All in all, it’s been a fabulously female week. Monday night—as already reported—was spent at Peer in Hoxton amongst the great dames Phyllida Barlow, Angela de la Cruz, Hannah Collins and the Peer director Ingrid Swenson. Tuesday, of course, was International Woman’s Day. In honour of which I paid tribute to a rare and tender art historical depiction of the mature female of Giorgione’s La Vecchia (1505), at the opening of the Royal Academy’s terrific show. Wednesday it was off to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) to chair a panel discussion with an official great dame, Marina Warner, along with recently-appointed Tate Modern director Francis Morris, artist Cathy de Monchaux and (token male) Gavin Turk. The discussion was in memory of the late, great and massively lamented artist Helen Chadwick, who died 20 years ago this month.
The five of us, along with many contributions from a 200-strong audience, paid tribute to the extraordinary and enduring legacy of this seminal figure—especially her fearlessness and love of erudite bodily provocation. We agreed that it was especially appropriate that this event was taking place at the ICA, site of Chadwick’s extraordinary breakthrough show Of Mutability in 1986-87, which included life-sized photocopies of the naked artist cavorting with various beasts as well as a precarious glass tower containing their decomposing remains, which led to her being the first female nominee for the Turner Prize in 1987. More poignantly, it was to the ICA that everyone repaired for the wake after Helen’s memorial at St Martin-in-the-Fields in September 1996.
Then last night there was more girl power at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall where a more recent, 2012, Turner Prize nominee, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, was mounting the premiere of her performative extravaganza, Here She Comes. Commissioned to celebrate the 70th birthday of the Arts Council Collection, and part of the Wow: Women of the World festival, the work tells the stories of great women from different moments in history from Boudicca to Montessori in characteristically carnival-like style. This memorable Gesamtkunstwerk transported all present to a riotous parallel universe featuring seminal feminist texts, vagina headdresses, a token naked male and the establishment of a new Guinness world record in setting off whoopee cushions—73 in 30 seconds—achieved by a woman, of course…
