Narcissism in a Good Way

It should come as no surprise that “British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning 1967-2009” — the challenging new exhibit at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art — contains not one but two references to Narcissus.

Mat Collishaw’s 1990 bromide print “Narcissus” is the more traditional of the two. The graceful youth who gazes at his face in a puddle — his cascading locks obscuring the object of his desire from our view — could be a Canova sculpture or a figure in a Waterhouse painting. Whereas in Ellie Rees’ video “Beyond Narcissus” (2008), the self-obsessed youth becomes the artist herself — or rather, the artist immerses herself in the ancient myth — as she kisses her lovely reflection again and again.

Narcissus, then, is the spirit hovering over “British Subjects,” which considers self-portraiture on “this scepter’d isle” in the postwar era. But self-regard needn’t be self-absorption. The 60-some artists in this show portray themselves as other people, places and things, not in an attempt to show off but to understand themselves and thus provoke us into confronting our own lives. It’s narcissism in a good way.

With postwar Britain as her subject, curator Louise Yelin — interim dean of Purchase College’s School of the Humanities and a professor of literature there — has created a show that is at once particular and universal. Works by émigrés from the former British colonies, or their descendants, depict a nation that is less comfortable with heterogeneity than the United States, a melting pot from the get-go. (On the other hand, Britain does not bear the legacy of slavery that the United States does.)

Sokari Douglas Camp’s ravishing sculpture “Nigerian Woman Shopping” (1990) suggests not only the discomfort of a formerly homogenous country coming to grips with multiculturalism but the tension in being an immigrant with a foot in two worlds. The piece captures the distinctive textures of Africa in a winding headdress and a gown made of half-moons and stars. The eye imagines the woman wearing this outfit having pride and confidence in her native culture.

At the same time, the steel sculpture is a kind of exoskeleton. It’s as if the soul, the essence of the person, has wriggled free, and all we’re left with is this exquisite shell.

The exhibit also contains the kind of stiff-upper-lip Brits that Americans love to tweak. Michael Landy’s dryly witty “Semi-Detached: Lisa, John, Ethel, Maureen and Michael Landy, “a 2005 C-print at right, recreates the artist’s semi-detached house and equally semi-detached family. Even when standing together, they’re apart.

“British Subjects” is, however, at its best when it explores the universal longing for transcendence through playing The Other. In Ellie Rees’ video “Reader, I Married Him” (2008), she is the happily-ever-after Jane Eyre (hence the title, the first line in the last chapter of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”) as well as the suicidal Virginia Woolf, who understood that beyond happily ever after is a string of endless days, each like the last, and so drowned herself in a river.

There are also Satapa Biswas as the Hindu goddess Kali and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith, avenging the members of the female sex; Cecily Brown as Fragonard’s girl on “The Swing”; Ashley Bickerton as Paul Gauguin; Gavin Turk as Jackson Pollock; Georgina Starr as the twin of her younger self; Frank Bowling as an Abstract Expressionist painting of Africa; Grayson Perry as a Grecian urn; Angus Fairhurst as the Jesus of both the Doubting Thomas and Pietà images.

The multiplicity of textures, patterns and colors in many of these works and in Chila Kumari Burman’s beautiful, psychedelic print “Autoportrait” (2007) — made up of many little self-portraits at left— reminds us that we create and recreate ourselves constantly. We do so by layering on what we borrow from others, bridging their worlds but with an eye to finding our more authentic selves. After all, the artists of “British Subjects” aren’t interested in being Jane Eyre or Jackson Pollock. They’re too edgy, too contemporary, too individual.

By making their idiosyncratic statements, the exhibit artists free us to role-play as well. So Yinka Shonibare’s C-print series “Diary of a Victorian Dandy” (1998), in which the British-Nigerian artist reinvents himself as a 19th-century gentleman, is not merely an opportunity for race reversal, as a black man becomes master of a house in which he probably would’ve been a servant. It’s also a chance to consider: What if we had been Victorian dandies? (I don’t know about you, but I would’ve enjoyed the musical soirées; the billiards-playing and late-night carousing, not so much.)

Still, the artists let us dream. Douglas Gordon’s “Self-Portrait of You and Me/Native American” replicates Andy Warhol’s portrait of Native American activist Russell Means with a difference. Cutouts of Means, placed on a mirror, enable us to glimpse ourselves in the negative space around them.

In “British Subjects,” the real subject may be you.

“British Subjects: Indentity and Self-Fashioning 1967-2009” is at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art through Dec. 13. It contains some graphic words and images that may not be suitable for young viewers. Parents are urged to preview the show first. 914-251-6100,
www.neuberger.org



Photos courtesy of the Neuberger Museum.