Girls Girls Girls, Lismore Castle Arts, 2022
Essay for a catalogue to accompany the exhibition ‘girls girls girls’ at Lismore Castle, curated by the celebrated Irish fashion designer Simone Rocha, and featuring Sophie Barber, Louise Bourgeois, Elene Chantladze, Petra Collins, Sian Costello, Dorothy Cross, Genieve Figgis, Iris Haeussler, Eimear Lynch & Domino Whisker, Roni Horn, Cassi Namoda, Sharna Osborne, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Cindy Sherman, Alina Szapocznikow, Harley Weir, Francesca Woodman and Luo Yang.
Extract
There is the house. The high-heeled shoes. The best blue dress. The prim little hat. The baby, to hold. The animals, out front. The kiss; the climax of so many fairy-tales, when the girl becomes who she — and we — dreamed she could be. A beauty, a bride. She is loved, and thus she matters. Her story is complete now she has approval, admiration. We are told that only now, has she become whole.
Look at these artworks; the lips and limbs and gowns and homes and flowers. The familiar motifs are here, but they are not quite as they seem. Something bristles underneath. Coarse, like thick animal hair. Insidious, flowing, like scent.
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, in The Second Sex; ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’1 The conversion, of course, relies on the input of others; on years of conditioning, on both forceful and quiet reminders. Cues from media, from images, from music, art and literature. And from those who surround us: colleagues, friends, family, lovers. Cues given sometimes by choice but often subconsciously, by habit, by the cycle of their own conditioning and self-construction. Though we try not to, we so commonly bolster these expectations, helping each other along on the journey de Beauvoir describes. Man becomes man, too.
And, of course, the conversion to womanhood requires many props, to get us into character. Fashion has, typically, been a keen supplier of the costumes and accessories to make us palatable, desirable, fitting us into the mould that has been set. A mould that can both cage and, perversely, protect us — from ridicule, from derision, from the bravery needed for difference. You see the link — between fashion and acceptability, and authority — in Louise Bourgeois’ double-phallic bronze, Janus in Leather Jacket (1968), which dangles in the exhibition. Both penis and jacket are a symbol of toughness, of power, of a subversion that is, ironically, given its associations with subculture, entirely rooted in the typical order of things: in machismo, in violence, in machinery and muscle, and hard, hard sex. How does the leather jacket differ from the suit?