"Once Upon a Time...Artists and Storytelling" Embankment Galleries, Somerset House 26 June - 26 July 2009

One of my favourite childhood memories is lying on my stomach in the local public library reading The Orange Fairy Book by Andrew Lang - I'm still searching for a copy of that book even now, it was large in my eight year old hands and had an orange cloth binding - just the thought of that book and I'm back there deep within the worlds created by the Grimms, Perrault, and the Arabian nights. So when I saw that the Courtauld Institute had an exhibition on in the Embankment Galleries called 'Once Upon a Time...' I wanted to go. The exhibition was the culmination of the year long MA Curating the Art Museum course at The Courtauld and therefore jointly curated by those students led by Martin Caiger-Smith who was previously Acting Director at the Hayward Gallery. Artists have told stories ever since there have been stories to tell and artists to depict them and the first section of the show, Childhood Stories, about the link between illustration and text show was the personal equivalent to Lascaux cave paintings - the earliest attempt to make sense of the world around us based upon Snow White and Cinderella rather than the caveman's woolly mamoth. While not particularly groaning with Fine Art as such - although some particularly fine Paula Rego illustrations feature - the familiar Victorian Cruikshank and Crane prints of Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, Three Blind Mice and so on, lulls the audience into a cosy rememberance of times past and in fact a quick glance around at my fellow visitors to the exhibition on a wet Wednesday afternoon confirmed this - plenty of nostalgic smiles and contented sighs. Personally I would have loved to have seen a few Ladybird book illustrations in there too - my version of Snow White was Eric Winter's, not Walt Disney's. However, one of the strengths of this section of the exhibition was that the dark and almost gothic side to our childhood tales was emphasised instead of the ubiquitous cartoon versions.



And like all good fairytales and stories the exhibition took a turn to even darker things...the second section of the exhibition was devoted to personal mythologies. Rather than taking an obvious line and showing some William Blake drawings, the MA curators had chosen Twentieth century prints and contemporary video works. Oskar Kokoschka prints waited in atmospheric subdued lighting alongside the dark curtained doorways to Tracey Emin and Gillian Wearing videos.


Tracey Emin's film Why I didn't become a dancer brought up memories of Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes very strongly - this piece from 1995 is so much more than just Tracey from Margate telling us about her crap childhood as if she was on television with Jeremy Kyle. Unlike the fairytale Emin has built a successful career on her lack of vanity and a strong personal mythology which finds itself deeply rooted in our celebrity culture - Tracey as Cinderella.


Part of that same conversation is Gillian Wearing's Confessions which really does tread the same ground as Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer but with ridiculous disguises that remind one of the Channel 4 comedy show Bo' Selecta. The interesting thing about all these television resonances is that Wearing's piece - fully titled Confess all on video. Don't worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian dates from 1994 so this is a true case of life (or television) reflecting art.Kokoschka, Emin and Wearing are also part of the same conversation that Sartre championed in Being and Nothingness and that politicians, actors, pop stars and even shop assistants all buy into; that our past is what we make it and truth doesn't have to feature in that. The exhibition makes a strong case for our past as story, our lives as story and art to make sense of our lives and ourselves. Intriguingly all the curators of Once Upon a Time... are women and so often, certainly in Western tradition, women were the storytellers - Mother Goose and the Wise Woman. This exhibition scratches the surface of a fascinating discussion which certainly continued for me as I went home to get out my copy of Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber a wet afternoon in a gallery started out with me enjoying childhood memories and ended with dark thoughts about blood and beasts, just like all the best afternoons.

I want to Google my memory!

Have you ever had that? Somewhere in the filing cabinets and dusty boxes of your brain there is a name, the name of an artist, one artist in particular. I know he's a Russian artist - well, at least born in Russia, but living in exile. I think he's Russian…Anyway, I can remember one piece of his in particular - it was a series of photographs hung in frames along a corridor - the corridor was badly lit and the wallpaper reminded me of something you might find in the home of a serial killer, or at least an aging uncle - bad taste circa 1975. Under each photograph was a small write up which seemed to be a story explaining the photos - the people in the pictures, where they were taken, how their lives were unfolding at the point in which the image was captured. As you went along the corridor however, you began to have the slow realisation that the story was not a simple linear narrative - in fact it wasn't one story at all. The entire thing was just growing and growing and with each new piece of writing your mind was desperately trying to fit it in with what had gone before, until, in my case, I gave up and stopped reading.

Now I want to remember or at least find out, who that artist was, is. I know I've seen more of his work - in fact I've been a fan of his work for a number of years - and each time I try to recall his name down come the metaphorical shutters and I'm left grasping helplessly at the ether. I'm pretty sure it's not Christian Boltanski - although I am a fan of his work too, but when I think of him large rooms of woollen coats come to mind and not photographs.

I found it!

It occurred to me that the artist for whom I searched is an installation artist - so I searched that term on Google - as an aside, wouldn't it be good if we could google our own memories? Up came the Wikipedia page and on it a name was mentioned - not the one I wanted, but beginning with the same letter - K. And at that moment my brain fired up and the name KABAKOV suddenly lit up in neon.

If only it were so easy to access other bits of information.

High Culture!

I'm currently working on a new short story and thinking about how it could relate to or indeed actually become an exhibition piece - Art. I don't mean that my writing is so sublime that it has become elevated to Art (ha! ) but rather that the ideas I have would work well if placed in a gallery space.

Now I could go on about intertextuality , juxtapositions, and other such poncy terms….which I have to admit to loving just because they sound so elitist. However, it would be truer to say that I'm really drawn to the idea of telling a story to people with pictures - both created in their heads and also accompanying - possibly photographs, but not illustrations.

I'm rambling now about Work…

I do find myself so often in two camps - that of Artist and Academic - with all the juxtapositions and other such high falutin language. And also that of the ordinary 'punter' - despite having studied Fine Art for a number of years I can honestly say that sometimes I'll go into a museum or gallery and be totally at a loss, not able to understand or even grasp what it was the artist intended to communicate. Sometimes it does appear that contemporary art is the Emperor's New Clothes.

But….

I guess we could say that about poetry too - sometimes poems can be impenetrable until we return to them again and again and their meaning trickles through. In the same way some art work can be like that - one glance doesn't give the viewer the whole story.

On the subject of poetry…at the moment my favourite is a Ted Hughes poem - The Full Moon and Little Frieda - simply because it makes me think of cryptic crossword puzzles. I'm utterly useless at cryptic clues, but this poem seems to work in the same way - the hints are all there…it's devilishly clever.

Ted Hughes

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket --

And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming -- mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath --
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

-- Ted Hughes

Pasted from <http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/723.html>

Can also be found in Staying Alive p.231