Cindy Sherman: Early Works, 1975-80 -
Stills until October 6th
Hanna Tuulikki: Deer Dancer - Edinburgh
Printmakers until October 5
Grayson Perry: Julie Cope’s Grand Tour - Dovecot
Studios until November 2
When
Cindy Sherman made Doll Clothes
(1975), the near two-and-a half minute silent film that helps frame Stills Gallery’s show of the iconic
American photographer’s early work, it provided a playful insight into
Sherman’s plundering of the dressing up box to try on different identities for
size. It also set out Sherman’s store for her Untitled (Murder Mystery People) (1976) series before her first
success with Untitled Film Stills
(1978-1980), both shown here either in part or full.
Barely
into her twenties when she made Doll Clothes,
and still a student, Sherman’s Super 8 stop-motion animated vignette casts the
artist as the sort of cut-out paper doll found in the fashion sections of a
particular type of young women’s magazines. Here, the usually cartoonified cut-out
doll effectively becomes a clothes hanger, on which assorted similarly cut-out
outfits and accessories could be tried on, mixed and matched in all kinds of
sartorial splendour.
So it
is with Doll Clothes, as Sherman’s
underwear-clad paper-doll comes to life and escapes her cellophane wrapper to
flick through the outfits contained next to her. After choosing one, the doll
is picked up by full-size human hands and put back in her wrapper once more,
with the ornate lid of the box that houses it closed as firmly as that of a
ventriloquist’s dummy or some treasured but neglected childhood keep-sake.
Sherman
didn’t open the box again for twenty-nine years, when, in 2004, she showed Doll Clothes for the first time
alongside other unseen early work. Fashions may have changed in the meantime,
but it’s worth noting that Sherman’s film appears in both Stills’ show as well
as Cut and Paste, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s major overview of
collage-based work, which also forms part of the 2019 Edinburgh Art Festival.
This in itself suggests Sherman is a living collage, jumping between scenes of
her own invention like some camouflaged chameleon in permanent disguise.
It’s there
in the seventeen photographs that make up Untitled
(Murder Mystery People), in which Sherman takes on the mantle of assorted
Runyonesque grotesques, each caught striking a pose as accessories after the
fact en route to True Crime style tabloid immortality. The rogues’ gallery of guys
and dolls lined up include a drunken wife, a jealous husband, a dashing leading
man, the inevitable Hollywood director and three different shots of a movie
starlet known only as The Actress, all blonde-wigged gazes into the camera and
who-me? innocence.
There’s
a delicious knowingness to all this that sees Sherman vamp it up even as she
disappears into each role. This is especially the case with the assorted
would-be matinee idol males she inhabits. There’s an exaggerated sense of their
ridiculous machismo, with Sherman at points all but twirling assorted stuck-on
moustaches.
Again,
like Doll Clothes, Sherman kept Untitled (Murder Mystery People) under
wraps for a couple of decades before coming clean, and it would have been
interesting to see Murder Mystery People
and Doll Clothes alongside Sherman’s
Bus Riders series. Dating from the same period and similarly kept out of view,
these too were eventually revealed to the world as some latter-day movie
queen’s early test shots might have been.
As it
is, we get a glimpse of what was effectively Sherman’s break-out roll. In the four
images from Untitled Film Stills (there
are more than 70 in all), Sherman is hiding in plain sight, like assorted
Hitchcock heroines seen through a long lens darkly in pseudo verite style.
There she is in regulation shades and tightly belted raincoat walking down the
street. And there she is again as someone else, standing in the corridor
outside an apartment front door, waiting for some possibly illicit liaison, or
else just the next scene.
Sherman’s
understanding of both the various archetypes women were cast as in the movies
of the 1950s and ‘60s as well as the generic styles from noir to nouvelle vague
are observed with an accuracy only a consummate film geek could muster. This is
no pastiche, however. Rather, each image possesses a near documentary monochrome
mystery that wordlessly awaits its own soundtrack. In this sense, Sherman’s
pictures capture the moments inbetween the shock-horror narrative. It’s up to
us amateur pulp fiction private eyes to guess what happens next.
Like
Sherman in Doll Clothes, you can see the contents of Hanna Tuulikki’s self-created
wardrobe in Deer Dancer, her new
commission for Edinburgh Printmakers,
in which she explores the pack mentality of the male psyche that runs from the
wildlife depicted onscreen all the way to stag-do paggas today. Tuulikki’s
outfits here are more formal costumes than those in Sherman’s closet, and are
designed to represent the five stag archetypes Tuulikki transforms herself into
for the twin-screen film at the centre of the exhibition.
With
the sounds of the rhythmic chorale that gives the film its soundtrack
permeating through the curtains of the room where it is shown on a loop, these
ornate disembodied creations made by Tuulikki with Lydia Honeybone hang like
the trophies of some historical re-enactment group. There’s a gold sequinned
jacket for the Monarch, brass chest armour and antler spears for the Warrior,
and so on, each elaborately accessorised with hunting horns, toy guns and
codpiece. This is super-hero cos-play for the sort of men who like to hang
tough with their tribe, however daft they might look.
Tuulikki’s
interpretations of all this on film comes from an anthropological study of
dances which have evolved out of deer behaviour. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance
in Staffordshire, the Yaqui Deer Dance from the indigenous Mexican Yaqui tribe,
and wedding ceilidh favourite the Highland Fling all feed into the assorted
shapes Tuulikki throws on the two screens that face each other from either end
of the room.
In
each, we see Monarch, Warrior, Young Buck, Fool and Old Sage gradually square
up to each other, with Tuulikki putting on the trappings of each beast off the
leash as they prepare to carve up both the landscape and each other.
Outside,
the movements of each of Tuulikki’s creations are mapped out in a series of
visual scores that hang on the gallery wall. The trails of tiny gold hooves on
each recall the sort of teach-yourself guides for the foxtrot, tango and other
essential steps required by ballroom chancers to strut and rut their stuff on
the dancefloor.
Not
that Tuulikki attempts to update things in the way choreographer Matthew Bourne
did with his nightclub-set crash-and-burn narrative take on Highland Fling.
Choreographed with Will Dickie and Peter McMaster, her take is more more
delicately realised and steeped in ancient myth.
While
Tuulikki’s portrayal of all of her creations points up the differences between
them in the man’s world they occupy, one longs to see Deer Dancer performed live. Tuulikki has previously done this with
works including Women of the Hill (2015) and the Gaelic song based air faibh na
h-eoin – Away with the Birds (2010-2015).
Having
developed Deer Dancer in part with
Edinburgh-based theatre company, Magnetic North, one hopes a live rendering
will put even more muscle and guts on things. Deer Dancer isn’t so much smashing the patriarchy, as illustrates its
proponents tearing chunks out of themselves in some sort of vainglorious bid
for immortality, only to end up self-harming themselves to death.
You
can imagine Julie Cope having grown up reading the sort of magazines Sherman emulated
in Doll Clothes. Such is the detail of Grayson Perry’s biography for his Essex
girl everywoman that accompanies the four monumental tapestries in Julie Cope’s Grand Tour, a glorious piece of 21st century mythology that charts an era of
working class life with quietly heroic intent.
Growing up with few
expectations in Britain’s unreconstructed 1960s and 1970s, Julie is 'a pale, beaded, Henna-tressed shopping mall
Madonna' as Perry has it in the lengthy ballad that accompanies the
tapestries. This is rendered both in ornate visual reproductions as if on
tablets of stone, and in Perry’s own recorded recital that runs on a loop
throughout the show. The ballad is peppered throughout with deliciously
evocative phrases like this, the words knee-deep in nods to the era’s pop
cultural ephemera to illustrate the sheer everyday ordinariness of Julie’s
story.
The tapestries reflect
this in their depictions of the incident and colour that map out Julie’s life,
from marriage to a local trade unionist when 'No dreams were crushed/children were kind of had', to what used to be
called ‘bettering herself’ a la Pygmalion or Educating Rita by way of a
form of social mobility that probably doesn’t exist anymore.
With further incidents
captured in cartoon-like prints, Perry has created the equivalent of the three-minute
kitchen-sink epic sung by the sort of fly-by-night girl groups practicing their
routines for their local coffee bars and social clubs. Julie Cope’s Grand Tour is too a Play for Today, in which Julie
could quite conceivably be played by the late Carol White of Cathy Come Home
and Poor Cow fame, albeit without the high drama of both.
Like both films, Perry
has nevertheless created something that captures a community in flux, giving
Essex back its dignity robbed by the poverty porn of The Only Way is Essex and
the resultant bad press that followed. Perry is a social historian on a par
with Jeremy Deller here, honouring those too often written off as lumpen
proles. With this in mind, just as one longs to see Tuulikki’s work live, Perry’s
four tapestries should be carried high through the streets of Essex as they
reclaim their neighbourhood’s own alternative history.
The community aspects go
further, with Julie Cope’s Grand Tour
forming part of A House for Essex, a
living art project in which Perry built a real house which isn't just a
monument to Julie, but to an entire way of life that she represents. This is
seen in the short films that accompany the show, and which document Perry’s
various travails with builders, designers and tile-makers involved in the
project. There are also the inevitable assorted protestors and cynics who
eventually come on board in a way that Julie herself might have done.
The sheer detail of the tiles
themselves is a wonder, with Julie depicted as a kind of goddess. As the films
illustrate, they were so complicated to make that each nipple on every
individual tile had to be put on by hand.
With the right to have a
home of your own, let alone a room, under threat, the fact that Perry built
Julie Cope’s house as a living archive in such a time is crucial. It brings to
mind the imagination capturing Granby Four Streets (2013-), the Turner Prize
winning project by arts collective Assemble, who breathed fresh life into four
derelict terraced houses in the one-time run-down Liverpool 8 area, flying in
the face of property developers’ penchant for ripping the once throbbing hearts
out of cities in the name of progress.
Like Granby Four
Streets, Perry’s construction of a thoroughly modern woman who reinvented
herself beyond her station is a thing of inclusive beauty that brings Julie
home to roost, a heroine of our time.
MAP, August 2019
ends
Comments