Helen Chadwick: Constructing Identities Between Art and Architecture 9780755603367, 9781780760070

Citation preview

to Julia, Felix and Benjamin

Illustrations

All works by Helen Chadwick. All images © Leeds Museums & Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive) and The Helen Chadwick Estate 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Examples of Chadwick’s notebooks and books from her library Menstrual Toilet, 1975–6 In the Kitchen, 1977 Model Institution, 1981–4 Train of Thought, 1978–9 Le Bateleur from her Notebook 2003.19/E/5.88–9 The Juggler’s Table, 1983 Eroticism, 1990 Enfleshing I, 1989 The Philosopher’s Fear of Flesh, 1989 Of Mutability, 1986–7 Viral Landscapes, 1988–9 Ego Geometria Sum, 1983–5 Nostalgie de la Boue, 1989 Piss Flowers, 1991–2 Cacao, 1994

xvi 3 4–5 7–9 13–17 25 28 88 89 91 112–13 142–3 166–7 182 188–9 190

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, the staff there including Penelope Curtis, Martina Droth, Ellen Tait and Jon Wood, and in particular to thank the archivists Victoria Worsley, Ian Kaye and Claire Mayoh. Jeremy Till and Andrew Ballantyne gave their advice and support during the formative stages of this research, and Louisa Buck and Ashley Givens provided their help with particular details on the way through. I am very grateful to Andrew Benjamin, Mark Haworth-Booth, and in particular Philip Stanley and Marina Warner, all of whom generously gave time to discuss their personal recollections of Helen Chadwick. At I.B.Tauris, I would like to thank Philippa Brewster, Liza Thompson and Alex Higson for their enduring support throughout the process of publication. Annie Jackson was once again a patient and sympathetic proofreader. I would also like to thank Florance and David Notarius from the Estate of Helen Chadwick for generously granting image rights, and the editors of AMBIT magazine for their permission to reproduce Chadwick’s articles. Finally, I am grateful to the Henry Moore Institute for their financial support during my initial archival research, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Research Leave Grant that was invaluable for the writing of this book.

Preface

The artist Helen Chadwick (1953–96) produced such a diverse range of work it is not possible to name a ‘typical’ piece or say for what she is best know. Perhaps her Piss Flowers or her chocolate fountain Cacao, or her photographic works Viral Landscapes or Meat Abstracts or Wreaths to Pleasure, or her operatic installations Ego Geometria Sum or Of Mutability. Her impact in the art world remains similarly hard to pin down; the first woman nominee for the Turner Prize, some-time broadcaster, curator, teacher and mentor, her contemporaries and younger generations of artists frequently acknowledge her influence. Yet despite such acknowledgements, or perhaps because of such diversity, her realised work has never really established a place for itself in the public eye. It might be said that she was an artist slightly out of her time. Work that was controversial and experimental when it was produced now seems too easily accepted; her work was far too prescient for its own good. While most art-historical reception of Chadwick’s work has understandably concentrated on her realised projects (and within these, the later projects such as those just mentioned), her notebooks reveal the extent to which these were informed by expansive research work and theoretical developments that were as creative as the realised pieces. Considered through this lens, her apparently diverse œuvre becomes far more coherent: life-long preoccupations were tirelessly explored, interrogated and developed in concert with her artistic making. Nevertheless, it is not my intention to demonstrate such consistency in this book, although it might emerge as something of a by-product. My primary concern is to enjoy the range, depth and continuing currency of Chadwick’s research and theoretical positioning. Chasing one of her enduring preoccupations—the construction and maintenance of personal identity—Chadwick’s work can offer insights into a number of major, enduring questions: the relationship between body, space, self and world;

PREFACE

xi

between art and science; between artifice and nature; between theory and practice, creative self and creative process. Chadwick was as witheringly critical of the damage done to people by monotonous physical surroundings as she was of the impact of limiting political, philosophical and scientific constructions. Never backing away from a fight, she was determined to find ways of renegotiating our relationship with and understanding of the world, even if this meant taking on the whole of the Western tradition: !"#$%"&'()*()'%+,$-($.*/$0"$*$1)((1"$&2*%3$('$41*).$('$(2/$('$3)+.*%(1"$*%3$ '5(.*%'"562"$(7"$#"+("2%$)%7"2)(*%4"$82'.$91*('$('$:"+4*2("+$('$;2"53$