into subsuming into their subconscious, razor sharp observations about the frailty of human consciousness.
The Garden Party also engages acutely and contemporaneously with feminist art criticism onwards from Laura Mulvey, who first coined the now ubiquitous term ‘male gaze’ in her ground breaking 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey invokes the psychoanalytic texts of Freud and Lacan to note that cinematic apparatus inevitably puts the spectator in a masculine subject position, whilst the women on screen take the role of object of that gaze – ie the object of male desire. Female characters of the 1950s and 60s (and beyond) were encoded with this “to-be-looked-at-ness” in the form of one of two archetypes - the ‘whore’ or the ‘Madonna’. Interestingly Nyotaimori, the Japanese practice of serving sushi off the shaved, naked and inert bodies of nubile young women was traditionally performed by virgins.
The manifestation of the female role in The Garden Party is created after the fashion of the 1950s Hollywood star with an hour-glass figure, yellow wavy hair, livid scarlet lips and long black synthetic eyelashes. For me she brings to mind both Jayne Mansfield and Alice in Wonderland – the ultimate male fantasy and the ultimate female fantasist. Maybe it was no coincidence that these Hollywood sirens resembled Alice in Wonderland – a sexed up little girl vulnerable to the manipulations of their overbearing repressed Victorian fathers.
It is also tempting to look at the Garden Party through an interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4), not least because of the cross over of the titles, which may or may not be a conscious decision by The Girls, but also because of the numerous thematic links between the two pieces of work. Five hundred years after early Netherlandish times artists are still preoccupied with the same themes – the human condition, sex, power and religion.
Time passes but things rarely change.
A few sentences from one of the most engaging analyses of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights I’ve come across, reads thus: “I have The Garden of Earthly Delights hung on my study wall where I can stare at it while waiting for the muse to goose me, because it makes me think of the relevance of mythology in our daily lives, which makes me think of Carl Jung, which makes me think of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which makes me think of the archetypes of the personal unconscious, which makes me think of most of the people I know who are possessed by archetypes which cause them to act compulsively and violently when confronted by an idea or situation which threatens their world view, which means any new idea or situation.”
This is profound stuff and seems as relevant to an interpretation of The Garden Party as it is to The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The centre panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights shows over a thousand men and women and various animals gambling about in a fantastical make believe world, eating strawberries and enjoying an orgy of sensory pleasures. In The Garden Party we are presented with a similar orgy of fantastical sensory pleasures but now on a personal scale, wherein the personal is symbolic of the collective. In both works of course, and throughout art history, strawberries and other fruits can be interpreted as symbolic of sex, hedonism, and indulgence. Flowers are symbolic of the female genitalia.
This male fantasy of sensory pleasure and power dynamics, is acted out self-reflectively by Zoe Sinclair and Andrea Blood, thereby turning the archetypal gender roles on their heads, as the female becomes at once both subject and object. By investigating these timeless topics so fundamental to the human experience with satire and irony The Girls show a conscious engagement with their own and our controlling archetypes and so step onto the path trodden by great artists throughout history, from Hieronymus Bosch to Judy Chicago and Sarah Lucas.
In The Garden Party, the Padre, by his unawareness, finds himself in a mini-cab to the dark side. Until we each as individuals have the courage to engage truthfully with ourselves and develop awareness about what controls and motivates us we are doomed to act out our own version of the heaven as hell scenario that The Girls here present us with. With awareness comes the possibility of change and ultimately enlightenment.
As Socrates famously spoke at his trial for heresy and sedition in 400 BCE “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
© 2008 Beverley Knowles
Beverley Knowles is the owner and curator of Beverley Knowles Fine Art, the UK’s only art space dedicated to exclusively champion contemporary British women artists.
