Clifford Hall’s painting ‘The Girl with a Cat’
which now belongs to The Arts Council Collection (Southbank Centre, London), is currently on display in Birmingham, in an exhibition called Too Cute! Sweet is about to get Sinister curated by multi-media artist Rachel Maclean.
On entering the exhibition, the first thing one encounters, in a darkened vestibule, is a loud and garish ‘interpretative’ video, specially made for the show by Maclean herself in which she plays the role of a really rather scary and constantly distracted sort of Care Bear character with blue skin, a pink heart-shaped nose, serrated teeth and fluffy ears, wearing a bight yellow wig, who is called ‘Dr Cute’.
There is a trailer for this video on YouTube:
Hysterical stuff. Eh?
Given this deliberately shocking introduction, it is hardly surprising that many of the exhibits which follow are quite grotesque and bizarre: some, no doubt, indeed deliberately so, and others, perhaps, quite unwittingly.
Frankly, it all leaves me feeling both deeply puzzled and strangely delighted that Rachel should have included my father’s painting in such a panoply of startling oddities, both old and new.
In one corner I spot a tiny creature, who has been perched on top of a square yellow pole inside a glass case, that reminds me of a little Mister Potato Head toy from McDonald’s c. 1995ish for some reason – but it turns out to be an Ancient Egyptian ‘mud monkey’, c. 2000-1800 BC, with faience beads for eyes. Oh dear, I do so beg its pardon!
A portrait in oils of the ‘Official Rat Catcher to the City of Birmingham’, by Arthur Charles Shorthouse (1870–1953), posing with a fierce white ferret on his shoulder and his wee sweet doggie leaning its head lovingly against his knee, along with a pile of dead rats by his other knee, is a curiously macabre artefact of local historical interest. You can tell the man loved his work.
Then there are several examples of the taxidermist’s ‘art’ on display: a bright-eyed wildcat, an angry mink and a pathetic little hamster on its haunches: creepy looking string puppets, strange little dolls and a ventriloquist’s dummy stuffed in a trunk. Will he break free of the gaffer-taped black bin bag that encases his body and leap victoriously out of his prison?- or will he just struggle in vain to free himself until he can struggle no more?
Oh, don’t be so silly! He’s not really alive – or is he? I could swear I saw him move just a moment ago…..
Images of children, mainly in the form of paintings and drawings, also abound. Boisterous boys, some advertising Bird’s Custard Powder of all things, and frightened looking girls, are the most memorable of these images. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, clutching her wicker basket close to her chest, by George Frederic Watts, is a minor masterpiece of Victorian painting – it manages to be both overtly sentimental and profoundly disturbing, when you look into the poor little mite’s eyes. So, indeed, ‘In illo tempore 1: 1994’ by Anna Maria Pacheco, with its timorous little girl surrounded by a gaggle of nightmarish creatures is an all too obvious fit for such an exhibition as this in which the happiest looking little girls that I can recall seeing were actually a couple of fairly boisterous little red-haired boys from the 18th century, playing at being agricultural labourers whilst dressed in their pretty, matching ivory coloured, skirts with silken blue sash belts- ‘The Blunt Children’ by Johann Zoffany. As one might expect, Zoffany’s meticulous attention to detail when rendering the lovely green foliage of the English countryside is most admirable.
Meanwhile, a noisy Heather Phillipson installation clamours for our attention in another corner. Ah yes, this is a piece of ‘Contemporary Art’. I don’t really get it. Is it trying to say something about sexual violence and social anxiety in the modern world? The way that gun is placed and aimed is really rather perturbing. An all too obvious visual metaphor is it not? – for a phallus bereft of love and consideration.
And then, in the opposite corner, above a now motionless automaton of a monkey playing the violin, hangs ‘The Girls with a Cat’. Such a calm and peaceful picture – at least in my eyes. I can imagine her saying to Saha (that was the cat’s name), ‘Well, what do you make of all this then, Puss?’
And of course, Saha just goes on gazing back at her enigmatically.
What a wise, serene and beautiful animal she was! My father adored her, and cried when she died – but I’m sure he never thought of her as ‘cute’.
Too Cute! Sweet is about to get Sinister can be experienced at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery from 26 January 2019 until 12 May 2019. Various associated merchandise for the show is available from the Museum Shop on Level 2.