We are delighted to announce the launch of Ceri Hand Gallery in London with Mel Brimfield's second solo exhibition, which sets out to explore the enduring romantic image of the heroic artist as a conduit of violent creative passion. Brimfield invites us to reflect on why this myth persists through a series of new darkly comic films, photographs, posters, paintings and sculptures. The potent and much lampooned eroticism of Ovid's Pygmalion myth is at the centre of this new body of work - disenchanted with womankind, the fervent sculptor retreats to his studio, carving an image of his own ideal mate in ivory, with whom he promptly falls in love. So fervent is his desire for his creation, that Venus brings the statue to life. This narrative is the basis for a staged set of a 'Sculptor's Studio', revealing one artist's unhealthy obsession with his work in progress.
A flattened stereotype of the suffering artist proliferates throughout both populist and academic approaches to conveying cultural history; the more prurient biographical details of artists afflicted with mental illness are inevitably picked over in media surveys of their work - so much the better if there's evidence of attendant drug addiction, alcoholism and promiscuity.
The title for the exhibition is taken from a trailer for 'Lust for Life', a florid Vincent Van Gogh biopic starring Kirk Douglas in the lead role. It is also the title for a new film by Brimfield also featuring in the exhibition, made in collaboration with acclaimed cabaret performance artist Dickie Beau and actor Tony Green.
Between Genius and Desire, 2012 is a film in two parts. The first focuses on Ed Harris' unintentionally comic turn as a moist-eyed, thick-skulled Jackson Pollock, lumbering dumbly about the studio like an injured bison to the thrum of inexpressible emotion in his Hollywood biopic. The second part focuses on Kirk Douglas's tortured gurning in his portrayal of Van Gogh for the 1950s Technicolor classic 'Lust for Life'. Each performance is condensed into a script comprising fragments of the most emotive monologues, and is performed for each film’s audio track by actor Tony Green, and lip-synched and physically interpreted by Dickie Beau on screen. A composite portrait of a 'great artist' is revealed in a variety of clichés - the emotional register ranges from hysterical, desperate, arrogant, impotent rage to the ecstatic and violent. Dickie Beau's further parody of these constructed Hollywood stereotypes of artists encodes the re-performance with another layer of distance from the 'real' artist. Extending the drag tradition of lip-synching, Beau adopts a variety of vocal masks for complex performances addressing the construction of gender identity and celebrity personae - his own subjects range from the imagined inner life of idols such as Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe to cultural giants such as Francis Bacon and Orson Welles. The found and appropriated audio material that forms the basis of his 'scripts' is obscure, the effect of its collage and interpretation by turns melancholy, hilarious and psychologically acute.
Also presented will be a series of photographs of Dickie Beau performing climactic moments in the lives of Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. Points of the referent biopics will be highlighted and re-created as static tableaux, such as Van Gogh cutting his ear off, Pollock posing for Hans Namuth in his studio 'at work', etc. Throughout, Beau will embody the high drama of the Hollywood re-creations of these moments, but in costumes that demonstrate the clownish 'drag' of it - his trademark over-drawn red
mouth and white mime style face will feature throughout with a series of low-end wigs, props and costumes, (with backdrops painted by Brimfield).
Alongside the artist's biopic, the artist’s studio also represents a mysterious theatre of dramatic conflict and alchemy, the artist a figure on the fringes of society suffering on our behalf, pulling genius from personal tragedy.
The Sculptor's Studio (2012), features instantly recognisable artefacts - from Van Gogh’s yellow chair and Francis Bacon's mirror to Pollock's paint-spattered floor; Brimfield references real infamous artists studios to create this fictional artist's frenzied outputs and reflections on his muse. Endless drawings, contact sheets and maquettes (all made and sourced by Brimfield) are juxtaposed with magazines, newspapers and found texts. Photographs propped and pinned around the studio are all works by Brimfield, created in collaboration with dance troupe The Beaux Belles. From repeated sketches of his ideal woman (apeing sculptors drawings from Moore to Leonardo), to an uncanny marble sculpture of her face with haunting glass eyes and scribbled notes that reveal his inner thoughts, we witness a self portrait of the artist and the woman he is infatuated with creating.
He Hit Me…and it Felt Like a Kiss 2011, (made in collaboration with Gwyneth Herbert and Paul Higgs) is a new film projected within The Sculptor's Studio. The piece directly appropriates Andrew Lloyd Webber's shamelessly sentimental torch song 'Memory' from the musical 'Cats'. Staged like something you might see on a live daytime chat show, Brimfield has adopted the emotional mechanics of the number to narrate the story of a half-finished sculpture, abandoned by 'The Sculptor' at the moment of becoming. In the grips of a peculiar existential quandary, she hovers somewhere between being and nothingness. She can only be 'brought to life' by the absent artist. She sings ecstatically about the fire of creative passion that characterized their early relationship, cooling as he begins to make abstract work - her glory days over, she is ripe only for the dust-sheet and oblivion. The idea of giving a voice and an interior life to a sculpture is darkly humorous, but the film aims to more directly articulate the peculiar eroticism of a man spending hours in the privacy of a darkened studio making a woman.
Also included in the exhibition is one from a series of Alan Bennett inspired monologues, made in collaboration with actress Joanna Neary, who gives voice to the uneven historical representation of 'great artists' in the art world. In Clement Greenberg – Lee Krasner = Jackson Pollock, (2011), Lee Krasner is re-imagined as a downtrodden, dowdy Home Counties frump and Pollock is reduced to a helpless feral dog-like caricature - smashing things up, pissing on carpets, chasing balls and hanging his head out of the car window with his tongue lolling - a version of Pollock’s much discussed alcoholism and primitive urges. Krasner puts up a relentlessly optimistic front despite Greenberg's blatant misogyny and the art world's complete disinterest in her as anything other than Pollock's carer.
The extraordinary range of Brimfield's practice is reflected in this exhibition: she selects music, writes and directs the scripts and films, makes all the props and sets, enabling her to fully collaborate with actors, opera singers, photographers, artists and musicians to create the final works.
