Beehives and Becky Sharp

Since last Autumn, there's been one beehive that I haven't been able to get out of my mind. Not Gaga's gravity-defying riot of lilac, Joan Holloway's chic sweep, or even - I'm embarrassed to admit - Tracy Turnblad's hair-hopping hootenanny. No, my mind always returns to the elegant up-do of London-based gallerist Maureen Paley.


I'd first read about Paley in the preview Issue 0 of The Gentlewoman, where she talks of her love for Sissinghurst and Vita Sackville-West's gardens ('very inspirational'), setting up her first gallery in her Hackney home in 1984, and her inimitable beehive. She comes across as a forthright businesswoman, but what's really affecting is her sense of emotion and wonder. I've never been more tempted to see an astrologer than after reading Paley's description of seeing a Jungian psychologist who reads the stars scientifically. 'It was like consulting an oracle', Paley says, 'she described a huge task I would undertake'. But the accompanying Paul Wetherall portraits really consolidated my appreciation for Maureen and her mop - attained simply by backcombing and hairspray.

Is admiration for a hairstyle a justifiable reason for visiting a gallery? That remains to be seen - but I can certainly think of worse motives. Last week, I trotted down to Bethnal Green to check out Donald Urquhart's Bi at Maureen Paley's two adjacent galleries. Urquhart has fascination with divas of yesteryear - literary heroines, silver-screen stars and faded icons. His stark black-and-white drawing style recalls graphic 1940s Hollywood publicity shots, but it also has a hand-drawn emotionality reminiscent of comic books.

Before achieving recognition as an artist, Donald Urquhart had been a postman, fashion journalist and party promoter. When he was rejected from Glasgow Art School in the 80s, he travelled from his native Scotland to become a part of the thriving London performance art scene headed up by Leigh Bowery. In the 90s he ran a club night called The Beautiful Bend, which brought his first taste of success in the art world. At The Beautiful Bend, Urquhart plastered the club walls with photocopied line-drawings of gay characters, gothic plague-doctors and camp heroines. It was only a matter of time before his work was spotted by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, and later she of the beehive herself, Maureen Paley.

Bi is a curious title for an art exhibition. On the surface, it refers to the fact that this show takes back in two different spaces, a couple of doors down the road from each other. But it the name is also reflective of the diversity of Urquhart's subject matter - as he says, 'biographical works as well as an array of bitter pieces, instructional wall charts and studies in style.' Urquhart combines elements from disparate sources to create a new enquiring subject.

Take, for example, Urquhart's new muse in Bi - Becky Sharp, the mendacious anti-heroine of Vanity Fair. In Urquhart's portraits, Becky appears as Bette Davis, whose acid-tongued persona is a perfect fit for the character.

The drawings of Bette in the role function as a trailer for a Davis-starring Vanity Fair adaptation that doesn’t exist. We all know the feeling of building up our own (often inaccurate) picture of what a fictional character looks like, and creating our own visions of the person in our mind's eye. Urquhart gives us a glimpse into his own private adaptation, fusing the real and the fictional in order to create something that is ambiguous in its could-have-been-ness. Urquhart's vision is essentially a more subtle version of Francesco Vezzoli’s Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula, a teaser for a movie that never has and never will exist.

His Joan Crawford As Mildred Pierce is a stark, flattened-out representation of the star - but this is no Warhol's Marylin. Whereas Warhol made Monroe luridly reproducible as a comment on her commodification, Urquhart re-infuses Crawford's image with humanity and vulnerability. His work recalls scrapbook doodlings of movie stars - complete with epigrammatic quotations – and each piece bears the marks of love and affection. None of this is beyond a joke, though, and you only have to look at his 2007 Joan Crawford Alphabet (F for ‘Fuck-me pumps, anyone?) to see that Urquhart gets it.

Fundamentally, Urquhart is interested in the women behind the image. His admiration is not for the glossy surface- his fetish is for the real, often tragic, people beneath. His Little Edie is tender, not grotesque; his Crawford is poised, ready for whatever the world has to throw at her. In Bi, we experience Urquhart's heroines as idiosyncratically as he does, and are encouraged to join him in appreciation.

Bi by Donald Urquhart is at Maureen Paley until 23 May.

For more on Donald Urquhart, check out his excellent article Four Women in MAP.

[Below: Little Edie Flower, 2007; Donald Urquhart at the Miami Ball of Artists, 2007]

Not Myra's Place

I almost called this blog something completely different – ‘Myra’s Place’, after Gore Vidal’s heroine Myra Breckinridge. I recently read Myra Breckinridge, and was enthralled (and half-appalled). Myra is a Hollywood-obsessed dame living in 1960s Los Angeles, and the novel takes the form of her diary. She is also – and I quote – ‘a dish, and never forget it, you mother-fuckers’.

The novel follows Myra on her quest for vengeance against the male species. You see, her recently-deceased husband Myron was a ‘fag’, and a power-bottom to the extreme who aimed to possess (straight) men by taking their forbidden cock. Alas, Myron’s insatiable lust for power (i.e. cock) just couldn’t be satisfied, and he killed himself. So Myra takes it into her hands to exercise revenge on the male species, to emasculate them and rob men of their macho supremacist bullshit for once and for all.

Sure, there’s not much that pisses me off more than macho bullshit, and I toyed with the idea of playing Myra. She is, after all, full of fascinating theories, not least her insight that between 1935 and 1945 no irrelevant film was made in the USA, and in these movies – only these – the full spectrum of the human condition can be glimpsed. But, ultimately, playing Myra was too big a task for me. I find the films of Hollywood’s Golden Age fascinating – and I plan to dedicate a number of blog entries to them – but many of them are transparently propagandistic and inane star vehicles.

So I decided to name the blog after a line from one of one of my favourite movies – the 1958 Douglas Sirk film Imitation of Life. It’s often forgotten these days, but at the time it was Universal’s highest-earning film – surpassed only by Jaws in 1975. The film is a double-headed maternal melodrama – a white mother who neglects her daughter in view of her career, and a black mother whose mixed-race daughter runs away to make her own life as ‘white.’

Let’s fact it though – Ibsen this ain’t. The script is cliché-laden and often saccharine to the point of sickliness. With a lesser director, Imitation of Life would be close to unwatchable, but through Douglas Sirk’s (Brecht-trained) lens, Imitation of Life becomes a painstaking exercise in human selfishness, claustrophobia, and miscommunication. It’s one of the most pessimistic films I’ve ever seen.

About halfway through the movie, a neckerchief-clad John Gavin confesses to Lana Turner that he’s bored of his life as an Ad Man. Flute trilling in the background, he utters the words that every homo the world over has felt at one time or another:‘Did you ever get the urge to let yourself go and follow the wind or a star, maybe even a dusty old rainbow?’ To explain the significance of the metaphor would be an insult to your intelligence.

I imagine Douglas Sirk reading this passage in the script for the first time, thinking that it was ridiculous, and what should he do? Tone it down or camp it up? He trusses Gavin up like a Christmas tree and hams up the melodramatic music – Lana Turner, of course, needs little help in looking comically expressionless.

And, like Sirk, we can react, we can laugh, we can call 'bullshit'!

This will be a blog about movies and being a homo in London, and I’m very happy to have you here.