TRANSMISSION, GLASGOW
JAMIE CREWE:BUT WHAT WAS MOST AWFUL WAS A GIRL WHO WAS SINGING
20 February 2016 — 26 March 2016.
Transmission are pleased to present But what was most awful was a girl who was singing, the first solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by the artist Jamie Crewe.
The exhibition includes Chantal after James Bidgood and Jean Genet, a video work situated in the basement of the gallery, which refers to an unfinished adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1957 play The Balcony undertaken by photographer and filmmaker James Bidgood, best known for his 1971 film Pink Narcissus. Its production is summarised by Bruce Benderson in his monograph James Bidgood (2009): “In 1975 Bidgood contracted with Jack Deveau of Hand In Hand Films to make a [gay] porno film partly inspired by Genet’s The Balcony. His agreement was to develop the lush aesthetic of Pink Narcissus on a more permissive scale, with triple-x-rated action. He’d designed a jade green genie whose spread legs framed an arch over a huge swimming pool and whose crotch spewed red wine surrounded by golden penises that pumped incense […] there were explosive arguments. Bidgood got so paranoid he began to think that he’d been handed a camera without film. In a short time he was banished from the set, and the film was never finished.”
The Balcony, set in a brothel in the midst of a violent uprising, is described by Genet as a ‘glorification of the Image and the Reflection’, a glorification taken up in Jamie’s adoption of a Bidgoodian aesthetic. The heightened artifice of Bidgood’s erotic fantasias, and the revolutionary rhetoric of Genet, are put to work against each other to dramatise the subtle violence of representation itself.
Chantal, a brothel-worker turned revolutionary figurehead, serves the original play as a symbolic figure and her death signals the downfall of The Balcony’s revolution. In Chantal after James Bidgood and Jean Genet she lives, played by the artist Sgàire Wood, and returns to the “house of illusions” triumphant. Filmed in the warped reflections of custom made mylar panels, she shrugs the camera’s searching gaze, sweeping past with urgent intent to destroy the studios of The Balcony (themed as church, as courtroom, and as military outpost, and dressed with rented props, glitter, plaster, gaffa tape and photocopies). The effect recalls the dreamy sensuality of Pink Narcissus, but instead of a boy masturbating, it features a trans girl committing arson.
In the upstairs space of the gallery, two new walls frame the sculpture Carmen after James Bidgood and Jean Genet —named for another girl in Genet’s brothel, who is faithful and ardent where Chantal is rebellious. This sculpture is a glittering rose bush made of rough plaster, chicken wire and delicate paper leaves, into whose boughs cut yellow roses have been inserted. Sporting both the real and artificial, this revisitation of Carmen hovers between the two, recalling a comment from Madame Irma (proprietress of The Balcony): “when you mounted the snow-covered rock with the yellow paper rose-bush—by the way, I’m going to have to store that in the cellar—and when the miraculously-healed leper swooned at the sight of you, you didn’t take yourself seriously, did you, Carmen?”
On the reverse of one of these new walls there is pasted A reunion, an anecdotal text that reflects upon a period of learning and becoming for Jamie (focusing on a ‘revolutionary cocktail evening’ facilitated by the artist Sharon Kivland, Jamie’s undergraduate tutor at Sheffield Hallam University, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the May ’68 riots in 2008). Anecdote is expanded upon by notes in the margins: notes about May ’68, the Chilean revolution, the Paris commune, student occupations at Hallam in the 80s, church occupations by sex workers in 1970s Lyon, and more. The dawning of political consciousness is paralleled with the dawning of transness, and the retreat and folding of both is suggested (temporary though this may be).
There are also unnamed presences in the gallery: window murals, a scent, yellow paint and light.
A PDF version of A reunion is available on request.
