Stella and Sylvia
“I think it is such a fine line between staying and going, everyone is just really hanging on by their fingernails in some way and I’m quite fascinated by that. That being on the edge of the cliff”.
I had the recent pleasure of attending a private view of the Stella Vine exhibition showing now at the Modern Art Oxford gallery. The gallery has exhibited high profile works before now, but Stella Vine is perhaps the biggest name they have showcased for some time. Hailed as the new Tracey Emin, Vine is one of those artists that people will probably have heard about in the press, and maybe seen one or two of her more notorious works, but perhaps not much else. I was only vaguely familiar with her work – which in many ways made the private view all the more thrilling.
Much like Tracey Emin, Stella Vine is something of a celebrity in the art world, a sort of post-BritArt/post-Stuckist heroine whose star is ascending much like Emin’s and Damien Hirst’s. (It seems de rigueur these days to be a personality as well as an artist. Celebrity is no longer the privilege of movie stars and musicians. If you do not have a media presence, you can kiss goodbye to getting people interested in your work, whether that be painted, written, or otherwise). Vine unfortunately seems to have a similarly lurid, tabloidy presence as Emin, her work being constantly lambasted by the likes of The Sun and Daily Mail alongside details of her past.
Her work is often thought of as trashy, kitsch, a kind of throwaway chocolate-box art, derided for its sensationalist, tabloid-esque, celebrity preoccupied subjects. Though her paintings are all these things, I think it is too easy to disregard her work on this basis. In many ways that is the culture that we live in today, so surely her art only reflects that. We are obsessed with celebrity, news is fashioned in a trashy, sensationalist fashion, we are concerned with the scandalous, the superficial and the fake. If we are disgusted by Vine’s work, we can only be disgusted with ourselves and the society we find ourselves in.
I must say I liked her work. Although I thought the execution in some of her paintings was sloppy and unrestrained, I did think the majority was technically accomplished, emotionally charged, and displayed a canny understanding of modern preoccupations. She is part of a long lineage of female artists and writers concerned with the same issues of desire, femininity, suicide and death, from Frida Kahlo to Sylvia Plath, PJ Harvey to Anne Sexton, Madonna to Cindy Sherman. Like them, her work is borne out of her personal life, though not in the same intimate, revelatory, knickers-on-the-floor way of Emin or Sexton. The work is produced from the clutter and debris of the artist’s life, whether directly or indirectly. The figures in her paintings might be of Elizabeth Taylor or Princess Diana, but with there big, sinister eyes and bloody, dribbling mouths, there is something of the artist there. Perhaps her paintings are self-portraits behind the mask of celebrity. For instance, in the paintings of Diana’s death the artist’s own mother’s death is complicatedly intertwined. She uses her sitters as metaphors or Noh masks to capture her own drama.
Being a devotee of Plath I was intrigued to discover some paintings of her and Ted Hughes, and found out later that Vine is in fact a fan of the poet. In many ways Vine seems preoccupied with suicide and the early deaths of young celebrities (Princess Diana, Kurt Cobain, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John F. Kennedy Jr, Marilyn Monroe, Paula Yates) or those on a crash course towards their own demise (Pete Doherty, Courtney Love, Kate Moss, Allegra Versace). Her interest in Plath seems to be the epitome of this fascination. In her painting Sylvia (2005) we see the platinum blonde teenager of the poet’s early years at Cambridge, after her first suicide attempt, with her mascara running down her cheeks as though to belie the happy exterior of the sitter, in some ways foreshadowing what was to come for the poet. In her portrait of Ted Hughes, the words “Daddy, I have had to kill you” from her most famous poem are painted in red, accusing letters above a typically moot, retiring Ted, visualising in a stark and uncompromising way the poem’s assertion that Ted and her dead father are one in the same.
In her Sylvia Oven portrait we see an actual oven door with again the young, bikini clad Sylvia on a beach, surrounded by what look like pine trees. It called to mind Plath’s own late poem Mystic, written ten days before she committed suicide, in which the voice of the agonised, death preoccupied poet recalls the summers of her youth: “I remember/The dead smell of sun on wood cabins/The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets./Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?” Vine is not just being crass by painting on an oven door. She is making a visual association between Plath’s young, happy self on the beaches of her childhood and the stark reality of the death that awaits her in the same way the poet does in her poem. It could be argued that Vine’s work is anchored in an intellectual understanding of her sitters, even though her paintings have as their basis photographic portraits. She is not just conveying an image, she is engaging with the subject in clever and subtle ways that aren’t always immediately appreciated by her audience. This suggests that we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss her as sensationalist.
The MAO’s exhibition is sprawling and features a vast array of canvases, but is a thorough and exciting review of the artist’s work to date. I am quite sure that this will not be the last we hear of Stella Vine.
Exhibition runs from 17 July to 23 September. Admission is free.
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