REID GALLERY, GSA MFA INTERIM SHOW, GLASGOW

JAMIE CREWE:A MILKY BATH IN THE 60S

May 2014 — June 2014.

 

A milky bath in the 60s describes a body of work by Jamie Crewe, displayed in the Reid Gallery at Glasgow School of Art, as part of the GSA MFA Interim Show, 2014. These works drew the work of photographer and filmmaker James Bidgood (1933-2022) into proximity with the Greek myth of Adonis. 

White Adonis was screened on a monitor placed on the gallery floor. This is a video which references James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971), while using as its inspirational myth the scene of Adonis’s death, rather than the proposition of Narcissus’s self-enjoyment. Adonis, the foreign, adolescent lover of the goddess Aphrodite, was said to have been gored in the groin by a boar and left to die in a bed of lettuce, a plant which the Greeks called ‘food for corpses’, and which they believed caused impotence. The video, filmed in Jamie’s bedroom while it was being repaired after a serious rainwater leak, and in ‘super-slow motion’ on a domestic digital camera, sees a man walk into shot, nude and oiled, to lie down amid lettuces on a bolt of pink sateen and stay still. 

5 insults, 2 fantasias, and words by Bruce Benderson was a set of eight digital prints which were pasted onto the window of the Reid Gallery. Seven of the prints faced outwards—the insults and fantasias. The insults were obtuse and mildly derogatory statements (in the same lexical sphere as the ancient Athenian quip ‘you are as sterile as the gardens of Adonis’), while the fantasias were ink drawings based on two of Bidgood’s classicist photographs. The words by Bruce Benderson, from a monograph on Bidgood and rewritten by hand, faced inwards, towards the gallery and the other works: they describe Pink Narcissus's originating idea, and hands full of splinters, dragging scavenged materials back to a tiny apartment to make a luscious image. 

Crockery I moved to Glasgow with prepared for plantings was a broken bowl filled with soil which was drenched in the fragrance Clinique Happy For Men. The bowl was one of two Jamie bought to Glasgow when moving from Sheffield in 2013, along with three plates and two mugs. During the ancient Athenian festival of the Adonia the women of Athens would mourn the death of Adonis on the rooftops of their houses. One of the ways they would do this was by growing ‘gardens of Adonis’ in shards of broken pottery, wicker baskets or other improvised receptacles, sometimes 'watered' with perfume. These planters would be sown with the seeds of fast germinating plants like wheat, barley, lettuce, and fennel, which in the midsummer heat would sprout, shrivel, and die within days. 

A rhetorical folding screen for James Bidgood was a folding screen made from six panels of oriented strand board. These were joined with brass hinges and supported by white clay feet in the shape of various male body parts; actual feet, fists, a head face down, an elbow, two buttocks, a genital cluster, a wrist, and a thigh. One side of the screen (facing White Adonis) was blank, but the other was marked with white spray paint forming vaguely phallic arches, pasted with photocopies of a drawing of Adonis’ fatal wound, and had tacked to it pages from Marcel Detienne’s 1971 book The Gardens of Adonis (the pages make up the entirety of the chapter ‘The Seed of Adonis’).

 

Viewing link for White Adonis avalable on request.