“Terrible,” one silver head, approaching the doors, opined.
“Awful,” her partner agreed.
It has taken decades and the work of many to persuade the powers that be at the National Portrait Gallery to buy and install these reliefs on the doors beneath the facade where the busts of “18 powerful men” appear in sculptural roundels of the exterior’s white portland stone. Frozen yet courtly, they survey the people going in and out, their power seemingly absolute.
By contrast, Emin’s 45 women’s busts on the doors are dynamic, turning in different directions, their faces expressing a variety of emotions, including tenderness, frustration and fury. The writer Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace, describing her reaction to the doors found something of her mother in one face, something of a teacher in another. Above all, she notes, the faces do not aim at objectivity but rather claim the value of subjectivity that for eons has been used to devalue women’s work.
She concludes, “I saw an insistent reminder of what stories are omitted from the record, and an invitation to fill those gaps with stories of my own. Instead of history, I saw life.”
That may have been what alarmed the Silver Heads: the pulsing vibrancy of life itself, perhaps glimpsed in the vigor of their children and grandchildren but carefully excised from their own lives, a deletion that age seems to make only appropriate.
Their reaction has nothing to do with age and can’t be blamed for it. After all, they are probably of my generation. At least some of us rose up and spoke out against the patriarchy. As Margaret Erskine, heroine of my next book, Taken By The Shawnee learned through hard experience with the Shawnee, passive acceptance of what the world seems to offer means death. For her, it would have been an axe in the skull. For the rest of us, the despondency I used to see in women’s faces when, separated from the men after dessert was served at a dinner party, they were directed to their hostess’ bathroom to “powder their noses.” Nothing bites deeper than the pain of genteel exclusion.
James Ozyvort Maland says
“Silver Heads” is the title of a 1998 Russian film which started a genre called “Necrorealism.” The Wikipedia entry for that term states: “Necrorealism is a Russian art movement primarily focusing on black humor and the absurd. Russia artist and filmmaker Yevgeny Yufit (1961–2016) is generally considered the father of the movement.”
Sarah says
Great idea Sallie! xxoo
Sarah