Emma Hart - Perspectives #1 - Peckham Rd. Lecture Theatre - October ‘23

Images emmahart.info (see bib)

From the lecture given at Peckham Road, I am focusing on two exhibitions: Mamma Mia (2017), Whitechapel, and Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules (2021), Somerset House. I’m skipping over several important exhibitions in-between, such as Strange Clay at the Hayward and Poor Things at the Fruitmarket, for the sake of direct comparison.

Mamma Mia is the outcome of a practice-based research project. Hart went to Faenza, Emilia-Romagna, to learn to make Maiolica-ware, a specific regional precursor glaze. In the orientating ‘traditional’ research, there’s a lot of trips to musems, and craftspeople, and places. When she begins practical ‘research’ work herself she finds that clay ‘always wants to be a pot’. Working with and against this, she ultimately compromises with the clay on a kind of jug with a decorative measure on the side, but finally inverts and suspends it back into sculpture.

The form brings multiple flashes of association. So the jugs are jugs, but inverted, but also faces, and also light shades with decorated insides, and the light shades cast a speech bubble light, and you can stand in the light it casts. On surface: some jugs are opaque, but measuring jugs are not, especially on the outside, so this is a kind of madness.

A teaching note: she says to think about the generative power of questions; say less ‘I am interested in surface’, and ask more, ‘how can I create a surface’ or ‘what could the surface be?'. Unlike painting, where the inside is illusory, or photography, where any inside is inside the camera (the tool), sculpture can have a literal inside.

In terms of install, to draw attention back to the dismemberment of the heads without bodies, and to emphasise the food association, there are ‘metal shapes’ which are also very like knives and forks and spoons on a rotary device. Nothing here is a readymade and lots of things are either live (light) or moving (devices).

Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules. Faces with multiple associations again, here simultaneously speech bubbles, but this time not hollow ‘container’ forms, but split. The heads are not literally suspended (or fallen), instead their suspension is an image-like wall mounting. As objects they have their ‘back’ to the wall, which they rely on for support, while huddling in an archway. Again, the inside and outside are contrasted; outside is gloss, the inside is matte, positing and parodying that we people present some kind of glossy image to the world. The text is comic-booky, handmade like before (no decals here).

To Hart they are speaking about class; this split-ness represents the splitness of working-class identity in a ‘middle-class’ art context. They are not hampered by their splitness, it makes them more interesting and gives them character. But at the same time Hart hates the idea of ‘being a character,’ finding it a patronising phrase. So one says character and another says ‘extra’ as in ‘she’s [being] so extra’.

In the work, other meanings continue to suggest themselves too; the rough inside of the body; the “extra! extra!” of the filmic newspaper boy; the late, last edition/addition. The extra in film is also a background character, a non-speaking and interchangeable and costumed part.

Cleverly, someone asks whether Hart claims to speak for her class. She says, rather, her job is to both inhabit and represent class somehow, precariously, alone. (Individualism is itself a potential betrayal or disavowing of, but an escape from, a collective class-based condition, unless you unashamedly join the artisan class, who might not accept you.) Her personal aim here is to have representation, and in this instance the "minority" position is speaking for itself, a self-identifying working-class person.

This contradictory dialogue she presents, parallel to the work, which it accepts and resists, highlights the common thread; that this second show is about dialogue, to Hart. To me its more like, an attempt to speak on her own terms and ‘visibility’ rather than actual dialogue; didactic, even. They are also somewhere on a scale between craft and art, craft broadly being something that the middle-class academic is quixotically proud not to have, preferring ‘taste,’ while the celebration of one’s own handiwork is more common to the lower and upper social castes.

To get back to the work, these heads are much more vocal than back in Mamma Mia, on the fringes perhaps, but no longer dismembered and mute, but facing out. Between the two, there are common motifs; of the familiar made strange through craft, of visual and textual language, as well as formal sculptural qualities like inside and weight, and general artistic concerns such as colour and scale. Overall the most powerful effect of considering both shows is noticing how important install is. I’m not taking about ‘installation’ but rather, ok, Hart’s objects definitely exist. But in Mamma Mia, their field of connotations is extended by adding in extra references to mealtimes. In Beano, I think this attempt is much less successful. Objects take on a life of their own, given by the viewer, which is parallel but distinct from artists’ intentions. There are many possible readings and even the same person might have different readings on different days. Through craft these say something about class; but what Hart intentionally ‘put there’ doesn’t come through for me much at all. I think these objects which are supposed to ‘speak for themselves’ are actually given over to a curator and they are rather swamped by associations; by Somerset House, by the Beano. Even with very skilled objects, context is key.

Bibliography:

Emma Hart (2023) [online] available at: emmahart.info [Accessed 7th Nov. 2023]

Wikipedia contributors (2023) [online] available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiolica [Accessed 8th Nov. 2023]