Monday 17 March 2014

Lubaina Himid: A Fashionable Marriage (Cast of Characters - Imaginings)

A concerned young intellectual and revolutionary crouches forward- Malcolm X's kid cousin in the UK. He's off to Mecca with a basket of reading material, but not much else. Certainly doesn't speak a word of Arabic, but no matter, for now. Or maybe a relative of Britain's own Black Power leader (via Trinidad), Michael X? He faces the audience but the towering pretensions of the other players threaten to overwhelm him. Or her? Could either be a 1950s/18th Century hybrid boy or an androgynous young woman? Unclear...

Ronald Reagan's body looks oddly feminine - perhaps because his pose recalls that of Madame Recamier or an Odalisque/Olympia. Help me, I took a History of Art Pill. 

Star Wars - Nuclurr Missils - Nuclear paranoia still very much in the air in the 1980s - even I remember that, and I have deleted so much of that decade from my memory banks (I have no memory of much of its deeply unpleasant mainstream musical output)... Cold War still going strong....

Maggie Thatcher whispers sweet nothings into his ears. Apartheid, the Falklands and the sinking of the Belgrano with a sour cherry on top... Plutonium Blonde... 
The eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe... Vous avez les yeux de Caligula et les levres de Marilyn... What a chat up line, Mitterand...

How very seductive... one warmonger to another... both declaring a kind of civil war in their respective countries ... laying them to waste with neo-conservative cold mendacity...

The Hairdresser has not dyed his locks properly. Such a bad advert for his trade but Maggie is too preoccupied to notice. Ever so brassy and orange. The fake-Aryan look failing to convince. This doesn't stop him from bitching about everyone else's style... His cock's turned into a hairdryer, perhaps that's why. So much better to lacquer Mrs T's into nuclear mushroom hardness (shut up Doctor Freud in the back there)

The Art Critic - Swathed in jargon. The rotting Marigolds caress him as he longs for the embrace of words of praise... He has no talent, he is a "churnalist" for the art world. 

The American feminist artist with her open drawers. Vile vulvas veiled in smugness. A coquettish glance for all the men in the room. Self-sabotage and ego rampant. She is not worthy of the name (of feminist), being a flimsy no-talent confess-all verbal bulimic who shouts shrill banalities at the assembled company as if they were the Seven Seals...

She is too self-absorbed to notice the tall black female artist who towers over her. She adopts an assertive "tears before bedtime" pose. She surveys the whole tawdry scene - the only one with a truly critical eye...

The detestable yuppie at the private view: 
"OK Yah, yah. Quails eggs and cocaine...OK yah, right now, yah..."
Sitting on the fence, ignored by all.

Two artists - trying to shock everyone by embracing (they are both male). No one is paying them any mind. They straddle an over-priced chair which looks like a hangman's apparatus, or perhaps a French revolutionary guillotine... They graduated from Glasgow School of Art recently and are united in an attempt to lose their identities as fast as possible, starting with their accents... They're feeling super-smug as they have landed a major show at a fashionable London gallery (and they are loaded to the gills on the tiresome yuppie's inexhaustible supply of cocaine). The Art Critic is feeling even more pleased with himself than they are, as he is the one who put in a word on their behalf...

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