Julian Trevelyan’s painted papier-mâché “Horse’s Head” from the Surrealists’ Float at the 1938 May Day Procession. On show at Pallant House Gallery.
Prairie King.
My recent visit to Pallant House Gallery for the exhibition Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, has proved to be a true font of inspiration. My fascination with Horse Head made by Julian Trevelyan for the 1938 May Day Parade is perhaps partly explained by my affection for my studio mate and childhood steed Prairie King. Prairie was an English playmate, British made, and occupant of a large playroom in Moseley Village in Birmingham. His fate was to lodge with my English aunt in London, when my father’s sabbatical took us for a year to California and Mexico City. For reason’s shrouded in the mists of time (and best left diplomatically to one side) Prairie never returned to us and is reputed to have rusted away in my aunt’s basement in Richmond.
Playing tea cups on the Canberra 1967 on the way to America.
The story I am about to tell somehow immerses me in the question contained in the title of this blog post. Am I a British Artist? I certainly felt that Conscience and Conflict connected me to an exemplary display of solidarity by British artists with Spain’s Second Republic, and that my current practice falls into this tradition of response to the Spanish Civil War, albeit with post memory eyes. I am British born, so where’s the doubt? Why as I pinned my colours to the flag of British art did I feel so at odds?
Let’s go back to Prairie, lost but not forgotten. About three years ago I had a minor operation and on recovery found myself one day in the Oxford Covered Market. It was with a post-op sense of queasy unreality that I first noticed Prairie tethered outside the butchers on sale for £15. Was it truly Prairie (it was) and what was the butcher doing selling vintage toys? Never again or since have I seen such a thing. Disorientated and quite unable to carry Prairie I wandered home with a few hasty images taken on my iPhone vowing to return, by which time Prairie had vanished. That was when a most sizeable feeling of regret set in, and the sightings of Prairie King began followed by a nostalgia for the English branch of my childhood.
My next encounter was months later in a Sunday magazine, Prairie emerged from the foliage of a seriously sumptuous garden in a lifestyle article which had my eyes out on stalks. Prairie! I checked Ebay, there were several Prairies at quite some cost, Prairie was desirable not only to me it seemed. So I posted my pictures of Prairie on Facebook and in an optimistic frame of mind sent a message to my old friend, “Prairie King come home!” I called into cyberspace half in jest and half not.
Some while later, I visited my cousin in Hove near Brighton, the daughter of the aunt originally entrusted with Prairie all those years ago and there ‘he’ was sitting in her living room, a recent purchase from a junk shop and not the t/rusty Prairie of Moseley Village she assured me. Now in a state of some excitement at my enthusiasm for our shared childhood icon, my cousin informed me that there was indeed another Prairie in the window of another junk shop in Brighton and we jumped in the car leaving bemused family members in our wake as we sped off in hot pursuit, but it was to no avail. No such Prairie King in the window, and the junk shop was closed it being Sunday. Someone had clearly got there first.
It was a dear neighbour in Oxford who, having followed the so near and yet so far poignancy of this saga of failed reunion, spotted Prairie next about eight months ago. My daughter and I were sitting in our front room when she appeared, banging on the bay window and gesturing frantically to the end of the street. Prairie she mouthed. Prairie King! I ran. My daughter says she didn’t know I could run so fast, but I couldn’t afford to let Prairie go again. Thus my neighbour and I torpedoed down the road and in rugby tackle mode (before the imaginary scrum) lassoed Prairie with our arms and, once secured, we gently trotted him home. You can imagine the joy.
Studio Assemblage, May 2014
The striking element to this story of return is that somehow, Prairie (under his own steam) made it to the corner of my road and no other road in any other city. I don’t know by what means other than the mysterious yet tangible power of synchronicity. He is very rusty, but I’ve had to admit that I can’t truly know he is my Prairie. That’s a detail we must fudge over a little with a sprinkling of poetic license. I’m certain it’s this narrative that drew me to the Horse Head on sight. There is a kinship between them in my mind’s eye – a kind of family resemblance which takes me back to playtime and early ‘theatrical’ forays in the play room. So carefully constructed and conserved is Horse Head that I was also drawn by the hand that made it. Here there is no doubting the piece is the original, a one off not mass produced like my Prairie. I would love to know the story of it’s survival and how it came to find it’s place in the gallery. Of course Horse Head must in some sense pay homage to Picasso’s Guernica (a major influence on the British artists) and I find through my comparison the innocence of Prairie King’s function (to be played with) a sudden sharp reminder of the child victims of the three day targeted bombardments by Franco an his allies. You can’t have a horse head in this context without Guernica.
So Horse Head has proved to be another such point of significance and intersection with the Pallant House show, as Henry’s Moore’s Spanish Prisoner which I talked about in my review https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/barcelona-in-a-bag/post/52398292 It hooks into my childhood – the part spent in England rather than those times spent shuttling to Spain, which have been my more recent focus. But it is this very shuttling in which I think my hesitancy to call myself a British artist probably lies. When I began my project it was with a dawning realisation that my subject is exile, most specifically post memory exile. In my Pallant House review I talk about exile as a no choice and no place existence, a no man’s land of psychological disorientation. I have also written about this in relation to Mira Schendel http://soniaboue.co.uk/section726751_277607.html as my chance encounter with this extraordinary artist on the last day of the Tate retrospective proved seminal in my growing understanding of the psychology of displacement and our creative responses.
Post memory refers to the osmotic transfer of trauma in the family from one generation to another usually in relation to war (particularly used in relation to the Jewish Holocaust). One effect for me of my father’s exile appears to be that although I am by birth and education British I don’t ‘feel’ it or identify with the culture – I feel like an observer. There are times when I probably have to ‘act’ British, yet I am not Spanish and must ‘act’ it sometimes too. The shuttling explains some of this situation; I was brought up with two cultures after all – but it goes deeper. It’s to do with internal geography and the powerful echoes of displacement, in which I find myself rooted here yet not of here – neither am I quite of there, my other place.
Tea lights form a ritual and part of my practice becoming also a medium. Post memory work for me includes the notion of vigil.
The role of art is crucial in mediating such experiences. To create is to be, to be present and to feel present in authentic and congruent spaces, and this is one of the attractions and great benefits of a creative life. It is partly why I think my father was married to theatre as a form of expression, as audience and critic but most of all as playwright. It was the urgent quality I felt I recognised in Mira Schendel’s work too as time and again I witnessed the here yet not here in many of her pieces.
In answer to my own question, I don’t know where the boundaries of internal and external geography quite meet. This business of post memory exile can sometimes feel like a nebulous yet thorny beast.
It perhaps helps to consider the difference between this and the experience of other bilingual people living with dual cultures. Choice or compulsion, and the emotional landscape of each cultural collision will surely determine outcomes and levels of engagement with host countries and identity for second generations. In my case the post memory experience appears to engender a persistent ambivalence I can’t dislodge. My formulation in answer to my title question is therefore as follows; I am an exile’s daughter, I am an exile artist. Neither wholly British nor entirely Spanish, I am irrevocably tied to both yet I’m something in-between.
My second hand dislocation doesn’t stop me, like my father before me, from deriving great riches from the meeting points between my two languages, my two cultures. Exile was my father’s curse, but his dedication to cross cultural translation in the field of literature and performance also provided extraordinary meaningful encounters. My own experience is that residing in the in-between spaces of this cultural ambivalence also lend a privileged and often original vantage point.
Some days after writing this blog I happened on a photograph of the Prairie King outside the butcher’s shop in the Oxford Covered Market. Synchronicity at work again.
