Going to the Nancy Spero retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, I was struck by the sheer forcefulness of her art.
Interviewed a year before her death in 2009, she said, ‘What can one do as an artist when you see all the violence being carried out in the world?’ Her answer is here: walking through the exhibition is like being whacked repeatedly about the head by furious mallets. Everywhere you look, something spiky and angry demands your attention.
Our blogger is assaulted by the severed heads of Maypole/Take No Prisoners II (2008)
A politically active feminist all her life, Spero’s work confronts issues of power and its abuse, particularly against women. The exhibition is awash with images of tortured, twisted bodies in pain both from mythology and recent times.
Her style, non-formalist and full of raw punchy emotion, is influenced by French theatre practitioner Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. Indeed her works Artaud Codex and Artaud Paintings pay direct reference to the relationship.
I studied and performed Artaud at university and it’s fascinating to see his theories put into practice in a non-theatrical setting.
For Artaud, ‘cruelty’ was not necessarily about sadism or causing pain but more about a violent, physical determination to shatter ‘false appearances’ forcing the spectator to confront the ‘real’.
This method is shown in a striking visual manner in the first work of the exhibition: Maypole/Take No Prisoners II (2008). Here, terrifying severed heads flew out at me from the central point of a maypole, seeming to swoop down from a skylight. Now that’s what I call impact aesthetics!
A more sobering work is Marduk (1986), which collages harrowing news reports of the abduction, torture or ‘disappearance’ of female political activists in places such as Paraguay, Turkey and China and juxtaposes them with an equally violent Sumerian creation myth in which the god Marduk murders and disembowels the goddess Tiamat, splitting her ‘like a flat fish into two halves’ to make ‘a covering for the heavens’.
Powerful stuff. I went for a walk through Kensington Gardens afterwards to detox, ending up at the Peter Pan statue – a nice juxtaposition of light and innocence to the sturm und drang of Nancy Spero!
Me and Sir George Frampton's bronze Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
You can watch an interview with the artist here.
Paul Lepper is the current creative apprentice with the Exhibition Road Cultural Group and is writing a weekly blog about his South Kensington experience
