A small Christmas tickler from my recent strolling round London. Every picture tells a story they say, and I like the story this one tells.
A detour before the third and final part of the story practice note. I’ve been writing up narrative method and thought it might be useful to share this piece. It comes from a thing I wrote for Sage Publications a few years back, with some amendments. I’m relieved to find it seems to stand the test of time as a decent method statement.
‘In any research topic, there are two overarching questions that have to be addressed: what is the object of the enquiry and how can it be enquired into’ | Hollway, W & Jefferson T |Doing Qualitative Research Differently:Free association, narrative and the interview method
Narrative enquiry seeks to emerge episodes and materials which might illuminate a greater whole.
The narrative enquirer is often regarded as a ‘fellow traveller’ (Gabriel 2000) with insiders in the organization, even if only on a short journey. Paying careful attention to use of anecdotes, metaphor, language and symbol, to what is not said, to the context in which it is said, creates insight into the qualities of an experience which are not immediately accessible to the subject through their own literal interpretation of an experience and the meaning it holds for them. A goal is to pull the raw material right through the process.
Documentation of the collecting process needs to thorough, (audio, video, email exchanges, journals, fieldnotes, diaries, bulletins, images, and the objects which are created (reports, essays, oral materials) need to travel and do work beyond the immediate remit of the assignment, with both predictable and unpredictable results, while not compromising privacy or confidentiality.
One challenge in the enquiry is how truth is compromised by the storytellers motivations, memory and anxiety. Another is that people will tend to recall the extraordinary, the vivid and the luminous not the ordinary, the mundane and the banal, so routines are overlooked.
There are particular, ironic, challenges in narrative research, in that the tendency is to recall a well-rehearsed story. And a well-rehearsed story or ‘whole’ episode is likely to contain drama. Indeed the insight we seek may not qualify, in the mind of the subject, as a story at all. So we need to look for gaps and hidden qualities and apparent ‘nothings’, as well as the more evident something which story-seeking questions throw up.
There is something beyond the ‘nothings’ which is the hiddens, and these may, or may not be, easy or appropriate to identify. In his book The Gate of the Sun Elias Khoury weaves together true life stories of Lebanese refugee camps into a fictional setting. At one point, the narrator is talking to a someone in a coma and he says ‘You only spoke about one woman, and even that one you only talked about a little. Piecing the tale together and arranging or scattered sentences, I turned it into a story. But you only mentioned love incidentally. You jumped over the essential story as though it was a pool and you were afraid of drowning.’
This can happen with narrative research too. Sometimes, interviewees will jump over the essential story ‘as though it was a pool’ and the interviewer must judge whether it is appropriate to pay attention to this or not.
Researchers cannot be detached but must examine subjective involvement to help to shape the way in which they interpret the interview data and other materials.
Sometimes fiction and fantasy, or imagery or metaphor might be a better way to access or convey difficult issues but are easier for sponsors to reject out of hand if it feels too counter cultural.
There is also the temptation for the enquirer to draw on other observations, outside the actual product of the interviews between researcher and subject. There needs to be agreement as to the degree to which inference is valid or peripheral vision – things noticed which creep beyond the scope of the specific piece of research – should be permitted. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) are very encouraging about completely situating the enquirer and encouraging them to journal and interpret. Embracing, but putting a careful boundary round, subjective interpretation, while making room for a shared view to emerge is an important, role that articulating the enquiry as narrative can make methodologically.
In addition, the positioning of the researchers needs to be considered. They need to be seen as clearly kinds of episodes collected through narrative research are, in part, skewed by the assumption of an authority figure and the relationship of the subject (or the enquirers) with faceless authority figures in general. Censorship and self-censorship arising from denial or partial perceptions, are often compounded by assumptions by the interviewee, in organisational settings, as to the sponsor, the sponsor’s real, as opposed to espoused, intentions, and the seriousness with which they as subjects of the enquiry will be paid attention to, so there are often politics or gaming, intentional or unintentional, in what’s being shared.
The challenges of developing consistent standards in this kind of approach are compounded by Sparknow’s particular leaning towards collaborative enquiry, often working in partnership with untrained volunteers in the client to build a sharper provocation and a deeper set of insights, while risking a more uneven, subjective and rawer approach. We take the view that this kind of situated learning has a value in its own right.
There is also a significant question of reality, truth and meaning. In qualitative and quantitative research it might be fair to say that you assume the subject knows himself well, has an accurate memory, can convey knowledge to a strange listener and is motivated to tell the truth. In our experience this is rarely the case. Often the processes associated with the whole of the working activity are regarded by the worker as subordinate to the ‘real’ parts of the work. Another challenge is that the holder of the experience can be genuinely unaware of their own filters and assumptions and so can only convey part of the experience, even with an experienced interviewer or sound process. Finally, as we’ve mentioned, there’s a tendency towards the dramatic, or to the inert and the indifferent.
This is a thing the organisation has done to me, and look what it’s doing to me.I told them all this when the put the system in.
So there’s an abdication of responsibility for process and so for giving a truthful rendition. Outsiders are shiny, interesting and a new channel for grievance, or they are to be paid lip-service to, because they can make no dent and will pass on, leaving the same on stuff in place. So the enquirer needs to be alert to the motives of participants in sharing particular aspects of the organization or their take on things.
The art, in crafting an intervention and decided how to thread narrativeness through its components, is to have enough of an early sense of the clients and the networks through which one must work, to create a firmly anchored but vivid place of engagement, reassuring, but with enough surprise shot through it that it interrupts (a narrative device in itself) expectation and draws people in despite themselves.
Clandinin, D Jean & Donnelly, F Michael, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research, Jossey-Bass, 2000, San Francisco
Hollway, Wendy & Jefferson, Tony ‘Doing qualitative research differently: free association, narrative and the interview method’ Sage Publications, 2000, London
Gabriel, Yiannis, Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies, OUP 2000, NY
In 1970 or so I started learning Latin. Susan and I went through the Cambridge Latin Course (Caecilius est pater, Metella est mater, Quintus est filius, Grumio est coquens) together, and then on to Latin A and S level. She went on to study classics, while I dived off into Italian, dragged along my German, and 40 years later, we’ve just come back from a trip to Turkey to celebrate our 40th anniversary.
Latin was taught by Mrs Anstey (Susan graduated to Veronica later, when she took Oxbridge, but I just don’t feel right with the Veronica, so Mrs it is). With Mrs Anstey, the Cambridge Latin Course determination to avoid any nasty grammar meant that things were A, B, C, D or E things, not nominative, accusative etc. Mrs Anstey would always call the ablative (E) ‘E type phrases’, evoking Jaguar cars. In our Ancient History lessons, the highlight would be the click and clunk of a slide show (remember that sound of slides changing, rather like the old sound of a polaroid whirr, or the proper chunking clunk of an old car door closing, almost as much of a whiff of the 70’s as the smell of a Sunday roast). In practically every slide Mrs Anstey, very tall, very slim, bikinid, would be in the middle of the picture, front or back, as a two-yard stick by which we were invited to measure the scale of that particular amphitheatre, or agora, or temple.
In our trips to Ephesus, Miletus and Priene last week, Susan and I spent quite a bit of time Being Mrs Anstey, but older, shorter, fatter, and altogether more covered up, so here’s a set of pictures to celebrate her brilliant teaching.
Susan (pink umbrella) in front of the Bouleterion, Ephesus
Susan, settling into the Upper Circle at the Boulerion at Ephesus
Me right in the middle of the Ephesus Bouleterion
Susan, with workman behind to left, in amphitheatre, Ephesus. We could practically whisper to each other.
Susan, in front of the amphitheatre at Miletus
Me in the posh seats at the Miletus amphitheatre
Me in the really really glamourous seats at Priene
Susan at Priene.
Apparently the Cambridge Latin Course still goes on. By the time we got to A level, I should say, we were thirsting for some grammar, and begged to do our ‘amo amas’. Susan and I had enormous fun with a Turkish dictionary, and found that by accidentally starting with translating a bottle of conditioner, in an effort to find out if it was conditioner or shampoo, we had equipped ourselves with some vital terms to do with building, repair and reconstruction that seemed to face us at every turn that followed.
I miss learning languages. They are a glorious treat, schlepping through the mundane to get to that mounting excitement when the stepping stones between words and phrases your recognise get closer together, the subjunctive becomes not only less mysterious but even a possibility, and the whole world makes more sense because you can hear the gaps between the words, so by having the outline of the words, can find the words themselves.
Here’s a sound postcard from Ephesus, where I’ve been on a week’s holiday. A blog to follow. Visiting the ladies, there was a lady handing out loopaper and quietly humming a beautiful tune. I caught a snatch on my eyephone.
The picture isn’t from Ephesus, it’s from the oracle at Claros, but I like the resonance between echoes, reflections, shadows.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a wall calendar called “Everyday Object: Enduring Legacies” which features a range of objects including cameras, headphones, shoes etc that have a connection to the Holocaust and a story to tell.
This piece of paper has two letters, one from a Jewish man being deported in a cramped railway car, the other from the railway worker who found the letter on the side of the tracks and forwarded it to the man’s wife. Click the link for the full translation and further discussion, including a video of the curator talking about the object.
In 2009 I helped design a series of four sessions as part of a working enquiry into Challenging History, a manifesto for change in the way museums and heritage sites engage with contentious and sensitive histories. David Gunn and I submitted an abstract for the conference coming up in February 2011 and I thought it would be interesting to post it here as a start towards moving from abstract to the experience we’ll actually work on with people, most likely more workshop than research paper.
ABSTRACT
Exploring the nature of story and history in the liminal spaces between art, business and the third sector.
Over the past 2 years, Sparknow LLP and Incidental have been exploring inter-disciplinary collaborations that combine narrative practice in organizations and public institutions with the techniques of sound and participatory art.
This has included: collaboration on a substantial narrative practice project for the Asian Development Bank, threading interview extracts with sounds of the Bank at work; and a workshop series for the World Health Organisation exploring participatory approaches to meetings and artifacts.
In each case these projects seek to question assumptions of what constitutes a particular history, process, ritual or convention, and to invite individuals, teams or institutions to between understand the complex interplay between images of the past, present and future.
These experiences sit alongside Incidental’s more direct engagement in “difficult histories” – such as their ongoing work in Cambodia, working with local artists to find ways to respond to, and overcome, the cultural devastation of the 1970s and 80s.
This session would use excerpts from our individual and collaborative projects as a means to draw analogies and comparisons between commercial and artistic spheres, before working with participants to explore a range of areas including:
- Finding ways to move away from static representations of history and cultural towards a process of continual “becoming” - ongoing re-invention and re-evaluation of the nature of culture and narrative.
- How to address “positionality” within a project – finding processes that recognize and leverage the fact that consultants are active, subjective participants in an emergent process, rather than neutral, objective “experts-in-airplanes”.
- Challenging static notions of community/history. In particular, the importance of “temporary communities”, or even the significance of “temporary histories” as a means to enable groups to explore contested aspects of community, organizational or national history in safety.
Travelling round London today, I stumbled over a little stand in St Pancras (at the time strangely surrounded by a phalanx of policemen sweeping everyone’s luggage with a sniffer dog, which, oddly, seemed set nobody’s heart beating a little faster, except mine.
It was a stand for audio obscura, a sound installation by Lavinia Greenlaw which was first experienced at Piccadilly Station in Manchester and is at St Pancras until 23 October. I swapped my credit card for headphones and spent the next 30 minutes in a strange and expanding parallel universe of crisscrossing fragments from different people’s lives inviting me to make stories of them, and with an ambiguous soundtrack which somehow knitted with the soundtrack of the station that I could hear anyway, to make an eerie story limbo, a kind of 5th dimension in a space I’d normally rush through. I found myself sitting on a bench and strolling up and down, looking completely differently at all of the passengers and the sniffer dog police and constructing stories for them too.
The leaflet I picked up at the end (not the beginning, on the advice of the women at the stand) talks of the idea of audio obscura as coming from the camera obscura, the ‘dark room’ which used a small aperture and mirrors to project a reflection of a passing world, ‘fragile, shifting but acute images that draw you in…we enter interior lives and discover, somewhere between what is heard and what is seen, what cannot be said’ and calls this an act of ‘listening, or dark listening.’
It really is strangely compulsive and elusive all at once and worth a visit. The expanding, slowing, suspended space it made for me, where a poetic world and the real world fused to make something new was strangely like my attempts to read Celan’s poetry while I was away on holiday. Must think about this some more.
I was talking at dinner with a friend last week about the startling echoes and deja’s that I’ve had while working at RBS since early March. I even had to go and get my security pass from 135 Bishopsgate, which is where I did my NatWest stint in the 1990’s. He talked about the special oddness of ’an estranged return’, which is just what it feels like. Entirely familiar and terribly unfamiliar all the time. Separately I’d been doing some autobiographical writing for various reasons and I thought I’d reproduce that here, as an exploration of how the cycles pattern back round and crisscross, even when you aren’t looking. Story forks make branching patterns that reconnect in unexpected times and places.
In 1981 I left Cambridge with an Upper Second class degree and a place to study for an MPhil 20th Century Art at the Courtauld. It was a rough time. A recession, no grants, not many jobs or prospects, much like graduating today. I bottled out and applied, instead for a great many jobs, ending finally with a choice between being a secretary at a computer company or a graduate trainee in a financial future brokerage. I’ve often wondered since what propelled me to apply to that tiny advert in the back of the Telegraph, spotted scouring the job advertisements in Westminster Library. I’ve supposed that my interest in Italian Futurism had the word futures catch my eye.
In any case, these random connections lead to surprising turning points. Story forks.
The company secretary was the year above me at Notting Hill and Ealing High School for Girls, so I beat off the competition of male economists who were there preferred choice, and started, as one of four graduate trainees, charting 15 minute barcharts of market movements and studying the price movements of railway stocks in nineteenth century America, working my way through back editions of the Bank Credit Analyst at the British Library in the old Reading Room. My first readers card.
The career that followed, from 1981 to 1997, rode a surf way of exchange traded derivatives, a ring side seat at the shifts in the City before and after Big Bang, and the increasing dominance of derivatives, with all the governance challenges that involves. I was very lucky and rode the wave quite well, ending up as the first member of the futures exchange executive ever to get voted onto the Board for a term, while I was working at NatWest.
City life became increasingly dissatisfying to me and I tried to find other ways to express my interests. I became chair of governors at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school while it was going through special measures. I formed an association with the Bromley by Bow centre in East London and invested a bit of my training budget for capital markets into taking some investment bankers to the Sinai desert with Big Issue Vendors to live with the bedouin in the desert for a week.
(I’ve still got a copy of the Big Issue issue. Tim Hetherington took the photos.)
In late 1996, trying to find an exit strategy, I chanced on an article about knowledge management in the Financial Times. It was the next big thing. I tore the article out, sent it to my then Chief Executive and scribbled on the top ‘if this job ever comes up at NatWest Markets, I’d love a crack at it’. Another story fork. Two days earlier, the Chief Executive of the Investment Bank had put his hand up, when Derek Wanless the then bank Chief Executive, asked who would look into knowledge management on behalf of the Bank. I got the non-existent job, squirreled a bit of money out of the budgets I’d become rather adept at handling, and set to.
This was the first moment at which I started to marry my interest in the provocative challenge of the avant-garde and the disciplines of designing tradeable instruments like financial futures and options. That marriage has stood me in good stead, as has my interest in the campaign to honour the human spirit in the workplace. We made some very good things during that year of 1996/7, but the Bank was having a troubled time and there wasn’t room for relationship in a transactional world. In late 1997, half way through my two-year plan, I had to make a decision: to take redundancy and go back into corporate life, or to see where I could go with what I’d started. There was a mixture of rage and determination in the early days of Sparknow. I wanted to see how far we could go. I’d also rather have done it with backing, from a client, an investor, my bank. We didn’t get any of that, but we did get a series of almost-business-angels, people intrigued by the experiment we were conducting in marrying the values of twentieth century art, traditions of librarianship and storytelling and hard-nosed business practice and theory. Each time it looks as if the lights would go out on us, something happened to keep us in business.
Story forks. The CEO of the NHS Equal Opportunities Unit had heard me speak at women’s lunch and asked us to do a knowledge audit for them. Roy McGregor at Kentish Town Health Centre, introduced through a friend, invited us to do a day with patients, doctors, volunteers and counsellors to help devise the brief for an architect’s brief for a new building. We used stories, postcards, the space, appreciative enquiry, plans, Roy’s dictaphone. Last year I went back and asked him how it had all turned out in the end. They’ve done it, they’ve won awards, they still use pictures taken on that day to induct people into the story of how the building came about.
Around the same time Manuel Fleurie heard Carol singing, inviting people to a storytelling workshop at a knowledge management conference in the Hague, where we’d strung washing lines across the workshop space and pegged objects to them as story starters. A tall booming geographer, running the knowledge management team at the time for the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development, Manuel invited us into a five-year partnership with the Agency which ended in around 2004 with the production of a storytelling guide that has become a global reference in the world of development.
Then there was our first outing into oral history in 2005. Through a series of chances, we were invited to pitch for a knowledge management project and an oral history project for the Islamic Development Bank. We won, head to head with the World Bank. We were told afterwards we were the only people able to do both parts of the project, and willing to go to Jeddah to do it.
Story forks. In 2007, I read about a tender to do a London Development Agency funded piece of research into the knowledge transfer between businesses in London and museums, libraries and archives. We were rank outsiders. Working with Will Ross from Spanner, a dear friend, I hounded Ellen at MLA London. This was the project that would get me back to my missing Courtauld and 20th century art story. The selection team laugh now at the absurdity of it. We were, they said, the only people who managed not to mention knowledge transfer, museums, libraries or archives in our pitch, but there was something about what we promised, with our narrative approaches, that had them unable to make a choice other than us. Looking back, three years on, each of the three people on the client side involved since the beginning cites it as the most satisfying and valuable piece of work they commissioned in that period.
The final report, Getting down to business, was completed in August 2010 and I fell into quite a dark, morose mood which it took me a while to understand. I had, somehow, completed the loop back to my unfinished alternative story in some way and needed a new challenge.
The mood got darker and angrier and I was rather too inclined to take it out on my colleagues, but I did really need a new question by then. Spark is 13, going on 14, twice the length of an apprenticeship, sturdier than it has been, and heading in a direction that only partly coincides with my interests. I was rather hoping in truth that we would founder after a tough year, so that as founder, I could move on. But we didn’t, this year flourishes.
Part of that flourishing is the series of coincidences by which I was invited into RBS to work on part of a larger change and learning project. I bump into myself every day. Meeting myself coming back, as the current radio programme series has it. I both admire and dislike those parts of my old self which have surfaced. Here’s a short list.
- Too easy to slither back into the politics and backchannels.
- Dangerously seductive to take power and let it bend you into nasty shapes.
- Falling into an old story of being resentful, a victim of a large organisational system. Overreacting to silly small things.
- Control/command on a mac and a pc are different. You can waste a lot of time on that I can tell you.
- Delightful to go to work everyday (surprising that, but especially sitting on top of the bus and giving room over to meandering thoughts that make new shapes in me).
- Needing to be in the surge and swell of activity and feeling to figure out ways to make it work towards a momentum for action. Constantly watching for where the pressure points are that can be squeezed a bit in the right direction. It’s addictive though. I don’t really like the days I’m not at work.
- Satisfying to get back into operations, an area of business I’ve always enjoyed for its engineness and lack of glamour.
- Much fun to be introduced to someone who worked on the floor of LIFFE while I was also working in futures and options and reminisce with him about what those days were like.
- Strange to have to remember to ask everyone on the desk if they’d like something when you go for a coffee, and to have people come up and chat. I notice the effort I have to make to overcome anti-social habits and plug in to what’s going on around me.
- Nice to chance on people from former NatWest and quickly discover people and histories in common. A kinship that has caught me by surprise and which has me reconsidering how I feel about extended alumnae networks, having always tended to shun them before.
- Handy to have a vague title like ‘interim programme manager’ - there’s a lot of room for maneouvre in the ambiguity which means I can form lots of small alliances to help me get things done.
- Ironic that NatWest, nearly 14 years later, is reaping the benefit of their investment in knowledge management in 1997 and the intervening work I’ve done to build on that. And nobody but me to appreciate it.
None of it is quite as I expected, and this reminds me of how it felt to wear a hijab and abbaya when we worked in Jeddah. You’d think I’d hate it. Actually I found, as we returned home via more liberal countries like Egypt and Turkey that I’d come to like it as a hiding place and didn’t want to take it off. You can’t learn those feelings from a distance. You learn them in your stomach, when you knot and puzzle about why your expected and actual reactions don’t add up.
It reminds me too of that saying that you can do nothing to change the future, but you can change the past.
I’m still looking for a new question. The detour, though, is enchanting. It feels a bit like being a Situationist. I don’t understand it all yet, but by being present as an outsider working from the inside, I hope to observe and connect strands of clues that might otherwise go undetected, and so by witnessing, change things.
About ten days back I started a glorious long weekend of culture of my favourite kind: all pretty contemporary, bit controversial, not easy to figure you stand always.
It started with me trailing over from the Strand, where I’m working, to a Late Shift, Picturing Philosophers at the National Portrait Gallery. The little booklet of quotes and coordinates for philosopher portraits is just the kind of cultural snack you need on a Thursday evening. I wasn’t just there for philosophers, mind. I’d come to catch up with the Challenging History crew who were setting up stall under Winston Churchill’s bust to get a bit of controversy going. I bumped into Sam outside and asked her where to go
Up the stairs, turn right then left at Henry V
How much easier than the impenetrable directions for getting to the Canary Wharf hotel where I’d been chairing a conference earlier in the week. Navigation by art I say. What about using Tracey Emin bronzed objects, say, to give directions right London? Go right at the teddybear.
Challenging History is a community that built over a 4-workshop series in 2009, and the four who keep it going (Sam Cairns of MLA, Amy Ryall of IWM, Alex Drago from the Tower and Jenny Kidd at City University) do a lovely job of nurturing it, on a tiny budget.
At a gallop over 30 minutes, they threw out some questions for us to consider:
- Do galleries have an obligation to engage with the various, often invisible, ‘challenges’ of an artwork or collection? What is the responsibility of the site when thinking about and acknowledging context, ownership and controversy?
- Is there such a thing as an anti-portrait, and what purpose might it serve?
- How interested are visitors in being challenged?
- Are galleries hostages to their collections? If a gallery wishes to change direction or its modes of interpretation, can it?
We talked about Gerhard Richter’s Uncle Rudi
And the challenges of showing it in its home memorial gallery in Poland, to which Richter had, without explanation, donated it in the 1960’s. The original, or any copy, will get defaced if shown there, pressing on an open sore in Polish history as it does. It can be shown abroad in other galleries though. It’s not a photo, but a painting of a photo: is it an anti-portrait? What does that mean?
We talked also of Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country
It has had very different contexts and effects when shown in the National Portrait Gallery and in the Imperial War Museum. I’d actually chanced on it in the Barbican and blogged about it then, in 2008. At the time I said:
There’s a French word, aider, which we don’t but should have in English, which means to be an accomplice in something simply by witnessing it. Aiding and abetting should have that meaning. It’s the job of the teller, the artist, the author, the actor, I think, to create spaces of witnessing from which we cannot step back. The privilege of access to an audience brings with it the responsibility to engage that audience in witnessing and becoming responsible both for themselves and for what they see over which they can have some useful influence.
Sam pointed out too that Churchill himself wasn’t exactly uncontroversial: how do we limit our complicated and unresolved stories about him by putting him in the gallery of National Portraits?
[She and Jenny were both on the hunt for abstracts for the 2012 Challenging History conference, so David Gunn and I have pulled together a workshop proposal for looking at the notion of temporary communities of participation and how temporariness can unlock the limits of consulting relationships and the constraints of permanence, to discover more difficult truths, sometimes using fiction to go deeper. Fingers crossed.]
I cruised out past the BP Portrait Awards, marvelling at how all of humankind thirsts for culture and the making of meaning.
The next day, I blew back in, really only for a glass of wine with my daughter, before we went to see Bridesmaids (much to be recommended in its own terms). Saturday, I larked about at an arty housewarming in North Kensington before going to the Colisseum to see Britten’s grimy Midsummer Night’s Dream. ’Totally bizarre and really rather brilliant’ said the Telegraph. Yes. And. The unreconstructed romantic in me, perhaps after the feeding frenzy of Bridesmaids the night before, wanted a few more cowslips and fairies, although the darkness of the staging in a bullying schoolyard really was hard to look away from and that’s enough for me.
I really dislike Tracey Emin. Much as I dislike Coca Cola. I’ve never tried it. But I was compelled by my mum talking about hearing her on Women’s Hour…
‘But wasn’t all that stuff about masturbation a bit much for you mum?’
‘Darling, I think you need to look past that: she’s just seeking attention’
..and a text recommendation from a reluctant convert found me at the Hayward Gallery on Sunday, with an old friend, equally reluctant.
We split up and for 90 minutes didn’t see each other at all, then spent two hours of lunch chewing it over.
So so much more to it than I was expecting. So much vulnerability: she charges her life with deep meaning that holds the grain of universal truth. Her soul is bared, her heart on her sleeve, evidence of her hurt laid out, almost forensically on show, and however much I wanted to distance myself from the transgressive quality or the attention-seeking of what was on display, made more demanding and urgent by the domesticity of much of the means, I was forced to look and feel and take it in and make it my own in the most troubling way. Somehow she seems to lie in the gutter and taunt the gutter press in ways they simply can’t handle. Go on, you fuckers, put in me a pigeon hole, she dares them, and they do, and that’s everybody’s loss.
I especially liked the layers of meaning in her taking domestic crafts and materials - applique, embroidery, blankets, lace bedding - and turning them to her own storytelling ends in telling a different tale. I’ve not read anything about her, so I’ve no idea if that’s the exam answer one is supposed to give. I felt a bit beyond reading her up and getting it right. I will though, when I settle a bit and I’d pressgang everyone else to go and make up their own minds.
That was it.
More art since, but that’s for another time.
