Enter the Prologue in armour.*
To me, a character not clad in cold chainmail, with its tight scrolls of steel, but one dressed in prosaic twill, in a flowing caprice, that twists and turns and shimmers, inviting an anomalous feel. They enter, to say it all. Nay, here, they enter and say nought at all, offering instead an athwart scene sketch.
Here, Prologue, beckons with twitching feet
To tell you, fair beholders, that our play
Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,
Beginning in the middle; starting thence away.
Theirs, therein, and here, body, bodies, and forms speak beyond themselves, abounding as an un-alphabeted sequence of gestures. That is, free from epistemic decree, here, thought and physical formalities split taut meanings. Now, unbounded, these fragments form anew, as fluid suntassein; syntax,
From the isles
of Greece
And as we see through these little body signs, a more capacious reading of the world becomes sensorial.
—
William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (c.1602) is considered to be one of his ‘problem plays.’ Teetering the line between high moral value and bawdy farce, the script’s narrative side-steps the steely walls of genre categories, as blockaded by literary Man, revelling in its own ambiguity. Problematic indeed… Like a well-orchestrated hand, seemingly bare of dictate judgments and wielding more than hollow chuckles, to me, the playverse performs in a wholly gestural manner. Filled with rhythm and whimsy, erotic flourishes and bombast sojourns beat through this ol’ embattled romance, enlivening both its writerly presence as well as its residual affect—more on that soon. Indeed, as the play progresses, as it grows glittering, prose and follied thoughts entwine, forming an anomalous body out of textual writ word waverings. More than an authorial narrator, the linguistic limbs of this text-body twist and turn, they tip-tap and chatter, so as to speak beyond readerly form. This is no allegorical enunciation however—remember no ‘high moral value’—rather this text-body speaking is more akin to a gestural prod; a silent, felt language, one free from the shackles of unicode meaning. Oosh; I feel this fluttering finger tock. Pushed beyond the world of readerly decorum, beyond the walls of categorical type, this affective touch leads me beyond actorly direction, beyond stage and lights and donned faces—be these political, societal, geographic and/or historical. Further, as I feel Shakespeare’s tactile stanzas leap and vault and cut into the antiquated battle between head and heart, the text gestures towards another way of understanding the world that surrounds.
—
Finding inspiration deep within the promising tissues of Shakespeare’s playverse, the exhibition Nay, her foot speaks (July 13 – September 13, 2023, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, UK) unfolds as an un-alphabeted sequence—that is, an in-alphabetical flow of fragmented forms and formal flirtations. Echoing the ‘problematic’ slipperiness of Shakespeare’s play, each of the artists included in this exhibition embraces gesture as a conceptual tool in order to toe past the confines of categorical inscription—a steely way of reading the world. Indeed, as with the play’s text-body, the artworks assembled here speak beyond themselves. Enunciated through the personal, the emotional, and through a deep sense of feel, here, we hear through the subtitles of body work.
—
Departing from a history of colonial resistance in Tanzania, the fleshy works of Valerie Asiimwe Amani position body part-like forms—arms and eyes and contorting torsos—upon loose swathes of muslin. Interrogating the ways bodies, languages and belief systems form communal lives, here Amani explores the relationship between war and myth, demonstrating how our bodies are constantly in states of reconciliation—repair and rebirth.
Alicja Biała’s paintings appear as quotidian tableau. For example, in Seven Women Crying, 2023, six unfaced figures sit slicking ochre-coloured onions. More than a punful scene, these figure’s arms writhe as they work, their everyday cutting overseen by the twisted gaze of a seventh figure, dressed in dark-brown-black hands in recline. Paired with Biała’s disquieting use of perspective, this image of labour suggests a deeper level of intention, something unsaid but burdened.
Charged, or frozen, with tension. The works of Francisco Rodríguez also suffuse the mundane with cold disquiet. Working in an illustrative manner, his often sparse scenes, as with those in this exhibition, waver with something of the unbridled testosterone of male youth. Positioned front and centre, the protagonists in these paintings do not appear to perform for us—viewing eyes—but act almost architecturally, building a quiet narrative that speaks of adolescence; specifically, the brutality and melancholic feel that Rodríguez associates with this childhood in post-Pinochet Santiago.
Carmen Winant series White Ink, 2018 unites both the deeply personal and the literary to écriture a move beyond the tight writ rules of patriarchal systems. Collaging images of breastfeeding found in motherhood manuals with handwritten citations, here Winant uses the gesture of writing to abound the regimented and regimenting of womanly bodies. Thinking with Hélène Cixous, and her essay The Laugh of the Medusa, Winant’s literal écriture féminine—Cixous term for a feminine mode of writing—questions the impersonal logistics imposed upon mothers, re-staging these in a way that is infinitely affinitative.
As with Winant, Sophie Thun’s ongoing series, titled After Hours, uses fragments of the female body—here, the artist’s own—to question established concepts and conditions; specifically practices and perceptions of photographic labour. Bare and with eyes beaming out of her cut-up scene, here Thun’s corporeal form confronts blasé voyeurship. Staged in impersonal hotel bedrooms, the series is at once a jabbing reference to the pornographic industry, and at the same time is a sleight of hand referencing how many established artists occlude the dependencies that allow them to produce their work.
Working from crops and excerpts from Georgian and Regency-era satirical materials, Charlie Billingham’s paintings can be seen as historical riffs. As sketchy lines judder and thick layers of oil from flesh and folds, the original narratives told in his source materials become wholly decontextualized. Unbridled and brought into the 21st century, the off-kitschy characters in Billingham’s works speak a ticklish language, one free of didact interpretation.
Rather than working through one aesthetic framework Laila Tara H uses a hybridised approach to painting to assess social structures. Deconstructing the traditions of Indo-Persian miniature painting the works that feature in Nay, her foot speaks appear as a fluttering of body parts upon beige grounds. Here, blue bodies scamper as eyeless faces look upon their sprightly forms. Pillowed below a minimal house shape, this disentanglement of bodily compositions questions differential power dynamics of domesticity—who is run legless and who looks without seeing.
—
Leaping o’er epistemic walls, each of these artists use gesture in their own way to free themselves from the steely curls of categorical chainmail. And in doing so they each act as a Prologue-type player; someone loosely sketching the syntactic contours of a world more capacious.
—Toby Üpson, June 2023
*the italic text throughout is quoted from William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida. c.1602
First published as an exhibition text for ‘Nay, her foot speaks’ at Cooke Latham Gallery (London).
Toby Üpson 