Boxing Tilda

ArtForum, Jan, 1996 by Louisa Buck

The Serpentine Gallery is no stranger to the rich and famous. Situated in Hyde Park in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it boasts HRH Princess Diana as a patron as well as a Vanity Fair gala dinner every summer guaranteed to set the parazzi buzzing. But the venue got more than it bargained for last fall when it put movie actress Tilda Swinton on show and over 21,000 people, including several national news crews, turned up in a single week. Not bad for a live-art event.

Swinton, previously known in the UK as the muse of the late filmmaker Derek Jarman and as the gender-hopping lead in Sally Potter's Orlando, 1993, is now probably more famous for being an art exhibit. In Cornelia Parker's installation at the Serpentine Gallery, The Maybe, 1995, Swinton played the toughest role in a career devoted to challenging ones: herself asleep. For seven consecutive days, eight hours a day, she lay motionless, eyes closed, in a raised, glass casket - a contemporary Sleeping Beauty in jeans and deck shoes, subject to intense scrutiny and speculation. Was she asleep? How die she pee? Was this an act of massive egomania or acute self-effacement? And was she a natural redhead? One art critic from a national newspaper became strangely preoccupied with a small blemish under her left ear. A poet came and read to her every day. There was much punning about actresses resting between roles. Tank Girl, and art being a yawn - as well as the perpetual chestnut of whether this piece constituted art at all.

What the coverage failed to point out, however, was that Swinton was one of the least bizarre exhibits in Parker's installation, which, in fact, had more to do with memory, mortality, and posterity than with hair color, natural or otherwise. Also what made The Maybe such an eerily unforgettable experience was the relationship of the slumbering actress to the other 35 cases containing such esoteric memorabilia as the rosary used by an exiled Napoleon, the rug and cushion from Freud's couch, the half-smoked cigar dropped by Winston Churchill when he heard that the Germans were suing for peace, Queen Victoria's stockings, Turner's traveling watercolor kit, and the shabby little quill with which Charles Dickens wrote the final sentence of what was to be his last, never completed work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

In the same gallery where, a year ago, Damien Hirst suspended a lamb in formaldehyde, crowds now inspected the (surprisingly small) pickled brain of 18th-century computer inventor Charles Babbage (positioned provocatively next to the sparking apparatus of electricity's discoverer Charles Faraday) along with the headgear worn by Stanley and Livingstone for their legendary rendezvous in the Congo. These evocative curios made the presence of the dead owners almost palpable (Wallis Simpson's shiny black ice skates were certainly a more accurate portrait of her than any of Cecil Beaton photographs), while the one exhibit that was still breathing seemed curiously empty. That's celebrity for you.

The equally celebrated artistic duo Gilbert & George is also no stranger to the living artwork. The besuited pair declared themselves a "Living Sculpture" back in 1969 and even though they won the Turner Prize in 1986, the British art world has been scrutinizing them with suspicion ever since. Liberals can't handle their abiding love of Margaret Thatcher, let alone their penchant for depicting provocatively posed Afro-Caribbean and Asian boys, while the establishment has a major problem with two men in cheap suits making giant photographs of inner-city decay, flying under-pants, and hunks of rough trade.

But if there's one group that can't get enough of the deadpan double act it's the current "Britpack" generation of artists. Gilbert & George were the only oldsters included in Carl Freedman's "Minky Manky" survey of Britain's rude boys and girls at the South London Gallery back in April; and now they're back again in the same venue this time going solo - or rather duo - with their "Naked Shit Pictures," 1994.

The exhibition was originally planned for the Sackler Galleries in the Royal Academy of Arts, but the prospect of giant photocopies featuring the ubiquitous pair minus their trademark suits accompanied by massive pieces of their own excrement ultimately proved too daunting a prospect for that guardian of Britain's artistic heritage, so Picadilly's loss became Peckham's gain. G & G certainly know how to fill a space, and the wraparound spectacle of turd crosses, turd surfboards, and columns of crap provoked the inevitable outcry from the popular press, as well as confirming the fecal duo's status as aging Lords of Misrule.

But this scatological display has also won the renegade pair admirers from some unexpected quarters. The art critic of the Daily Telegraph, a publication better known for devoting its column inches to the Tory status quo, has possibly put his job on the line by applauding Gilbert & George's exploration of "what it is to be human," while British art-guru David Sylvester, whose favored Modern artists are Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman, only last month compared the exhibition - in this very magazine - to a frescoed chapel. Within the British art establishment, shit, it seems, sticks.