by Lucy Harbron: art

Thank You Darling - One Day's Notes On Anger

By Lucy Harbron - 18:02

“a play on apparent cliched stereotypes of femininity, but her work has a depth and toughness…”

- Lily Van Der Stokker, 'Thank You Darling' at Camden Art Centre

Staring at the big wall of flowers trying to decipher darker meanings felt apt today – when the world is talking about wombs and the ownership of them changing hands. I wanted to find some comfort, something soft and feminine, made by our hands for our eyes, whispering like mums to daughter ears, friend to friend. Leaving the house, I felt the familiar pang of cramping and today I hated myself for taking it for granted – the nothingness I feel towards if it comes or doesn’t, tracking so laxly that the whole app is pretty pointless, I’ve just been letting my body tell me without listening too intently. On Twitter, people are talking about ways to safely track your hormones without the government knowing, and I hope I don’t bleed through my white jeans.

But in my fantasies, I do, create a pool around me right here on the overground, today of all days. Stain shoes, walk red across London, make it brutal.

Someone should write a dystopia in which a period is illegal and watch it make people squirm. Not because it hits too close too home, but just because of the descriptions of blood. I would make it so gory. Have the main character sneeze and write monologues about the flood; clotting and metallic.

I thought about it all train journey while mindlessly clicking through infographics that managed to break through their usual numbness. I reshared some but no one know what else to do.

Spanning years with big pastel walls, I walked slowly waiting for one of the slogans to hit me. All about babies and loads and cohabitation, I think it’d be better on any other day when a soothed mind could find space to introspect on midgrounds between joy and regret, peace and anger, sweetness and snark. But on a big blank canvas housing only the world “childcare”, I wanted to write an essay. Wanted to scribble on the entry notes that every and any ounce of femininity is always deep and tough – there’s no addition needed, no active thought. I wanted to scream that you could hang a single pan, a spray of perfume, handbag lint or hairbrush strays and find toughness; only no one would talk about it because it wasn’t labelled, invited into the higher canon of art and then made so. I wanted to say something about how the daily acts and thoughts of women shouldn’t always have to be annotated for someone to see the depth.

I’m still thinking about an argument I had with a bar on Instagram over a neon sign, the day making me brave to stand up to something, I wanted to fight. “Normalise Sex Work” – thank you, businessman. With each Love Island boy standing in the pink light, do you feel the world change? Do you lock up every night with the credit in coin bags, making thoughtful change through silly porn names?

I’ll be considering comebacks for three more days, contemplating how womanhood is a currency for everyone but us to spend. Expected to analyse worth worn into every tiny top, while 30-year-old men aestheticize safety, and at 60 they’ll take cash to kill us. Caving in our rights till there’s no choice but to curl up, clutch tummies, self-soothe and die.

A wall says nothing but “thanks” in a field of flowers. “Thanks for affirming we’re on the right path, Lucy”, the bar said to my criticism. The most cutting tone I could muster purposefully misread and shot back at me like girlie politeness. At 24, why am I so used to this? Raised knowing we can never win, but isn’t it sweet to play nice, share toys, brush hair, make your dolls kiss, turn into them. Make-believe your entire life so when something happens you can’t articulate your feelings outside yourself, say “please” and “thank you”, smile and then shut the fuck up.

I’ve never hit anyone but my sister. I’ve never screamed without reserve. Even when I cut myself, people cared about the visible impact, soaked my arm in lavender oil and prayed the upset wouldn’t show on my skin.

Sat in a garden with a gin and cake, I could throw the glass onto the concrete and howl. But I won’t. I wouldn’t know how.

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andy warhol

Perfect Warholian Messiness | Andy Warhol @ TATE

By Lucy Harbron - 11:16

I’ve dedicated a fair amount of time to Warhol. I’ve read his books, slogged my way through his diary, forced myself to sit through several hours of his ‘anti-films’, and found myself hooked on any literature I can find to give me another view of the enigmatic icon. Every knows Andy Warhol but nobody knows him. After hours and hours dedicated, I still can’t make my mind up as to whether he was the social butterfly of the 60s scene or the ‘ambulatory black hole’ the Grateful Dead deemed him. Within a year I’ve moved from writing about the beauty of his friendship with Edie, to writing essays about his manipulation, to settling into an ongoing obsession with his multiplicity as no matter how much I read, I’m unable to pin down a personality for the icon. You can picture him so easily in your mind, pull up mental images of his works that are recreated world-wide, know the easy quotes off by heart, he feels like the easiest artist ever, but once you get into it, the image quickly blurs.

The more I started reading and watching, I got the feeling that Andy was laughing at us all from beyond the grave, desperately trying to find some meaning in his ‘wow yeah’ rhetoric and half-smirking answers proclaiming himself ‘empty’. With his most famous work being so simple and specifically made as a screen-print to be recreated as quickly and easily as possible, the over-arching legacy of Warhol is one of thoughtless living room prints and vapid American-dream myths, but I think his genius is in making us fall for that.

While so much has been written about every and all artists, it seems that none are aware and crafting of their legacy as Andy Warhol was. Though he famously said that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, Andy, who would’ve been 92 this year, secured his place in immortality and worked for it. Furiously recording his every thought through transcribed diaries, surrounding himself with photographers to capture every glamorous factory moment, even half-joking that after dying he’d allow his name to be used on anything that will make money, Warhol’s fleeting fame obsession and product-frenzy are immediately complicated.

I think I’ve settled into a love for it, stopped trying to pin him down into one thing, or characterise him as good or bad, but loving him for the messy multiplicity of his self and the self he made. Walking around the Tate exhibition, I forced myself to not get hooked on the sharp question mark corners of assumptions about the figure, simple staring starry-eyed at the scale of his work and silliness of his persona.

Even writing this is tricky, never knowing what path to take here. I don’t envy the Tate staff that had to sit down and craft a path round Warhol’s legacy, deciding which works to focus on and which parts to not. I had moments of love and hate in the exhibition. I loved the immediacy of the reminder that Warhol was once Varchola, careful to introduce the artist as an immigrant born into poverty, and not the capitalist All-American artist that the Make America Great Again age could morph into something sinister and wrong. In this, his simplest works get an immediate context; the soup cans seem brighter than ever when you’re reminded that Warhol’s early years were fed on watered-down ketchup. I loved the companion quotation of ‘a coke is a coke is a coke’, reframing pop-art as ‘commonism’, reminding you that American culture of Cola and Elvis transgress class and economy.

I had questions about the narrative of Warhol as a ‘shy gay man’, purposefully seeming to pull out his most erotic images, and choosing to display his film Sleep, a 6 hour still shot of a man sleeping. One Google search and you’ll find claims that Warhol was gay, bisexual, asexual, celibate and in a relationship with pretty much every single person he did a portrait of, meanwhile, Warhol himself said nothing about his sexuality. I was confused by the continuous references to his queerness mixed in with the reminders that Warhol purposefully and regularly distanced himself from the Gay Liberation movement, known for standing for pretty much nothing and finding politics a bore.

I hated the hero-worshipping energy of it all. In a small corridor you’re towered over by a portrait of Warhol’s scars, walking you through the experience of his shooting with little to no context beyond one page of the S.C.U.M manifesto, brushing over it as Warhol was shot by a radical feminist that wanted to kill all men. The absence of Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol’s biggest muses and original superstar felt like an active erasure of the more exploitative sides of Warhol as a man that didn’t pay anyone and obsessively captures his friends' mental declines, choosing to show Sleep rather than Beauty No.2, a film of him grilling a drugged up Sedgwick about her sexual abuse while forcing a male model to kiss her. Instead, filling the exhibition with the 60s soundtrack of The Velvet Underground and funny moments from his TV appearances seemed to want to keep you in the narrative of Warhol and his friends as a group of faultless coolness and antics.

But the likes and dislikes made it perfectly messy.

While I stood in front of his 6-foot towering Elvis, my friend stared into the face of a corpse, repeated over and over. An intense car crash complete with splayed bodies reflected into his glossy flowers, his Brillo boxes sat pretty next to a recreation of a newspaper that screamed ‘129 DIE IN JET!’. The Tate, in attempting to carve a covid-friendly one-way path round Warhol’s identity, perfectly captured the manic light changes of his work, from his pop-culture obsession being the thinnest line away from morbid wallpapers of disasters and suicides. My friend was shocked, looking at the repeated print of a paused moment before a woman jumped to her death, never knowing that Warhol was so dark. I hear him laugh again from his final resting place, he tricked us. Writing a 2-sentence chapter on Death his The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist said simply ‘I don’t believe in it’, a complete lie from a man that dedicated a large majority of his career to studies of electric chairs, skeletons, dead bodies and mourning celebrities.

And that sums it up perfectly. Warhol left us with a mess of an identity that he knew we’d never decipher and settle for something chic and simple. He made a product of himself that was so shiny and consumable that we’re willing to brush over all the rest, showing us up to be the filthy capitalists and consumers we all are.

Stood near enough with my nose on the glass, I stared at the mistakes. In his flowers, you can sit little patches that missed a second coat. In 129 die, you can see the tracking lines for the typography and where he went over them. In his Marilyn Diptych, some of the faces are distorted or lines duplicated. All these little details won’t make the cut in your living room print, no.1084903858 to be made of that print. Maybe Warhol knew he could get away with messiness because when you’re dealing with celebrities, or products, or the American dream, it will always be blurred or simplified into perfection. Or maybe it was all purposeful and meaningful as some critics say, that Warhol duped us all with funny statements hiding the deep artistic and poetic thought behind his repeated Monroes. Or maybe Warhol himself didn’t know, didn’t care enough to think about it, just wanted to make his pictures and have his parties and capture the things and people he liked and get paid for it.

For better or worse, the Tate exhibition serves as proof that we’ve blown Warhol up to a god-like status, displaying his silver wigs in a case like ancient relics. And you can see that however you wish. A statement of our obsession with celebrity culture. A celebration of how an immigrant can become an American icon. A sad image of societies simplification of art. Or a shrine to our shared love for pretty, shiny things; a coke is a coke is a coke and we all love it, stare up at the nice pictures and say simply, ‘oh yeah’, ‘wow’, ‘gee whiz yes!’.

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Sappho : Thoughts from Manchester Art Gallery...

By Lucy Harbron - 19:02

So many are pulled here, heard the call to arms to sit at the feet of the lost and lonely, to give Sappho their tears are she stays frozen on the brink of her own, whispering; remember whom you leave shackled by love, in a glass frame, on a wall in Manchester. Heartache on display, on tour for the lonely hearts to see. Sitting in front of her and I feel the need to confess my sorrows, show my own in return for hers, given unwillingly. Sitting in front of her and I want to strip myself bare, tear off my clothes for her, place myself under her eyes, my hand on the glass and try to hold the cold paint from which she was made, unknowing. Sitting in front of her and I feel some sense that her soul was left locked in the likelihood, left waiting for love to return for which she will raise her gaze and finally, weep.

Until then I don’t want to speak. I wish for the room to fall silent, for the guide in the corner to stop trying to explain in any words other than her own. While the lovers no longer sing their song, we have no right to sing along, so sit down. Shut up. Only hum the refrain silently in your head for all the goodbyes and unwilling exits made. Remember in secret the cold stones your feet have felt, the waiting on cliffs for a return that never came. Hear the sound of the funeral you made of that love. Don’t taunt her with vocalisation, shh. No chorus here, no choir singing, just silent soloists naturally knowing the words hidden behind painted skin.

Where do your eyes fall? Not to the chest but to the arm. The lean of longevity, still staying stood and patient, respectful to the possibility of reunion and the ceremony it would deserve. To the bare feet of abandon, of rushing out of the house, of chasing her down the street, of pavements and stones and coals you’d step on to bring her home, of how unexpected it was that she left, of how unprepared you were for this. To the eyes, tired and stinging stoney, paused in the moment before the flood and disallowed the relief of it, averted from those that try to meet them, that dare try to relate to this pain, this image of love unknown but certainly gone. She keeps us distant as if her gaze would show some paradise, a memory she must ration for only herself.

Turned to the sea she begs for relief, for permission to cry or die or something, to not be confined to here, this feeling, this place, this wall in Manchester where onlookers try to explain in words other than her own, make a mockery of her pain as they wrap arms around lovers at the foot of her stone. She begs to be left alone.