To say that I had misgivings about visiting the Heidi Horten Collection during a recent stay in Vienna is an understatement, especially in light of the scandal surrounding the scrapped auction of Horten’s jewelry, misappropriated as it was from Jewish families from whose disenfranchisement Horten and her husband demonstrably profited.
The Heidi Horten Collection. All photographs: Harry Heuser
“Christie’s Cancels Sale of Jewelry Connected to Nazi-Era Fortune,” a 31 August 2023 headline in the New York Times read. According to the article, the “decision follow[ed] a backlash from Jewish organizations after the auction house generated $202 million” in an earlier sale of Horten’s hoarded treasures.
My views on the Heidi Horten Collection—just like my viewing of the temporary exhibition “Rendez-Vous: Picasso, Chagall, Klein and Their Times” then on show there—were no doubt skewed. And yet, I am certain that I would have felt just as disturbed and affronted had I been unaware of the controversy.
Poster design by Neil Holland featuring Marcelle Hanselaar’s print “The Addict” (2015)
“I love it when curators come up with juicy titles.” That is how London-based painter-printmaker Marcelle Hanselaar announced the exhibition Crying Bleeding Kicking Screaming in one of her newsletters.
As Hanselaar put it, a title like that offers a “glimpse” of how others read her work and “how it might impact the viewer.” It is “part preparation and part enticement to what will be shown and the very least it will do is to put visitors in a state of mind of curiosity.”
Hanselaar’s prints – and their titles – do just that: they make us curious, and they play on our inquisitiveness. They do not necessarily show and tell us what we want to see, but they remind us that we are eager and anxious to look. Providing another chance to view works in public, an exhibition can and should also facilitate the act of looking.
Early in 2023, I participated in a workshop at Aberystwyth University exploring collectibles and the collection of ephemera. I was the only participant, among academics and museum staff, to talk about my private collection of ephemera. So as to give that fruit fly of a presentation an afterlife, I have gathered my notes for this entry in my journal, which, after all, was created for the purpose of ‘keeping up with the out-of-date.’
The presentation was titled “Making It Matter: Ephemerabilia, Queer Identity, and the Imperative of Being Out of Touch.”
I know, titles are like jokes. If you have to explain them, they don’t work. But, here goes:
“Ephemerabilia,” meaning, the love of the fugitive, the fragile, and perhaps even the futile. All of the above – which may apply to any of our lives and bodies. All of the above – but not ‘trivial.’ Nothing is trivial in itself. Just like nothing is memorable in itself. Someone has to make it matter.
For that reason, the word “minor” in Maurice Rickards’ definition of ephemera is problematic, as it devalues what it defines. To quote myself: “Trivia is knowledge we refuse the potential to matter,” whereas “Memorabilia is matter we grant the capacity to mean differently.”
The need to make something matter and mean something, something else, no matter what, is, to me, intimately bound up with queer identity, with my sense of being, thinking, feeling, and loving differently.
And that is where, to me, the compulsion of being out of touch comes in: being drawn to what has been relegated to the margins, to matter that has been disregarded and discarded as presumably nonessential or unrepresentative.
I could have put the last two words in parenthesis; because sharing my passion for the untouchable – or the “not touched much lately” – means coming out with what drives me. Making something neglected and presumably immaterial matter and mean something anew is an act of reification.
It means saying I matter. But the question I keep asking myself, in relation to my collection habits, is “What’s the matter with me?”
Let’s say I say “I am a collector.” Which question should I expect to follow? Is it “What are you collecting?” How about: “Why are you collecting?” “Why do you collect what you collect?”
What I collect is stated – and illustrated – on my website. I collect ephemera related to products of what once was popular entertainment – early-to-mid twentieth-century, mainly US American, film, theatre and radio – that are lesser-known now. I call it “unpopular culture.”
My collection is all fairly methodically put into actual and virtual drawers. Unlike in this scenario.
The image on the left shows my ex’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I once lived there, for about fifteen years, and, for over 33 years now I have stayed at that place whenever I am in the city.
Due to the pandemic, I hadn’t been back in three years. In the fall of 2022, my ex had a heart attack just days before I was set to arrive there. I looked after the apartment while visiting him at the hospital. Anyway, I was shocked when I saw the place in such disarray. My ex has always been a hoarder. But the place had become almost unnavigable in the intervening years.
Obviously, hoarding is not collecting. But is it so obvious? Is the distinction perhaps too obvious? Sure, hoarding is chaotic. It is indiscriminate, whereas collecting is orderly and discerning. Collections are curated. whereas the compulsion of the hoarder may strike us as an infliction, an illness that may or may not be curable.
Curating is derived from the Latin word “curare,” meaning to care. Does it follow that the hoarder is careless? While staying in my ex’s apartment, I took it upon myself to discard of some items I deemed trash.
Given that chaos, I thought my ex would never notice. When my ex returned to the apartment after three months of intensive care, hospital care and aftercare, he emailed me and inquired about some of the objects I had discarded.
And he was so incensed about my attempt at tidying that he pretty much ended our 33-year-old friendship.
Seriously, to give up a friendship over a pile of cheap Chinese take-away containers, most of them without matching lids? That struck me as unreasonable, disproportionate.
But the fact that my ex remembered where what is in that chaos made me rethink the relationship between hoarding and collecting.
And it made me question whether collecting is not like hoarding in its illogical, perhaps even pathological clinging to matter that may not matter to most. Something that takes up so much time and space, it can threaten to diminish rather than enrich our experience of life.
Possessions can take possession of us. This is not vanity. It is not conspicuous consumption. For gay men born into decades of intolerance and legal discrimination, it may be a stab at making our existence more concrete and at leaving a trace or trail of it behind. I should have known better than to mess with the mess that I found.
Powell had no offspring, even though he married toward the end of his short life. Stating his intention to leave his collection to our museum, he referred to it as all he possessed of bigotry and virtue, meaning, bijouterie and vertu – trinket and treasure.
Powell left the lot to what is now Aberystwyth University. In his book collection, for instance, was a popular volume called Book of Wonderful Characters, which contains a short account of the life of Chevalier D’Eon, who lived as a crossdresser for half a century and to whom we owe the term “eonism.”
I sensed that Powell created through that bequest a diary of sorts – an invitation, by way of visual and material clues among the objects he once possessed, to go in search of him.
The “it” in “making it matter” refers less to the collection than it does to the collector. Powell did not curate his collection to take care that what might reflect poorly on his character or cause suspicion as to his tastes. To filter anything out would mean to erase what was at the core of his being, which is why Powell initially insisted that a museum be built to house it and that the collection be kept in one place, Aberystwyth, in its entirety.
He did not want to disappear behind his collection but reappear through it. He wanted to be become readable, to be understood. The Powell case made me more aware of the relationship between the private act of collecting and the public act of sharing a collection, of remaining visible through one’s collection.
Powell’s desire to remain visible, become readable and be understood becomes clearer to me in the contemporary periodicals he bequeathed to our University. Here, he did not give us the lot – the magazines, cover to cover – but he cut out which articles he wanted to preserve and bound them in leather. There is no telling whether he read the articles. But it is clear that he thought they mattered and should matter to others. And they are quite eclectic, ranging from articles on animal cruelty to drunkenness and insanity.
Articles on ‘Consanguinity in Marriage’ and ‘Marriages between First Cousins in England and Their Effects,’ which were no doubt of particular interest to him because his grandmothers were sisters and his parents first cousins.
Powell appeared to have been drawing attention to his struggle to figure out who he was and why he was the way he was.
‘Do we collect things simply to indulge our passion for them? If so, why make a display of that passion? Showcasing seems calculated to raise certain objects to the status of ‘collectibles’ so as to advance the collector as connoisseur. And yet, might not the urge to exhibit our personal belongings be rather more elemental?’
What are ‘collectibles’? What is collectible? Take, for instance, two different but related types of objects in my collection. Cigarette cards of once well-known but now mostly forgotten performers, in this case radio stars. As well as movie posters and lobby cards of films of roughly that same period.
Both feature performers from the world of popular – or now less popular – entertainment. Both are finite. Lobby cards were generally produced in sets of eight. Cigarette cards in sets of up to fifty.
The main difference is that cigarette cards were designed to be collected. They were meant to be habit-forming, to encourage addiction.
Lobby cards on the other hand were not designed as collectibles. In fact, as the fine print states, collecting them was prohibited by the studios whose property they remained.
By now, the industry that cigarette cards once served has become detached from them. They no longer advertise and encourage addictive products, which makes them candidates for my belated affection, and which makes it possible for me to make them matter differently.
I became intrigued by the French-born US American actress watching a movie on television with my grandmother when I was 8 or 9. I didn’t start collecting until decades later. Nor did I know then that Colbert was rumoured to be queer.
My collection is also a catalogue of the love: more than 90% of my collection has been gifted to me by gay men, and almost all of which by my husband. Original film posters are now almost out of my league as a collector.
I do not collect objects because of their monetary value, of which, due to the fact that the items were given to me, I often have no knowledge. I have always been attracted to what is of little value to others.
A queer friend told me once that, as a child, he used to pick the crayon no other kid would pick up – the least popular colour. Embracing neglected objects to me is related to the feeling of having been unwanted and misunderstood as a child.
Exhibiting my collection, I realized just how intimate collecting is. I was very self-conscious about opening my drawers to display those objects – paper dolls, mass-produced pictures of performers few people today still relate to. When I tried to exhibit the cigarette cards, I also realized they were too small to be impactful or readable for display.
So I created a slideshow of them. There are objects in my collection that matter more once they are dematerialized. I scan many books and scripts so that I need no longer handle the physical artifact. It preserves the object. But it also makes the object less meaningful if what matters is the visual or written information it conveys. Not that I dispose of ephemera in my collection once I have scanned them.
The most ephemeral items in my collection are literally untouchable. They are digitized sound recordings. The cigarette cards of radio performers are, like scripts and contemporary books on radio, not the real thing. They are a means to materialise the immaterial culture they commemorate: the world of sound broadcasting.
My (Im)memorabilia exhibition contained a listening station and featured a soundtrack of clips on a loop. They are from my collection of audio recordings, now widely available online. The files contain recordings of radio broadcasts from the 1930s to 1950s, most of them plays, almost all of which were part of episodes of series or chapters of serials.
The vast majority of plays were also broadcast only a single time. Despite the recordings that gradually materialized from the vaults, they were as ephemeral as soundwaves. That they survive at all is owing to their commercial value.
The recordings are evidence for the sponsor that the programme they funded actually existed and could be inspected – or audited. As cultural products they were not valued. They still are not valued much. They certainly never received the scrutiny or status accorded to motion pictures or television programmes.
I organize the folders alphabetically by each series title.
And each subfolder contains recordings of broadcasts from those series. Some subfolders contain close to one thousand recordings per series. Cataloguing these immaterial objects, which I have written about at some length in my study Immaterial Culture and on my blog broadcastellan, involves adding and correcting information about talents involved in a broadcast play; verifying air dates by referencing old newspapers and magazines; checking for sound quality and recording speed; and replacing files with newer, cleaner, more authentic recordings.
It is not possible to listen to all of those recordings in full. There are now over 30,000 of them. It is almost impossible to keep track of them.
Unlike my ex, I have forgotten about many of the items in my collection. But like my ex, I would be very upset if only a single item went missing. Most of these recordings are readily available on the internet, copyright being a murky issue. In my writing, I have argued for their cultural significance, their artistic merit. But I have not been successful in making a career out of my caring. I am wary of intellectualising my desire, and I am suspicious of such attempt by academics.
The difference between hoarding and collecting lies in the adding of value. Hoarding is an act of accumulation. Collecting is an act of accretion, of value added.
The ‘imperative’ in my title is the imperative of the matter – what drives us, what makes us who we are. The ‘it’ in “Making it Matter” refers both to the ephemeron and the life of its collector who deems it worth preserving. That my efforts have been futile only seems to fuel a desire that has been termed “The Queer Art of Failure.”
As I browsed those old albums, I was reminded of an unsettling homecoming in 2022, when, on a dark December afternoon, I returned to my mother’s house for the first time in about thirty-four years. I had lived in that house – one in a row of unassuming bungalows in a small town in the dull flatness of North-Rhine Westphalia – for about fifteen years, during which time, in the process of growing up that many deem concluded all too prematurely, I gathered a great many memories, not many of them great, that made me eager to forget the place. And although my skin never developed the thickness of an elephant’s hide, I cannot but remember.
You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe reminds us; but when we do return to the places we once called home – whether by choice or not – it can hit home hard that whatever home may be is a construct the mind makes even when it is not made up on that point. A lot of what happened or befell us where we come back for a second or umpteenth look is bound to topple from the shelves to which we relegated some of those none-too-precious but relentlessly durable mental keepsakes.
The living room in my parents’ house was never my place, even though it held several attractions: a good stereo system, courtesy of my maternal grandmother, and, after years of resistance from my father, who held that the technology had not been perfected yet, a colour television set. My room was more of a listening post; apart from drawings I made, the comics I consumed and the magazines I scoured for material to luxuriate in, vivid dreams were produced there, many with the aid of a radio and cassette recorder.
Since then, my Kinderzimmer had been repurposed, although its current state said nothing more distinctly about its present purpose than “spare.” None of the cheap furnishings had survived, and the change of décor did little to revive, revise or confirm the images that, originating there, I had been carrying in my mind since the late 1980s.
It was the most private place in the house – the shared bathroom – that brought back the identity crises I experienced growing up queer: the shame of developing breasts that waited long for the development of pectoral muscles; the attempts at concealing the unseemly tissue by stretching my t-shirts and tying them around my genitals; the anxieties that caused me to scratch the skin off my ankles that, raw and oozy, were then soaked, doctor’s orders, in a bidet filled with salty water.
Memories tend to come back faster and with greater force when we return to the places where there were made. That was certainly the case when I stepped into Mutti’s abode (my father having left and since died decades ago). The interior was like a time capsule. Not only the furniture was unchanged, but all the bric-a-brac was still in the same spots my mother had set aside for their display and regular dusting.
The self-exploration that happened in that room also took a creative turn, as, transitioning from adolescence to dreaded adulthood, I took what I now call retroactive selfies: photographs of my body that I initially produced mainly for my eyes only but that I am now, in this post, making public for the first time via the social medium of blogging so as further to blur boundaries the maintenance of which can cause so much sustained and needless suffering.
Once we do decide to “come out,” we soon realize that we do not come out once only: we must do so over and over again, and each time we come out – and come out looking – differently, like an inadvertent burst of digital photographs that, owing to a finger staying put too long, shows our poses changing and our masks slipping.
Excusing myself from the dinner table during my short visit to my mother’s, I secreted myself in the bathroom, that anti-parlour of abjection. Not that I needed to go. What I needed was to go look at myself in the mirror that, in my youth, became a lens of self-exploration. I needed to return to the spot where I had once stood and posed – donning masks and dappled in spraypainted dots – a young person, once called “the battle of the sexes” by a classmate, learning to live in and with the strangeness of a changing body, an organism that I seemed to be invading and that rejected me as much as I was rejecting it.
Uneasy, curious and ever self-reflexive, the boy in the avocado bathroom is not gone, though none may recognize him now. He is a persona still grappling with the challenge of achieving personhood: a retroactive selfie.
Navigating the docklands on my way to Tate Liverpool
Just what is a landscape? It is with this question that I open the undergraduate art history module Looking into Landscape, which I have been teaching at Aberystwyth University since 2016. In 2014, I leaped at the opportunity of trialling the module in China, where the history of art engaging with the natural and human-made environment spans many more centuries than it does in the West, and where it bears little resemblance to what Westerners tend to regard as “landscape” when referring to artistic practices rather than the outdoors. Landscape, that is, as a genre distinct from portraiture or still life.
But I am not lecturing. Actually, I am on research leave, which will take me back to New York – after a three-year absence from my old neighborhood and the favorite haunts that may well have become unrecognizable or ceased to exist in the interim – in preparation for my exhibition Asphalt Expressionism, about which I shall have – and have to have – more to say in subsequent posts as I ponder just what I have gotten myself into this time.
To some extent, Asphalt Expressionism – a belated follow-up to my 2018 exhibition Travelling Through: Landscapes/Landmarks/Legacies – is a response to the question “Just what is a landscape?” It aims to explore, in a series of photographs snapped with my phone camera, the terrain of Manhattan from the perspective of a walker looking down on the pavement rather than ahead, taking in the sights. It is an alternative approach, a looking away from what is privileged or deemed worth seeing. It is also an alternative to the tourist’s selfie, as my feet will stand in for my face in pictures that say “I was here.”
Downtown Manhattan, 11 September 2019
Unlike selfies, my photographs will not be shared first, let alone exclusively via social media, from the platforms and forums of which I have largely absented myself. Do these images belong in a gallery? Do they need to be printed and displayed to have a life, to find eyes and minds other than mine to serve other than dead ends?
Is the gallery the habitat for creative practices engaging with the act and art of living? I asked myself just that the other day when I went to Liverpool in order to experience – or, as it turned out, in hopes of experiencing – the exhibition Radical Landscapes. The show, at Tate Liverpool, invites audiences to consider many of the forms that responses to the environment can take and how those responses may be motivated, whether it is primarily to make a living or to fight for the survival of the planet.
Displayed among the commodifiable images of the countryside were sculptures, textiles, installations, photographs – among them early efforts by Angus McBean, whose later works are currently on show in the exhibition I staged with students at Aberystwyth University – videos of performance art, as well as living plants and early twentieth-century scientific wood-and-papier-mâché models thereof. So, the question arose, again and again, “Just what is a landscape?” How is that term defined here?
The dissatisfaction I felt walking through Radical Landscapes – well worth the walk though it is – is not so much that it does define its territory so loosely. It is that it still insisted on calling all those responses “landscapes” and declaring them to be “radical.” “Radical Landscapes” is not an oxymoron – Peter Kennard’s Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980) makes that plain – but it is certainly a misnomer.
Curators Darren Pih and Laura Bruni doprovide some indications of how the theme or subject of their project was delimited by throwing a few descriptors into the mix, via the exhibition’s subtitle: Art, Identity and Activism. Still, much of what is on show, from oils to soil, is not genre landscape. What is radical in the creative practice of adapting to our changing environment or adopting ways of making the future survivable is activism, which may or may not yield a physical by-product displayable in a gallery space. You cannot expect to be walking a line in, say, Peru – or any line that, through radical thinking and doing, has temporarily been withdrawn between art and life or between objects and objectives – by looking at line, color and form in a cube, white or otherwise.
Peter Kennard, Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980) detail
There is evidence of radical engagement with land on the walls, mainly in the form of documentarian photographs. But those images only remind us how galleries, by educating us about what is or was out there, also distances us from those radical approaches. In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool, makes the claim that the “gallery space for this exhibition has become inverted, with the outdoors brought inside: living sculptures, film, painting, photography and immersive installations transform the gallery into a new fertile terrain.” For the most part, this is not achieved. Radical Landscape is no New York Earth Room. You can smell the difference. Nor does it hand out shovels or seed.
Thoroughly researched and contextualised though it is, there is nothing curatorially radical about Radical Landscapes. While the large spaces and open plan display enable stimulating interventions and juxtaposition – such as seeing Jeremy Deller’s Cerne Abbas (2019) reflected in the glass behind which other objects are mounted on the walls – it nonetheless rehearses what is part of the history it puts on view: the Enclosure Acts that, during the Industrial Revolution, did away with common land and restricts access to most of what remains of the British countryside. We can still see the countryside to which we have no access, but we can no longer experience it – unless we take radical action and trespass, invade, occupy or appropriate what has been taken from us so long ago that we are often no longer aware of that loss and the consequences of our detachment, the aftermath of which involves crises of identity and climate.
Jeremy Deller’s Cerne Abbas (2019) reflected in a display of flower models by R. Brendel and Co.
Similarly, Radical Landscapes takes from the field of creative practice – from the domain that the radical insist on being public – and parcels out what now can only be contemplated at a remove, not lived. “Developed,” as Legg reminds us, “in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when access to fresh air and green space took on special significance,” Radical Landscapes casts those venturing out to experience it as witnesses, not as participants. We end up looking at where life ends by ending up as art – at historical practices preoccupied with land whose future we are shaping by our actions and apathy alike.
The illusion of the stage. The magic of the movies. The glamour of fashion. In a career spanning half a century, Angus McBean (1904–1990) turned instances of make-believe and masquerade into enduring records of enchantment.
Poster design by Neil Holland, from a photograph of Angus McBean by Robert Greetham
McBean was born and raised in South Wales. His father had worked in the collieries. Encouraged by his mother to make art his life, McBean moved to London. After working in banking and retail, he became a theatrical mask-maker and designer before achieving international fame as a photographer.
This year’s exhibition at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, showcases McBean’s work in advertising, his commissioned portraits, and his annual Christmas cards. It offers rare glimpses of McBean’s private life, holidaying on the continent, as captured in two unique photo albums. Also featured in the exhibition are portraits of McBean at home, in later life, by the contemporary photographer Robert Greetham.
Make/Believe installation view
Not all the personalities on view in this exhibition – Marlene Dietrich, Ruth Draper, Audrey Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Claire Luce, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Welsh icon Ivor Novello among them – are as familiar today as they once were, even though some of them, including Rosemary Harris and Maggie Smith are acting to this day. All of them, like McBean, lived by their passions, whether performing on stage and screen or playing on the tennis court, as Wimbledon champion Helen Wills Moody did.
Make/Believe installation view
McBean’s photographs were made in the pre-digital age of the medium. Using scissors and paste, montage and collage, as well as elaborate sets and props, McBean employed every trick of the trade to bring out the beauty, vitality and personality of his subjects. His photographs were staged, not taken.
Drawing inspiration from Salvador Dalí, whose exact birthday he (incorrectly) claimed to share, McBean ‘surrealized’ many of them. ‘This thing of truth doesn’t really come into it,’ MacBean said in late life of his portraits.
Make/Believe installation view
The theater, to McBean, was ‘fantasy.’ It was ‘what you wished it to be.’ It was also the refuge McBean needed at a time when being queer was a crime. During the Second World War, he endured a two-and-a-half-year sentence of imprisonment and hard labour. His work is a testament to the imperatives of making, believing, and make-believe.
Make/Believe, which draws almost entirely on the School’s collection, opened to the public on 16 May 2022 and runs until 30 September 2022.
Curators: Hannah Beach, David Eccles, Helen Flower, Ellie Hodnett, Mayu Maruyama, Ekene Okoliachu, Lucija Perinic, Joanna Reed, Katerina Vranova, Portia Sastawnyuk, Anna Slater, and Helena Zielinska. with support from Senior Lecturer Harry Heuser (text and concept) and Senior Curator Neil Holland (staging and design).
I had misgivings about screening The Snake Pit (1948) as part of a festival of gothic films that included chestnuts such as The Cat and the Canary and The Old Dark House, many of which, for all their darkness, make light of mental health. Aside from the plot to deprive Annabelle West of her millions by robbing her of her senses (The Cat and the Canary) and the miasmic madness of the Femms (The Old Dark House), there is cuckoo Miss Bird, in The Uninvited, collecting pebbles like eggs in a basket. There are the convalescent servicemen in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, whose nervous breakdowns are trivialised as ticks and foibles. And there is psychoanalysis surrealised in the romance of Secret beyond the Door.
By comparison, The Snake Pit, which is set in a mental institution, aims to deal seriously with mental disorder and health practitioners’ at times disorderly approaches to it. To call such a film “gothic” – or to place it in the context of the modally gothic – may seem insensitive and insulting. After all, ever since Vasari called medieval architecture “gothic,” the term has generally been used pejoratively, denoting products of culture that are beyond, and thus beneath, the grand narrative of the Enlightenment – beyond truth, beauty, and “all ye need to know.”
And yet, by choosing The Snake Pit as the concluding entry in my festival Uneasy Threshold – which explored non-genre gothic films that prominently feature houses as contested territories – I aimed to explore just how far that term may be stretched until it loses whatever elastic usefulness it might have when defining and describing certain or uncertain aspects of narrative film (such as imagery, cinematography or costume design) and film narrative.
Different treatment, same old story
Academics engaging with the gothic tend to draw attention to the challenges and perils of such an engagement, in part to cast themselves in the role of intrepid explorer by insisting on the treacherousness of the path they do not fear to tread. It is a postmodern move as well to create a scholarly persona only to tear it off and examine it as if it were some uncanny other.
Ushering us into her study Gothic Contemporaries (2012), for example, Joanne Watkiss performs the part of an educator who is taught by a student asking her “is there such a thing as the contemporary Gothic?” to question her subject:
I hesitated before I answered, because I realized this was an impossible question to answer. For starters, there is no such thing, entity or body of work, delineated as the contemporary Gothic. So his question raised all kinds of other interesting questions: was there such a thing as the Gothic in the first place? If so, where and when was the Gothic? Has it been and gone? Can it be located within a specific time frame? Impossible. How can limits be place upon concepts that frustrate those very limits?
Her “convoluted answer” to the student’s question was “that the Gothic has never been a genre to define,” and that that is “certainly the current critical consensus – a move, as outlined by Catherine Spooner, ‘towards understanding Gothic as a set of discourses rather than simply as a genre.’”
As Watkiss acknowledges, that conclusion, such as it is, has already been reached, which raises the question: why claim having been challenged or perplexed when the answer is argued to be so obvious? Besides, the student’s question has not been answered, as the question was not whether the gothic is a genre but whether it is “a thing” – meaning, I presume, a subject, something to go on about.
My response to the student, fictive or otherwise, would have been: what is your understanding of “gothic”? And would you prefer I use lower case for that word, being that it is not a genre? Undeterred by the copyeditors of a book chapter on the “Gothic of Audition” who insisted I use upper case consistently, I am making a case for the modality of gothic by using lower case.
The gothic mode is a questioning of the conventionalising of purported wisdom, of classifications, of the tyranny of systems, and of the false sense of clarity achieved by staying clear of – disregarding, discarding, or else deforming and reforming – whatever does not fit the picture as framed. In The Snake Pit, the pendulum swings from realism to romance, from therapy to terror, from civilisation to barbarism; but, to those receptive to its weight, its trajectory is the equilibrium-defying gothic.
The snake pit metaphor in Ward’s novel and the screen adaptation by Frank Partos
As Lindsay Hallam observes in her notes on the film, The Snake Pit shows the “grim reality” of therapy by “employing techniques more commonly associated with Gothic horror.” For instance, in the scene in which Virginia Cunningham, played by Olivia de Havilland, receives her
first electro-shock treatment the hospital becomes akin to a torture chamber or a Gothic pile, full of evil villains and threatening devices. This is further emphasised through the prevalence of high-angle shots looking down on Virginia and the other patients, accentuating their powerlessness and vulnerability and making the medical staff and the hospital itself into menacing figures.
Aside from the visualisation of the titular Pit, a teeming abyss in which women are locked up, as Virginia remarks, like “animals” in a “zoo,” and in which authority figures such as a jealous, vindictive nurse and a repugnant doctor, stand in for the monks and sisters encountered in the fictions of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, what makes Anatole Litvak’s film a candidate for the gothic – as experienced by me – is its insistence on its own allegedly good intentions: it is gothic in spite of itself.
Virginia Cunningham, a writer who suffered a nervous breakdown, endures shock treatment and straitjacket so that, upon release, she may once again function as wife to a husband she has quite forgotten. “I have no husband,” she insists, remembering only the name she had before marriage, and the system is devoted to disabusing her of that notion. “Let me go. Don’t touch me,” Virginia screams when her husband, visiting her in the Pit, tries to take hold of her. “No, you can’t make me love you! You can’t make me belong to you! You can’t!”
Women can be doctors in 1940s Hollywood movies: provided they cure the emasculated male
The Snake Pit, like so many Hollywood films, aims to convince us that he not only can but must, for her own good. Post-Second World War Hollywood, with its codes and prejudices, its blacklist and censorship, its narrative straitjackets and Christian cover stories is as gothic a structure as any house capable of haunting us with our pasts.
Ceri H. Pritchard at his solo exhibition Paradoxes, MOMA Machynlleth, 18 Sept. 2021
Some creative sparks managed to rekindle themselves during the pandemic; stoked up by a keenly felt sense of do-or-die urgency, they keep generating alternative realities – or alternatives to reality – out of the deepest blue of mind-numbing, soul-crumbling chaos. While I do not quite succeed in numbering among those motivated mortals, visual artist Ceri H. Pritchard certainly does.
In front of Metamorphosis I at MOMA Machynlleth, with a temporarily unmasked Ceri H. Pritchard
His prodigious output, mordant wit and renewed openness to experimentation are on full display in his latest of a slew of solo shows. Ceri H. Pritchard’s Paradoxes opened on 18 September 2021 at MOMA Machynlleth, one of Wales’s most distinguished contemporary art galleries, and is on view there until 13 November 2021. I have been keeping up with Ceri’s work and am excited to see it transmogrify. I said as much, or as little, in the introductory text panel I was glad to contribute to his exhibition:
Ceri first invited me into his studio in 2015. A few years earlier, I had co-authored monographs on his parents, figurative painter Claudia Williams and the late landscape artist Gwilym Prichard. At the time, I was as yet unfamiliar with Ceri’s decades-spanning international career. It was an unexpected, disorientating encounter – in his parents’ house, no less – with what Ceri here terms ‘Paradoxes.’
I was perhaps too quick to label his paintings ‘neo-surrealist’ in an effort to get an art historical handle on the uncanny with which I was confronted: an otherworldly territory strewn with the detritus of modernity, with outcast and less-than-easy chairs, outmoded models of disconnected television sets, and displaced floor lamps shedding no light on matters.
Resisting further temptations to make sense of it all by trying to place the work, I did not initially consider – but subsequently discussed with Ceri – how his conspicuous enthusiasm for colour and his partiality for patterns is prominent as well in his mother’s work, although in subject and mood Ceri’s paintings could not be further removed from Claudia’s figure compositions expressive of the bond between mother and child.
And yet, the patterns in Ceri’s paintings, too, suggest blood bonds – biological ties, be it the universality of our molecular make-up or the common experience of life and death in the strange new age of COVID-19. Those repeated shapes bespeak at once commonality and change, circulation and evolution – and they remind us that what we share can also keep us apart.
Gwilym Prichard, Landscape (1960), detail
The mostly unpopulated landscapes painted by Ceri’s father, Gwilym, meanwhile, showed a preoccupation with home and belonging, with the uncovering of roots in ancient soil rather than the representation of the iconic sites of his native Wales. Ceri’s work, too, is concerned with home – but his approach to the question of belonging to particular cultures and traditions – is entirely different. It is the paradox of being at home with dislocation and familiar with estrangement.
Claudia Williams, The Toy Basket (1989) detail
The paradoxes that Ceri’s work communicate are not the consolidation of a calculated career move, an effort to set himself apart as much as possible from the tradition represented by his artist parents. They are felt, not fabricated. Ceri’s practice is informed by an international outlook, a transnational engagement with diverse cultures, high and low, in France, Mexico and the United States. The unresolved tension of paradox at play in his compositions reflects and responds to decades of being abroad and of returning as an artist whose paintings redefine the tradition of what it means to be living and working here and now – in twenty-first century Wales.
Upon first seeing Ceri’s work, I felt as if I were about to be let in on a secret: canvases that were still underway, waiting – ready or reluctant – to come out into the open. Catching up with his evolving work in his studio years later, in the middle of the pandemic, I sensed a renewed purpose, a conviction of having arrived at something worth the departure and of forging ahead, destination unknowable.
This is a body of work distinguished by something other than its now familiar set of iconography and ready tropes packaged for public exhibition. There is continued experimentation both in subject and technique – not just a recycling of a haunting image repertoire but a repurposing of found materials as well and an increasing openness to change and chance.
Ceri H. Pritchard, The State of Things (2021)
That air of mystery has not dissipated since I opened Ceri’s solo exhibition The Strange Edge of Reality at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery in 2016. And although encounters with art may become less personal in a museum setting, an institutional space can also contribute to our sense of discovery by making us become more aware of alternative approaches and canonical outliers we may not have expected to find there. Surprise, mystification, and a darkly humorous take on what it means to be alive at a time it seems impossible for future generations to get nostalgic about – all that may be experienced here, but also the realisation of being prompted to become part of a compelling narrative in the making.
Rather than look at Ceri’s paradoxes as puzzles to be solved it might be useful to regard them as open invitations to question our assumptions about culture, heritage, and about art produced in Wales today.
‘Mysteries,’ are ‘like the sun,’ the metaphysical poet John Donne wrote, ‘dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.’ And not unlike the metaphysical poets, Ceri’s compositions yoke together opposites to achieve a kind of reconciliation, a discordia concors (harmonious discord), even though, in Ceri’s case, the aim is not harmony: it is to become reconciled to remaining unsettled.
Like most professionals – secret agents excepting – I talk about my work at the slightest provocation. Besides, academics are expected to drop their names freely in the hope that it may take root in a crowded field scattered with formidable grey matter and fragile egos. There is a reason I have not yet mentioned one of my latest projects – the exhibition “Inconvenient Objects.” For a while, it was my blood pressure monitor that had to do most of the talking, delivering clinical statements geared toward a strictly limited audience listening out for official pronouncements that can be made to serve as quantifiable substitutes for my, to my mind, tell-tale cries of anger and frustration.
The power of words is at once affirmed and eroded in the act of our being rendered speechless, be it by way of silencing or sheer incredulity. There is no irony in the fact that, in this case of speech free and curtailed, seemingly innocuous curls of quotation marks are at the heart of the matter.
And just what was – or is – that matter you may well ask after reading this abstract and oblique preamble?
Since 2012, I have been involved in staging exhibitions in the galleries of the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, where I also teach art history and exhibition curating, as well as serving as Director of Research. Most of those exhibitions – Queer Tastes, Ugly, and Alternative Facts among them – are projects that I, with the assistance of the School’s senior curator, create for and realize with groups of undergraduate students each year. All of those shows draw entirely from the School’s collections of some 25,000 objects of visual and material culture.
The School of Art at Aberystwyth has the distinction of being one of only two art schools in the United Kingdom that also operate as accredited museums. I try to make use of that nearly unique status in all my teaching, and curating – in which many prospective students express an interest in their applications – provides me with an opportunity to link art history, theory and praxis in practical, public-oriented and creative ways.
I have long regarded the School of Art’s museum collections and public galleries as a mother lode for staff and students alike, as it enables them to generate and showcase their research. The project for the current show, with which the galleries reopen to the public after over a year during which our collections lingered in the Pandora’s box that is the pandemic of which the previous project, Seeing Red, had been a casualty, was for students to investigate and interpret objects that might pose challenges to cultural institutions due to their subject matter or the politics and ideologies they bespeak.
The selected works range from Third Reich photography to a bust of a Congolese pygmy chief, but also feature groups of female nudes executed by male artists, graphic images of starvation in 1970s Ethiopia, unauthorised sketches of patients in a mental institution and scenes of bullfighting. However rewarding the digging, the mother lode, in this instance, turned out to be a minefield.
The mining metaphor is borrowed from and alludes to one of the best-known examples of institutional critique, a practice of interrogating collections and museum spaces that artist-curators have employed since the 1970s. Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum was one such landmark project in which the legacies of colonialism were made transparent through the juxtapositional display of objects as outwardly disparate but intimately related as silverware and slave shackles to remind us how and on whose backs the wealth of the United States was built.
“Inconvenient Objects” was conceived to create awareness about the responsibility of contemporary museums such as ours and the role that exhibition curators play in making artifacts and their at times problematic histories accessible to the public.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, an early twentieth-century bust ostensibly created in the service of science and not intended as a portrait of the subject, Chief Bokani, was previously shown as an ethnographic “specimen” in the University’s geography department. In the context of the exhibition, the plaster bust – created by one of Wales’ foremost sculptors – encourages debates about ethics and ethnicity in art and science.
Wilson, unearthing a similar bust at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in 2005, had asked: ‘[Can we] extricate ourselves from the violence involved in acquiring these objects?’ The question remains whether “we” – as cultural institutions – can fulfil our civic mission by removing ourselves from the public discourse of reckoning? “We” have a lot to answer for if we don’t ask.
“Inconvenient Objects” so fully lived up to its title that it was ordered shut and hidden from view. The word “inconvenient” was apparently central to the university management’s claim that the show posed a reputational risk. I say “apparently” because what issues the university had with the show was never clearly – let alone directly – communicated to the curatorial team.*
Being that I also serve as the School’s “Equality Champion,” I had envisioned “Inconvenient Objects” as an opportunity to demonstrate that our University is committed to participating in the debate surrounding Black Lives Matter and the legacies of colonialism and empire in which sculptural objects such as our bust of Bokani are enmeshed. Some three thousand words of gallery texts were in place to clarify those objectives.
After nearly two months behind closed doors – a hiding away that is now part of its story – the show was once again opened to the public, and it is scheduled to remain so until 1 October 2021. With the addition of a single label, and a sign advising “viewer discretion” at the entrance, nothing has been altered. And yet, everything has changed.
Our senior curator, who designed the poster, was obliged to place the title of the exhibition in quotation marks, indicating that we do not really mean what we say or else that that “we” does not refer to representatives of our institution. In effect, the museum has been disabled from reflecting upon itself because such a critique – widely practiced elsewhere – might reflect poorly on the academic institution under which it is subsumed.
Minor adjustments though they may seem – a concession that allowed us to hold on to the title of the show – those quotation marks signal a disavowal, a lack of commitment and self-confidence. They undermine the common endeavor to mine our public museums, instead of simply minding the store, an engagement with history and civics that should be all of our business.
*Curatorial team: Audrey Corbelli, Ciara Donnellan, Eve King, Orla Mai-Riley, Farrah Nicholson, Lucia Paone-Michael, Katie Rodge and Katarzyna Rynkowska, with contributions from Cara Cullen and Sarai David, and support from Harry Heuser (text and concept) and Neil Holland (staging and design)
As a frustrated writer, or, rather, as someone who is disenchanted with the business of publishing and of ending up not reaching an audience, I have come to embrace exhibition curating as an alternative to churning out words for pages rarely turned. I teach curating for the same reason.
Staging an exhibition reminds students of the purpose of research and writing as an act of communication. Seeing an audience walking into the gallery – or knowing that anyone could stop by and find their research on display – is motivating students and encourages them to value their studies differently.
Travelling Through, installation view
As someone who teaches art history, and landscape art in particular, to students whose degree is in art practice, curating also enables me to bridge what they might experience as a gap or disconnect between practice and so-called theory, between their lives as artist and art history at large.
It also gives me a chance to make what I do and who I am feel more connected.
Angus McBean’s personal album of travel photographs featuring McBean and his gay companions (1966)
In my latest interactive and evolving exhibition, Travelling Through: Landscapes/Landmarks/Legacies (on show at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, Wales until 8 February 2019), I bring together landscape paintings, ceramics, fine art prints, travel posters and luggage labels, which are displayed alongside personal photographs, both by a famous photographer (Angus McBean) and by myself.
Here is how I tried to describe the display of those never before publicly displayed images from my personal photo albums:
Before the age of digital photography, smart phones and social media, snapshots were generally reserved for special occasions. Travelling was such an occasion.
For this collage, I rummaged through old photo albums and recent digital photographs. When I lived in New York, from 1990 to 2004, I very rarely photographed the city. All of these images either predate that period or were produced after it. The historic event of 11 September 2001 can be inferred from the presence and absence of a single landmark.
The World Trade Center is prominent in many of my early tourist pictures. Now, aware of my gradual estrangement from Manhattan, I tend to capture the vanishing of places I knew.
Plinth display of NYC, Travelling Through Me (1985 – 2018), digital and digitised photographs
For this collage, I rummaged through old photo albums and recent digital photographs. When I lived in New York, from 1990 to 2004, I very rarely photographed the city. All of these images either predate that period or were produced after it. The historic event of 11 September 2001 can be inferred from the presence and absence of a single landmark.
The World Trade Center is prominent in many of my early tourist pictures. Now, aware of my gradual estrangement from Manhattan, I tend to capture the vanishing of places I knew.
Lost New York City landmarks: Twin Towers and Gay Pier, 1987
Back in the 1980s, New York was not the glamorous metropolis I expected to find as a tourist. My early photographs reflect this experience. Most are generic views of the cityscape. Others show that I tentatively developed an alternative vision I now call ‘gothic.’ Yet unlike Rigby Graham, whose responses to landscape are displayed elsewhere in this gallery, I could never quite resist the sights so obviously signposted as attractions.
Like the personal photo album of the queer Welsh-born photographer Angus McBean, also on show in this exhibition, these pages were not produced with public display in mind. McBean’s album was made at a time when homosexuality was criminalised. It is a private record of his identity as a gay man.
I came out during my first visit to New York. The comparative freedom I enjoyed and the liberation I experienced were curtailed by anxiety at the height of the AIDS crisis.
Being away from home can be an opportunity to explore our true selves. Travelling back with that knowledge can be long and challenging journey.
Harry Heuser, exhibition curator
Pennant Tour of Wales featuring illustrations by Rigby Graham, with one of my photo albums and a collage of luggage labels from my collection beneath it.
Harry Heuser 
