Latest news with #MarinaWarner
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sanctuary by Marina Warner review – the power of stories in an age of migration
Marina Warner begins this dazzlingly protean book with a distinctly mundane memory. It is the 1950s, she is a young teen, and the highlight of her week is going to the Saturday morning 'flicks' with a neighbour's slightly older daughter. One particular movie scene has stayed with her: it involves a man dressed in a vaguely historical costume who is fleeing for his life. Face contorted with terror, he makes it as far as the door of a cathedral, whereupon he knocks loudly and cries 'Sanctuary!' The door opens a crack, the man slides inside, and the Saturday morning audience breaths a collective sigh of relief. Even if the plot points remain hazy – is Robin Hood somehow involved? – the underlying principle needs no explaining. The fugitive has invoked the ancient right by gaining entrance to a designated sacred space. As long as he stays put his pursuers can't touch him. From these hyper-local beginnings, Warner sets out to explore and expand what 'sanctuary' means in an age when millions are on the move around the world, chased out of their homes by environmental disaster, economic collapse, war and political oppression. It is in these grim circumstances that she proposes a new concept of sanctuary, one built not from bricks and mortar or even tents and blankets, but by tales and their telling. Over the past 50 years of her distinguished career as a cultural historian, Warner has immersed herself in liminal literature, tracing the way that fairytales, playground chants, lullabies, fables, patter and ditties manage to evade the censor, slip under the radar, and slide into conversations without attracting too much attention. Now she suggests putting these folk forms to work, using them to build bridges and forge connections between arrivants (a term she prefers to 'migrants') and their often hostile hosts. It is at this point that sceptics might ask how Warner's proposed 'commons of wonder', filled with stories of myth and magic, can possibly help with the practical needs of displaced people more likely to be worried about clean water, healthcare, a job and, above all, the legal right to remain. This is a challenge that she knows well and has spent her career confronting. Her earliest books on the Virgin Mary (1976), Joan of Arc (1981) and, especially, female statuary (the magnificent Monuments and Maidens, 1985), all made the case for allegorical forms having a powerful conditioning effect on the way that people understand and experience their own lives. She got critical flak for it, as well as a great deal of praise. Decades on she shows no signs of being abashed, insisting as strongly as ever that storytelling can function as a 'binding agent' between strangers, creating spaces for concepts of justice and coexistence to develop. As back-up she deploys the British anthropologist Alfred Gell's useful phrase 'art as agency' to underscore her belief that telling stories has real-world consequences. This won't be enough to convince everyone, yet even the most literal-minded critic must admire Warner's commitment to making things happen. In 2015 she won the prestigious Holberg prize and used her £380,000 winnings to help set up Stories in Transit, a project designed to facilitate the exchange of stories between the young people, mostly men, who daily arrive in Sicily from the Middle East, the Maghreb, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the eastern Mediterranean. What might emerge, Warner wanted to know, if these travellers and their tales were encouraged to mix and mingle? Din from Guinea, where civil strife has destroyed his family, arrived in Sicily after a two-year trek by foot across the Sahara followed by a journey across the Mediterranean in a boat. During a Stories in Transit workshop he tells a traditional tale from home called The Huntsman, the King's Son and the Enchanted Deer, a spirited mashup of politics and magic, comedy and sorrow, with one tale nestled inside another in the manner of One Thousand and One Nights. What strikes the comparatist in Warner is the way that this Guinean tale echoes animal stories from both the medieval Arab world and the even older Aesop's Fables. Still, it is not where a story has come from that concerns her so much as where it is going. Over the course of several sessions, The Huntsman, the King's Son and the Enchanted Deer develops into a promenade piece, complete with puppetry, song and animated film. From here another arrivant, this time from Gambia, takes the spirit of Din's story and turns it into something quite distinct, a comic parable with music called One for You and One for Me. Sceptics once again might worry that this privileging of fantastical and shape-shifting narratives strikes the wrong note in a world where truth has become slippery and facts are optional. But Warner is ready for them, pointing out that the world in which the arrivants live is already fictional. Rhetorically marshalled into 'hordes' or 'swarms', these 'aliens' are routinely denigrated as 'scroungers' and even 'criminals'. The official maps that tell them where they have come from and where they should go are also imaginary, continually redrawn in the wake of colonial and nationalistic carve-ups that frequently take little account of linguistic, cultural and ethnic affinities. There is another reason Warner feels strongly about encouraging the arrivants to play fast and loose with the materials to hand. At every stage in their hazardous journey they have been required to narrate their life stories to officials in particular ways if they are to be allowed to proceed to the next stage in their search for sanctuary. The dates must be right, the dangers consistent, and motives must be pure, involving escape from tyranny rather than desire for a better job. To deviate from the first telling of an account is to risk deportation. As a result, suggests Warner, in an exquisitely attuned reading of the situation, arrivants are sealed into versions of themselves that take no account of their changing feelings and experience. It is in this context that making up stories becomes vital in ensuring a form of survival that is as psychically healthy as it is physically safe. Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling by Marina Warner is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Body of work: the transgressive art of Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she's 'one of contemporary art's most provocative and profound figures'. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist's hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as 'a penis-envy farce'.) It's easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art's pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance. Now, her prolific if all too short career is getting its first major showing in more than two decades. At a time when gender binaries are being dismantled, Laura Smith, curator of a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, and editor of the accompanying book, hopes to make Chadwick's relevance to a fresh generation clear. 'She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity,' Smith says. 'She was really pioneering and she wasn't afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.' The exhibition opens with the decidedly fluid Cacao, one of Chadwick's most affecting evocations of how opposites such as desire and abjection entwine. It's a huge chocolate fountain set to be filled with 800kg of Tony's Chocolonely, which will gush from a central liquid erection. Needless to say, this brown pool evokes more than confectionery. 'It's joyous and kind of gross,' says Smith. 'It bubbles like a swamp. Basically, it farts.' Chadwick was also an inveterate craftsperson. The images of her MA graduation show of 1977, In the Kitchen, where she's encased in sculptural costumes of white goods, are often used to represent feminist art of that decade. What the pictures can't tell you is what went into those creations, including performances with wearable beds and latex nudity suits cast from their wearers' bodies. According to Errin Hussey, who's overseeing an exhibition in Leeds of her archive, 'the costumes really show the dedication she had. The intricacy of detail and planning that went into the textile and metalwork on just one shoe is amazing.' For her first major work, Ego Geometria Sum, she devised a novel way to embed shots of herself on to the plywood surfaces of sculptures by painting them with photographic emulsion. The Oval Court, part of the exhibition that led to her Turner nomination, took the experimentation further. She created its dreamy blue-and-white collage with a photocopier, making direct images of her own body alongside an apparent cornucopia of flowers, fruit and dead animals including lambs and a swan. Complementing this lusciously libidinal work is Carcass, a glass tower that, when originally shown at the ICA in 1986, was filled with dead animals' bodies, plus weeks of kitchen waste. When the gases generated by its live decomposition caused its glass to crack, and the gallery attempted to remove it, the lid blew off, spraying rot across the art space. (At the Hepworth, its vegetarian recreation features a gas valve so it can be 'burped like a baby' each night.) In what would be her final decade, frustrated by the heat she was getting from fellow feminists about her use of nudity, she abandoned depicting her outer body and looked within instead. Moving on from questions around objectified gender towards a polymorphous, fluid sexuality, in these works things are forever collapsing into their opposite, like Piss Flowers' erect recesses. As Smith reflects: 'In her thinking nothing was black and white.' Viral Landscapes, 1988-89In this work created after Chadwick stopped depicting her outer body, photography of Pembrokeshire's coast is overlain with images of cells taken from her urine, blood, cervix, mouth and ear. In the Kitchen, 1977 (main image)Chadwick's earliest works hinged on feminist concerns about constructed identity. For her MA degree show she and her performers donned sculptural costumes of white goods and made a tongue-in-cheek speech about 'kitchen lib' to a soundtrack of clips from daytime radio aimed at housewives. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Piss Flowers, 1991-92Chadwick's Piss Flowers first made a scatalogical twosome with her chocolate fountain sculpture Cacao at her exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1994. The press had a field day but the show attracted record numbers to the venue: 54,000 visitors in six weeks. The Oval Court, 1984-86In this sculptural installation featuring collage on a large, low platform, the artist created a vision of baroque excess using blue-and-white images of her own body, flora and fauna made with a photocopying machine. Unlike the finger-wagging Vanitas paintings Chadwick drew on, its vision of life's transient pleasures mixed with death has a luxuriant, unbridled energy. Loop My Loop, 1991Chadwick had a genius for evoking the slippage between desire and disgust. Here, she entwines the age-old lover's keepsake, a lock of golden hair, with pig intestines. Airy romance meets bodily urges; the human entwines with the animal. Where does one begin and the other end? Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is at Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October; the book of the same name is published by Thames & Hudson (£30); Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist is at Leeds Art Gallery to 4 November.
