In presenting their new exhibition “Walls are Talking” the Whitworth Gallery emphasises the artists’ subversive use of wallpaper as a medium - how surprising that it can be used to discuss topics as serious as warfare, racism, and gender! It is as if they are anticipating their audience to find it farcical that artists might find wallpaper a useful canvas to carry their message.
Of course artistic battles have long been played out on the home front. From the Surrealists (Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Object (Le Dejeuner en Fourrure)’, 1936), to Pop Art (Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just What Was it That Made Yesterday’s Homes So Different, So Appealing’, 1959), to the YBAs (Tracey Emin’s appliqué blanket ‘Hate and Power can be a Terrible Thing’, 2004), artists have turned domestic materials into a canvas. Subverting the most everyday and familiar items strikes at the heart of people’s lives and their conceptions of identity and reality; it is one of the most useful tools to artists trying to get a message across.
The exhibition has a strongly surrealist tone, partly because the work it contains so often makes reference to Victorian social and aesthetic values; revolting against their Victorian predecessors was a major driving force behind the Surrealist movement that began in the early 1920s.
The exhibition displays many original examples of Victorian wallpaper. Victorian decoration was often guided by their belief that scenes depicted on their walls would influence the room’s inhabitants. In one example of Victorian nursery wallpaper, a diamond pattern contains scenes of children diligently employed through each of the year’s four seasons. Another displays a catalogue of scenes from Robinson Crusoe, intended to inspire self reliance and discipline in those nursery inhabitants confined between the images. In the seasonal design, barely any attention has been paid to drawing the children’s faces, giving rise to the suggestion of how little Victorians valued individuality in comparison to conformity and respectability.
Several artists in the exhibition subvert these intentions and designs, taking elements of the traditional motifs and incorporating additional, often shocking images of their own. Francesco Simeti’s ‘Acorn’ takes the decorative frames of traditional ‘print room’ wallpaper and replaces the images they contain with disturbing scenes of chemical warfare and figures in biohazard suits dealing with contamination. Another of his works, ‘Arabian Nights’, takes a traditional wallpaper design of tranquil landscape scenes. Within the motifs he incorporates images of Afghan refugees displaced by the war – they are displaced again within the rigid confines of the repeated paradise that echoes across the wall.
The repetitive nature of wallpaper design makes it the perfect vehicle for commenting on media culture and the proliferation of images. Who better to display as an example of this than Andy Warhol, whose “Mao Wallpaper” features a repeated design of the dictator’s face, just as Mao’s face formed the wallpaper of China as a nation. The work is at once imposing in Mao’s omnipresence, and reductive, as the controlled pattern relieves the face of its significance as it is subsumed by the rhythm of the design.
Many artists make use of wallpaper’s overtly domestic identity to comment on confinement and repression within the home. ‘Five Bar Gate’ by Kelly Mark is filled with lines that appear to mark out time within a prison, but imagined within the home setting they could equally be chores ticked off as they daily grind wears on. In another piece, ‘Cry Baby’, a repeating design of baby faces bloom out at the onlooker in claustrophobic deep pink, echoing the feelings many young parents experience of the walls closing in as they are confined with the constant demands of young children.
As the exhibition demonstrates, wallpaper is irrevocably associated with our living spaces, and as such can be of major significance to our memories and identity. Many people can remember the wallpaper of their house as children, and memories of this image become interwoven with the domestic scenes they formed the backdrop to. In times of physical or mental illness, insomnia, or confinement, the familiarity we gain with our own walls can make their image both intensely comforting and threatening.
Victorian women, for whom the outmoded adage ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ held sway over their entire existence, developed an intense relationship with their home’s furnishings. We need not join the ranks of the Surrealists or modernists to pick apart the misplaced values of this era; in 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman first published her 6,000 word short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The story depicts the mental deterioration of a woman forced into confinement by her husband so she can recuperate from “a slight hysterical tendency". Forbidden from working, and totally lacking in stimulation, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper she is confined by. As she descends further into psychosis she loses herself in the patterns of the wallpaper, imagining women creeping around behind the patterns, eventually believing she is one of them.
This excellent exhibition takes full account of the threatening, comforting, and even political role wallpaper has played, and continues to play. It is well worth a visit.
Of course artistic battles have long been played out on the home front. From the Surrealists (Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Object (Le Dejeuner en Fourrure)’, 1936), to Pop Art (Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just What Was it That Made Yesterday’s Homes So Different, So Appealing’, 1959), to the YBAs (Tracey Emin’s appliqué blanket ‘Hate and Power can be a Terrible Thing’, 2004), artists have turned domestic materials into a canvas. Subverting the most everyday and familiar items strikes at the heart of people’s lives and their conceptions of identity and reality; it is one of the most useful tools to artists trying to get a message across.
The exhibition has a strongly surrealist tone, partly because the work it contains so often makes reference to Victorian social and aesthetic values; revolting against their Victorian predecessors was a major driving force behind the Surrealist movement that began in the early 1920s.
The exhibition displays many original examples of Victorian wallpaper. Victorian decoration was often guided by their belief that scenes depicted on their walls would influence the room’s inhabitants. In one example of Victorian nursery wallpaper, a diamond pattern contains scenes of children diligently employed through each of the year’s four seasons. Another displays a catalogue of scenes from Robinson Crusoe, intended to inspire self reliance and discipline in those nursery inhabitants confined between the images. In the seasonal design, barely any attention has been paid to drawing the children’s faces, giving rise to the suggestion of how little Victorians valued individuality in comparison to conformity and respectability.
Several artists in the exhibition subvert these intentions and designs, taking elements of the traditional motifs and incorporating additional, often shocking images of their own. Francesco Simeti’s ‘Acorn’ takes the decorative frames of traditional ‘print room’ wallpaper and replaces the images they contain with disturbing scenes of chemical warfare and figures in biohazard suits dealing with contamination. Another of his works, ‘Arabian Nights’, takes a traditional wallpaper design of tranquil landscape scenes. Within the motifs he incorporates images of Afghan refugees displaced by the war – they are displaced again within the rigid confines of the repeated paradise that echoes across the wall.
The repetitive nature of wallpaper design makes it the perfect vehicle for commenting on media culture and the proliferation of images. Who better to display as an example of this than Andy Warhol, whose “Mao Wallpaper” features a repeated design of the dictator’s face, just as Mao’s face formed the wallpaper of China as a nation. The work is at once imposing in Mao’s omnipresence, and reductive, as the controlled pattern relieves the face of its significance as it is subsumed by the rhythm of the design.
Many artists make use of wallpaper’s overtly domestic identity to comment on confinement and repression within the home. ‘Five Bar Gate’ by Kelly Mark is filled with lines that appear to mark out time within a prison, but imagined within the home setting they could equally be chores ticked off as they daily grind wears on. In another piece, ‘Cry Baby’, a repeating design of baby faces bloom out at the onlooker in claustrophobic deep pink, echoing the feelings many young parents experience of the walls closing in as they are confined with the constant demands of young children.
As the exhibition demonstrates, wallpaper is irrevocably associated with our living spaces, and as such can be of major significance to our memories and identity. Many people can remember the wallpaper of their house as children, and memories of this image become interwoven with the domestic scenes they formed the backdrop to. In times of physical or mental illness, insomnia, or confinement, the familiarity we gain with our own walls can make their image both intensely comforting and threatening.
Victorian women, for whom the outmoded adage ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ held sway over their entire existence, developed an intense relationship with their home’s furnishings. We need not join the ranks of the Surrealists or modernists to pick apart the misplaced values of this era; in 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman first published her 6,000 word short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The story depicts the mental deterioration of a woman forced into confinement by her husband so she can recuperate from “a slight hysterical tendency". Forbidden from working, and totally lacking in stimulation, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper she is confined by. As she descends further into psychosis she loses herself in the patterns of the wallpaper, imagining women creeping around behind the patterns, eventually believing she is one of them.
This excellent exhibition takes full account of the threatening, comforting, and even political role wallpaper has played, and continues to play. It is well worth a visit.
Fi
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