TRAMWAY, GLASGOW

JAMIE CREWE:PASTORAL DRAMA

15 September 2018 — 28 October 2018.

 

Pastoral Drama is an exhibition of a new body of work by Jamie Crewe. Starting from an ancient Greek myth, via a 17th-century variation, this body of work thinks about the dangers of being seen, and about transformation over time. It includes a window mural called 25 abductresses, a text called Terms, and a video work called Pastoral Drama. 

Terms, a 300 word text, is pasted on either side of a small, irruptive wall near the entrance of the gallery. In language which touches on the conventions of rules, contracts, and demands, the text asserts the narrator’s intense desire not be referred to as a man. At different points it seems to be addressed to professional contacts, to family, to romantic partners, to old friends, and to traumatic figures from the past. Throughout these increasingly desperate appeals for personhood, the narrator only has power to threaten one thing; their own withdrawal, which may be pulling out, distancing, dissociating, hiding, or running away. 

Beyond this, 25 abductresses fills and blocks the windows of the gallery. Digital prints reproduce twenty five ink drawings of demons (or perhaps furies—ancient Greek spirits of vengeance who punished oath-breakers) who appear briefly in the video work Pastoral Drama. They are printed onto fluorescent yellow paper and pasted onto the window, facing outwards, while around them liquid rubber in a shade of ochre brown is sloshed, filling the glass panes. Though they are called ‘abductresses’ (women who abduct), these demons all bear ambivalent expressions, and have postures that hide or distance them from viewers on the street. Still, they have gathered on the window, and come to meet the public, for which they might be accused of seduction. The painted rubber around them hides the interior of the gallery from outside view. 

Situated behind an angled wall, Pastoral Drama comprises two videos, played simultaneously. Drawing from the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice, and from Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio (a 17th-century opera in which the titular male character stands in for Eurydice, and achieves a different fate), the work emphasises the cleft between boy and woman, and envisions the collapse of a mythic past. 

Eurydice, as described in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses (written around 8AD), was the wife of the poet Orpheus. She died soon after their marriage and Orpheus resolved to break the rules of death and quest into the underworld to reclaim her. Assisted by Hermes, the messenger god, he confronted Hades, the god of the underworld, and sang his grief. Moved, Hades agreed that Eurydice could return to the land of the living, provided that Orpheus walk ahead of her and never look back. They were nearly back in the land of the living when, through doubt, or miscalculation, or some uncontrollable urge, Orpheus turned around. He saw Eurydice, and she disappeared, lost for good. He grieved again for her, before moving on to become the first pederast. Agazzari’s Eumelio, written for an all-male seminary in 1606, echoes this myth; Orpheus is replaced by Apollo, the sun god, and Eurydice is replaced by Eumelio, Apollo’s young male ward. In this story Eumelio is charmed by a demon in disguise, who grabs him and pulls him into the underworld. Apollo resolves to break the rules of death and quest into the underworld to reclaim him. Assisted by Mercury, the messenger god, he confronts Pluto, the god of the underworld, and argues his case. Pluto agrees that he can take Eumelio home, and unlike Eurydice, no rules are enforced. Eumelio is able to return to life, having learned a lesson about temptation, and live happily. 

Filmed chronologically over the course of nine months, Pastoral Drama uses intricate drawings, weeping ink, speckled clay, encrusted plasticine, and agglomerations of lichen and glitter to slowly build these parallel narratives of Eumelio and Eurydice. The designs of both lead characters are modelled on the artist at the age of 21, with masculine or feminine attributes exaggerated respectively; neither character is a portrait of Jamie, but both are made from the materials of Jamie’s face, body, and past. As the videos run, side by side, their similarities and differences glare. Beneath the action, and informed by months of shifting thought over the slow course of production, themes of rule-setting, the ethics of representation, abominable half-people, the body as Hell, irretrievable femininity, gay exile, and ambivalent visibility churn. Upon reaching the end of their narratives (happy and tragic respectively) one video keeps going, lurching into nonsense and disaster as Jamie improvises scenes beyond the conclusion of the source material. The climax of the work is a peak of process, in which all the skills and sensitivity learnt from many months of drawing, constructing, and filming are applied; at the same time it is a narrative nadir, as the action is emptied of intention and the last surviving character is dispatched. 

In her myth Eurydice is maintained on a journey back from death by being unacknowledged and unseen by her retriever. This exhibition considers time in both slow accumulations and sudden jarring leaps. It considers sight that might cause disaster, and acknowledgements that might cause a vulnerable subject, or a delicate knowledge, to flee or disappear. At its most hopeful, it tests how such a vulnerable and delicate thing might move forward, into the future.