Essay by: Sally O’Reilly

Undercover

For the exhibition Adam and Eve It, a two person show with Miranda Whall at London Printworks Trust.

Undercover

The word ‘camouflage’ comes from the French camoufler, meaning to mask or disguise. This probably came from camouflet, a manner of snubbing – blowing smoke up someone’s nose and thereby obscuring their features – which is possibly traceable to chault mouflet, or ‘hot face’. How fitting this etymological route is for the work of Danica Maier and Miranda Whall. Their lacy patternings camouflage flagrant scenes of desire and fulfilment – images that might indeed cause a flustered hot face.

Another word that the more prudish among us might use for sexually explicit imagery is ‘dirt’. This too is interestingly apt. Dirt, as the anthropologist’s saying goes, is simply matter out of place. In Maier & Whall’s drawings there is certainly something in the wrong place: what at first seems decorative or prim harbours quite the opposite. First, to know that something is out of place, we must establish boundaries in order to be able to tell what has transgressed those boundaries. Whall’s use of concentrically spreading patterns seem to assure us that we are in the realm of benign decoration, and Maier’s use of actual lace similarly implies prettification. Pattern, and lace in particular, has an oddly double-edged set of associations, though, from Victorian uprightness and indigenous handicrafts to sluttish ostentation. So already the ambivalent cultural history of decoration and body adornment leaves us a little unsure, perhaps, and heralds further complex transgressions.

Among other things, lace is associated with knickers, which, explains Freud, are chosen as a fetish because they ‘crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic’. A fetish object is adopted by men as a ‘substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and … doesn’t want to give up … for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger’. Whether or not you ascribe to Freud’s analyses, the depiction of pornographic imagery with formal allusions to lace is undeniably self-referential. Lacy pornography could be the über-fetishists’ holy grail.

Anne Hamlyn talks about the relationship between fetishism and textiles in her essay ‘Freud, Fabric, Fetish’:

‘The surface is a potentially dangerous ground but the fetishist’s indulgence puts paid to the idea that the firm structure of truth and the malleable surface of appearance are separate and irreconcilable entities. In doing so he/she allows for the free play of desire that is in itself a critical force to be reckoned with.’

Here innuendos are multiple, through dualisms such as hard and soft, surface and structure, social and private, fabric and nakedness, first impressions and second glances. There are so many conceptual crossings and recrossings within the work that it is difficult to unpick. Perhaps it is best to start with the narrative that each artist sets up, and the ensuing mechanics of looking that affirm them.

Both artists talk about baring the hidden, but draw on different cultural frameworks and eras, although both can be characterised by hypocrisy and latent desire. Whall’s filigree designs of masturbation and bestial titillation recall the contradictory character of Richard Dadd. It is unfathomable, when looking at his delicate paintings of fairies and foliage, to imagine that he murdered his father – but then perhaps this is not so surprising when you consider the notorious hypocrisy of the Victorian age in Britain, the vice and criminality lurking beneath the manners and moralising. An excerpt from Richard Dadd, His Journals (a novelisation of the artist’s diaries by Isaure de Saint Pierre) illuminates Dadd’s troubled understanding of himself, as if his behaviour were the result of a visitation:

‘I am not of the real world. I hate blood, I hate violence, I wish those voices would fall silent, those dreadful voices with their dreaded orders.

I will not obey!

I refuse to do it again, so what I did; that violence is not mine. I am being tricked.

A winged being lies in ambush behind every leaf, and we cannot tell for certain if it is a bird, butterfly, dragonfly, monstrous creature of the night or a fairy in its evanescent nakedness.’

Whall’s evocation of brocade and flock is also a garden inhabited by nymphs that participate more in nature than society. Maier, on the other hand, sees herself as a subversive 1950s housewife whose position in society is pivotal to the plot. Imagine a saccharine domestic scene where a serene wife and mother is working away at her needlework – but the work that she performs is not nurturing in the homely sense. Maier’s grandmother’s lace, pinned to the wall like little running fences, depict women with eyes half-closed in ecstasy, the perspective distorted anamorphically to exaggerate limbs akimbo, punctuated by orifices and nipples. Maier has a difficult relationship with her material due to its unshakable associations of decoration and femininity – although it is precisely this that enables her mode of subversion.

Whall’s uncovering of the deviants among the lupins is analogous to Maier’s nymphomaniac in the parlour, but these bifurcations seem to be a process of what is already there separating out, rather than fundamental metamorphosis. The work discloses an embedded propensity rather than something entirely transformative. Perhaps, instead of matter out of place, they signify dirt rising to the surface. The device by which this is manifest in the viewer is the double take. We see this in film when a character walks past a scene, apparently oblivious or accepting, then visibly reacts as reality registers. It may be that they realise a person is not who they are expected to be, that one apparent object is in fact another, that what is usually benign has somehow become abject, and so on. To double take is to look and look again, as complacent assumption is jolted into profound comprehension, as illusion gives way to truth. This is the tendency of the radical act, when bourgeois principals are upset. There are, however, other related mechanisms at play. Illusionism was customarily related to the devil, the trickster or the conman, and magic was originally distinguished according to three categories: miracles from God, whereby the laws of physics were suspended; Natural Magic, or the wonderful properties of earthly things; and the illusory work of the Devil. With the advent of lenses, the camera lucida and theories of visual psychology, we can add to this list the wilful mischievousness of humans. While the secularisation of culture has caused us to conflate the work of God, Nature and the Devil, it has also facilitated a massive proliferation of artificial construction. Photography and illusory deception are notoriously intertwined in the digital age, but there are still vestiges of a more ancient order of transformation in the work of Whall and Maier too.

The metamorphoses embedded in the myths of Ovid, from lover to swan, woman to tree and so on, hold allegorical relevance. As Marina Warner writes in Fantastic Metamorphosis, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2002):

‘Ovid’s picture of natural generation, assuming a universe that’s unceasingly progenitive, multiple, and fluid, organizes the relationships between creatures according to axioms of metaphorical affinity, poetic resonance, and even a variety of dream punning. Linnaeus would come along much later – more than two millennia after the ancient philosophers who influence Ovid had elevated flux to the prime mover of nature. He would propose, to the scandal of his contemporaries, that phenomena should be classified by their sex organs; it was this principle, he argued, the ability to unite and procreate, that determined identity of species. It is still the basis of species differentiation today.

But in Ovid, no such limitations impede the energies of nature or interrupt the vital continuum of all phenomena. Ovid’s biological metamorphoses include any number of disruptions of these borders…’

The ancient concept of fluid metamorphosis was interrupted by scientific reason, specifically when Linneaus delineated rules of categorisation of the natural world. Reproduction is key to this system of differentiation – although, of course, contemporary transgender issues confuse this issue, somewhat, reinstating the possibility of classic vital transformation. Warner hints at other ways that we might transcend the mechanical absolutism of rationality. Those punning dreams she speaks of seem particularly pertinent. The pun is a subgenre of wordplay – wordplay occurring when the dual meaning of a word gives rise to hilarity and a pun whereby the comical crux hinges on words merely sounding similar. Some consider punning the lowest form of wit because of its exploitation of formal similarities rather than conceptual mutation. Personally, I prefer the buffoonery of the pun and the possibility that a word from one linguistic province may tip up at any moment in the territory of any other.

As punning and wordplay require language to trespass, so a visual pun might require two visual or formal devices to come unexpectedly together. Maier’s lace pictures and Whall’s patterned panels employ such intrusions: the whorls, abstract motifs and lacy niceties also speak of heaving rumps, extended limbs, arched backs and libidinous unfurlings, while the repetition required for both patterning and sex is not lost either. Visual punning, then, is the compacting of multiple meanings into one image or the breakdown of one image into many meanings. This is similar to the two modes of camouflage (here we are, hot-faced again). The dazzle technique, formulated for ships by artists during World War I, involves a single form painted so that it is incomprehensible as a whole. The low-visibility techniques of land-based camouflage, which we are perhaps more familiar with in high-street fashion, work to the principle of hiding a figure in its ground, blending the multiple into the apparently one. (Interestingly, experimentation in camouflage techniques took place around the time that Picasso and Braque were formulating Cubism, which was a similar breakdown of the traditional figure/ground relationship.) You could describe camouflage in biological terms as the integration of gametes or the hatching of new entities, i.e. differentiation and integration or the basic modes of reproduction. Here sex and survival are intertwined at yet another level.

Whereas Whall’s approach is more that of low-visibility camouflage – the figurative pornographic elements are sumerged into pattern by our immediate willingness to consider the whole – Maier draws on the ocular methods of dazzle. The human form, whether writ large in collaged expanses of lace or small in an intricately worked doily, is fractured into constituent surfaces, lines and negative space that read in the first instance as abstraction. Maier’s work demands that you step backwards for the reveal, Whall’s that you peer more closely. And this issue of distance is amplified when you discover that Maier’s imagery comes from anonymous pornography and Whall’s is self-portraiture.

Such reveals are classic narrative fulcrums. To quote Warner again:

‘…some kinds of metamorphosis play a crucial part in anagnorisis, or recognition, the reversal fundamental to narrative form, and so govern narrative satisfaction: when the beggar maid turns out to be the foundling princess – Perdita in The Winter’s Tale for example, any number of Cinderellas, in opera, novels, as well as classic fairytales, or when the beast or the pet bird or the stricken deer turns out to be a prince under a spell. Stories of this kind promise us change too.’

In the case of Whall and Maier the moment of revelation is central in more ways than one. Either side of the visual epiphany are two very different understandings of the image, but it is impossible to revert to the original state of innocence once the truth has been realised. The revelation is indeed a seismic, gestalt-altering moment; the boundary between décor and the indecorous a one-way passage.

Sally O’Reilly