October 2024
Notes from London by Sascha Behrendt
BARBIE (a.k.a Barbara Millicent Roberts)
There is Astronaut Barbie, Firefighter Barbie, Panda Care Barbie, Down’s Syndrome Barbie, Barbie with wheelchair, The Birds’ film, Tippi Hedren, Barbie.
You name it, Mattel has done it.
Starring at the London Design Museum, is Barbie®: The Exhibition, a show that currently has five to ten year old girls in paroxysms of joy, but where also, all ages can experience the expertly choreagraphed evolution of Barbie, via 250 dolls, along with fantasy cosplay and accessories. The show’s title distinguishes itself in grandiose, brand style from the film phenomenon Barbie, a 2023 heroic update attempt by Greta Gerwig.
The museum has adroitly put a design spin on Barbie's Dreamhouses, interior decoration, and designer fashions to place more of her relevance within the wider cultural context. References abound, from Florence Knoll inspired mid-century cabinets, and a British Austin-Healey 3000 sports car, to tiny Kartell, Philippe Starck chairs in mouthwatering pinks. For fashion flamboyance, there are Barbie clothes by Oscar de la Renta, Yves St. Laurent and Richard Quinn. Even Warhol got involved with his silkscreens, Barbie, Portrait of BillyBoy* (1986).
Barbie®: The Exhibition, Installation View, 2024 Photo: Jo Underhill
However, though the exhibition included many updated modern-day Barbies, they all felt like superficial distractions from a deeper nagging question. Like, still, (annoying though this is) how does Barbie function as a role model when placed into the hands of impressionable, very young, girls?
Ruth Handler, launched her first Barbie in 1959, with a doll titled Teenage Fashion Model, which wore fuck-me mules, red lipstick, and a strapless swimming costume. The legs were twice as long as the torso, with a large bust in contrast to a tiny waist. Handler wanted a doll that looked like an ‘adult woman.’ Subsequent Barbies all sprang from this ‘ideal’ prototype, taking over in popularity from the baby dolls children played with. Barbie’s proportions, though tweaked in later special editions (for political correctness) as ‘curvy,’ nevertheless still reek of this sexualised objectification today. It has been pointed out, that if Barbie were to exist as a real woman, ‘she would have half a liver and a few inches of intestine.’
Girls do not develop their sexuality or sense of self, suddenly in adolescence. It’s an evolution from a much younger age. And in America, according to Psychology Today, ‘90% of 3 to 10-year-olds own a Barbie doll.’ Barbie subliminally taps into and lays down, pre-pubescent sexuality and feminine ideals that influence and act as forerunners to what comes later.
Barbie 1980 Black Barbie © Mattel, Inc.
1992 Totally Hair Barbie. Petra Rajnicova for the Design Museum
Someone willing to tackle the consequences of this, in a terrifying yet interesting way, is the Berlin-based artist, Anna Uddenberg. Through her life-size cast figures contorted into positions recalling BDSM submission or extreme yoga, she critiques and reflects back to us, impossible beauty standards and trappings of feminine consumerism. Oozing hyper-sexualisation, they present perfect thrust butts, slinky waists, faces unseen, buried downwards or hidden by glossy long hair. Though these faceless female forms feel interchangeable, Uddenberg’s uncannily precise, accessorization of each, is not. Like in Barbie world, the fashion choices and adornments are coded cultural signifiers of fantasy feminine value, whether pastel-shaded Crocs and athletic wear, chiffon frills, studded body harnesses, and perfect nails, with maybe a wicker basket thrown in for good measure, for a ‘nature, homely’ girl feel.
Anna Uddenberg, CORPORATE GRAY/ External Spine, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Ziedler gallery, Berlin. Photo: Stephen James
When I was a teenager, one of my first paid jobs enabling me to rent my own flat, was as a model for a mannequin company called Adel Rootstein. It was not just any company within the field. They prided themselves on making shop window dummies based on real people. Or in truth, models and actresses.
Their sculptor, John, re-created life-size replicas of me in clay before these were cast in fibre-glass. Every part of my body was scrutinized, measured, and compared using calipers. My memories are more of the lovely philosophical conversations John and I had whilst he created my döppelgangers, than of the reality that I had anorexia at the time. Ironically, this was necessary in order for me to even get a job like that — to meet the industry criteria.
When, many years later, healthy in body and spirit, I dropped by to say hello to John, one of the first things he said was, “Oh, you put on weight.” Luckily, the conversations questioning life and art, rather than those warped ideas about feminine standards, were what I took with me into my future.
Barbie®: The Exhibition, sets out to celebrate the progression of Barbie, and stylistically, yes, there is her ingenuity in navigating the decades to enjoy. Yet, unwittingly, the show also reveals how little has changed, through Mattel's dependence on presenting Barbie's outer image, exaggerated beauty, and consumption of symbols of wealth, to make continual, successful sales.
As Uddenberg’s work explores, an underlying persisting narrative is one where women’s sexuality, desirability, and power lie in being viewed and valued as a commodity to be packaged and fed back to society. To serve as reflections, but also consumers, of unrealistic collective fantasies.
Anna Uddenberg, CLIMBER (Peasant Pull), 2021. Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Ziedler gallery, Berlin. Photo: Stephen James
August 2024
Notes from London by Sascha Behrendt
brecht: fragments
If one wants to be jolted out of one’s usual, comfortable way of seeing art, then Raven Row’s recent exhibition will confound, unsettle, and do the job.
In this luxuriously unusual show, brecht:fragments shares rare excerpts from the Berlin archives of avant-garde dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht, alongside twice daily live performances of his experimental plays from 1924 to 1931.
Born in Germany in 1898, Brecht experienced the societal upheavals of World War I and II. He fled the Nazis after the Reichstag burnt down, living in exile in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland before traveling via Russia, to California. He ended his final years in the German Democratic Republic, his work feted in Paris and London, more than the GDR.
An artist-intellectual who wrote poems daily, Brecht sought to combine through his Epic Theatre, both Marxist politics, and culture, using the art of theatre entertainment as a Trojan horse to provoke and engage public audiences into thinking about deeper societal issues and inequalities. His goal was to ‘make the familiar strange’ (Verfremdung) to disrupt the viewer’s passive, consuming relationship towards what they saw, into one of critical inquiry and new ideas.
Raven Row presents in glass cases and on walls, fragments of Brecht's newspaper collages, notes, and photographs that reveal the obsessive methodology behind his work. Photos of a fierce, proud head-scarfed young folk woman, are alongside Renee Falconetti as Jean of Arc, a child asleep on the father’s shoulder, mugshots of murderers, Hitler’s physical stances, or a lavish illustration from the epic 16th c Persian Shahnama (Book of Kings). All were meticulously pasted by Brecht onto paper sheets to record gestures, body language, and faces as sources of inspiration. Brecht utilised physical actions, rather than just words alone, to communicate his ideas.
Exhibition view, brecht: fragments, Raven Row, 2024, Photograph by Marcus Leith
Detail: BBA 0277:037, brecht: fragments, Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin and Raven Row, 2024
At Raven Row, actors performed fragments from four of his plays, while roaming around the gallery. I discovered, during these 90 minutes, that Brecht’s work was funny and absurd; the actors were purely ‘signifiers’ for ideas, not actual embodiments of real people.
Die Sinflut (The Flood) a play applicable to our current environmental crisis, was dramatized crammed on the stairs, with the audience as participants and witnesses to disaster. In Fleischhacker, actors outlined the shady dealings of Stock Futures wheat markets, with costume bullheads and an electric piano, while we were shooed from room to room.
Ensemble and solo singing, and direct speech disrupted any lulled, audience rapture. The actors were superb, bringing carefully calibrated intensity and comic physical flourishes to the ‘characters’ they represented. Der Brotladen (The Breadshop) the most enjoyable play, sketched out a tale of economic exploitation amongst rising inflation with a lying baker, his desperate worker (homeless mother) a shifty landlord, and a preachy Salvation Army girl.
brecht: fragments performance, Raven Row, 2024, Photographer: Anne Tetzlaff
brecht: fragments performance, Raven Row, 2024, Photographer: Anne Tetzlaff
Like modern fables for adults, but not following the rules, Brecht's plays deliberately stop the spectator from being carried along, hypnotized by the story. Instead, unfair situations and relationship twists are emphasized in hilarious dramatic form, but through the distancing effects of caricature, one cannot emotionally attach to the protagonists. Watching them, I was both moved and discombobulated, because my senses and expectations were not being met. Genres were subverted and I had to think why.
Brecht hoped future artists would recreate and re-construct his works as needed. Here, in brecht: fragments, director and curator Phoebe von Held, and co-curators Tom Kuhn, Alex Sainsbury and Iliane Thiemann, intertwine Brecht’s aesthetics as visuals, text, and live plays, to fulfil that desire.
The show also makes one pause and consider the times we are in. Brecht wanted to encourage viewers to develop critical thinking, to ‘make the familiar strange again.’ As we wrestle with issues of disinformation and polarised politics, accelerated by social media and AI, his attempts through art, to get individuals to wake up and critically question how they think and want to live, seem so prescient.
I left, grateful, that Raven Row can afford and has the inclination, to put on odd, profound, unfashionable shows like this, when few others dare. I enjoyed being shaken up.
brecht: fragments performance, Raven Row, 2024, Photographer: Anne Tetzlaff
May 2024
Notes from London by Sascha Behrendt
Anne Hardy: Survival Spell
Anne Hardy likes to play with the uncanny. Over two exhibition spaces, the British artist shifted from immersive environments and installations into something more pointed and figurative. She is interested in the fringes and edges of things and how that shows up in psychic and physical ways. Unafraid of creating liminal and ambiguous spaces, her installations are about emotional and visceral experiences and what is brought to these with one’s presence. So, there was a switch in this exhibition, with lone figures created out of Hardy’s clothing. With Being (Interloper), 2023-24, we see a mysterious hooded figure, extruding a metallic and bone tail, snaked by the surrounding earth. Both poignant and shamanistic, we are aware of a human form, elusive and possibly sinister, yet connected to natural forces. Being (Immaterial), 2023-24 was an assemblage of blue jeans, white pointy boots, and clouds of swirling fine wire replacing a head and torso. Fragments of stones formed patterns that resembled the skeletal bones of a hand, branches were placed on steel and polished pewter, with rusty metal and dried plants, all these pointing to a pulling back into the unknowable, trusting force of ‘nature.’ At a time of mass accountability, quantification, and data sets, it’s not a new sentiment, but very valid.
Anne Hardy, Being (Interloper), artist’s clothes, tin cans crushed by trucks outside the studio, welded steel, cast pewter, cast jesmonite, jewellery, earth, wood, wire, 115 × 55 × 360 cm – 45 1/4 × 21 5/8 × 141 3/4 in, 2022–24
Anne Hardy, Being (Immaterial), detail, artists clothes, rusted wire, shells, welded steel, jesmonite, jewellery, cast concrete, bronze, pewter, white metal, dried plant, earth, 82 × 116 × 130 cm – 32 1/4 × 45 5/8 × 51 1/8 in, 2023 – 2024
April 2024
Notes from London by Sascha Behrendt
Entangled Pasts: 1768 to Now
Britain’s relationship to colonialism and slavery makes the title of this exhibition loaded words indeed. The Royal Academy was founded in 1768 by architects and art stars, including Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, at a time when slavery had yet to be abolished. The Academy grew over centuries to become a bastion of tradition, the epitome of the British establishment. I had steeled myself before going to see the show, feeling a sense of duty rather than an anticipation of being surprised or enlightened.
The very first room demanded hushed attention, with its dark, octagonal rotunda revealing a dramatic spot-lit, black bust at its center, overlooked by mirrors. Flanking the walls were portraits by Kerry James Marshall, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Singleton Copley. All of the Black subjects were magnificently painted. It was both exhilarating and unsettling, so unused are we to glimpsing rare paintings like these to experience the technical virtuosity of these skilled painters, but of people historically erased and forced out of sight. Yet despite the precision of the brush marks, sitters still lacked proper identities. Reynold’s painting’s title was Portrait of a Man, Probably Francis Barber (c 1770). John Singleton Copley’s sensitive rendering of an unknown sitter was so full of vitality and yet sadness, vastly superior to any of his schmaltzy, overwrought epic sea dramas elsewhere in the exhibition. Copley himself was a slave owner.
Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA, Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber, c. 1770, Oil on canvas. 78.7 x 63.8 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston.
John Singelton Copley RA, Head of a Man, 1777/78, Oil on canvas. 53.3 x 41.3 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Gibbs-Williams Fund. Photo © Detroit Institute of Arts
Other notable works of the 100 on show include Hew Locke’s poignant Armada (2017-2019), a flotilla of model ships suspended in poetic formation. Akua’s Surviving Children (1996) by El Anatsui was an unexpected installation of what looked like charred and water-ravaged wood, precariously balanced, as perhaps spiritual grave markers, referring to the sea and the Middle Passage. Other artists included J.M.W Turner, Betye Saar, Frank Bowling, Kara Walker, Keith Piper, John Akomfrah, Kehinde Whiley, and Lubaina Himid. All works were intelligent choices due to the rigor of the curatorial contexts given.
Since Black Lives Matter, art institutions in the United States have started the work to address those unheard and unseen, even if it is still vastly inadequate, with shows like Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility (2024) at the Guggenheim, Barkley l. Hendricks (2023) at the Frick Collection, and Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (2024) at the American Folk Art Museum.
Bravo to the co-curators of this Royal Academy show, Dorothy Price and Dr. Esther Chadwick, both art historians and specialists on visual culture and the transatlantic slave trade. They avoided just juxtaposing the usual Black art stars with history. Instead, they made thoughtful past and present connections with the few fragmented artifacts available, beginning the necessary questioning of Britain’s relationship to its past and Empire from the inside.
Lubaina Himid RA, Naming the Money, 2004, Mixed media installation with sound, dimensions variable. National Museums Liverpool, International Slavery Museum, Gift of Lubaina Himid, 2013. Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London and National Museums, Liverpool © Spike Island, Bristol. Photo: Stuart Whipps
March 2024
Notes from London by Sascha Behrendt
Ptolemy Mann: Colour/Light/Movement
Ptolemy Mann, Soho Days, 2023, liquid watercolor, gouache, acrylic, on arches cotton paper. Courtesy of the artist and Union Club. Photo: Roz Arratoon
Ptolemy Mann, The Blue Hour (Lateral Orange), 2020, liquid watercolor, gouache, acrylic, on arches cotton paper. Courtesy of the artist and Union Club. Photo: Roz Arratoon
Spontaneous, lush colored paintings on canvas and paper by Ptolemy Mann were shown in an intimate space upstairs at the Union Club in Soho, London. Her works brought to mind a more optimistic and sensitive Howard Hodgkin, with their singing color juxtapositions and fluid gestural strokes. Mann has been expanding her usual practice of formal color field panels, made of dip-dyed threads woven using the Ikat method into large shimmering abstractions, adding layers of spontaneous paint. Those particular woven/paint works were not shown here, nevertheless one can enjoy Mann’s breakout energy released with relish in paint alone — after years tending with discipline to her loom. While hefty exhibitions, such as The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, ran recently at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, with artists such as Cecilia Vicuna, Tau Lewis, and Mrinalini Mukherjee, Colour/ Light/Movement was a tiny jewel of a show, and Mann the textile artist already updating her field, here, showed us the other side of her talents.
Ptolemy Mann, Soho Spectrum, 2023, liquid watercolor, gouache, acrylic, on arches cotton paper. Courtesy of the artist and Union Club. Photo: Roz Arratoon
Barbie®: The Exhibition
The Design Museum
July 5 - February 23, 2024
brecht: fragments
Raven Row
June 15 - August 18, 2024
Anne Hardy: Survival Spell
MAUREEN PALEY
6 April 6 - May 19, 2024
Entangled Pasts: 1768 to Now
Royal Academy of the Arts
February 3 - April 28, 2024
Ptolemy Mann: Colour/Light/Movement
The Union Club
March 26 - May 17, 2024
Editor Sascha Behrendt is a writer with an in-depth knowledge of arts and culture in the US and UK. Interviews and profiles include artists Stan Douglas, Arthur Jafa, Sakiko Nomura, Walter Van Beirendonck, Francesca Woodman and Wolfgang Tillmans. She writes for the Sasson Soffer Foundation in New York, and is currently working on a comedy thriller novel.