A woman sits imprisoned in her own giant wedding cake, its tiers like manacles around her naked body. Another is lopped into parts and then badly reassembled, so that her limbs are uselessly displaced. A third lies shrouded in a white coffin, its lid open for the viewing of the corpse – except that at second glance this is not a casket. This woman is entombed in a shiny fridge-freezer.
There is such an affinity between these photo-based images – so visually coruscating, so emotionally succinct – that they might almost be by the same artist. But the first two were made by the British-American Penny Slinger (born 1947), and the last is from the British sculptor, photographer and installation artist Helen Chadwick (1953-96), whose superbly original imagination remains such a deep loss to the art scene.
The two are paired at Richard Saltoun Gallery to extraordinary effect. Each makes the other look even stronger. To say that these two women broke taboos in the late 60s and 70s would be true, but an understatement. They look startlingly radical right now.
Slinger tears into 60s admass images of women. Out of the mouth of a model in sultry satin, her silver eyelids seductively half-shut, slithers a glistening, serpentine coil. The Laval Worm (1969) is a shocker of a warning: be careful what you wish for. A lingerie ad is adapted so that the bra seems to develop an unsmiling mouth, visible behind a bodice of chain mail.
A girl dressed in a classic 60s leotard lies prone in a desert. She may be dead or alive, it is hard to tell. Preying upon her flawless body is a weird hybrid of skeleton and gigantic avian wing. Leda Legend is the title; a devastating reprise of myth as reality, with the added dimension of death. Rape as something far worse than a great big swan.
Slinger graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 1969 with 50% The Visible Woman, a photobook of black and white collages that appear fantastically far-sighted in their repudiation of the awful old misogyny of the male-led surrealists, as obsessed with bare breasts and vulvas as any porn-mag addict. Her collages are a cutting reprise.
A photograph of a woman is superimposed, at crotch level, with an open sardine can containing a bloody severed finger. Another interpolates a pair of scissors over the genitals – one in the eye for lascivious gawpers – but a beautiful rose for a face. Slinger has a superlative eye for substitution and placement.
The collage Don’t Look at Me shows a beautiful woman in a veil turning away from the probing lens of what is implicitly an unwelcome camera. She holds up a hand, which is turning into an alarming face, glaring back at the camera with two sharp eyes.
For her degree show at Brighton Polytechnic, seven years later, Chadwick put on what seems to be her earliest performance, of which newly digitised footage exists. Four women – half-naked, including one in a gynaecologist’s stirrups – vacuum and clean and generally primp up the premises of some kind of beauty parlour-cum-surgery. There is horrifying and nameless rooting around in the stirrups, and many ritual moppings and dustings. In the background, a silky male voice advertises amazing transformations through beauty products.
I could hardly watch Domestic Sanitation for its mordant triangulation of female health, cleanliness and beauty with money and drudgery. How little has changed since 1976. By contrast, her long and seminal series of photographs In the Kitchen (1977) seems closer to comic satire. Chadwick created wearable sculptures in which she appears, got up as a fridge, stove or sink, for instance, little more than her head projecting from these household appliances.
But when she strips these white goods down to the bone, the images are indelibly shocking: Chadwick, naked, incarcerated inside the structural bars of a washing machine, her bare abdomen exactly adjacent to its round drum.
Chadwick went on to work with fur, ink and offal, live cells and dead embryos, chocolate, smoke and blood-red light. Slinger’s career runs all the way from performances to films and, lately, an immersive collaboration with Dior. The revelation of this photo-based show is that both artists started at the highest of pitches and never left off.
Slinger’s Orgasm (1969) remains a devastating image, not often shown. It collages the face of a woman, glittering eyelids tight shut, with a scatter of black blood that doubles as a spider, a clutch of black pearls that might be dying grapes and the short-lived wings of a dragonfly. It is as pithily condensed as a sonnet.
And there are unfamiliar works by Chadwick in this exhibition that enlarge one’s sense of her imagination in all its grave and trenchant lyricism. Et in Arcadia, made the year before she died, possibly as a consequence of myocarditis, is as beautiful as it is disquieting. A photo etching of a black fly printed on a panel of shimmering white marble, it is abruptly counterintuitive. The insect, filthy and pestilential, is so exquisitely depicted in every whisker and proboscis as to resemble a Rembrandt etching. The ancient marble, grand and pure, is fused with the lowest of memento mori. It is a dazzling epigram to end this rare opportunity of a show.
