V for Victory



Victorian fusion: Gallery view of "Secret Victorians."

"Secret Victorians" succeeds as a show of eclectic, contemporary work.

by Robin Rice

Secret Victorians: Contemporary Artists and a 19th Century Vision

The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1315 Cherry St., through April 7, 215-568-1111

"Perhaps... we are all secret Victorians" conclude curators Melissa E. Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner in their catalogue essay to the current exhibition at the Fabric Workshop. But, then, weren’t the Victorians us not so long ago? In addition to our common humanity, don’t we share an oddly similar array of moral, technological and aesthetic dilemmas in a culture distorted by commerce and self-righteous hypocrisy? The accessibility of 19th-century writing and art is undoubtedly part of its contemporary attraction.

Feldman and Schaffner’s selection of Victorian-inspired photographs, paintings, cut paper constructions and one video installation was organized by the Hayward Gallery in London. A catalogue pairing of Victorian-related themes: "Ornament & Sexuality," "Photography & Death," "Collecting & Colonialism" and "Science & Crime," appears to be arbitrary, while the work in the show rarely evokes an over-arching Victorian sensibility. It merely borrows elements. Experientially, "Secret Victorians" is an eclectic collection of recent work by 19 artists.

Kara Walker’s perverse cut-out silhouettes in Underground Railroad transpose a Victorian sense of decorative form with graphic content only imaginable as art in today’s world. Though obviously political in origin, Walker’s images of 19th-century African Americans tortured with spikes seem to have no purpose other than the expression of an uncentered, unassuagable passion of destruction. This all-encompassing fury is even more pronounced in the sexually explicit World’s Exposition, Walker’s piece (illustrated in the catalogue) in the original show venue. Walker’s attention to decorative flourishes — bows, feathers, anatomical details, curls of hair — echoes the Victorians’ concern with surfaces which masked pits of disease and cruelty.

There’s a parallel to Mat Collishaw’s comparably mild photographic montages in which pink little girls wearing gossamer pastel wings perch in oversize still-lifes of rusting urban decay. By inserting the word "art" into his all-embracing title for the numbered works, Sugar and Spice, All Things Nice, This is What Little Girls Art Made Of, Collishaw emphasizes the confectionery process by which imaginary fairies no longer romp amongst the lilies and roses but today must dwell in unsanitary garbage dumps strewn with enlarged discarded soft drink boxes, cigarette packs and at least one used condom.

The exhibition curators, both American, appropriately limited themselves to artists working in the United States or the United Kingdom. These are the core sites of Victorianism and it’s no surprise that the dialogue regarding Victorian issues continues. Lari Pittman’s painting This Discussion, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless deals with non-communication about sexual matters. There’s a doubled time reference here, as Pittman’s images of 18th-century aristocrats are based on 19th-century silhouettes. Ladies with high-dressed hair engage in conversation, perhaps about the oval-framed silhouettes of the gentlemen enclosed within their voluminous skirts. Another pair of gentlemen plays chess. One rests his foot on a gout stool and takes a pinch of snuff. Pittman’s use of cartoon and other diagrammatic signs indicates conversational, personal, libidinal and more arcane preoccupations in this layered, harshly colored, post-modern composition. Polished crafting of surfaces, such as lines composed of regular beads of paint, bring the Victorian respect for handwork to the forefront.

Elliott Puckette’s calligraphic conceits are Victorian but also Near Eastern in mood. Beautiful penwork becomes an end in itself, communicating a skillful hand and the intention to communicate. A well-bred lady’s bread-and-butter note has no purpose at all except to prove that one cares enough to send the very best handwriting. Wong Wong, a calligraphy in white on a black ground was made by laboriously cutting away a black surface to expose the white ground underneath. It has a visual link to Mark Tobey’s fields of "white writing" and reinforces a key reverence for skillful labor.

This Victorian virtue shines in Louise Hopkins’ Aurora 13, a painting executed on the back of a furnishing fabric. The design, a pattern of lush flowers and leaves, is visible through the fabric which has been coated with a translucent ground. Hopkins painstakingly and skillfully painted in about half the pattern, following lights and darks in shades of brown. This record of meaningless but beautifully executed activity recalls the often-shallow occupations of the Victorian lady.

Simon Periton is showing several cut-paper items conceived as doilies. A large multicolored "target" is named for the queen. More interesting is a pair of lungs rendered in several colors and titled Suffocation (lungs). The curators link the work to tuberculosis, a rampant Victorian disease, but it also suggests the lung damage suffered by Victorian factory workers and coal miners, the lethal "pea soup" fogs caused by coal smoke pollution and constricting corsets which resulted in ladies’ fainting spells.

Joan Nelson’s landscape paintings, some based on the work of historic artists, hang on hand-screened wallpaper of leaves and vines of her design. Nelson’s use of curious ingredients, such as nail polish, cinnamon, cocoa and talc, is reminiscent of the Victorians’ elaborate, and oftentimes dubious, recipes for polishes, remedies and other useful items.

Sally Mann’s photographs of family, though less literary, do have an obscure link with photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, but in spite of their elegiac quality Bill Jacobson’s unfocused photographs of couples with AIDS are a stretch as Victoriana. Likewise, although Jane Hammond’s cartoonish painting is charming, it has little Victorian resonance. Conceived in collaboration with poet John Ashbery, A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets depicts a world map peppered with conventionalized illustrations including a vintage postcard of Cypress Gardens, an igloo, a harem dancer and people drowning in water.

Usually the appropriation of Victorian ideas is superficial. St. Clair Cemin’s conflation of lush Islamic decoration with English tea customs is quite beautiful. Helen Chadwick’s hugely enlarged jewelry sculpture related to Victorian mourning jewelry commemorates the loss of unborn fetuses (raising contemporary issues of abortion), while Laura Stein’s botanical studies have an authentic Victorian feeling for order and grotesquerie. Historic figures, including that of Victoria herself, photographed in a wax museum by Hiroshi Sugimoto in exceedingly long exposures look more dead on paper than they do in real wax "life."

Tailoring the antics of museum-prankster Fred Wilson to his purpose, Yinka Shonibare constructs a Victorian wardrobe for an entire Nuclear Family in batiked African fabric. The eye-popping color is not absolutely contrary to the spirit of Victorian fashion, but the African designs are. Shonibare’s skillful re-packaging of self-absorbed colonialists in their typical restrictive garments reveals much about Victorian mores.

If you love all things Victorian, let "Secret Victorians" remain a mystery. The artists in it deconstruct some Victorian motifs and bend others to their own purposes, but on the whole they do not exemplify the Victorian spirit. But if you want to see an eclectic group of contemporary artists, these Victorians could be your cup of tea.