Summertime
22 April 2009
I must admit I am in a state of shock. I have been waking up to a blue sky several days in a row. My confusion is hardly surprising since London is probably as famous for its bad weather as it is for Buckingham Palace but the sun does shine on occasion. I have experienced it. It is startling. The temperature has barely risen a few degrees and people start stripping off their clothes and walk around in shorts and flip flops. It has been pretty drizzly and cold for the past weeks, so everyone seems utterly starved from sunshine. Sunshine changes everything in a city. It illuminates the streets, it draws people onto the sidewalks and it appears to raise the general mood and brighten people’s expression. I certainly feel happier when the sun is out. After a never ending winter when being outside is pure torture the warmth brings an end to struggle. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was braving along a snow covered slippery Oxford Street on a day where even Topshop had closed due the severe weather conditions. The downside to beautiful weather is that I reluctantly sit in an office all day. I yearn to be outside. Having lunch on a terrace or coffee in a garden seems much more appealing. It’s utter torture to be trapped in an office gazing out into the sun watching strangers enjoy what I would love to enjoy myself. I suppose everything in life comes with a price tag.
For the past few weeks I have been squeezing yet another activity into my seemingly exploding day- flat hunting. I have finally had enough of fungus headquarters and I am on the look out for the perfect flat. Ironically the leak that never dried looks surprisingly dry these days. Typical! The price tag for the perfect flat is rather high. It involves countless and exacerbating meetings with strangers, at random street corners and on doorsteps, then snooping and wading through other peoples mess. It often feels intrusive and tiresome and frankly almost like a full time job, juggling all my different agents and the various viewings. You see I don’t want to miss out on the perfect property so of course I am looking via five different agencies. It is hard enough to remember the agent’s faces, let alone their names or the names of their agencies. Obviously my confusion doesn’t exactly facilitate our communication. On top of that, agents babble in a language foreign to me. Their jargon is a minefield: a storage cupboard is described as a study, a fire escape is a balcony and “the property could do with a slight refurbishment” means the place is in shambles. And what is the deal with pretentious Latin company names or tongue twisting lengthy titles? Most properties are so clearly not what I am looking for that I must ask myself how these agents in cheap suits and square pointy shoes survive in the real world? Add all this to my justified paranoia about English plumbing and insulation and you have the acidic mixture I am dealing with. In short, not exactly my idea of fun in the sun.
I escaped the perfect flat hunt plight to a far more interestingly disturbing sight, Cindy Sherman’s opening at Sprueth Magers. This time Miss Sherman has transformed herself into various rich American heiresses. Their fake tans, heavy make-up and big hair glare provocatively back at me. The women she impersonates expose their wealth and position so blatantly that it undermines them, their waxy skin and wrinkled faces are a caricature of what they hope to represent: power. The photographs expose the insecurities their make-up so desperately tries to cover up. But, of course, these heiresses are as fictional as their positions and wealth are. The farce is an even bigger farce. The works somehow remind me of Velasquez’ paintings of the Spanish royal family, they are full of grandeur. Sherman’s women have a glimpse of sadness in their eyes. It is as though they are trying to convince us and thereby themselves of their successful existence. These large images transfix you at the same time as they repel you. I have grown up amongst the works of Sherman. As a child I always was attracted by these portraits of woman from all walks of life, always provocatively gazing back at you an air of fragility hanging over them.
Cindy Sherman looks or acts nothing like the woman in her works, by the way. She is a rather slight and fragile looking blonde. She seems shy, almost elusive, and not at all the exhibitionist characters hanging on the walls all around us. These women could easily gobble their creator up. Is her work a comment on the role of woman or on the artificiality of all our identities? I don’t know. What I do know is that there is something both raw and honest behind her masked and ever changing faces. Maybe the price tag for great art is the loss of the artist’s identity?
